NEWSVol. 12 No.3 - Spring Edition 1995 Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042
Pro-Life Victoria: Speaking Up for Humanity in the Nineties |
Contents:
- The Pro-Life New Generation
- Editorial
- Unfamiliar Doctors Exaggerate
Risks
- China's Children of the Damned
- Volunteers
- Euthanasia Campaign
- Abortion and Breast Cancer
- Recent
Guttmacher Study Offers Some Interesting Information
- World View
In a Features article in the Melbourne Age June 7 this year, titled Cable Mission, Jesuit priest Father Michael Kelly speaking on whether or not pro-life groups would feature on his proposed cable television Lifevision, had this to say: "Political action on the issues of abortion and euthanasia is a short term way of dealing with it. Long term, it’s an exercise in education about values."
The photograph opposite of students being introduced to the wonder of human life before birth, is evidence of Pro-Life Victoria’s long term commitment to "education about values". The set of foetal models is one of the sets already placed in 100 Victorian Secondary Schools by Pro-Life Victoria as part of its continuing "Project How You Began". Pro-Life Victoria is committed to placing a set in the remaining 500 Secondary Schools.
¬
Secretary of Pro-Life Victoria, Denise Cameron with
students from Sacred Heart Girls College Oakleigh. Left to right: Lisa
Nieuwesteeg, Marina de Visser and Evelyn Hodawany, admiring a set of Foetal
Models.
The retail price of a set of foetal models is $120. Pro-Life Victoria has sought and been granted funding for the first 100 sets over and above the money raised by subscriptions and donations. It is once again seeking funds for a further 100 sets. Pro-Lifers who wish to contribute to this specific project may do so. The more funds we have, the faster we can place them in schools and perhaps even save the life of a baby by showing a student the life destroyed in an abortion.
Whilst this long term project continues, short term political action is always necessary. eg. invitro fertilisation legislation, euthanasia legislation, and the introduction of RU 486 into the country. Its amazing how we hear such arguments against the politicization" of abortion and euthanasia when the politicization of the environment for example, is so acceptable. We have "Green" politics. No one believes these are a "short term way" of dealing with environmental issues. Pro-Life Victoria often speaks of creating a "new pro-life generation". The looks of wonder and respect on the faces of these young people as they tenderly hold the small models of babies are the looks of a new pro-life generation.
When you receive the spring issue of Pro-Life News, I will be on long service leave and 12,000 miles away in Scotland. On August 19, I will be present at the re-enactment of the Raising of the Standard at Glenfinnan in the Scottish Highlands, 250 years after it was first raised in the presence of Prince Charles Edward Stuart and 800 of my Clansmen.
Now it is not my intention to persuade the Pro-Life Movement to take sides in the Jacobite Cause of 250 years ago! But. the fact that it was generally considered a "lost" cause will make me think of our cause, the pro-life cause, and whether or not we will ever win this, the most important cause of the 20th century.
It was good for me therefore to read an essay by Maria McFadden in the Spring 1995 edition of Human Life Review about the death of her brother Robert, a 34 year old pro-life lobbyist in December 1994. In the last years of his life, her brother had been concerned about the escalation of violence in the American pro-life movement which caused him to write the following.
"The conflict surrounding abortion is not a game between teams, but rather a fight between the elemental forces of good and evil. That is not a battle mere humans are meant to win or loose. The choice presented to us in this fundamental struggle is to fight either against Light and Darkness, and to do so until we pass from this existence. For greater forces than us will eventually win, and loose. And the fact that we have already been told the outcome, that good will triumph over evil, does not give us the right or excuse to hurry that outcome along in our own time, by our own devices.
This does not release us from responsibility but instead focuses our attention on our individual responsibility to do what is right, what is moral.
It is right to fight abortion, not because you can win, but because of what abortion is."
On my way home on October 2, 3 and 4, I will be attending the Third World Congress for Pro-Life Movements in Rome. The theme will be an in-depth study of the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae together with an exchange of up-dated information and recommendations by the Movements.
After which, I am sure I will return revitalised to continue the struggle.
Please "keep watch" while I am away!
Denise Cameron
Reprinted from New Zealand’s Humanity, February 1995
Dr James King, medical superintendent of the Mater Mothers Hospital in Brisbane, is not a man to boast of his surgical exploits.
We had been talking on the subject of Caesareans for half an hour before he mentioned in passing that he had delivered a woman of her thirteenth child by Caesarean section.
It was Dublin in 1973 when Dr King was doing his specialist training as an obstetrician at the Rotunda Hospital which served a poor area of the city.
"I remember the lady well, she was still quite young, I delivered her eleventh child in 1971, her twelfth the following year .and the thirteenth in 1973, all by Caesarean.
"She
was sailing uncharted seas for it was the biggest number of Caesarean deliveries
anyone had known. But her uterus healed fine every time, and her abdominal wall
was in very good shape. When we did operations there was an increasing number of
people attending each time to see what it was like. She was a celebrity."
The Rotunda Hospital did not perform tubal ligations and the question of sterilisation did not arise at all.
Commenting on Deborah Mitchell’s experience, he said doctors might exaggerate the risks of childbirth to mothers because they are no longer seeing large families at all, let alone by Caesarean Section.
"Doctors sometimes make assumptions about people from their own value system. We have no right to do that, or to advise people on what should be the size of their family."
In Western society the dramatic drop in the number of births has changed the whole atmosphere surrounding birth, both for mothers and doctors, he said.
"There is a lot more fear and doctors are not so comfortable with birth. It is no longer just a normal part of family dynamics in our society."
After four years of working in Ireland, Dr King was struck by the difference in attitude when he went to North America. "In Ireland the women had an emotional preparedness for birth as an inevitable consequence of life. They had an instinct and intuition that birth was women's business and that they were capable of it.
"Birth seemed to be a far greater hurdle for North American women. It was something you had to train for, and pass an exam in, and be a graduate of a preparation programme.
For women who want to have more children, and have Caesarean sections, Dr King said that after one Caesarean operation a normal delivery is possible.
"Most times after two we would recommend that the rest be by Caesarean, and after three, certainly, always to have Caesar.
By Melinda Tankard Reist, The Age, March 31, 1995
There has been international criticism of the Federal Government’s plans to disallow forced abortion and sterilization as grounds for refugee status. Melinda Tankard Reist interviews a Chinese doctor who says she has performed many forced abortions under China’s one-child policy.
They were dragged kicking and screaming to Dr Xiao Ying Wong’s hospital.
Only four or five weeks from giving birth, their hands and feet were tied to the table for the abortion Dr Wong had been ordered to perform.
Others, bowed and defeated after days of harassment and threats of fines, job losses or the destruction of their homes, came quietly, authorities at their side, for their "voluntary" abortions.
Dr Wong (not her real name) estimates she has performed at least 15,000 abortions in the seven years she worked at a hospital in Jiangsu province.
She killed almost full-term babies in the womb by lethal injection. She put babies who survived abortion into rubbish bins to die. And she saw another doctor plunge a hypodermic syringe into a baby’s brain through the soft spot on the skull as the head crowned at the point of birth.
Dr Wong, 34, received asylum in Australia on the grounds of fear of persecution under China’s population policy. She was first refused asylum by an immigration minister’s delegate in 1993, but won her appeal on religious grounds as a conscientious objector in April last year.
She is now safe, but many other Chinese women are not.
If Federal Parliament approves legislation, to be debated in the Senate in May, that will prevent asylum seekers applying for refugee status on the basis of fear of prosecution under China’s fertility control policy. Dr Wong is afraid that women facing abortion and sterilisation, and couples with more than one child will be returned and punished.
From 1983 to 1989, Dr Wong worked as an obstetrician and gynaecologist in China. She was just 23 when the family Planning Office ordered her to ensure the violators of China’s population control program were dealt with.
"You would not think mine is the face of a murderer," she says in her small Melbourne flat. A Melbourne psychiatrist has diagnosed her as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. "She presents with symptoms of depression, guilt, vivid reliving of traumatic experiences and nightmares," the psychiatrist said. The Australian Red Cross described her as having "nervous eczema, disturbed behaviour and insomnia
Xiao Ying entered medical school at 19. In 1983, with a degree in medicine, she received her first shock while on a training visit to a hospital.
"I saw the dead babies in the rubbish bin and I saw the blood, so much blood," she recalls. "But I didn’t think that it was an abortion, I think that maybe someone just lost her baby (miscarriage).
"My teacher pushed my hands down to force the needle into the womb. I could feel the baby’s body, I could feel it struggle."
"But then I saw the women giving birth to dead babies. I saw their suffering and pain. Some of the babies had their eyes open, sometimes they breathed, sometimes the baby boys would urinate, then die.
Dr Wong was sent to a hospital between the country and city to conduct abortions and sterilizations on women who had violated the one-baby quota. Other women who were unmarried or deemed too young, not married long enough or whose babies would exceed the quotas permitted by their work unit underwent abortions of their first children. Dr Wong says one in three abortions she performed were first pregnancies.
For Abortions after 19 weeks of pregnancy, a long needle filled with the abortifacient Rivalor was inserted through the abdomen into the womb. Contractions usually began and the woman was left to expel the baby.
Dr Wong vividly remembers the first time she did this. "My hands were shaking. My teacher pushed my hands down to force the needle into the womb. I could feel the baby’s body, I could feel it struggle."
Where abortions failed and the baby was expelled alive, which Dr Wong says was common, the baby would scream sometimes for two hours - before dying. Those who did not die quickly were put in a bin and covered. Dr Wong tried to find a place to bury them.
"I put many, many babies in the garden around the hospital," she recalls. "There was no money for a special (burial) place
There were also no anaesthetics or pain killers for women undergoing abortions at Dr Wong’s hospital. There wasn’t time. "There’s not enough doctors and the doctor wants a dead baby, fast," Dr Wong says.
Women also suffered with the IUD’s they were made to have fitted following the birth of their first child. The women were X-rayed regularly to check the IUD was in place. Dr Wong was not permitted to remove them; this would have been a crime.
Medical teams were bused to the countryside for crackdowns on women pregnant with unauthorised children. Dr Wong recalls that in each village women rounded up by family planning workers were brought to them for abortions while other women and men were sterilized.
"If you don’t want an abortion, you have a big problem. In the countryside, they (the authorities) will pull down your house and sell your things to pay the fine." The fine depended on a couple’s money and possessions. A second child (unless authorized in cases where the first child was female or disabled) would be denied education medical care and other basic rights. "The second child has no rights, it’s illegal," Dr Wong says.
Many men were less distressed over their wife’s forced abortion if they knew the baby was a girl. "If he sees a boy (he says), ‘Oh my God!’ He picks up the dead baby, crying. He wants to beat the doctor, he wants to beat the family planning officer’
"So we get experience. When the baby is born (aborted), we quickly take it out to the rubbish. Then we lie about the sex.'
For many women, it was important to prove they could bear sons — even though they knew the babies would be aborted. They wanted to save face with their husband’s families.
She says she felt it was impossible to leave her job. It was futile to complain and she felt great pressure to continue because she was viewed as a competent specialist. She feared authority and did not want to face the punishment, financial loss and criticism of expressing her distress. Doctors who interfered with the population control plan were condemned as counter revolutionaries.
She was also confused. Throughout her medical training, she had been taught that life began after birth and that anything a doctor did beforehand was not murder - even if the infant’s head was crowning.
Her guilt and grief were compounded by her Christian faith. She found her faith in 1980 while at university, was baptized in 1983 and later sang in the choir at church. None of her fellow believers knew what her job involved. Being a Government-controlled church, she was afraid to reveal her anguish.
She never even told her family what she did. "How could I tell them?" she asks. "They would think I cut meat (like a butcher)."
She lost any desire for marriage or children. "I hated Chinese men who have big power They make suffering for children, for women. Who decides the one-child policy? The Communist Party leaders decide. He never thinks of the woman, how she suffers."
Finally Dr Wong decided to leave her homeland. A door opened when Australia promoted English-language courses for Chinese. She arrived in December 1989 and applied for refugee status in June 1991.
A member of the refugee review tribunal, Dr R. Hudson, found that "persecution of a person who refuses, because of her genuine religious belief to carry out forced abortions on pregnant women, is persecution for a (Refugees) Convention-based reason". (The United nations Refugees Convention of 1951 and the Refugees Protocol of 1967 provide a legal obligation not to a "refugee" under the United Nations definition, that is a person with a "welt founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political option.")
He also said it was "strongly arguable" that compulsory abortion "would fall foul" of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Before her appeal, Dr Wong had been too ashamed to tell anybody she was a Christian. "I don’t think I’m really Christian. I think I’m opposite to a Christian because I do so many bad things," she says. "I didn’t try and do something for Chinese women. I’m not a very brave woman, I’m weak."
Now she feels the only way she can atone for her deeds is to try to help other Chinese women by making known what happens in the name of population control in China.
"You have to listen to the woman, to the story. Listen case by case. You can’t say, ‘everybody go back’. Let her speak. She is not stupid. Listen to her story, then you can understand what is going on in China."
Many will be shocked to find,
When the day of judgment nears,
That there’s a special place in Heaven,
Set aside for Volunteers.
Furnished with big recliners,
Satin couches and footstools,
Where there’s no committee chairman,
No group leaders or car pools,
No meeting team that needs attendances,
No bazaar and no bake sale.
There will be nothing to staple.
Not a thing to mail.
Telephone lists will be outlawed,
But a finger snap will bring,
Cool drinks and gourmet dinners,
And rare treats fit for a King,
You ask, who’ll serve these privileged few,
And work for all they’re worth?
Why, all those who reaped the benefits,
And not, not once volunteered, on earth.
A tribute to our volunteers from a grateful
Executive of Pro-Life Victoria.
Reprinted from Melbourne Age
July 21, 1995
Catholic and Anglican church leaders yesterday released an historic joint statement calling on the New South Wales Government to resist attempts to legalise euthanasia.
The two churches formed a united front at yesterday’s annual conference of NSW and ACT bishops and warned the Government that legalising euthanasia would pave the way towards involuntary killings.
A spokeswoman for the Anglican Church said the decision to issue a joint statement underpinned the overwhelming opposition against "mercy killings".
from Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati, Inc., June/July 1995.
The Daling study publicised in October and reported in the Journal of The National Cancer Institute showed an overall risk of 50% more cancers in women who had their first abortion before age 18 or after age 30.
A far less publicised and rather frightening piece of information in the research study was the fact that, of the women in the study who had a family history of breast cancer, who aborted their first pregnancy before age 18, everyone developed breast cancer.
Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry continues to claim that there is no evidence of a cause and effect relationship here, but an increasing number of people believe that Planned Parenthood has a legal responsibility to at least to inform its clients of this relationship.
Failing this, many now believe that Planned Parenthood has exposed itself to a major-class action lawsuits for withholding such information from women. A positive development here is talk in the United States House of Representatives about holding hearings on this issue.
In its recent study "The Cost Implications of Including Abortion Coverage Under Medicard," it shows a relationship between higher welfare payments and higher abortion rates.
Taking the states in groups often, from the most generous to the least generous in AFDC payments, those with the highest ratio of abortions to live births. The average for each groups of states:
Maximum
Abortions per
Benefit
1000 Births
Group
I
$636.40
440.0
Group
II
450.30
287.0
Group
III
374.80
258.3
Group
IV
327.80
318.6
Group
V
198.60
231.0
from Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati, Inc.. Our thanks to Michael Schwartz for pointing this out.
CANADA: A Toronto Clinic Bombing - Back in 1992, an abortion chamber in Toronto was burned. No one was arrested. No one was charged. There was no evidence in any way to implicate prolifers in the incident. Nevertheless the Canadian media unanimously attributed it to the pro-life movement and the Ontario Provincial judgment sought an injunction against pro-life activities outside of abortion chambers in that province.
Now we have a report from Canada’s Security Intelligence Service. It cites the opinion of an informer that, "The bombing was by a left wing activist to make the government take action against anti-abortionists." Canada’s Campaign Life Coalition has offered a reward of $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators of the bombing.
ITALY: Pro-Life Decision - The President of Italy’s constitutional Court (their Supreme Court) on April 26, issued a landmark statement that has shaken the pro-abortion industry in that nation. He stated that the right to life of unborn babies must override the right to abortion in constitutional law. It is "unchallengeable that the right to life begins at the moment of conception. From the point of view of constitutional law, it is very difficult - I would say impossible - to recognise abortion as a right of freedom for the mother. The only case," he said, "where the right to abortion is on the same level as the right to life of an unborn child is in a situation where the life of the mother is in serious danger. Even then," he says, "the choice is difficult because the ‘lives have equal value.'"
The constitution of the nation of Italy defines life as beginning at conception. But a 1978 law stripped legal penalties for abortion and allowed it under certain circumstances. This has been interpreted to allow abortion virtually on demand during the first three months of pregnancy. Since that time, there has been a progressive decline in the number of abortions. In 1982, there were 235,000 abortions. In 1993, 151,000. The judge spoke to the freedom and choices that the citizen has in a constitutional democracy such as Italy’s. "Everyone should be given the freedom to build his own world," he said, "but there is a nucleus of fundamental values, known as unalienable rights, which cannot be part of political negotiations." Included in this he placed the right to life of the unborn child.
from Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati, Inc., June/July 1995.
PHILIPPINES: A nationwide vaccination program against tetanus in women of childbearing age has blown up into a national scandal. It seems that of four batches of vaccine, three were "contaminated" with anti-pregnancy vaccine. This chemical, known as anti-human chorionic gonadotrophin, tricks her body into attacking this hormone which is vital to the continuation of pregnancy.
Concerns about this surfaced in Mexico late last year where this chemical was found in anti-tetanus vaccine being used in women and girls over the age of twelve. This report is from IRLE weekly Volume 5, No 8, 24 February 1995, its source is Today (Phils), 8 and 22 February 1995.
UNITED KINGDOM: London - A women who was given an abortion without her consent while undergoing a gynaecological operation is suing the surgeon for damages. The surgeon may also face criminal charges.
Barbara Whiten, 35, from Nottinghamshire, did not know she was 11 weeks pregnant when she agreed to a hysterectomy because of endometriosis and severe abdominal pain.
During the operation the surgeon, Mr Reginald Dixon, discovered she was pregnant but continued to remove her womb and ovaries.
Mrs Whiten says Mr Dixon later told her husband he did an abortion "because of my age, because I had two stepsons and because I’d had some family problems" (The previous summer Mrs Whiten had taken an overdose of anti-depressant tablets while depressed following her father’s death).
Mrs Whiten who thought she was infertile, says she has been cheated of her one chance of becoming a mother. "I would have loved to have had a baby. He took our decision away from us. He had no right to do that".
© The Official Newsletter of Pro-Life Victoria, Edited by Denise Cameron |