British Section of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life

Daily Telegraph, 12 June 2008

A teenage Christian died a fortnight after having an abortion to avoid conflict with her Muslim boyfriend's family, an inquest has heard.

23rd May 2008

Daily Telegraph

The politicians may have cast their votes on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, but is the conscience of the nation at ease with itself? Far from settling the issues until the next Bill comes along, this week's extraordinary debates have in fact woken us all up to the reality of what is being done in our name. Many people are left deeply uneasy and perplexed, profoundly worried about the direction we are now taking.

And yet, for me it has been one of the most significant debates that the House of Commons has had in recent times, undertaken with a sober recognition that it was dealing with fundamental questions which transcend party politics. Although I would have much preferred other outcomes on all four of the debates, including the issue of fatherhood, I was glad at the sincerity and thoughtfulness of the discussion.

However, it would be wrong for us to think that the debate within society is over. A vote alone cannot and should not close the discussion. Underlying it are crucial questions. What is it to be a human being? What conditions do we need for our flourishing? In what sort of society can we put our faith and know that we are cherished and valued and above all enabled to grow in our search for what is right and true? It is in this context I want to make two practical suggestions.

First, it is increasingly clear that we need a statutory National Bioethics Commission. The parliamentary debate showed that for the moment we will have to live with an unresolved and deep tension between competing views on these fundamental questions. We need to use that tension creatively. We must search together to discover the deeper truths that enable us to secure the common good with justice for all, especially the disadvantaged and disabled, the elderly and, yes, the unborn too.

The bodies set up to regulate embryonic research and to comment on bioethics are too limited in their scope. A high-level national bioethics commission with the best expertise from different disciplines might not always be unanimous in its view. But it could greatly serve the common good simply through continuing dialogue and exploration.

As a society we urgently need to create the capacity for continuing ethical reflection. Ethics needs to keep pace with the science, and the public must not be left behind. Many other countries have such a commission and the UK is badly served without one.

Second, the vote to maintain the current status quo on abortion is not the end of the question. The idea of 'viability', prominent in the debate, is a concept dependent on the availability of resources and technology; not one that is able to found a moral distinction between a life that is worth our respect and protection and one that is not.

Life in the womb needs all our resources and protection and makes that claim from the moment of conception. For everyone involved, abortion is often a painful and shattering decision and it can only be a source of profound distress. That is why I believe we must all, whatever our beliefs, work together to find a better solution.

There are many people of all sides of the abortion debate who yet agree that 200,000 abortions a year is far too many. Even without a change in the law, the number of abortions could fall dramatically if more people worked together to foster a new understanding and approach to relationships, responsibility and mutual support.

Over the past few weeks, these profound questions have sometimes been falsely polarised as science against religion. The truth is that 'science' is never in itself on one side or the other. Of course we all need to understand what scientific advances tell us about the physical and biological worlds, about the material out of which human lives are made, and the breathtaking beauty and complexity of human development from the embryo.

But science remains a human activity. It takes place in moral space not a moral vacuum. What we are dealing with are profound ethical judgments which are informed, but not determined, by the insights of science. Our views will be shaped not only by scientific facts but also by our basic understanding of what a human life is, and also our philosophy of life (which may or may not be informed by a religious belief). Science cannot replace ethics.

I believe there is no conflict between faith and reason, and the positions articulated by people of faith about the ethical basis of law should, like those of anyone else, be tested at the bar of reasoned debate. They should not be excluded or marginalised simply because they come from a religious perspective, and nor should they be given special privilege in democratic debate.

The Church puts forward its teaching, but does not seek to impose its views nor indeed to tell any individual how to vote. What matters is the appeal to reason and intellectual argument, and the coherence of the vision of human life that we present. Reason and faith go hand in hand, and, for me, faith brings an insight into the truth which helps reason.

The gift which the Christian faith brings to all these discussions is a vision of humanity in which every human life has infinite value and dignity because it is made in the image and likeness of God. Whether or not we share this vision of faith, cherishing life and protecting the vulnerable, especially those who are unseen or unheard, is a central value of every society that wants to flourish.

This week's debate does not mark the end of the discussion but in fact, paradoxically, opens up the possibility of one that is much deeper. I hope this can become a conversation for everyone marked by a new openness and mutual respect in which we have much to learn from each other. This is because it is a common search about nothing less than the ultimate truth of who we are and what we are called to become.

Daily Telegraph, 20 May 2008

For the first time since 1990, the House of Commons will today debate, and vote upon, abortion. Few issues arouse greater passions or raise more profound questions of morality.

There are many who strongly object to abortion on any grounds, other than to save the life of the mother. However, Parliament made the practice legal 40 years ago; and the debate now tends to focus on the upper limit for termination.

A series of votes in the Commons today will invite MPs to reduce the current 24-week limit. Advances in neo-natal care mean that babies born at 23 weeks cannot merely survive, but grow up to lead valuable and valued lives. It is difficult to argue a case against a reduction to 22 weeks (or even to 20, given the pace of medical progress) and we trust MPs will vote accordingly.

There is an even more pressing matter, which is the excessively large number of abortions at well below the legal ceiling. In truth, only a small number of terminations take place at more than 22 weeks. However, there are 200,000 abortions in this country every year at 12 weeks or less.

When abortion was legalised in 1967 no one imagined there would be so many terminations or that abortion would become a form of post-coital contraception. We also have the highest number of teenage pregnancies in western Europe and a growing incidence of sexually transmitted disease.

These are all of a piece and cannot be attributed to an absence of sex education, which is available in abundance in schools and in any magazine aimed at young people.

Governments routinely launch campaigns telling us not to drink, smoke, take drugs or eat to excess; yet there is no sense of a similar effort being expended on advising women about the medical and psychological trauma of abortion.

Nor is sufficient emphasis placed on adoption rather than abortion, the former having fallen precipitously while the latter has risen. It is essential that abortions are not made easier to obtain.

The suggestion that a single doctor's approval should be sought or lunchtime abortions be made available at the GPs' surgery must be resisted. We also need to question as a nation how a loss of the taboos that once acted as a constraint on behaviour conspired to make such a distressing procedure almost commonplace.

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP whose amendments to the Fertilisation and Embryology Bill have allowed this subject to be revisited in the teeth of government objections, is to be congratulated, not least for standing up to personal intimidation.

But we should not have to wait for the appropriate legislative vehicle to come along: each Parliament should have the chance to review the law.

SIR - Professor Stuart Campbell (Features, April 30) says he does not foresee an increase in abortions as a result of the proposal to abolish the requirement for two doctors' signatures.

In 1967, David Steel did not foresee that his Bill legislating for "hard cases" would lead to an increase in abortions.

More than six million mainly social abortions later, Prof Campbell advocates making abortion even easier to obtain, with the support of David Steel.

Ann Farmer, Woodford Green, Essex

February 7, 2008
Volume 11, Number 8
http://c-fam.org/

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) In recent years abortion advocates have watched dismayed as hundreds of millions of government dollars have flowed into the fight against HIV-AIDS because they have felt the money has been taken in part from them. Abortion advocates are taking steps in Washington DC this week to right this perceived wrong by connecting HIV-AIDS money to the spread of abortion.

The US Congress began consideration this week to reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a $50 billion pot of money. The draft bill, sponsored by Tom Lantos (D-CA) guts funding for abstinence programs and shifts the focus of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to family planning which will open up the proposed $50 billion program to abortion groups now barred due to the U.S. Mexico City policy. International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has launched a campaign to block all amendments and any proposals to reinstate funding for abstinence programs in the bill.

A document circulating by IPPF told supporters, “Thanks to advocacy efforts over the last few years, the draft prepared by Chairman Lantos' office does not contain an earmark for abstinence-until-marriage programs, includes important funding increases, and emphasizes the integration of HIV and AIDS prevention programs with family planning programs.” The document asks supporters to “oppose harmful amendments, especially those that would reinstate a funding earmark for abstinence-until-marriage programs.”

< The Lantos bill encourages “linkages” and “integration” with family planning programs. In recent months, abortion proponents have advocated strategies to get more funding for abortion through family planning programs by linking it to HIV/AIDS. This plan was unveiled by top UN officials at the Women Deliver conference held in London last October. Nafis Sadik, special advisor to the UN Secretary General for HIV/AIDS, and Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA), amongst others, argued that the abortion rights agenda can advance by linking HIV/AIDS to reproductive health under UNFPA. The US stopped funding UNFPA in 2002 after receiving evidence that the UN agency was complicit in China’s brutal one child policy. UNFPA supporters hope the US will reinstate funding and allow access to PEPFAR funds when the Bush administration leaves office in 2009.

While PEPFAR funds could not be directly used for abortions, the draft bill would fund aid organizations which do advocate abortions as part of their family planning programs. Critics are also concerned about the draft bill’s many references to “reproductive health services,” language which is defined as including “obstetric services” and which could be misused to include abortion. Pro-life advocates are urging decision-makers to ensure that the resources are spent on evidence-based programs with proven track records.

< Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) told the Friday Fax, “By making billions of U.S. taxpayer funds available to pro-abortion organizations the bill unnecessarily puts countless children directly in harms way. No child should suffer the cruelty of abortion because U.S. legislation integrated and enhanced pro-abortion organizations role in PEPFAR.”

The Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a meeting of the full committee next Thursday, February 14th to debate the draft bill.

DEFENDING THE UNBORN: In Wilberforce’s day, defenders of the slave trade alleged that the British economy would collapse if it were ended.

In 1967, the fear of the “population bomb” persuaded many to accept the Abortion Act. Today, even with global warming to worry us, the realisation that we are attacking the unborn on a massive scale makes people uneasy.

Those who believe in the value of all human life are called many names, as Wilberforce was; “ghoulish” is new. But pretending that killing is curing is only effective for a limited time.

Dr Mary Knowles
Chair, Doctors who Respect Human Life
London SW3

Thursday, January 31, 2008

By Jo Steele

(Metro)

The debate over Britain's 24-week legal limit on abortions could be re-ignited after new research showed a dramatic improvement in survival rates for premature babies.

More than double the number are surviving now than 20 years ago at London's University College Hospital.

Only 32 per cent of babies born between 22 and 25 weeks survived in 1981 – that soared to 71 per cent in 2000.

On average around 50 per cent of Britain's most premature babies survive.

'This study is hugely important because it provides information on the survival rates that can be achieved with consistent levels of staffing and resources, and consistent ethical policies,' said Prof John Wyatt, of University College London.

The study also showed almost a quarter of very early babies were disabled.

When the abortion laws, introduced in 1967, were last amended 18 years ago premature babies had a survival rate of ten per cent.

Abortions may be performed up to 24 weeks if two doctors agree that continuing with the pregnancy involves a greater risk to the physical or mental health of the woman, or her existing children, than having a termination.

Lifesitenews.com

By Hilary White

LONDON, February 1, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Seriously disabled children should be considered non-persons and would be better off having been aborted, according to a Peer speaking in the House of Lords Tuesday. Attempting to couch her assertion in terms of children's "rights", Molly Baroness Meacher told the Lords that children born with severe disabilities are "not viable people".

The comments came as the Lords debated an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, put forward by Lady Swinton, Baroness Masham of Ilton, that would have protected unborn disabled children from abortion after the 24 week gestational time limit. The amendment was defeated by 89 votes to 22.

Under Britain's abortion law, children judged to have some form of disability, including such comparatively minor disabilities as club foot or cleft palate, can be aborted up to the time of natural birth. 

Referring to two children she knows who were born prematurely with severe cerebral palsy, Baroness Meacher said, "They were natural births. Those two children cannot breathe naturally; they have to be helped to breathe. They will never talk. They lie on their backs and can do nothing."

"My belief is that there are children, born at those very early ages, who are not viable people. It would be in their best interests to have been aborted."

She said, "I want to speak about the rights of the child. The Mental Capacity Act refers to the child having capacity; if they do not have capacity, it is important for the professionals to consider their best interests."

"There rests my case. We need to consider the best interests of these babies."

John Smeaton, national director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, wrote that Baroness Meacher's comments support what SPUC has said about recent British legislation, that it creates a mandate to kill the disabled and vulnerable. SPUC has pointed out regarding the Mental Capacity Act, "that [the term] 'best interests' in that legislation can be defined in such a way that mentally incapacitated patients may now be killed in their 'best interests'."

"Baroness Meacher," Smeaton said, "clearly considers that her own capacity and achievements in life put her right to life in a different category from the right to life owed to people with cerebral palsy - that she is 'viable person' but 'they' are not 'viable people'."

Others in the Lords, however, do not share Baroness Meacher's extreme form of eugenic thinking. Robert Shirley, Lord Ferrers, said he was "apprehensive" about abortion at early stages "because you are destroying some form of life", and "deeply apprehensive" about abortion in later stages, since it is "difficult to tell...when [the child] becomes a human being with a soul."

Lord Ferrers said he hoped the amendment would pass, "because I do not think it right that human beings should decide at one moment that this child, who is a human being, should not be born."

Baroness Tonge, a leading supporter of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, said that the children referred to were not "disabled human beings" but "grossly abnormal human beings". Citing the "grotesque appearance" of children with anencephaly, Tonge said, "many of those whom I have seen bear little resemblance to human beings."

But Baroness Williams of Crosby said the permission to kill the disabled before birth is at odds with the nation's efforts to help disabled people throughout their lives. "We have a society where once people are born we increasingly go to extraordinary lengths to look after them if they are disabled."

"One of the things that really frightens me is that, if we pick out the potentially disabled at the age of 25 or 26 weeks, we will sooner or later develop an attitude towards the severely disabled who have been disabled since birth," she said.

Contact:

Molly Baroness Meacher
The House of Lords,
London, SW1A 0PW
U.K.

BEIJING, Jan. 7 -- Officials in Hubei province have expelled 500 people from the Communist Party for violating China's "one-child" family planning policy, state media reports said Monday.

Of the 93,084 people who had more children than allowed last year, 1,678 were officials or party members, the New China News Agency reported. Among the violators were seven national or local legislators and political advisers, all of whom were stripped of their political status. Another 395 offenders lost their jobs.

China's family planning officials, worried about a baby boom that could further strain the country's resources, have been trying to crack down on parents who have more children than they are permitted under the law.

Under the current rules, city residents are limited to one child, while rural residents may have two children. In addition, parents who themselves are only children and members of ethnic minorities are granted exceptions.

Controversial family planning rules have helped lift millions out of poverty here but they also have exacerbated a gender imbalance, whereby 118 boys are now born for every 100 girls.

In recent years, a growing number of wealthy Chinese have defied the rules and simply paid the resultant fines. Now, government agencies are attempting to improve the enforcement of their policies without necessarily resorting to coercive means such as forced abortions -- a tactic used in the past.

Hubei province, which levied a record-breaking $105,000 fine against a local lawmaker last year, now bars violators from holding elective office or government jobs for three years.

"More party members, celebrities and well-off people are violating the policies in recent years, which has undermined social equality," said Yang Youwang, head of Hubei's family planning commission, according to the New China News Agency. A number of cases involving celebrities or officials were still under investigation, but they would be later identified, Yang said.

Wang Yukai, a professor with China's National School of Administration, said gradual changes to family planning policies would take years to complete. Those changes also would have to include a social security system for rural residents who make up most of China's 1.3 billion population.

"Family concepts in the countryside are old and traditional, such as having a son to carry on the family name. It will take a long time to change people's minds. Sons live with their parents and look after them, but daughters leave home when they marry," Wang said. "It will also take a long time to change the idea that men are superior to women, to enhance education, to modernize agriculture and to set up a social insurance system."

MADRID — Private clinics in Spain, which perform most of the country’s abortions, began a five-day strike on Tuesday to protest what they said was persecution by anti-abortion campaigners and government inspectors, who have swept clinics in recent weeks to crack down on illegal terminations.

The strike, which involves about 40 clinics, revives a debate about Spain’s abortion rules at an awkward moment for the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which is trying to avoid inflammatory issues before elections in March.

The strike could affect as many as 2,000 women, according to Francisca García Gallego, a regional director of the Association of Accredited Abortion Clinics, which organized it. She said striking clinics, which account for a majority of abortions in the country, would accept only emergency cases. The number of abortions in Spain has doubled in the past decade, to about 100,000 a year.

Spain decriminalized abortion in 1985, and under current law women can have an abortion during the first 22 weeks of pregnancy if there is a risk of fetal malformation and the first 12 weeks in cases of rape. However, they are allowed to abort at any point if they can demonstrate that their mental or physical health is at risk.

Ms. García said the central government had done nothing to protect abortion clinics or patients from a wave of aggressive protests by anti-abortion campaigners and raids by the local authorities that resulted in a dozen arrests in December. In recent weeks, clinics had been vandalized and doctors and nurses insulted and, in one or two cases, hit by protesters, she said.

The raids followed the arrest in December of Carlos Morín, a gynecologist who ran a group of clinics in Barcelona and who was secretly filmed by a Danish journalist apparently agreeing to her request for an abortion in her seventh month. Dr. Morín is in jail, according to local news reports.

Ms. García said by telephone that cases of illegal abortion were extremely rare and that 90 percent of terminations in Spain happened in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

“There is a cloud of suspicion hanging over us ever since the Barcelona clinic was closed,” she said. “We feel physically threatened, but nobody in the government has come out in our defense.”

Dr. Morín’s arrest also set off a flurry of news media reports of “abortion tourism.” They offered macabre details of late-term abortions at clinics in Barcelona and Madrid. One private television producer released a video, said to have been made in a Madrid clinic, that showed an abortion at 21 weeks.

In December, prosecutors in the Netherlands said they had arrested a Dutch woman who was accused of having had a late-term abortion in a Spanish clinic. Dutch law allows abortions up to the 24th week and illegal abortions are virtually unknown, according to a report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Abortion-rights advocates say the law should be more flexible, allowing women to terminate a pregnancy before a certain number of weeks on the basis of social or economic pressures, as is the case in many European countries. Critics say existing rules are routinely flouted by doctors.

Mr. Zapatero said after the Barcelona arrest that an overhaul of the abortion law would be part of the government’s election campaign, but almost immediately backtracked, saying simply that the law should be reassessed.

REGRET: “I hadn’t given it a thought,” Mark B. Morrow, shown with son Ross, said of long-ago girlfriends’ abortions. “ Now it all came crashing down on me — look what you’ve done.”

'We had abortions,' say men whose lovers ended pregnancies. It isn't just a women's trauma, they insist. But critics see a political calculation.

By Stephanie Simon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 7, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO -- Jason Baier talks often to the little boy he calls Jamie. He imagines this boy -- his son -- with blond hair and green eyes, chubby cheeks, a sweet smile.

But he'll never know for sure.

His fiancee's sister told him about the abortion after it was over. Baier remembers that he cried. The next weeks and months go black. He knows he drank far too much. He and his fiancee fought until they broke up. "I hated the world," he said.

Baier, 36, still longs for the child who might have been, with an intensity that bewilders him: "How can I miss something I never even held?"

These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of "post-abortive men." Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

"We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had abortions."

Morrow spoke to more than 150 antiabortion activists gathered recently in San Francisco for what was billed as the first national conference on men and abortion. Participants -- mostly counselors and clergy -- heard two days of lectures on topics such as "Medicating the Pain of Lost Fatherhood" and "Forgiveness Therapy With Post-Abortion Men."

The most striking session featured the halting testimony of men whose partners aborted. Baier, who now lives in Phoenix, told the crowd he suffered years of depression and addiction. "I couldn't get the thought out of my head about what I had lost."

Since the concept of post-abortion syndrome first emerged in the early 1980s, some women have recounted similar stories -- and learned to leverage them into political power. They speak at legislative hearings and rallies organized by the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. They write affidavits detailing their years of emotional turmoil, which the Justice Foundation, a conservative advocacy group, submits to lawmakers and courts nationwide.

Last spring, the Supreme Court cited these accounts as one reason to ban the late-term procedure that opponents call "partial-birth" abortion. The majority opinion suggested that the ban would protect women from a decision they might later regret.

Women's testimony was also used to justify a sweeping abortion ban passed in 2006 in South Dakota. (Voters overturned the ban before it could take effect.)

"It's a rule of thumb that if you want to get a law passed, you have to tell anecdotes that grab people," said Dr. Nada Stotland, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Assn. Antiabortion activists have done that well, she said. "They've succeeded in convincing a lot of the American public" that abortion leaves women wounded.

From The Times. Read the original here.

November 30, 2007

Thomas Catan in Madrid and David Rose

Police investigating four abortion clinics in Barcelona used frequently by British women have been horrified to find purpose-built machines attached to the drains that were used to crush foetuses.

The clinics allegedly performed illegal abortions on women into their eighth month of pregnancy. Police have arrested Carlos MorÍn, the Peruvian head of the clinics, his wife and four other colleagues after a lawsuit by a Christian organisation, e-Cristians. Mr MorÍn reportedly has refused to answer police questions.

Because they were so loud, the machines – which fed into public drains – were switched on only during the early hours of the day to avoid drawing attention to the illegal arrangement, police sources said. Officers gathering evidence at the clinics this week have been testing the machines and drains for traces of DNA, which may be matched with that of past clients, according to reports.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill began its second reading debate in the House of Lords on MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19.

The bill allows for the creation of human/animal hybrid embryos by transferring human DNA to animal eggs, by fertilising animal eggs with human sperm and by adding animal genes to human embryos.

Pro-abortion MP’s want to add amendments to the bill which will make it legal to have an abortion without two doctors’ signatures, as at present, for nurses and midwives to perform abortions and for abortions to be carried out on unlicensed premises – but please note these amendments about abortion have not been added yet.

The battle over this bill is likely to be the biggest battle over life issues in 40 years.

It is vital to contact members of the House of Lords to ask them to vote against the bill. Point out your objections to the creation of hybrid embryos.

For names and e-mail addresses of members of the House of Lords, log on to www.spuc.org.uk/lobbying. click on Parliamentarians’ emails, then click on Peers.

From Lawyers Christian Fellowship:

Many of the speakers at the debate on 19th November spoke against Government plans to remove the requirement that IVF providers consider the need of a child for a father when considering IVF applications. Further controversy was sparked last night when it was reported that Gordon Brown would not allow Labour MPs to have a free vote on this issue of conscience. One Labour MP, Geraldine Smith, stated that she would deny any order to back the legislation, saying “Can you imagine a child who has a birth certificate with two females as mother and father? It’s nonsense. It’s madness. “The Conservative Party will allow a free vote on the issue.

It is now important to continue writing to the Prime Minister asking him to allow a free vote on this, and on the hybrid embryo issue in the Bill. Also please write to David Cameron commending him on his decision to allow a free vote on fathers, and asking him to take a public stand for the family in how he votes.

This letter was sent to the Observer but was not printed.

The letter from Baroness Gould et al. about Education and abortion (4th November) cites lower abortion figures from Belgium and Holland to justify liberal contraception and comprehensive sex education even in faith schools. However, abortion figures from these countries cannot be directly compared with U.K. figures. The reason for this, according to my Dutch colleagues is that very early abortions brought on by medical treatment, wich they call "over time treatment" are not included in the figures as this is not obligatory.

Robert P. Balfour, FRCOG
President, Doctors Who Respect Human Life

Minority report MP’s blast Committee’s pro-abortion bias

By Hilary White

LONDON, October 31, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The UK’s Commons Committee on Science and Technology has issued its report saying that Britain’s abortion law should be further liberalised so that women can abort their children more easily. The report recommends scrapping the requirement of two doctors to sign an approval and says women should be allowed to use the deadly RU-486 abortion pill at home without medical supervision.

The Committee concluded that the gestational age limit of 24 weeks should remain in place and “that there is no scientific basis - on the grounds on viability - to reduce the upper time limit”.

“The Committee supports the removal of the requirement for two doctors signatures before an abortion can be carried out” and is “concerned that the requirement” “may be causing delays in access to abortion services.” In the British political system, a Commons Committee report is normally followed very closely in creating or amending legislation.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the Committee’s conclusions were “unusually” published at midnight after MP’s had already left for a week’s holiday leading to accusations of railroading its conclusions and cutting off debate.

MEDIA INVITATION 
REPORT LAUNCH

Assessing the Damage:  The Demographic Impact on Society and Consequences for the Health of Women of the 1967Abortion Act over 40 years 

Date: Thursday 25^th October 2007 

Time: 11.00 a.m. 

Venue: Robert Adams Room, Ground Floor, Royal Society of Medicine, Chandos House, 2 Queen Anne’s Street, London.

Available for interview:

Patrick Carroll M.A, F.I.A, Author of the Report

Dr. Joel Brind, Professor of Biology, Chemistry and Endocrinology at Baruch College, the City University of New York

Dr Greg Gardner, GP and member of the Medical Ethics Alliance (by telephone). 

You are invited to send a reporter, camera crew and/or photographer. 

For further information, please contact Terry McErlane on 07860862231

(NEW YORK -- C-FAM) A group of nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s) from the United States, Europe and Latin America today delivered a letter to the UN and the organizers of the just concluded Women Deliver conference complaining that the conference was more about promoting abortion than caring for the real needs of women.

The joint letter was issued by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), United Families International (US), Concerned Women for America (US), World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations, Institute for Family Policy (Spain), Instituto Mujer y Vida (Spain), Comite Nacional Provida de Mexico, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (UK), and many others.

The letter said, “We wish to express our profound disappointment and dismay that the Women Deliver conference has failed to meet its stated objective of addressing Millennium Development Goal 5, which is to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity. Delegates were invited to attend a global conference on the causes, prevention and treatment of the complications of pregnancy and childbirth which lead to the deaths of so many mothers, particularly in developing countries, and to consider effective solutions. Regrettably, the conference agenda was so preoccupied with promoting the ideology and practice of abortion that the genuine healthcare needs of women and children were virtually ignored in the plenary sessions and overwhelmed in the panel discussions.”

Read the full text here.

Read the original here.

Tuesday September 25, 2007

500 Centre for Bioethical Reform explicit abortion billboards had powerful effect

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, September 25, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "Right to Life" defenders won an impressive victory in Slovakia with the Health Ministry rescinding a law that forced all hospitals to provide abortions. Even the Slovak branch of Planned Parenthood attributed the graphic abortion truth campaign of Pravo Na Zivot for the Ministry's retreat over the abortion requirement.

By Samantha Singson

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) British Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Nirj Deva has slammed a new EU report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Speaking in the European Parliament this week, Deva acknowledged the need for a progress report for achieving the largely non-controversial MDGs of reducing poverty and disease, and increasing access to education. Where Deva diverged from the report, which was later passed by the European Parliament, was the attempt by the authors to “insert a covert agenda of abortion promotion” within the text.

The introduction to the "MDGs at the Midway Point" report states that “saving women's lives means ensuring that they have universal to access to sexual reproductive health care and family planning” and that the EU “should continue to lead the way on sexual and reproductive health rights by maintaining levels of funding for the full range of (sexual and reproductive health and rights) services.”

Deva took issue with two paragraphs of the report and urged his fellow parliamentarians to vote against them. Paragraph 41 of the report urges the EU “to continue to be the vanguard of efforts to support sexual and reproductive health rights” and links maternal mortality, low contraceptive prevalence and high rates of unsafe abortion in sub-Saharan Africa. Paragraph 42 of the report states the UN intends to adopt a new global target on “universal access to sexual and reproductive health.”

UN experts point out several problems with the two controversial paragraphs. First, the term “sexual and reproductive health rights” has never been included in any negotiated UN document. Even so, they point out that such “rights” language related to "reproductive health" has been misinterpreted by UN committees to include abortion. Second, according to a 2004 report issued by the pro-abortion UN Population Fund (UNFPA) the most important means of reducing maternal mortality is not access to contraceptives and legal abortion but the presence of skilled birth attendants and access to emergency obstetric care.

Paragraph 41, which says the UN is about to adopt a new global goal on reproductive health, contradicts the repeated assertions of UN radicals like UNFPA chief Thoraya Obaid that such a goal already exists. Contrary to Obaid’s statements, no such target currently exists and delegations such as the United States have spoken out in the General Assembly against any new targets, particularly in regards to reproductive health. Moreover, against the content of the new EU resolution, the UN General Assembly has no plans to initiate a new global goal in this area.

Speaking to the Friday Fax, Mr. Deva said, “This report in the European Parliament has very little to do with 'a woman's right to choose', and a lot to do with controlling population figures in the third world within what the 'West' feels is a manageable amount. It is clear that certain UN-backed and EU-backed non-governmental organizations which are heavily promoting abortion in the third world are more interested in culling people than in reducing the relatively far smaller figure of deaths through unsafe and illegal abortions."

WASHINGTON, May 21 — For many years, the political struggle over abortion was often framed as a starkly binary choice: the interest of the woman, advocated by supporters of abortion rights, versus the interest of the fetus, advocated by opponents of abortion.

But last month’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act marked a milestone for a different argument advanced by anti-abortion leaders, one they are increasingly making in state legislatures around the country. They say that abortion, as a rule, is not in the best interest of the woman; that women are often misled or ill-informed about its risks to their own physical or emotional health; and that the interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus are, in fact, the same.

Daily Mail (London)
April 17, 2007 Tuesday

INCREASING numbers of doctors are refusing to carry out abortions, forcing the NHS to pay private hospitals for the procedures. Here, Dr Robert Hardie, a former GP, explains why he resigned rather than refer women for terminations.

NO GP should go against their conscience. So says the General Medical Council. If only the Department of Health understood this ethical stance, the droves of young doctors now refusing to perform abortions would not have to worry about losing their jobs for sticking to their principles.

The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday awarded a 36-year-old Polish woman 25,000 euros, about $33,000, in damages after doctors refused to grant her permission to terminate her pregnancy despite serious risk to her eyesight.

After her delivery, her eyesight deteriorated considerably, and she has been declared significantly disabled.

The court ruled that Poland had no effective legal framework for pregnant women to assert their right to abortion on medical grounds.

The ruling means that Poland will have to introduce clearer guidelines on abortion on medical grounds. As a member of the Council of Europe, Poland is obliged to abide by the court's judgments.

The Polish government has three months to appeal the verdict.

Daily Mail (London)

December 16, 2006 Saturday

It sounds beyond belief . . . newborn babies killed for their stem cells to create beauty products. But as this Special Report reveals, the evidence is both compelling and deeply distressing

THE PLASTIC bag looks as if it contains meat. But then a right leg is taken from it and placed surgically on the morgue table, followed by the left one. Then the torso. The head follows, a gaping cavity where the brain used to be.

But it is only when the gloved hand of the pathologist examines the tiny fingers of a baby aged about 30 weeks that the full horror of what I am witnessing sinks in.