Pro-LIFE NEWS

Vol. 14 No.2 - Winter Edition 1997                                      Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042

Contents:

- Our Finest Hour
- Editorial
- A bit too fiery
- Man Wakes from Eight Year Coma
- Dr Grundman to extend his grisly practice to Melbourne?
- Doctors sees lies behind reasons for late-term abortions
- Status of the Embryo
- World View

At 1.15 am, the morning of March 25th, the hopes and aspirations of pro lifers around Australia and even further afield, were realised when the Senate of the Australian Parliament voted 38 to 33 in favour of Mr Kevin Andrews Euthanasia Laws Bill, overturning the Northern Territory’s euthanasia legislation, the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act. For those of us who had stayed up to listen to the final count or woke to listen to the first news broadcasts, it was a moment of great joy and gratitude. Our Parliament had demonstrated it took very seriously its responsibility to protect the sick, frail and vulnerable from so called "mercy killing".

The standard of debate in the House of Representatives which rejected the Northern Territory Legislation last year 88 to 35 and the Senate was high. Many Senators have sent copies of their speeches to pro lifers who have written their thanks to them. Victorians should be especially proud that 9 out of 12 Senators voted for the Andrews Bill.

The Senate Committee established to inquire into the Bill received 12,577
submissions (the largest number for any Parliamentary Inquiry) of which
11,731 (93.3%) supported the Bill and 804 (6.4%) opposed it.

The word pictures related by the press of the scene in the darkened public gallery in the early hours of that morning are memorable. Mover of the Bill, the Member for Menzies, Kevin Andrews and Tony Burke, the co-ordinator of the Euthanasia No! campaign, shaking hands, Margaret Andrews, cradling her month old baby in her lap, giving her husband a hug and M.H.R. Dr Brendan Nelson, former President of the Australian Medical Association, slipping into the gallery for the final vote. Margaret Tighe, who had sat through every speech in both Houses, and Father Eugene Ahern of the Right to Life Australia were there along with supporters from other states, Church and medical professionals, as well as euthanasia advocate, Dr Philip Nitschke.

There is always the threat of State Parliaments considering euthanasia legislation. Victoria’s own Premier Jeff Kennett remains an euthanasia enthusiast.

The backlash from euthanasia advocates and some sections of their supportive press was stronger than even expected. But the House of Representatives and the Senate vote has sent a clear message around Australia and even the rest of the world.

Apart from such obvious people as Federal M.P. Kevin Andrews and Euthanasia No’s Tony Burke, the pro-life movement which provided the backbone to their efforts, deserves great credit and our gratitude. Thank you for remaining faithful to the pro-life philosophy and strategies. Thank you for the myriad of tedious tasks, the letters, the phone calls, the public meetings, the talking to others to raise the issue in the community. Thank you for never losing hope, for not wavering from our goals, for "keeping your eye on the ball", for knowing where the action was and knowing what had to be done. Pro life "executives" can only do so much. Everything depends on our supporters, so many of them silent and never seen. Consider this your finest hour!

Top of Page

There are increasing references in our newspapers to something called "Emily’s List". The word "Emily" is an acronym for Early Money is Like Yeast and refers to a group of women established in the United States of America in 1985 to provide financial and political support for women in the Democratic Party An Emily’s List Australia has now been set up here. Former Victorian Premier Joan Kirner is a coconvenor. The purpose is to propel Labor women into State and Federal Parliaments here.

There is however, another "List" in the U.S. This list is called the Susan B Anthony List and it is called after the suffragette pioneer Susan B Anthony. On April 3, 1996 ABC television screened a fascinating documentary by Don Parham on Susan B Anthony and her role in the history of the American suffragette movement. It was interesting to learn that her Southern sister suffragettes wanted to exclude their black sisters from the vote. Susan B Anthony fought for their right to be included. It is also interesting to recall that Susan B Anthony considered abortion "child murder". She is quoted as saying "Guilty? Yes! no matter what the motive, love of ease or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the women is awfully guilty who commits the deed (abortion). It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death."

What a tragic irony that while for such a distinguished pioneer of women’s rights, the vote was the cornerstone of women’s rights, for todays feminists, abortion is the cornerstone of women’s rights.

I suggest Susan B Anthony would no more have wanted her feminist successors to exclude from life their unborn sisters than she wanted. Southern suffragettes to exclude their black sisters from the right to vote.

Interestingly, in the last U.S. Congressional elections, Emily’s List actually fared poorly, when 70% of them were sent packing. In contrast 6 out of 10 of the pro life Susan B Anthony List were elected. No one resents the election of women to Parliament, but, must it be done over the bodies of dead babies?.

Perhaps Australia needs a Susan B Anthony list. If we want more females to get into Parliament, we have to first get them into the world.

Denise Cameron

Top of Page

from The Age, March 31, 1997

Dr Nitschke’s puerile petulance in setting fire to a copy of the Andrews bill irresistibly calls to mind the dictum those who begin by burning books sometimes end up burning bodies.

By publicly incinerating material with which he happens to disagree, Dr Nitschke has lined up alongside all the mindless bigots who have ever believed that principles can be destroyed along with the paper on which they are written.

William James, Bayswater

Pro life Senator Brian Harradine, on Sydney doctor, Dr Geoff Brodie’s determination to use an alternative to the French abortifacient RU 486.

"To me, it is highly symbolic that the abortion industry would look to a drug used to fight cancer to destroy an, unborn child".

Senator Brian Harradine
Senator for Tasmania.

Top of Page

London

A 30 year old man awoke from an eight year coma this week and tapped out a message to his family that rekindled Britain’s contentious right to life debate.

Andrew Devine, crushed in the Hillsborough soccer stadium disaster that killed 95 fans in 1989, yesterday showed signs of cognitive response, communicating by pressing a button, his family’s lawyer said.

He had been classed in a persistent vegetative state, with no sign of mental awareness, kept alive by an artificial feeding tube.

"I know of no other case in the world literature where someone has emerged (from PVS) as late as five years," said Dr Keith Andrews, a British expert in brain damage who treated Mr Devine at length after the accident, and intermittently over eight years.

The Devine case bears strong similarities to that of Tony Bland, a young man injured in the same disaster, also in a persistent vegetative state, who was allowed to die in 1993 after a landmark decision by the House of Lords. The Lords made clear, however, all right to life decisions would be made on a case by case basis.

"Inevitably, it is going to cause concern in some people’s minds, and for very good reasons," said Dr Andrews, the medical director at London’s Royal Hospital for Neurodisability. "One may ask the question, ‘If it can happen to Andrew Devine, could it have happened to Tony Riand?"’

"But we’ve now seen a large number of people in the same situation for long periods of time and have not seen anybody else emerge from a vegetative state."

Mr Devine’s family had refused the entreaties by medical personnel to remove the artificial feeding tube that kept him alive despite severe cerebral lesions that apparently put his brain in a vegetative state.

Mr Devine, who has been mainly cared for at his family’s Liverpool area home, now "has some recognised cognition and is aware of what’s going on around him" the family’s lawyer, Mr Robin Makin, said.

"He communicates by pressing a touch sensitive switch one for yes, two for no."

The right to life debate was fuelled a year ago when a man in a persistent vegetative state for seven years began communicating with his wife and hospital staff, just as the health authority caring for him was preparing to ask for court permission to withdraw his feeding tube.

from The Age, March 28, 1997

Top of Page

In an address to fellow surgeons "Abortion after 20 weeks in Clinical Practice" at the Monash Bioethics Conference August 1994, Dr David Grundman said "To the best of my knowledge, post 20 weeks (abortion) services are almost non existent in Victoria". It now appears Dr Grundman is to set up a day procedures clinic in conjunction with a 30 bed nursing home at the former Croydon and District Private Hospital in Dorset Road Croydon. Interviewed by local paper, Maroondah Mail, Dr Grundman denied an abortion clinic was being established but would not rule out abortions being done there as one of possible other day procedures, adding "there’s no law against abortion".

Pro Life Victoria must do all it can to stop Dr Grundman operating in Victoria.

Currently, Dr Grundman is being investigated by the Medical Board of Queensland. with the assistance of a full time officer funded by the Queensland government, because of complaints in relation to the practice of late stage abortions.

We already know that the Royal Womens Hospital operates a "midtrimester" service which has "cared for" (read "killed") 200 "patients" since it was established 4 years ago. And that specialist obstetrician Dr Martyn Smith says of the "dedicated" unit "wide ranging support and care of these women is needed because they start as much-wanted pregnancies. (Sally Heath, Melbourne Age Newspaper January 1996).

Here is an opportunity for us to appeal for an end to these horrible abortions - some done for something as "correctable" as a hare lip. Let us not forget, if we do not speak out about, no one else will. These unborn children are relying solely on us. This is a very disturbing and sobering thought.

Write today, please, to:

Express your horror and anguish at this particularly painful abortion procedure.

Write your own words. Below are two sample letters but DO NOT COPY THEM!

Dear ...

Yours sincerely,

YOUR ADDRESS

NAME & ADDRESS OF MINISTER

Dear ...

In an interview with the Maroondah Mail, Queensland abortionist Dr David Grundman failed to rule out the possibility of performing partial abortions in a day procedures clinic at a 30 bed nursing home at the former Croydon and District Private Hospital in Dorset Road Croydon.

Top of Page

by Mike Royko former columnist Chicago Tribune - reprinted from Human Life Review Spring 1997

During the national debate on the late-term brain-sucking procedure, Fitzsimmons was one of many pro-abortion spokespersons and media dupes who assured the nation that almost all late-term abortions were done to preserve the health of the mother or because the fetus had serious abnormalities.

Now, Fitzsimmons said, "I lied through my teeth". And that most late-term abortions were done for the same reason as early abortions - because women wanted to end pregnancies.

Fitzsimmons’ confession was barely out of his mouth when he was whopped by fellow abortion advocates, who held a news conference to say, in effect, that he was being truthful when, he now says, he was lying. But now he is lying when he says he is finally being truthful.

Typical was Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. She said; "If he thinks he lied, that’s his problem to deal with. We have not lied".

Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said Fitzsimmons had been "mixing up gestation with procedure".

Whatever the heck that means.

While they squabble about who did or didn’t lie, let’s listen to someone else for once - genuine physicians, rather than pro-abortion lobbyists and other non-medical spin experts who seem to get all the invitations to yap on TV. One is Dr. Pamela Smith, former director of medical education in obstetrics and gynaecology at Mt Sinai Hospital. She recently resigned that post to do anti-abortion public-health work in the community and practice medicine at the Lawndale Health Centre.

The only thing that surprised her about Fitzsimmons’ confession was that he made it.

"Most of the time, there is nothing wrong with the baby or the mother (when late-term abortions are performed)", she said. "People have known about this for a decade.

"There is a clinic in New Jersey that said of the 3,000 abortions it did last year, 1,500 were late-term.

"So we went from being told that only 200 a year were being done in the entire country to one clinic saying it does 1,500 a year. Obviously, the actual number (of late-term abortions) is in the thousands.

"The media believe what they want to believe. And because a lot of doctors who have testified in support of the partial-birth ban have been pro-life the knee-jerk response is that it is a pro-life pro-choice thing.

One of the arguments for the late-term procedure is that it helps a woman preserve her fertility. Smith describes that as "fantasy".

The future-fertility risk was one of the excuses offered by President Clinton when he vetoed the bill that would have outlawed the procedure.

Clinton said: "There are a few hundred women every year who have personally agonising situations, where their children are born or are about to be born with terrible deformities which will cause them to die just before, during or just after childbirth.

"And these women, among other things, cannot preserve the ability to have further children unless the enormous size of the baby’s head is reduced before being extracted from their bodies".

"I don’t understand that argument about fertility at all". she said. "We have no idea what happens to women who have this procedure down the road. We don’t have a clue. There is no scientific evidence that shows that procedure would be preferable over existing techniques. I question why it is not being taught or performed by the majority of people who specialize in these pregnancies".

As for the propaganda campaign that led Clinton to veto the bill outlawing the procedure, Romer believes she understands it.

"Those who opposed the legislation have a much broader agenda, and that is to have totally unrestricted access to abortion. They will defend abortion rights blindly, regardless of the facts of the matter. Any legislation, if it’s antiabortion, they are against it.

"They don’t think ‘Is this procedure appropriate, who is doing it and why are they doing it?’. They don’t care about the details. They won’t acknowledge the truth of what we are saying because it defeats their larger agenda".

So the whole battle is going to be fought in Congress one more time. And if a bill passes and gets to Clinton’s desk, maybe he can ask the CIA or the FBI to find out who is telling the truth before he makes any more sombre pronouncements.

 Top of Page

The Pontifical Academy for life has issued a statement on the identity and status of the human embryo - "a human being with an intrinsic active capacity for development, and not a mere possibility of life." The secretariat of the Academy is in Vatican City. E-mail: pav@acdlife.va

The third Plenary Assembly of the "Pontifical Academy for Life" took place in Vatican City, 14-16 February 1997. At this Assembly papers were presented on the work carried out in the last two years on the subject "Identity and Status of the Human Embryo" by a study group (Task Force) established by the same Academy and composed of experts in various disciplines connected with this topic.

Biologists, physicians, philosophers, theologians and jurists from different countries, have worked together on the question of the identity and status of the human embryo, which is both complex and of great importance.

This issue has arisen especially in relation to the possibility of man ipulating the human embryo as a result of artificial conception and of scientific research on the early stages of the development of the individual life.

The work of the Assembly - faithful to the character of the Academy itself - has developed in the context of an interdisciplinary discussion, which has brought together contributions from a number of different approaches which, in their nature and methods, are demanded by the question at issue.

From a biological standpoint, the formation and the development of the human embryo appears as a continuous, coordinated and gradual process from the time of fertilisation, at which time a new human organism is constituted, endowed with the intrinsic capacity to develop by himself into a human adult. The most recent contributions of the biomedical sciences offer further valuable empirical evidence for substantiating the individuality and developmental continuity of the embryo. To speak of a pre-embryo thus is an incorrect interpretation of the biological data.

Judgment - as an act of the human mind - on the personal nature of the human embryo springs necessarily from the evidence of the biological datum which implies the recognition of the presence of a human being with an intrinsic active capacity for development, and not a mere possibility of life.

The ethical exigency of respect and care for the life and integrity of the embryo, demanded by the presence of a human being is motivated by a unitary conception of man ("Corpore et anima unus"). whose personal dignity must be recognised from the beginning of his physical existence.

The theological perspective, beginning with the light which revelations shed on the meaning of a human life and on the dignity of the person, supports and sustains human reason in regard to these conclusions, without in any way diminishing the validity of contributions based on rational evidence. Therefore the duty of respecting the human embryo as a human person derives from the reality of the matter and from the force of rational argumentation, and not exclusively from a position of faith.

From the judicial point of view, the core of the debate on the protection of the human embryo does not involve identifying earlier or later indices of "humanity" which appear after insemination, but consists rather in the recognition of fundamental human rights by virtue of the presence of a human being. Above all, the right to life and to physical integrity from the first moment of existence, in keeping with the principle of equality, must be respected.

In this great challenge of defending the life and dignity of the human embryo, special commitment is needed on the part of families, and particularly parents, as well as that of the scientific community. The woman is the first person called to welcome and nourish in love and solicitous dedication the human being who has been conceived in her womb. The irreplaceable role of a guardian of human life entrusted to a woman’s motherhood must be encouraged and actively supported in civil society.

The Assembly hopes that its own contribution will serve as an occasion for reflection and dialogue with all those who understand that the expanding frontiers of civilisation and the authentic progress of society rest on the unconditional defence of human life.

Top of Page

BE’AD CHAIM, THE ISRAEL PRO-LIFE ASSOCIATION states in their January ‘97 report, "Since 1985, Messianic believers in Israel have been praying and working to save the lives of unborn children from abortion. By the grace of God we have established five crisis pregnancy centres which give free pregnancy test information and counselling to clients. These centres are located in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba, Haifa and the Galilee." It goes on to relate that they have distributed pro-life educational literature in Hebrew, Russian and Arabic in various cities in Israel. Some of their Russian leaflets having been sent back to the former USSR. They have been able to speak in schools, military bases, institutions and with individuals.

I.R.T.L.F. ma, Newsletter; April/May 1997

 

BIO TECH - THE ANSWER: In the prestigious Forbes Magazine of 10th March ‘97, there was an interesting article entitled "Monsanto vs. Malthus". It started by predicting the possibility of a doubling of the world’s population by the year 2100. Considering the rapid and continuing decline in birth rates worldwide, this may be a significant overestimation. The article is about the Monsanto Chemical Corporation and its Chairman, Robert Shapiro. It details the genetically superior crops of grain and vegetables that are now in the research pipeline. It predicts larger harvests, foods that resist draught, insects and blights, as well as foods with built-in healthful properties. All of this will result from cutting-edge bio-engineering. According to this article, if Monsanto realises its goals, there will be more than sufficient food available to feed a world population that is double the population existing today.

LR.T.L.F. ma, Newsletter; April/May 1997

DR. QUILL CHANGES HIS MIND: The New York doctor, Timothy Quill, long a vocal proponent of assisted suicide, whose case was carried to the practice. He recently spoke before an AMA symposium on end-of-life care in New York. In his speech he stunned many present by stating that he "wouldn’t mind if the court and society decide against physician-assisted suicide.... it is a bad option. We need to work to find a less bad option... .but we need to step up to the plate and say what we’re going to do about relieving suffering". Quill and two other NY doctors brought the case which could be the Roe vs. Wade of euthanasia. Not surprisingly, in response to this Mr Kevorkian s attorney called him "a liar, a hypocrite and an AMA poster boy".

MIKE ROYKO ON PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION: In his recent column, Mr Royko has supported the ban on partial-birth abortions. He received a "nasty letter from pro-abortion feminist" stating; "I’ve been waiting for someone to address the ridiculous aspect of a bunch of men piously denouncing abortion. The problem is that neither you nor those other men have a clue as to what is involved in carrying an unwanted child, nor will you ever do so". Royko’s response was; "True, a man doesn’t know what it’s like to bear a child. On the other hand, I don’t know of any woman who knows what it feels like to have a hole poked in the base of her skull and her brains sucked out, although some talk as if they might have experienced it".

RTL CincinnatI Newsletter

 

WHO FAVOURS EUTHANASIA?: At a recent symposium in Washington, Dr Harold Koenig, Dept. of Psychiatry & Medicine at Duke University, gave extensive information from their large data base on depression and suicidal thoughts among hospitalised patients. His conclusions were very clear. There is opposition to physician-assisted (euthanasia) by a clear majority of; (1) older adults, (2) those who are physically or mentally ill, (3) those who are experiencing pain, (4) those who are less educated, less wealthy, (5) Black Americans. It is obvious these are exactly the groups of people most likely to be the unwilling victims of euthanasia if and when it is ever legalised in this country. And who supported it? The strongest supporters were white, male, better educated and healthy.

RTL Cincinnati Newsletter

Top of Page

Back to newsletter archive