Remember Roe!’, an article by Sarah Kliff in Newsweek (21st April 2010), paints a dramatic picture of a greying abortion rights leadership in the US racked by a growing anxiety about who will take over the torch from them when they retire.
One of the strongest abortion rights groups in the US is the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), founded in 1969.
Its current president, Nancy Keenan, described in the article her response to the huge crowds flocking to the March for Life in Washington DC this January - ‘my gosh, they are so young - there are so many of them and they are so young.’
There were 400,000 at the March for Life. Two months earlier, the pro-abortionists held a rally against Congressman Bart Stupak’s proposed abortion opt outs in the Health Care Bill and only 1,300 turned up. Over 300-times as many activists came to the March for Life as bothered to turn up to oppose restrictions on abortion in Obama’s health-care package.
In her Newsweek piece, Sarah Kliff says that the difficulties encountered by pro-choice activists during the recent US health care debate marks ‘the day when they became aware of their waning influence in Washington.’
The Newsweek article said that research carried out by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws found that 51% of under 30s opposed to abortion see it as a ‘very important voting issue’. Only 26% of young people who support abortion see it as a very important voting issue. Their research found a similar though lesser difference among older voters.
This means that it is a live political issue for the pro-life voters especially the young, whereas it is not a hot issue for those who are pro-abortion. So the pro-life activists are pushing an open political door that the pro-abortion activists are not holding shut.
In a separate article in the current Time magazine (3rd May 2010) Terry O’Neill, President of the pro-abortion National Organization for Women, concedes in passing that those on the pro-life side ‘are winning the abortion fight.’
Her intuition was reflected in a number of polls in the last year suggesting that a tipping point may have been reached in American public opinion with the pro-abortion view on the brink of slipping into a minority position as the trend edges in a pro-life direction.
Polls by Gallup and Pew have found rises in the numbers taking a pro-life position and falls in the numbers taking a pro-abortion position. Gallup’s poll exactly a year ago, found ‘51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice”.’
Gallup says “this is the first time a majority of US adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.”
At a time when pro-choice campaigners should be exulting in their current successes – the election of the most pro-abortion politician in America as President, control of Congress by the Democrats, pro-abortion since 1980 - they are instead keenly aware that things are not going their way. Without becoming complacent, pro-life supporters should take heart from these encouraging and uplifting developments.
Showing posts with label pro-abortion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pro-abortion. Show all posts
Monday, May 31, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Groups presssure Lancet editor to delay publication of maternal mortality research
Lancet, a leading medical journal, has just published a new study of international maternal mortality rates, which finds that the World Bank, the WHO and UNICEF statistics for maternal mortality were over 100,000 too high due to reporting and methodological problems.
But in a corrupt and brazen, and thankfully, unsuccessful, attempt to subordinate science to politics, ‘advocacy groups’ lobbied the editor of Lancet, Dr Richard Horton to delay the publication of the new study until after upcoming meetings of the UN Commission on Population and Development, the Women Deliver Conference and the next UN Assembly, which are scheduled to discuss maternal mortality.
What’s bugging these ‘advocates’? Dr Donna Harrison, President of the American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said of the new Lancet article:
"The study uses the best statistical methods currently available and clearly demonstrates that worldwide legalization of abortion is unnecessary to bring about significant decreases in maternal mortality. The American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists encourages the UN member nations to continue to develop even better statistical information by improving the identification of maternal mortality causality, especially induced abortion related mortality, which is most often underreported or misreported".
Where the UN bodies have been pushing for ‘safe’ and ‘legal’ abortion as the key to bringing improving maternal mortality rates, the new Lancet article does not. It found key causal factors improving maternal mortality – falling pregnancy rates in some countries, higher per capita income, higher education rates for women, and increasing availability of basic medical care, and in particular, ‘skilled birth attendants’.
But in a corrupt and brazen, and thankfully, unsuccessful, attempt to subordinate science to politics, ‘advocacy groups’ lobbied the editor of Lancet, Dr Richard Horton to delay the publication of the new study until after upcoming meetings of the UN Commission on Population and Development, the Women Deliver Conference and the next UN Assembly, which are scheduled to discuss maternal mortality.
What’s bugging these ‘advocates’? Dr Donna Harrison, President of the American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said of the new Lancet article:
"The study uses the best statistical methods currently available and clearly demonstrates that worldwide legalization of abortion is unnecessary to bring about significant decreases in maternal mortality. The American Academy of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists encourages the UN member nations to continue to develop even better statistical information by improving the identification of maternal mortality causality, especially induced abortion related mortality, which is most often underreported or misreported".
Where the UN bodies have been pushing for ‘safe’ and ‘legal’ abortion as the key to bringing improving maternal mortality rates, the new Lancet article does not. It found key causal factors improving maternal mortality – falling pregnancy rates in some countries, higher per capita income, higher education rates for women, and increasing availability of basic medical care, and in particular, ‘skilled birth attendants’.
US National Public Radio has just issued a mandatory censorship protocol for reporters.
They are no longer allowed to use the word ‘pro-life’ to those campaigning for the right to life of unborn children. They have to call them ‘abortion rights opponents’.
In describing those who support abortion, reporters have been forbidden to use the phrase ‘pro-abortion.’ They may, naturally, describe those who oppose abortion as ‘anti-abortion’.
Similar thought-control policies have been adopted by major US news corporations Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, CBS and NBC.
Dictats on what words reporters are allowed to use? Prescribed words? Forbidden words? Sound familiar?
This kind of ideological censorship was chillingly diagnosed by George Orwell in his final novel, 1984. The totalitarian society seeks to suppress and eventually eliminate dissent from the officially desired thoughts by gradually imposing a new obligatory official language called Newspeak so that dissenting opinion, not only cannot be articulated in a publicly approved way, but, in the end, cannot even be thought privately.
As Orwell put it, the purpose was not only to provide a medium of expression for the ‘proper’ worldview and mental habits, ‘but to make all other modes of thought impossible’ – it was intended that when Newspeak.had been adopted for once and for all, an unorthodox thought ‘should be literally unthinkable.’ This was done, he says, ‘chiefly by the eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings.’ The imposed words, Orwell says, ‘had been deliberately constructed for political purposes’, that is, they ‘were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.’
What a terrible irony – major news organizations in the free world are imposing Newspeak on their reporters.
Now we have major news outlets in the free world succumbing to the ideology of abortion rights which renders the unborn child what in Orwellian Newspeak presciently calls an ‘unperson.’
In Nazi Germany, gleichschaltung was the process by which one institution after another conformed to the totalitarian ideology in power, sometimes without even having to be compelled - they just saw the way the wind was blowing and got in line voluntarily.
The fact that major news institutions in the US are engaging in a self-imposed pro-abortion gleichschaltung is hard not to read it as a move of desperation on the part of the pro-abortion ideological elite.
They sense public opinion gradually shifting from majority pro-abortion to majority pro-life. They see this reflected in polls showing a majority in the US for the first time in recent years describing itself as pro-life rather than pro-abortion.
They see one movie after another exploring unexpected pregnancies in a positive light and showing ways forward, movies like Waitress, Knocked Up, Juno, Precious and Leonera, and on the other hand, the even more radical emergence of movies showing the dark side of abortion, movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
They see women who’ve been through abortion coming forward together asking for their experience to be heard and heeded.
They’re losing the debate, so they’re changing tack. ‘If we can’t win the debate, let’s not have the debate, let’s suppress it’, they seem to be saying.
If news outlets opt to turn themselves into a pro-abortion echo-chamber – talking to one another in a fake language designed to pretend that abortion is not destroying a human life - they will lose half the public.
With the click of a mouse, the days of this kind of censorship are well and truly numbered.
In describing those who support abortion, reporters have been forbidden to use the phrase ‘pro-abortion.’ They may, naturally, describe those who oppose abortion as ‘anti-abortion’.
Similar thought-control policies have been adopted by major US news corporations Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, CBS and NBC.
Dictats on what words reporters are allowed to use? Prescribed words? Forbidden words? Sound familiar?
This kind of ideological censorship was chillingly diagnosed by George Orwell in his final novel, 1984. The totalitarian society seeks to suppress and eventually eliminate dissent from the officially desired thoughts by gradually imposing a new obligatory official language called Newspeak so that dissenting opinion, not only cannot be articulated in a publicly approved way, but, in the end, cannot even be thought privately.
As Orwell put it, the purpose was not only to provide a medium of expression for the ‘proper’ worldview and mental habits, ‘but to make all other modes of thought impossible’ – it was intended that when Newspeak.had been adopted for once and for all, an unorthodox thought ‘should be literally unthinkable.’ This was done, he says, ‘chiefly by the eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings.’ The imposed words, Orwell says, ‘had been deliberately constructed for political purposes’, that is, they ‘were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.’
What a terrible irony – major news organizations in the free world are imposing Newspeak on their reporters.
Now we have major news outlets in the free world succumbing to the ideology of abortion rights which renders the unborn child what in Orwellian Newspeak presciently calls an ‘unperson.’
In Nazi Germany, gleichschaltung was the process by which one institution after another conformed to the totalitarian ideology in power, sometimes without even having to be compelled - they just saw the way the wind was blowing and got in line voluntarily.
The fact that major news institutions in the US are engaging in a self-imposed pro-abortion gleichschaltung is hard not to read it as a move of desperation on the part of the pro-abortion ideological elite.
They sense public opinion gradually shifting from majority pro-abortion to majority pro-life. They see this reflected in polls showing a majority in the US for the first time in recent years describing itself as pro-life rather than pro-abortion.
They see one movie after another exploring unexpected pregnancies in a positive light and showing ways forward, movies like Waitress, Knocked Up, Juno, Precious and Leonera, and on the other hand, the even more radical emergence of movies showing the dark side of abortion, movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
They see women who’ve been through abortion coming forward together asking for their experience to be heard and heeded.
They’re losing the debate, so they’re changing tack. ‘If we can’t win the debate, let’s not have the debate, let’s suppress it’, they seem to be saying.
If news outlets opt to turn themselves into a pro-abortion echo-chamber – talking to one another in a fake language designed to pretend that abortion is not destroying a human life - they will lose half the public.
With the click of a mouse, the days of this kind of censorship are well and truly numbered.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
RTE Bias on Abortion
Scannal Programme was a Blatant Pro-Abortion Promo
24ú Feabhra 2010
RTÉ - Mícothrom agus claonta i ngaeilge agus i mbéarla araon.
It's no secret that RTÉ the tax-funded State broadcaster is openly hostile to the pro-life position. The station doesn’t even bother anymore to create the pretence of balance when covering life issues. The latest manifestation of this was on Scannal, broadcast on RTÉ 1 last Monday, 22nd February at 7.30pm. You can watch it on the RTÉ player if you care to.
Even the description of the programme on the RTÉ website lets the cat out of the bag. It states: “Scannal looks back at a story that gripped the nation and raised the issue of abortion once again, an issue subsequent Governments have failed to fully deal with through legislation”
The so-called failure to deal with the issue through legislation might have something to do with the fact that the majority of Irish people are opposed to abortion and that the controversial X case decision by the Supreme Court in 1992 failed to set any time limits for abortion and if legislated for would have to allow abortion up to birth.
Were the producers of Scannal remotely interested in balance they could have invited reasoned pro-life voices to make these and other points in defence of the right to life.
RTÉ insists on turning a blind eye to the compelling arguments against abortion. Whilst we heard about the difficult circumstances surrounding the X case and the injunction sought by the Attorney General at the time - and nobody belittles the emotional difficulties that faced Miss X and her family - we heard nothing on Scannal about the fact that the X case judges heard no medical evidence to justify the Supreme Court decision.
Similarly, we heard nothing about the health of women in the wider context of the abortion issue. For example in recent years, several studies have been published, and in particular a study from Finland in 2005, showing that women are more likely to commit suicide after having an abortion than whilst pregnant. One horrifying case that illustrates this is that of Emma Beck, a 31 year old English artist who committed suicide in 2007 after aborting her twins. Emma's suicide note read: "I told everyone I didn't want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does."
In fact the link between abortion and negative mental health consequences has become so clear that the British Royal College of Psychiatrists recommended that abortion counselling leaflets be updated to include information about the latest studies showing the negative effects of abortion on women. Separately, research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008, concluded that induced abortion is linked to an increased risk of mental illness in later life.
Importantly, the fact that Irish women receive all necessary medical treatments during pregnancy here - even if it unintentionally results in the loss of the unborn - was not highlighted on Scannal. Nor was the fact that despite having no abortion in this country, Ireland is rated number one in the world in protecting women’s lives during pregnancy, according to the latest UN/WHO report on maternal mortality. Ireland, for example, is a much safer country in which to be pregnant than say Britain or Holland, where unrestricted abortion regimes exist.
But RTÉ didn't see fit to take on board any of that. Why? Because it wouldn't have helped the agenda that RTÉ constantly pushes in favour of abortion.
RTÉ never reports on the brutality of what abortion regimes entail in other countries, like for example the fact that abortion is legal up to birth in Britain. Do we want to follow England's abortion regime - one of the most liberal in the world - where babies are aborted simply because they have 'disabilities' like hare lips and cleft palates? RTÉ seems to think we should considering the open way it promotes abortion without limits.
RTÉ has never once presented a programme that set out to challenge abortion advocates who believe that unborn children are deserving of absolutely no protection throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. Surely there is something very suspect here?
On every occasion without exception RTÉ builds it coverage of the issue around challenging the pro-life side to justify its position. This is a genuine scandal that the programme Scannal, if it was doing its job would investigate!
The way RTÉ treats the pro-life issue is becoming a major story in itself. If the station continues along the path of openly promoting abortion, pro-life activists will have no choice but to devote all their energies into making the public aware of the culture of ideological bias in RTÉ in favour of abortion.
24ú Feabhra 2010
RTÉ - Mícothrom agus claonta i ngaeilge agus i mbéarla araon.
It's no secret that RTÉ the tax-funded State broadcaster is openly hostile to the pro-life position. The station doesn’t even bother anymore to create the pretence of balance when covering life issues. The latest manifestation of this was on Scannal, broadcast on RTÉ 1 last Monday, 22nd February at 7.30pm. You can watch it on the RTÉ player if you care to.
Even the description of the programme on the RTÉ website lets the cat out of the bag. It states: “Scannal looks back at a story that gripped the nation and raised the issue of abortion once again, an issue subsequent Governments have failed to fully deal with through legislation”
The so-called failure to deal with the issue through legislation might have something to do with the fact that the majority of Irish people are opposed to abortion and that the controversial X case decision by the Supreme Court in 1992 failed to set any time limits for abortion and if legislated for would have to allow abortion up to birth.
Were the producers of Scannal remotely interested in balance they could have invited reasoned pro-life voices to make these and other points in defence of the right to life.
RTÉ insists on turning a blind eye to the compelling arguments against abortion. Whilst we heard about the difficult circumstances surrounding the X case and the injunction sought by the Attorney General at the time - and nobody belittles the emotional difficulties that faced Miss X and her family - we heard nothing on Scannal about the fact that the X case judges heard no medical evidence to justify the Supreme Court decision.
Similarly, we heard nothing about the health of women in the wider context of the abortion issue. For example in recent years, several studies have been published, and in particular a study from Finland in 2005, showing that women are more likely to commit suicide after having an abortion than whilst pregnant. One horrifying case that illustrates this is that of Emma Beck, a 31 year old English artist who committed suicide in 2007 after aborting her twins. Emma's suicide note read: "I told everyone I didn't want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does."
In fact the link between abortion and negative mental health consequences has become so clear that the British Royal College of Psychiatrists recommended that abortion counselling leaflets be updated to include information about the latest studies showing the negative effects of abortion on women. Separately, research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008, concluded that induced abortion is linked to an increased risk of mental illness in later life.
Importantly, the fact that Irish women receive all necessary medical treatments during pregnancy here - even if it unintentionally results in the loss of the unborn - was not highlighted on Scannal. Nor was the fact that despite having no abortion in this country, Ireland is rated number one in the world in protecting women’s lives during pregnancy, according to the latest UN/WHO report on maternal mortality. Ireland, for example, is a much safer country in which to be pregnant than say Britain or Holland, where unrestricted abortion regimes exist.
But RTÉ didn't see fit to take on board any of that. Why? Because it wouldn't have helped the agenda that RTÉ constantly pushes in favour of abortion.
RTÉ never reports on the brutality of what abortion regimes entail in other countries, like for example the fact that abortion is legal up to birth in Britain. Do we want to follow England's abortion regime - one of the most liberal in the world - where babies are aborted simply because they have 'disabilities' like hare lips and cleft palates? RTÉ seems to think we should considering the open way it promotes abortion without limits.
RTÉ has never once presented a programme that set out to challenge abortion advocates who believe that unborn children are deserving of absolutely no protection throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. Surely there is something very suspect here?
On every occasion without exception RTÉ builds it coverage of the issue around challenging the pro-life side to justify its position. This is a genuine scandal that the programme Scannal, if it was doing its job would investigate!
The way RTÉ treats the pro-life issue is becoming a major story in itself. If the station continues along the path of openly promoting abortion, pro-life activists will have no choice but to devote all their energies into making the public aware of the culture of ideological bias in RTÉ in favour of abortion.
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