Pro-LIFE NEWS

Vol. 15 No.1 - Autumn Edition 1998                                  Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042

Contents:

- Pro-Life Grief
- Editorial
- America Mourns 25 Years After Roe V Wade
- Roe V Wade Anniversary Brings   'Converts' Out
- International Criminal Court - Feminist Threat
- HowAdopting a Child Put Joan Andrews in Prison
- World View

Pro-Life grief over abortion laws were the words Melbourne Age Newspaper correspondent David Reardon used in that paper on Friday April 3, to report the Western Australian Parliament’s vote to create Australia’s most liberal abortion laws. And they describe very accurately the pro-life movement’s reaction to the breathtaking disdain for truth, the callous disregard for human rights with which the W.A. Parliament, in the words of Richard Egan, president of the WA. Coalition for the Defence of Human Life, "declared open season on unborn children" in that state.

On April 2, 1998, the West Australian Parliament passed two separate bills to give official sanction to abortion on demand. The Abortion Law Repeal Bill introduced into the Legislative Council by Labor MP Cheryl Davenport was passed twenty-two votes to eleven. An alternative Bill introduced by Liberal Attorney-General Peter Foss was passed by thirty-one votes to nineteen. Cheryl Davenport "celebrated" with champagne. W.A. Federal MP Carmen Lawrence was "delighted" and former Victorian Labor Premier Joan Kirner tells us now she is no longer Premier, abortion law "reform" would have been on the Kirner Government’s agenda eventually.

As this Pro-Life News goes to press, the abortion situation in West Australia actually remains unclear.

The Australian newspaper reported on April 9 that the Foss Bill was ruled out of order by Council President George Cash because it breached standing orders, which preclude debate on two Bills dealing with the same issue in the same sitting of parliament.

Prolifers have increased their activities electorally following a good Rally for Life attended by 2,400 on March 24.

The prolife movement has long held that though being pro-life does not necessarily qualify one for serving in Parliament, being anti-life certainly disqualifies any would-be member of Parliament.

Pro-abortion Labor MP Cheryl Davenport, who revealed she had been seeking the opportunity to repeal West Australia’s abortion laws for 10 years, had a head start on prolifers. Dr Victor Chan, one of the two doctors charged with procuring illegal abortions, had contacted her in late 1997. She in turn contacted Liberal Attorney-General Peter Foss. The first the pro-life movement heard of these charges was in February 1998, when the WA Coalition for the Defence of Human Life was galvanised into action.

Right to Life Australia conducted massive mail outs and telephone calls to pro-life supporters in the West, arranged for the radio advertisements of a baby’s heart-beat newspaper advertisements, and the presentation of a set of foetal models to each of 48 Members of Parliament by Julie Cooke of Women Hurt by Abortion. Newspaper reports have stressed the fact that the success of West Australia’s abortion lobby has buoyed the hopes and aims of abortion supporters in other States. These reports have struck fear into the heart of Pro-Life Victoria. While ever the practice of abortion remains against Section 65 of the Victorian Crimes Act, prolifers can continue to work for the enactment of the law protecting children in the womb. Repeal of that law, as is possible in West Australia, would set back that goal by indefinately.

It is incumbent on us therefore, in Victoria, to organise to see this doesn’t happen. The first thing we must do is learn from the West Australian experience, to recognise the weaknesses in the defence against the recent onslaught, as well as the strengths.

For some time now Pro-Life Victoria has been urging its membership to be more proactive politically, to commit itself to personal lobbying of local State and Federal members of Parliament. These are the people who frame the laws protecting unborn children from abortionists. These are the people to visit and with whom to talk.

Since the announcement of Dr David Grundmann’s intention to set up practice at 411-415 Dorset Road, Croydon, Pro-Life Victoria has appealed by newsletter, letters and phone calls, to all members to visit their local State MPs and urge him/her to use their Parliamentary power to protect the unborn from such gruesome deaths. We still urge you to do so and to accept that the future calls for much more pro-life lobbying. The issue of Dr Grundmann is an excellent issue with which to start, one that may well engender support from MPs embarrassed and uncomfortable about the technique employed in such abortions. The West Australian tragedy has really driven home to Pro-Life Victoria the stark message: If you want to see a repeat of this tragedy in Victoria, stay home, don’t visit your MPs. If you are committed to preventing a similar tragedy, rise up and visit your Member of Parliament - tomorrow!

The most enduring image of the West Australian abortion debate, Dr Sarah Oh (pictured right) whose baby, due within four weeks of the debate, is known to have a fatal disease. She and her doctor husband Steve, members of Doctors Against Abortion, stated "Abortion goes against the maternal instinct and if I was to abort the child, then I believe that It Is something that would stay with me for the rest of my life".

Right to Life Australia covered the cost of 48 sets of these Foetal Models from Pro-Life Victoria and organised for them to be personally presented to Members of West Australia’s State Parliament. Pro-abortion Perth obstetrician/gynaecoiogist, Dr Harry Cohen criticised this strategy, no doubt wishing to maintain a conspiracy of silence by the medical profession on just what is destroyed in an abortion.

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To return to a recurring theme, media inconsistency. Some might even suggest schizophrenia! Andrew De La Rues’ photograph in the Melbourne Age newspaper a few months ago of a pregnant mother, cigarette in hand, standing outside a well sign posted Royal Women’s Hospital was as thought provoking as it was eye catching. As a trained midwife, I understand the adverse effects of smoking on unborn babies. I also know the fag in the hand of that mother will do a lot less damage to that unborn baby than a curette wielded by doctors on unborn babies inside that hospital. Smoking may stunt the growth of babies. Abortion kills them.

The pregnant mother Wendy Mankelow was reported as claiming "The nurses at the Royal Women s Hospital give her a bit of a hard time" for smoking. What about the doctors who kill babies by abortion? Do the nurses give them a bad time? In The Age Good Weekend Magazine, in an essay titled Ethics in Embryo (1991), Adelaide abortionist Dr Robert Jones admitted "Abortion is murder . . you’re extinguishing a life and if you don’t face up to it, you’re not being honest with yourself’. Is murder less evil than smoking?

The excuse of doctors who abort is "I have to do what the woman requests", not withstanding many women claim doctors suggest abortion. This is nonsense. If a woman walked into the Royal Women’s Hospital tomorrow and asked a doctor to remove her perfectly healthy right arm because she "chose" to have one arm only, he would refuse. Scandalously, if a woman asked the same doctor to remove one of two twins because she "chose" to have only one, the doctor would agree.

If the medical profession is sincere about its concern for the health of unborn children, it should campaign against smoking and abortion.

Denise Cameron

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presented at the 25th annual March for Life.

The enlightened national debate over partial birth abortion has accelerated the process of exposing the simple truth that abortion is violence against children and that the abortion movement routinely exploits, injures and lies to women.

The 25 year cover up of this national scandal is over. As movements go, the pro-abortionists have lost credibility. They have been unmasked and shown to have engaged in a grand deception - they have lied through their teeth Our prayer for Abortion President Bill Clinton and the Abortion Vice President Al Gore and all those blinded by the abortion industry: learn from Dr Nathanson - have the courage, compassion, and intellectual honesty to get off the death ship and join the crusade for life. Like the Titanic, the pro-abortionists are going down. Don’t, Mr President, let your legacy be "Abortion President".

For the first time in 25 years, Americans are looking beyond the cheap sophistry and self serving rhetoric of the abortion industry and they are connecting the dots. If it’s shocking and inhumane to jam scissors and a vacuum hose into the head of a partially delivered baby, why is it any less violent, shocking, and inhumane to dismember the bodies of children with surgical knives, or to dislodge and destroy babies with hideous suction machines (20 to 30 times more powerful than a household vacuum cleaner), or to pump dangerous chemical compounds, including extremely high concentrated salt water, into the unborn baby’s environment so as to poison the child?

Today we mourn the untimely deaths of more than 36 million babies - a holocaust of staggering proportion. Today we remember the 36 million kids who will never take their first steps or thrill their parents with their first day of school or play soccer, basketball, or baseball. For every two young people in America and at this March for Life, a third person is missing because an entire generation has had no protective law to ensure its safety.

Congress reconvenes next week and I ask your prayers and lobbying to stop the Clinton administration and their Republican and Democratic friends in Congress from giving hundreds of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood and like-minded groups who seek to topple pro-life laws in foreign countries.

As you know, at home, Planned Parenthood operates the largest chain of abortion mills and performs or refers for over 230,000 abortions each year - a staggering loss of life. Planned Parenthood lobbies and litigates against even the most modest safeguards like parental consent laws.

Overseas, Planned Parenthood employs the same deceitful tactics they use here, putting millions of kids’ lives at risk in the 100 countries that currently protect unborn children.

Please, tell your congressmen and senators to support the Mexico City Policy on population control funding - so taxpayers will no longer subsidise the overseas abortion industry.

Finally, a special word to our young people who march today in record numbers. Think about running for Congress someday. Despite what you hear, public service can and certainly should be honourable, ethical and clean.

You can make the difference.

Right now, the task in the Republican Party is to make safeguarding the precious lives of unborn children and their mothers a priority

Except for an important remnant (of pro-life Democrats) in Congress, it is pitiful that in 1998 unborn baby girls and boys are simply not of any importance to the Democratic Party. They are the throw aways.

To our young, I encourage you to pray, fast, and get involved in politics. Our nation needs you.

from National Right to Life News - USA.

WASHINGTON - Three people who played key roles in creating abortion on demand in the United States 25 years ago were prominent in pro-life actions marking the Roe v Wade anniversary on January 22.

Norma McCorvey - Jane Roe of the court case which overturned abortion restrictions throughout the country in the name of a constitutional "right" - told a Senate committee hearing on abortion that she wants to see Roe reversed.

"lam dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name, she said, adding it was her "sincere prayer" that there be no 39th anniversary, "I would like nothing more than to have this law overturned, either by an act of Congress, or a reversal in the Supreme Court."

Ms McCorvey, who stunned the abortion establishment when she turned against it in 1995, joined the annual March for Life in the capital, along with Sandra Cano, the Jane Doe of a Case similar to Roe, and former leading abortionist Dr Bernard Nathanson.

They addressed a rally of tens of thousands of pro-life supporters, and joined in the March to the Capitol and the Supreme Court. The three also spoke at the March for Life Convention the following weekend.

"It’s interesting that they’re all now on our side," March organiser Nellie Gray told The Catholic Times, England, before the events. While NARAL hosted a lavish luncheon to mark the Roe anniversary, "the three that got them started will be out there in the cold with these grass-roots people," she said. "That’s quite a contrast."

During an overnight vigil at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, a message from Pope John Paul, then visiting Cuba, was read out. The Pope said abortion was a "destructive force" in many lives, but especially for the women left to deal with the sorrow of ending the life of their child.

"The 25th anniversary of the decision is a call to people of good will to reflect seriously on the devastating consequences of that step," he said. "Now is the time for recommitment to the building of a culture of absolute respect for life from conception to natural death."

President Clinton said he was committed to "keeping abortion safe, legal, and accessible - and to making it more rare" through family planning and sex education. He would do everything to ensure that every child in America is a wanted child - that was the idea the Roe anniversary "celebrated"

- and to protect "the right to choose."

reprinted from Humanity, New Zealand

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During the Preparatory committee stages on the establishment of the court, feminists succeeded in having "enforced pregnancy" listed as a crime in the Report.

"We must do all we can to have the term "enforced pregnancy" deleted if it is not defined" said Brendan Gerard, Society for Protection of Unborn Children Information Officer. "It could, of course, relate to rape. However, other obvious targets for prosecution are doctors who refuse to perform abortions. They could then be accused of the criminal offence of "enforced pregnancy". Thus to protect its medical profession from prosecution before the International Criminal Court, a government would have to introduce legislation to allow abortion on demand."

The benefits of an International Criminal Court, for which there is broad support amongst states and nongovernmental organisations, are felt to be considerable. For example, a case cannot at present be brought against those who it is thought were responsible for the Lockerbie disaster because their country refuses to hand them over to the Scottish authorities on the grounds that feelings are so strong in Scotland that they would he unlikely to be given a fair trial. The same claims, however, could not be made about the International Court.

The offence of "enforced pregnancy" was put forward as an amendment in two clauses of the draft document (Al AC.249/1997/L.9fRev.1) relating to sexual offences:

committing rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, enforced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation, and any other form of sexual violence

"All of these terms can be readily understood by anyone except for enforced pregnancy", which is not in ordinary usage and is, therefore, blatantly open to manipulation" said Brendan Gerard.

"It is essential that as many people as possible write to Tony Blair urging that his government should oppose the inclusion of "Enforced Pregnancy" at the United Nations Meeting to conclude the Report for establishing the Court; this takes place in Rome and begins in the second half of June.

"It would be outrageous if developing countries, which frequently defeated measures at the UN aimed at forcing abortion on demand on their countries, were to find themselves dishonestly outmanoeuvred by Western nations - such as Britain and the EU - through the establishment of an International Criminal Court."

Note: Australian prolifers should write to the:

Prime Minister, The Honorable John Howard, Parliament House, Canberra, ACT, 2600.

reprinted from Human Concern, Spring 1998

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by Mary O’Neill - One of America’s best known crusaders for protection of the unborn child spent the Roe v Wade anniversary In prison, writes Mary O’Neill, who has had her own brushes with the law over abortion.

Melbourne’s Sunday Age of March 8 carried a report by Karen Kissane that Amnesty International had announced abortion provider Jo Wainer was to be honoured by them with a Women’s Human Rights Activist Award to mark International Women’s Day, and the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was nominated as the activist of the 70’s for her efforts to have abortion removed from Australia’s Criminal Code. Many members of Amnesty international must be offended by this award. Surely Amnesty International’s Charter is to concern itself with the unjust imprisonment of human rights activists such as Joan Andrews, not with "rewarding" those such as Jo Wainer who would deny the first human right, the right to life? - Editor

Mother Teresa has died, but maybe it is time the world got to know her younger "sister", a woman equally tiny in stature and with the same steely, stubborn streak when it comes to saving the unwanted", the "untouchables".

Joan Andrews Bell speaks with a soft Tennessee accent and, as I write, she is in a Pittsburgh jail, sentenced to two years for the crime" of trying to save unborn children from abortion.

In a way, it was fitting that Joan should be behind bars for the shameful 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v Wade, which held that abortion was a "right" protected under the Constitution.

That ruling changed Joan’s life. She was 25 years old and immediately began to seek out pregnant women in need of help, welcoming them into her own home.

But it was against the law to try and help them in the place where they were in the most danger in the waiting rooms of abortion clinics. Because of her non-violent efforts to prevent women entering the clinics she has been arrested more than 200 times.

When I met Joan in 1994, she was living in hiding in the top floor of a house near New York, because so many states has warrants out for her arrest.

For unplugging the cord on a suction abortion machine at a clinic in Florida she spent two and a half years in South Florida’s most formidable maximum security prison for women. Her time in jail was without any privileges, and much of it was spent in solitary confinement, because she refused to accept the right of the law to imprison her, since she had committed no crime.

Joan met her husband Chris Bell when he brought her Holy Communion in a Delaware State Prison. He was already running four homes for unwed mothers which he had founded in New York. After Joan was released they were married in 1991. When Joan had her baby, Mary Louise, at the age of 43, she was cared for by former abortionist Dr Bernard Nathanson.

Two years later Joan and Chris adopted Emiliano, a little Mexican boy abandoned because of handicaps. Emiliano, now nine, has arthrograposis, also known as "frozen joint disease", which affects his hands and feet, but after four operations and physiotherapy he is now able to walk.

It was this adoption which led to Joan’s latest sentence handed down on January 15. While completing the adoption papers a warrant for her arrest - relating to a 1985 sit-in at a Pittsburgh abortion clinic - was discovered, and officials told the Bells they could not adopt Emiliano while the warrant was outstanding.

The FBI acted on the warrant and arrested Joan at her home last September 26. In October she appeared before Judge Raymond Novak in Pittsburgh, the judge trying to force her to accept a sentence of three years probation with a promise not to try and rescue at abortion clinics.

Joan presented her case in an affidavit: "I will not accept probation. To accept probation would be to accept the lie that I harmed society by prayerfully and non-violently save children from a brutal death by abortion, and that I therefore need to be rehabilitated... I could no more adhere to the unjust laws of this land, or in any way give credence to evil enshrined in law, than deny God Himself With God’s help I will, with trembling and shame for my own sins and weaknesses, accept and defend the laws of God."

Joan Andrews Bell is small, shy, quiet, but her whole being is pitted against the might of a State which has usurped the power to kill its own children.

An abiding memory is of her holding Emiliano on her back, jumping him up and down, and saying, "Emiliano, my son, my son!" while the little boy laughed in glee.

To think that was what led her to the Allegheny County Jail last month...

Joan Andrews Bell

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Mexico City - Mexico' s National Population Council, an aggressive official organisation promoting birth control, has recently admitted that Mexico will become a "nation of elders" if changes are not made. It recently issued a report warning that the elderly population in Mexico will reach 20 million by the year 2000, with the percentage of children and youth diminished dramatically. If present trends continue unchanged, in the next 15 years the total population will increase 22%, but those older than 60 years will increase 73%. Life expectancy in the last 60 years has increased from age 35 to 76, while the fertility rate has dropped from six children per woman in 1975 to 2.6 in 1997.