Pro-LIFE NEWS

Vol. 14 No.1 - Autumn Edition 1997                                  Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042

Contents:

- One Last Burst of Letters Needed
- Editorial
- How data on death became a numbers game
- Graphic photos of Abortion?
- Interesting Quote
- Democracy on trial
- World View

On December 9, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, 88 votes to 35, in support of the Member for Menzies, Mr Kevin Andrews’ private members Bill to overturn the Northern Territory’s euthanasia legislation. It was a great day for Australia, a day of deep relief It was also a day for us to be proud of our representatives in Parliament, who so obviously had thought long and hard about the question of euthanasia and cared enough for us to protect us from such dangerous legislation. There were 78 speeches made on the Bill. The member for the Northern Territory, Mr Nick Dondos’ speech was bitterly sectarian - "The debate in terms of amending the self-government act has really been driven by the Catholic society and the Catholic community of this country I know it is in very, very poor taste to suggest this." he said, to the interjections of anti-euthanasia MPs, Catholic and otherwise, furiously shaking their heads, "You’re right. It is!" Others however, were well researched and very sincere.

One of the first three speakers, in favour of the Andrews’ Bill Labor Left MP, the Member for Melbourne, Mr Lindsay Tanner said, "No government should be allowed to sanction one person’s involvement in the death of another. regardless of the worth of arguments in favour of ending a dying persons pain." He urged his colleagues to support the Bill to overturn the Northern Territory’s euthanasia’s law on the ground that sanctioning killing was fraught with difficulty. "I’m troubled by euthanasia because I think it is virtually impossible to prevent abuses and mistakes. I’m troubled by it because I think it’s virtually impossible to justify offering the option of assisted suicide to one category of people when you deny it to others.... Why is it that we put so much effort and so much concern into telling some people ‘Don’t kill yourself - we have so much concern now about youth suicide - and yet on the other hand, we are now shifting into a pattern where we are going to help certain people commit suicide." he said.

The biggest hurdle for the Andrews Bill still lies ahead of us. The vote in the Senate mid to late March. Prolifers throughout Australia have until now, rallied behind this legislation and been a big factor in its success. It would be a tragedy to ease up now on our efforts to stop this evil form of killing. We must make one more huge effort to ensure the Andrews Bill passes through the Senate.

The "numbers" in the Senate have always been thought to be tighter than in the House of Representatives - and getting even tighter. So this is our most important appeal to date - please write to all Victorian Senators - especially the "bolded" names on our enclosed letter writing notes today. There is little time left. The same letter may be written to all of them. We have also listed telephone numbers, local and Canberra for you to phone your Senator close to the date of the final vote to appeal to them to pass the Andrews Bill. If you have written before, please still write again! This is one of the most important requests we will have to make of you. The success of Kevin Andrews’ Bill is now up to each and every one of us.

¬ In Canberra to lobby for support for the Andrews Bill, Shirley Howard, Richard Grant & ProLife Victoria Secretary, Denise Cameron. Personal lobbying of parliamentarians is vital to the success of prolife legislation or the defeat of anti-life legislation.
 

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On January 10 this year Melbourne’s Age newspaper printed an article ‘A decision worth making" by Jo Wainer, "National Spokesperson for the Womens Electoral Lobby on the status of abortion and a Joseph O’Reilly, Executive Director of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties and President of the Victorian Aids Council. In a 1200 plus word article they argued that "the beginning of a New Year could not be a better time" to start dismantling the laws that exist to protect unborn babies. By my count, this was the fourteenth substantial article, including editorials, in defence of abortion, the Melbourne Age has printed since RU 486 was banned in May 1996. These fourteen articles have been "balanced" by one small par in Access Age. Articles in defence of the right to life of the unborn child have been submitted but never printed. Surely this amounts to censorship by those who would protest the loudest should censorship be imposed on them?

I wrote a response to the 1261 word Wainer O’Reilly article, dutifully reduced to the 850 words the Opinion Editor insisted on when I phoned to request a "right of reply" It never appeared.

My response was as follows:

A Moratorium on abortion would be a better way to start the New Year.

I was nursing a baby, admiring his delicate features, and feeling the serenity in the trusting gaze he was returning when I first saw the front page headline of the 1994 report, We Women Decide, to which Jo Wainer and Joseph O’Reilly refer in their article A decision worth making (January 10). I felt the report was an affront to the perfect little being I was holding, an embarrassment to me as a women, and a challenge to my responsibilities as a nurse.

Jo Wainer has long campaigned for the removal of community disapproval of the practice of abortion. Naomi Woolf’s concession to the pro life movement that our slogan ‘Abortion stops a beating heart" is "incontrovertibly true", Norma McCorvey’s (of the infamous Roe versus Wade U.S. Supreme Court Decision) turnabout, "Oh my God, the playgrounds are empty because there’s no children, because they’ve all been aborted" and Britian’s palpable public unease last year at the destruction of 3000 human embryos, along with the revelation doctors had aborted one baby of a well-off married women because she just didn’t "choose" to have twins, have no doubt caused her to fear this may never be, creating in her sense of urgency. She and Joseph O’Reilly want abortion decriminalised and decriminalised now. I think we should have a moratorium on abortion.

Abortion on request has been available to Victorian women for at least 25 years. But before decriminalising abortion shouldn’t we consider what abortion has actually done for Victorian women and their babies? Have the promises made by the pro abortion lobby, that more readily available contraception would diminish the need for abortion, that permissive abortion would eradicate child abuse, that making it "legal" would make it "safe", been fulfilled? The incidence of abortion, teenage pregnancies, extramarital pregnancies, sexually transmitted disease, child abuse, rape and youth suicides has actually increased. Agencies, originally established to provide pregnancy support for women, have had to expand their services to provide professional help for women suffering post abortion grief "I spent hours at the station working out which train to jump in front of.. were the words of one abortion victim, "Fiona", quoted in her story published in the Pregnancy Action Centre’s November ‘95 Life in Focus.

Jo Wainer writes that attempts in some states of America to defend the right to life of the unborn have lead to dreadful consequences. She cites the case of an unnamed women, suffering cancer, and her baby, dying during a caesarean section ordered against her wishes by an unidentified judge, in an unnamed city, on an unnamed date. She never mentions the dreadful consequences of "legal" abortions. Pro choice Washington writer, Can dace C Crandall does. In "Legal, but not safe" (The Womens Quarterly Summer 1996), she told us of Carolina Gutierraz who died on February 5 1996 after an abortion at the Maber Medical Centre in Miami. Doctors had worked for six weeks to save her life, amputating both her legs in futile attempts to stop worsening gangrene. She told us of Dr. David Benjamin' s reckless indifference to human life that left Guadalupe Negron, a 33 year old mother of three, sitting on her operating table covered in her own vomit, watching her life bleed out of her. Benjamin, who was convicted of second degree murder, had scores of complaints on file and had been banned from two hospitals for gross negligence.

She told us of unlicensed abortion clinics such as the Santa Ana clinic run by Alicia Hanna, who had no medical training and was caught loading Angela Sanchez’s body into the trunk of her car repeatedly planning to dump it in Tijuana, Mexico. Candace Crandall writes ‘Abortion malpractice is a national scandal. Without taking steps to resolve it, we will continue as we have for more than twenty years, whispering through a grave-yard of women like Carolina Gutierraz, for whom the only consolation was that their abortions were legal." She quotes nationally known abortion specialist and author of Abortion Practice, Warren Hem: a lot of bad medicine is being glossed over in the name of ‘Choice’." Hem puts much of the blame for the dangerous conditions at some clinics on the feminist movement, commenting that activists have "denied for twenty-five years that pregnancy is a medical condition and that abortion is a surgicalprocedure." Finally Crandall says:

"Epidemiologists with the federal centres for Disease Control and Prevention will only say that they cannot be certain that all abortion related deaths are being reported today. However anyone can sit down at a computer and pull up hundreds of newspaper accounts of death, injury and fraud at walk in abortion clinics across the country." It would only take some truly investigative journalist, committed to providing the public with the truth, to unearth similar stories in Australia.

The climate is not right for the decriminalisation of abortion. There is increasing unease, deep down in our psyches. Could it be that something we all recently experienced? The overwhelming joy at the rescue of those two intrepid sailors? The sense of the absolute preciousness of human life? We need a moratorium on abortion to have the opportunity again to save the lives of unborn babies.

Denise Cameron

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Last Friday The Age carried the following headline on its front page, "Euthanasia kills one in three: study." The process by which astonishing headlines - for a similar one also appeared in The Australian - came to be produced is of more than a little interest.

The study referred to is published today in the Medical Journal of Australia under the authorship of the pro euthanasia campaigners most importantly, Helga Kuhse Peter Singer and Peter Baume. The purpose of their study was a comparison of the medical practices concerning death in Australia where, except in the Northern Territory, euthanasia is illegal with the medical practices concerning death in The Netherlands where euthanasia is effectively legal. Its method is a replication in Australia of the famous Remmelink study into the medical culture of death in Holland which was conducted in 1990 /91.

Although the contentious headlines did not alert readers to this, there are, asked about the relationship between this study and the beliefs of its authors. By its nature a research study of this kind is highly politically charged. Those who favour the legalisation of euthanasia hope that such a study will reveal that the practice of euthanasia is as common or even more so, in Australia than in The Netherlands. They hope to find that since the legislation of euthanasia in The Netherlands there has been no descent down a "slippery slope" towards a medical culture of death. Those who oppose legalised euthanasia hope of course, to show the opposite.

In the social sciences genuinely unbiased research is exceedingly rare. Almost invariably, the political values or the ambitions of the researchers will influence the ways in which findings are interpreted and reported.

It was, in my view, wrong that research on a question as sensitive as the comparative medical practice of death in The Netherlands and Australia should have been conducted by those who had and were known to have a vested ideological interest in the outcome of the study.

As it turned out the study did not amount to a genuine replication of the formidable Remmelink study. By comparison with Remmelink the Kuhse study is in fact disappointingly thin.

Much of the most interesting (and to me, disturbing) information gathered by the Dutch was obtained in searching individual interviews. Kuhse and her colleagues conducted no interviews. Their explanation for this decision - that as euthanasia in Australia is illegal they would not have discovered the truth - is only partly convincing: In the Remmelink study doctors interviewed readily admitted to illegal activity. There is no reason to believe that those engaged in illegal practice in Australia where the threat of prosecution is negligible - would have been less candid than their Dutch counterparts.

More significantly, because in Australia there is no death certificate system equivalent to the Dutch, those doctors receiving questionnaires in Australia had to be selected by a different statistical method. Australian apples were compared with Dutch Oranges.

Even more significantly it appears to me that in the Kuhse study the Remmelink researchers pointed out of course fundamental questions to be amount to a genuine replication of the that in The Netherlands 30% of all deaths are sudden or acute while 70% are drawn out or non acute. Obviously only among these 70% of non acute deaths is it possible for "medical decisions concerning the end of life" -MDEL’s - to take place. They found that in 30% of all deaths in The Netherlands and in 54% of non acute deaths that MDEL’s did in fact take place.

The Kuhse study arrived at a startlingly different conclusion. In Table 5 of the article the authors maintain that in 61.8% of all deaths in Australia MDEL’s take place. As about 30% of deaths in Australia must be, as in The Netherlands sudden or acute where MDEL’s could not take place, what they are effectively claiming is that while in The Netherlands an MDEL takes place in a little over half of non acute deaths. In Australia a medical decision concerning the end of life takes place in almost every case.

This is simply preposterous. To my mind this finding calls into question the scientific rigour of the whole study, although is does not mean that the raw data they have produced -which may be discomforting to some opponents of euthanasia - can be simply dismissed as insignificant.

Which leads me to the results of the Kuhse questionnaire and the manner of its presentation, defined as "the administration of drugs with the explicit intention of ending the patients life at the patient’s request." By this definition - which is the one almost every Australian would recognise -what Khuse and her colleagues discovered among 800 MDEL deaths were 26 cases of euthanasia or doctor assisted suicide. They also discovered 51 cases where the life of a patient on the point of death was taken without a specific request. In 53 of these 77 cases of what might be called voluntary or non-voluntary euthanasia, the doctors believed they had shortened their patients life by fewer than seven days.

Kuhse and her colleagues are however, somewhat more attracted to a broader definition of euthanasia, that is to say of a "death intentionally accelerated by a doctor."

By using this definition and by adding together the small numbers of genuine acts of voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia the larger numbers of cases where doctors have administered painkilling drugs with what is called a "partial intention" of hastening death, and the far larger numbers of cases where they withheld or withdrawn forms of treatment to a dying patient with what is called the "explicit intention" of hastening death, Khuse and her colleagues are able to claim that 30% of all Australian deaths (or 37,000 cases) would be cases of euthanasia.

We know from a study published last year in the MJA that 05% of Australian doctors would refuse a genuine euthanasia request. And from the Remmelink study that 88% of Dutch doctors would accept. And yet we are asked to believe "euthanasia" is practised far more commonly in Australia than in The Netherlands and that in Australia "euthanasia kills one in three."

One final point. The questionnaire sent to Australian doctors by Kuhse and her colleagues was in one aspect different from the Remmelink model. The Australian doctors were asked two questions that the Dutch not surprisingly were not. Did Australian law "inhibit or interfere with your preferred management of the patient and the end of-life decision? Would laws which legalise euthanasia "have enabled your patient to receive better and more appropriate care?

In the article published today by the MJA there is no reference to these questions, let alone the detailing of the results I have a question of my own for Kuhse, Singer and Baume, Why not?

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So what is it that offends many people who are shown the pictorial truth about abortion? It is instructive to notice that people who become infuriated after seeing the gory graphics are usually not outraged at the barbarian who did this to a baby, but rather at the person who showed the pictures to them. Why is it that in this generation, showing pictures of emaciated, naked Jews, stacked like cord wood, engenders emotion against the Nazis, but a garbage pail full of baby parts produces anger at the messenger? The answer can be found by acknowledging that the present generation bears no responsibility for slaughtered Jews whereas the present generation is covered with guilt of innocent blood of aborted babies. When one is confronted with one’s own guilt, it is easier to shoot the messenger than to deal with the guilt. That would take courage and sacrifice two qualities that are in short supply in contemporary society.

by Tom Cyr, Life Adv, October, 1996

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The Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska has condemned "Catholics for a Free Choice" as being "virulently anti Catholic." Msgr Timothy Thornberg said that to use the name Catholics for a Free Choice "is as offensive to Catholics as the intrinsic contradiction "Jews for the Holocaust" would be to Jewish people."

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by Congressman Henry Hyde, reprinted from Humanity February 1997

During debate on President Clinton’s veto of the partial-birth abortion ban, Henry Hyde, the leading opponent of abortion in Congress, made an impassioned contribution on behalf of the unborn child.

Mr Speaker: In his classic novel, Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky has his murderous protagonist Raskolnikov complain that "Man can get used to anything, the beast!"

That we are even debating this issue- that we have to argue about the legality of an abortionist plunging a pair of scissors into the back of the neck of a tiny child whose trunk, arms and legs have already been born, and then suctioning out its brains - only confirms Dostoyevsky’s harsh truth.

We were told in committee by an attending nurse that little arms and legs stop flailing and suddenly stiffen as the scissors is plunged in. People who say "I feel your pain" can’t be referring to that little infant.

What kind of people have we become, that this "procedure" is even a matter for debate? Can’t we draw the line at torture? And if we can’t, what’s become of us? We are incensed at ethnic cleansing - How then can we tolerate INFANT CLEANSING!

The justification for abortion has always been the claim that a woman can do whatever she wants with her own body. If you still believe this 4/5th’s delivered baby is part of the mother’s body, your ignorance is invincible.

The supporters of abortion-on-demand have exercised their capacity for self-deception by detaching themselves from any sympathy whatsoever for the unborn child - and in so doing they separate themselves from the instinct for justice that gave birth to our country

In one of his memoirs, Dwight D Eisenhower wrote about the loss of 1.2 million lives in World War II. He said: "The loss of lives that might have otherwise been creatively lived, scars the mind of the civilised world."

Mr Speaker, our souls have been scarred by one-and-a-half million abortions in this country every year! Our souls have so much scar tissue there isn’t room for any more Partial-birth abortion is a lethal assault against the very idea of human rights, and destroys, along with a defence-less little baby the moral foundations of our democracy. Democracy isn’t, after all a mere process - it assigns fundamental values to each human being - the first of which is the unalienable right to life.

One of the great errors of modern politics is the unavailing attempts to separate our private consciences from our public acts. It can’t be done. At the end of the 20th century, is the crowning achievement of our democracy to treat the weak, the powerless, the unwanted as things to be disposed of? If so, we haven’t elevated justice - we have disgraced it

This debate has been about an unspeakable horror. And while the details are graphic and grisly, it has been helpful for us all to recognise the full brutality of what goes on in America’s abortuaries

Let the innocence of the unborn have the last word in this debate. Let their innocence appeal to what President Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature.

Prove Raskolnikov wrong. This is something we will never get used to. Make it clear once again, that there is justice for all - even for the most defenceless in this our land.

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SOUTH KOREA: REPUDIATES BIRTH CONTROL For 35 long years South Korea has had an aggressive family planning policy which mirrors Planned Parenthood goals. With fewer than 50 million people, it has, according to reports, 1-1/2 million abortions a year - the same as the U.S. The Korean Times elaborated: "The Government’s birth control policy will be revolutionised. The new focus will be to improve the disparity in the male/female ratio and to have more children in order to cope with the rapidly increasing percentage for senior citizens. The denial of medical insurance for third and later-born children will be cancelled. The priority now enjoyed by sterilised people in lotteries for apartments will cease. Third and later children will now get the same rights to scholarship grants as first and second babies were given. Public health clinics will now offer services for the treatment of infertility and crack down on fetal gender tests in a step to prevent aborting female babies.

The motivation? Hardly an ethical one. Rather, a response: the aging population, the dwindling number of workers, the alarming increase in male to female ratio among children caused by the selective killing of female babies, and the Confucian ethic preference for male babies. It apparently has finally occurred to Korean officials that maybe, in the not too distant future, there will be too many men and a real shortage of brides. Perhaps South Korea is waking up to the national suicide caused by permissive abortion and is doing it sooner than most in the Western nations.

RTL Cincinnat4 February 1997

UNITED KINGDOM: TYCOON IN PRO-LIFE BID London-Harrods department store owner Mohammed Al Fayed has again entered the fray of British politics this time to fund a new anti-abortion party.

The multi-millionaire believes abortion should be a key issue in the next election. Mr Fayed accused both major parties of being "mealy mouthed" on abortion.

He will underwrite Pro-Life Alliance party candidates with about $50,000 to stand against "pro-choice" MP’s.

        Herald-Sun December 12, 1996

HOLLAND: EUTHANASIA UPSURGE The Dutch Government yesterday proposed new measures to regulate euthanasia and promotes treatment to control pain in an attempt to stem an upsurge in assisted suicide. From 1990 to 1995 requests for assisted suicide rose by 33% to an estimated 3600 in 1995.

The Age-AFP

EUROPE: LEGAL DRUG Europe has granted the first patent for a euthanasia drug to the drug company Hoescht AG. The drug is intended for use on animals but the patent for the euthanasia compound is worded to include humans, to cover the possibility of legalisation. The killer drug was developed by Michigan State University and funded by Hoescht. Spokesmen from Michigan State University admit they worded the patent to include the possibility of legalisation but they have no intention of allowing anyone to use the drugs for that purpose.

   source UPI

USA: ASSISTED SUICIDE A survey by Geriatrics magazine showed that most older patients opposed assisted suicide but their relatives favoured it. This is a chilling indictment of our society

    Life Coalition International

RTL Cincinnat4 February 1997

USA: "I QUIT" A Nigerian, Dr Nwa nnunu in Merrillville, Indiana had been doing abortions. In a recent interview he stated that he was moved by "how Cardinal Bernardin handled death" and by the letter the cardinal had written to the Supreme Court against assisted suicide prior to dying. Dr Nwannunu said that he "will never do this procedure again, and this is out of respect for the cardinal."

He called the Roman Catholic bishop and said "Come and get my equipment." Bishop Dale Melczek of Gary, Indiana called the ex-abortionist’s decision "a miracle."

RTL Cincinnath February 1997

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