Pro-LIFE NEWS

Vol. 15 No.2 - Spring Edition 1998                                     Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042

Contents:

- Life Issues - Public Policy Briefing for Legislators
- The Fetus Beat Us
- Editorial: Prolifers - Pro- Women and Pro - Choice!
- Lobbying State MPs
- Stop Press- Action Alert!
- World View

Vice-President of Pro-Life Victoria, Brendan Prendergast, has initiated a new project for Pro-Life Victoria. From now on, all State & Federal Members of Parliament will be sent a Quarterly Bulletin: Life Issues: Public Policy Briefings, to keep legislators updated on life issues. The first of these bulletins went out in June, We reminded our legislators that despite attempts by some commentators to marginalise those who affirm prolife values, abortion remains the issue which refuses to die. Our first briefing reproduces an essay by feminist Candice C Crandall exposing the inadequacy of the popular arguments in defence of abortion. The fact that it was written by a professed prochoice writer made it compelling reading. We have reproduced it here for your information as members.

Vice-President of Pro-Life Victoria, Bredan Pendergast 

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by Can dace C Crandall - reprinted from Human Life Review, Spring 1996.

(The following first appeared as the lead article in the Winter, 1996 issue of The Women's Quarterly [published by the Independent Womer8s Forum in Washington 00] under the headline "The Fetus Beat List, with a subhead noting that the author "explains why the pro-choice movement is suddenly playing defence." Ms Crandall is described as the "former communications director at The Centre for Strategic Studies" in Washington, Who snow writes for the Science & Environment Policy Project in Fairfax, Virginia." Her article is reprinted here with permission © 1996 by the Independent Women’s Forum].)

 

Over the past six months, the morale of the pro-choice side of the abortion stalemate has visibly collapsed. Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land, and 1.5 million abortions continue to be performed every year. But defenders of the right to an abortion - once so supremely self-confident - now express unprecedented doubts and misgivings about the cause.

In October, Norma McCorvey - the "Jane Roe" in Roe V Wade - dramatically defected from the pro-abortion camp, overcome with guilt, she said, at the sight of empty swings in a playground. That same month glitter feminist Naomi Wolf published an anguished piece in the New Republic, warning abortion-rights supporters that they stood in danger of becoming "callous, selfish, and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life." Only a few weeks before, the Atlantic Monthly had published an appeal to liberals by Professor George McKenna of New York’s City College, urging them to recognise abortion as perhaps necessary, but certainly evil.

Two politicians who ventured into the 1996 race in the confidence that their records on abortion would win over the pro-choice majority alleged to lurk inside the Republican party - Governor Pete Wilson of California and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania - ignominiously backed out. The Republican presidential nominee in 1996 will again be pro-life, as he has every year since 1980.

The Congress, which battled only three years ago to junk the Hyde Amendment prohibiting federal funding of abortion, has likewise become inhospitable to abortion. Abortion opponents were permitted to display gruesome drawings during the fierce debate over banning partial-birth abortions. Dozens of pro-choice Democrats, including House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and former Commerce committee chairman John Dingell, joined Republican in voting for the ban.

Even the Supreme Court speaks a little more differently on the subject of abortion. In a 1989 case, Webster v. Director of Reproductive Health Services, and its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court permitted states to limit abortion rights, especially those of minors, without fear of falling foul of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, the Supreme Court seems to be continuing to uphold Roe v. Wade less because it believes that decision to have been correct than because it fears damaging its own authority by conceding that the decision was mistaken.

What happened? How did the pro-choice side lose its way?

The answer couldn’t be simpler. Proponents of abortion rights overcame Americans’ qualms about the procedure with a long series of claims about the benefits of unrestricted abortion on demand. Without exception, those claims have proven false.

Perhaps the most powerful of the pro-choice arguments was the claim that any infringement of the right to an abortion would return America to the dark ages when thousands of women died because of unsafe, back-alley abortions - between five thousand and ten thousand a year was the figure usually given by abortion proponents in the 19 70’s. In fact, it wasn’t Roe v. Wade that made abortion safe: it was the availability of antibiotics beginning in the 1940’s. And at no time could the number of abortion fatalities ever have come anywhere close to the thousand to ten thousand number

The National Centre for Health Statistics confirms that 1,313 women died obtaining illegal abortions in 1940, most of them victims of infection. But as penicillin and sulfa drugs spread - and as medical techniques improved - abortion-related deaths fell off sharply: only 159 in 1966, fifty-one in 1972.

Had pre-Roe abortions been so very dangerous, we would have expected a sharp drop-off in the death rate among women after Roe. But Centres for Disease Control statistics show no decline in the years after Roe in the rate of women aged fifteen to thirty-four, the group of women who account for ninety-four percent of all abortions.

Nor were the abortions of the 1950’s and 1960’s the untrained butchers of legend: Dr Mary Calderone, a former medical director for Planned Parenthood, estimated (in the Amen can Journal of Public Health) in 1960 that ninety percent of all illegal abortions were performed by qualified physicians.

Another persuasive argument put forth by abortion advocates was that by guaranteeing that every child was a wanted child, legal abortion would protect children from being born into poverty, reduce illegitimacy rates, and help to eliminate the horrors of child abuse. That argument too has been spectacularly falsified.

Child poverty? Abortion advocates like Senator Jacob Javits of New York darkly suggested in the 1970’s that America could get rid of poverty by getting rid of the poor. He described New York’s decision to legalise abortion as "a significant step forward in dealing with the human problems of our state".

The commission on Population Growth established by President Nixon in 1970 agreed. In the second of its three reports, issued in March 1972, it called for Medicaid funded abortions as necessary weapons in the war on poverty:

"Unwanted fertility is highest among those whose levels of education and income are lowest...."

But in fact child poverty rates have multiplied since then; the hope that America could abort poverty out of existence has not been borne out.

The commission also predicted that the legalisation of abortion would reduce illegitimacy rates. That proved staggeringly incorrect. Only 10.7 percent of all births were to unmarried mothers in 1970. By 1975, after Roe, the illegitimacy rate had jumped to 14.3 percent. It now stands at twenty-six percent. Two-thirds of all black children are born out of wedlock.

Predictions of the alleviation of child abuse have proven no more accurate. The National Centre on Child Abuse and Neglect reported 669,000 incidents of abuse in 1976 (the first year for which it has data) and three million incidents of abuse in 1994.

There was probably something disingenuous even at the time in abortion advocates’ concern for children. Far more since - and passionate - was their argument that untrammelled abortion rights were indispensable to women’s equality In the early 1970’s, abortion advocacy groups, such as the National Organisation for Women, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (later the National Abortion Rights Action League), and the President’s Advisory Council on the Status of Women, insisted that any limit on abortion violated a woman’s right to control her body.

Feminist author Shana Alexander expressed this point of view forcefully in an article in the October 2, 1972 Newsweek. She praised the demise of "Victorian sexual hypocrisy," and divided women into three categories: the most enlightened, who were now "legally able to terminate unwanted pregnancies"; the semi-enlightened, whose divorces had helped them to "gain a new understanding of their property rights and the fact that, through the very act of marriage, they surrounded certain of their fundamental human rights, including even their name"; and, most backward of all, "the so-called happily married women" who failed to recognise their oppression.

Feminist advocacy of abortion was powerfully seconded by the terror incited by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s best selling book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968. All ocean life would die of DDT poisoning by 1979, Ehrlich warned. Nor would Americans be spared. Thousands would die in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles. Life expectancy in the United States would plunge to just forty-two years by 1980, as pollution induced cancer epidemics ravaged the population.

Ehrlich co-founded the group Zero Population Growth to save the world from such destruction. To the public, the forecasts of this scientist, reported and amplified in the media, seemed appallingly plausible. By 1971, the number of children desired by young married women had dropped to an average of 2.4, just shy of Zero Population Growth’s recommended 2.1. The United States birthrate tumbled from its post war highs, and population experts credited the new environmental ideology as a factor in the decline. Press reports told of earnest young college girls having themselves surgically sterilised rather than bring any more children into an overcrowded world. In a controversial two-part episode of the popular CBS sitcom "Maude" broadcast in 1972, the title character chose to have an abortion to end an unplanned pregnancy: a New York Times reporter intimidated that the show was prompted by a $5,000 prize offered by the Population Institute for the best prime script concerning population control.

Paul Ehrlich looks pretty silly now. Life expectancies in both the United States and the Third World are lengthening. Western European countries fret over birth rates below replacement levels, and birthrates in Mrica, Asia, and Latin America have been falling for twenty-five years. Economic growth has brought creature comforts and better health to an increasing fraction of the human population everywhere on the planet.

Perhaps the last of the abortion myths to tumble is the familiar refrain that abortion ought to be a matter between a woman and her doctor. More and more abortion is a matter between a woman and a specialised abortion clinic that offers little support or counselling. Two-thirds of the obstetricians and gynaecologists in practice in the United States refuse to perform abortions, according to a survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation in September 1995. The reasons given by these doctors only rarely included pressure from anti-abortion activists. Most doctors cited religious scruples, or simply said they did not like doing them.

The American College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology found the same levels of reluctance in a similar study done in 1985. The college found that even of the one-third of obstetricians and gynaecologists who perform abortions most do four or fewer per month. A majority of the 1.5 million abortions in the United Sates each year are done by just two percent of all obstetricians and gynaecologists.

Pro-choice groups now pin their hopes on RU-486 and other abortion inducing drugs as a way of bypassing the need for physicians. But this type of abortion, in which the dead fetus may be passed in the toilet or shower, may be even more emotionally traumatic for women than current procedures. It certainly does nothing to reassure the public that abortion is humane.

Instead, abortion, in the public mind, has become linked to sexual irresponsibility and the degradation of sound values and human life. Women may be free from "forced" childbearing, but increasing numbers of them are bearing and rearing their children alone. And, contrary to pro-choice assertions, figures from the Centres for Disease Control show that many of those having abortions are using the procedure as a form of birth control: of those who opted for abortion last year, nearly half had had at least one previous abortion. Nearly one in five had has two or more previous abortions.

Further, that the nation should aim, as the Commission on Population Growth recommended in 1972, "toward the development of a basic ethical principle that only wanted children are brought into the world" is disturbing philosophically Should a human being’s right to existence depend solely on how much it is desired by another? Does support for abortion on demand lead us toward eliminating all of the unwanted, those whose suffering, or potential suffering, we decide is too much for them (or us) to bear?

A September 1995 Gallup poll shows the United States divided between those who take the more liberal view that abortion should be legal in "any" or ‘‘most" circumstances (forty-five percent) and those who take the more conservative view that it should be illegal or legal only in extreme circumstances, ie, Rape, incest, or fetal deformity (fiftyone percent). But single issue surveys are meaningless in gauging whether support for abortion is a voting issue. Increasingly, Americans say they are personally opposed to abortion, yet favour the availability of legal abortion for someone else. That kind of soft support is vulnerable to erosion in the face of pitched congressional battles over gruesome medical procedures.

We are now in an election year in which the much maligned Catholics - one quarter of the US electorate - have been identified as the swing vote between solidly Democratic blacks and Jews and solidly Republican evangelical Protestants. Abortion rights advocates (with whom I sympathise) should take heed. The debate over partial birth-abortions - a procedure in which the physician partly delivers the fetus, feet first, then kills it by piercing its skull with scissors, attaching a high-powered suction devise and sucking out its brain - revealed not only a disturbing brutality toward the unborn, but also the prevalence of second and third trimester abortions. If abortion advocates remain rigid ideologues, unwilling to consider even the slightest restriction on a woman’s right to choose, it could be a tough year for them at the polls.

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Many of you would have seen the article in The Australian recently (25/8/98) by Simon Busch, entitled "Conceive be silent, procreate". In this quite rabid piece of diatribe, the writer charges that "Pro-lifers are anti-women, pure and simple".

Of course, like all lies, this one immediately collapses when confronted with facts. For instance the fact that pro-lifers are the only people setting up services to support women faced with "unexpected" pregnancies, and offering to help them through their pregnancies and beyond. Or that only prolifers are concerned about helping those (many) women who experience physical or psychological harm as a consequence of having had an abortion. Indeed, the potentially devastating condition known as "Post Abortion Syndrome" is not even recognised by the abortion lobby, and the women so afflicted are dismissed, ignored or even suppressed, for the sake of protecting their ideology. So much for being "prowomen". And as for being "prochoice", what "choices" do the pro-abortionists offer to a woman confronted with an unexpected pregnancy? Their only solution is to "get rid of it". But a single option hardly makes for a definition of genuine "choice

Therefore it is time, I feel, for all of us who are pro-life to stop letting these anti-women, no-choice hypocrites set the tone of the debate. It is time for us to stand up in righteous indignation and start demanding: "Who is really being pro-women?" Let’s turn the tables! Where is the voice of the feminists? Where is their outrage against so many men who pressure their partners into having an abortion in order to avoid their responsibility to that woman and her child? Where are they when she is crying?

And "Who is really being pro-choice?" Let’s ignore the slogans and start demanding the facts! Let’s ask, and keep on asking: Where are their Pregnancy Support Centres? How much lobbying have they done to obtain funding to assist women who might prefer to carry their baby to term?

Who knows what effect this could have. It might even succeed in embarrassing some of them into doing these necessary tasks of supporting women, and perhaps even result in them saving babies! Now that is something to pray for!

But of course, if we are asking these questions of our opponents, we must make sure we are ourselves supporting those initiatives which care for pregnant women, to the fullest of our abilities and resources. And not just those women with the traditionally understood "crisis" pregnancy. We must encourage and support all mothers, through every pregnancy. For only by cultivating a climate in which motherhood is esteemed, the hard work and difficulties mothers face acknowledged, and their vital, irreplaceable position in society justly rewarded; only then will the "demand" for abortion begin to disappear.

Dr Peter Walker

President

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This is the text of a talk delivered by Pro-Life Victoria Secretary Denise Cameron at the July Right to Life Conference on the importance of campaigning against Dr David Grundmann’s Partial Birth Abortions.

I couldn’t describe to you the feeling in the pit of my stomach as I sat in the West Australia Parliament and saw legal protection of babies in their mothers wombs slip away before my eyes. The realisation that we prolifers had failed these babies in the West was hard to bear.

I have sat through two major abortion debates, the first in Federal Parliament in 1973 was dramatic, but the outcome was predictable. The final vote 98 to 23 simply reflected the enormous amount of work that had been done around Australia. Here in Victoria the Right to Life movement was born - organised on the 39 Federal Electorates with every one of those 39 MPs besieged by constituents - by visits, letters, phone calls, telegrams, in local papers and at Public Meetings.

In Perth this year it was a very different story. As speaker after speaker rose to their feet, I couldn’t help but feel none of them had been truly lobbied by pro-life constituents. I resolved then that I was going to speak out. At the risk of being blunt, being described as "over the top", I resolved to hammer the importance of each and every prolifer personally visiting their State MP to plead the cause of unborn children. Here in Victoria, right now, for their protection from partial birth abortions.

Normally when I am asked to speak to other prolifers, I try to lift spirits, to encourage all efforts. At times, however, it’s necessary to be self critical. To stop and consider just how well we really are doing. What I am saying now is from the perspective of 25 years in the pro-life movement. If we don’t lift our game with the personal lobbying of our 139 State MPs, we are in very real danger of West Australia style abortion in Victoria. All could be lost. All the blood, sweat and tears of the last 25 years could have been for nothing.

Visiting MPs is the most fundamental core activity of the prolife movement. It’s like making your bed before you leave home in the morning! There are of course, many other essential prolife activities - I’m the first to admit that, having been involved in many of them. But I have always had to discipline myself and ask myself if I have contacted my local MP I can’t ask others to do what I haven’t done myself We can’t leave it up to one or two key pro-life activists to lobby all 139 State Members of Parliament. MPs will really only listen to their own constituents. No MP will raise the issue of abortion if he/she has never received a visit from a constituent expressing concern about the abortion death toll.

Can’t you just hear them talking in the Party Room, if someone did raise the issue: "Well, no one in my electorate

is concerned about abortion. No one ever comes to my office about it."?

For the last 18 months we have tried to campaign about partial birth abortions. We have a list of the 139 State MPs with ticks beside those who have been visited. But it is frighteningly free of ticks.

I’m very concerned that I even hear such statements in the pro-life movement as

· "the political way has failed" The political way, has not been tried in Australia, not as much as in the USA.

· we shouldn’t just lobby for lobbying’s sake. We are lobbying for life’s sake! There can never be too much lobbying.

· only "heavies" should lobby, I just wish the "heavies" would lobby! Somehow however, they seem to think lobbying is only done by grass roots supporters!

It is important to be informed when visiting an MP on a life issue - but it’s not necessary to have a PhD in life issues. MPs know even the intellectually challenged amongst us has a vote. There is a place for the articulate, informed and higher profile prolifers to lobby MPs - but they must be backed up by people like ourselves. The bottom line is, we must go to our MPs and say "As my representative in Parliament, please legislate to protect the unborn child in the womb from abortion." It is a tedious chore. We have to approach it like lifting the phone to make an appo1ntment with the dentist - when we really know we just haven’t got the time or the inclination. But once that appointment is made - things fall into place, we find the time, the parking - and the enthusiasm.

Right now in Australia the climate couldn’t be better for visiting Ms. Members of Parliament no longer know with confidence how any voter really thinks out there. There’s no way they’ll knock back a request to "hear from the electorate".

And the issue of partial birth abortions is an easy issue about which to speak to your MP. If you haven’t visited your MP, you have passed up a golden opportunity. Victorian Ms are uncomfortable about partial birth abortions.

Everyone in this room should have been to personally see their MP on this issue - it isn’t fair to those pro-life Ms in Parliament for us not to have been. I felt sorry for those courageous Ms in the WA Parliament, for those Labor Ms such as John Kobelke who is with us this weekend - who stood up and defended the unborn child, knowing that only the constituents could really influence colleagues.

We in Victoria have to look after Victorian babies. They only have us to rely upon. It is always important to sort out our priorities I say that to you as a nurse with some knowledge of triage sorting out what comes first. The fellow with the splinter can always wait - the fellow haemorrhaging to death can’t. First things first. Visit your MP. You can always be helped with the information we provide.

I have been disturbed when reassured simply that some MPs are "sympathetic". Sympathetic for how long! A quarter of a century? If your MP is "sympathetic" ask him when he is going to move in Parliament to protect the unborn. Never mind that the climate is not right, that we don’t have the support of public opinion, nor a pro-life Parliament. When will the climate be right?

We should be pro-active. We should emulate the example of the great William Wiliberforce, who in 1787, in the face of strong opposition in the community and in government, courageously presented the first Private Members Bill for the abolition of the slave trade. It was quickly and soundly defeated. Slaves had the same legal status as unborn children. They were deemed legally to be non-persons without rights, and the property of their owners.

Undeterred and convinced of the justice of his cause Willberforce continued zealously to present the same Bill, year after year. Finally in 1807, the Bill succeeded and the British slave trade was stopped. It had taken 20 years.

How many babies must die before we act with the passion and zeal of Willberforce?

"Since 1976 Congress has passed the Hyde amendment which prevents federal funding of abortion in our country. We know that funding has an impact on the number of children aborted because of the measurable decline on the number of abortions in the States that have passed their own bans on funding. This is a critically important goal for Australia." Lori Hougens, US National Right to Life Committee - Keynote Speaker Right to Life Australia Conference- July 1998.

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Alert!

AND TO:

EXAMPLE ONLY - WRITE A SIMILAR SHORT LETTER IN YOUR OWN WORDS

Dear ……………

With all the recent news of people in Victoria not getting medical treatment they need, the last thing we should be talking about is making patient killing legal Please ensure that the ALP drops euthanasia from its agenda once and for all. Even with the best health system, there will be pressures owing to our aging population, so legalising euthanasia will never be safe.

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Spain and Abortion: Abortion is legal, with exceptions, the law having been forced through the parliament by the Socialist government. However, it is still rare, as Spanish doctors and nurses in great numbers have simply refused to do abortions, or to work with those few who do them. Accordingly, there are almost no abortions in hospitals, most being done at two free-standing abortion mills, the best known one being the Dator Clinic in Madrid. The newly formed Spanish Youth Defence Group last December blocked its entrance in a direct action effort. Forty protesters were eventually peacefully dragged away by the police. The action received considerable publicity, much of it favourable, and for several hours no babies were killed.

from international Right to Life Federation Newsletter, May/June 1998.

 

Canada - Pro-Euthanasia Motion Defeated: A motion aimed toward legalising assisted suicide was voted down in the Canadian House of Commons on March 25 by a vote of 169 to 66.

from international Right to Life Federation Newsletter, May/June 1998.

England - Quickie Abortions: Even strong pro-abortion people groaned a bit when the Marie Stopes pro-abortion organisation publicity announced that they would commence "lunchtime walk-in walk-out" abortions in London, Leeds and Manchester. Talk about crass commercialism and disregard for women’s health - this tops the list!

from International Right to Life Federation Newsletter, May/June 1998.

China - Euthanasia Coming?: Dr Hu Yamie of Beijing Children’s Hospital recently called for China to consider euthanasia. She said that China’s 1.2 billion strong population was aging and that the issue needed to be discussed. She proceeded to list all of the requirements and restrictions that would be needed to control it. Perhaps she should visit Holland where all such restrictions have been in place for many years, and all of them are ignored. Her report was published in the South China Morning Post March 11, 1998.

from international Right to Life Federation Newsletter, May/June 1998.

USA - Partial-Birth Veto Override: On July 23, the US House of Representatives voted 296 to 132 to override President Clinton’s veto of the ban on killing babies during delivery (partialbirth abortions). This sets up a showdown for a similar vote in the Senate. This year’s vote was exactly the same as last year’s similar House override of his veto then. To date, no senator has announced a change in his vote from last year. If this holds true, we are three votes short of an override in the Senate. Speculation has it that the senate vote will be scheduled for sometime in late September.

from Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati Newsletter, August 1998.

Miscarriages or Abortions?: In every underdeveloped country, International Planned Parenthood tells us the same thing. The hospitals are filled with women who tried to induce abortion on the outside, and then are admitted to have the abortion completed, lest they suffer serious physical problems. Their comments are always phrased to give the listener the impression that very few of these gynaecology cases are due to spontaneous miscarriage, and that almost all of them are due to attempted induced, illegal abortions. Accordingly, the following is enlightening: "Our impression is that not more than 1 in 5 abortions treated in hospitals is other than spontaneous in onset. Such statistics as are available to the Registrar General are not out of keeping with this estimate" The paper reporting this is Legalised Abortion, Report by the Council of the Royal College OB&GYN, Br. Med. J., 2 April 66, P. 850 - 854. To repeat, clearly, then, 80% of cases of "incomplete abortion" admitted to hospitals in developing countries were the result of natural miscarriages.

from international Right to Life Federation Newsletter, May/June 1998.

USA - Pharmacists Refuse Morning-After Pill: With the recent heavy publicity promoting the use of morning-after pills has come some very clear complains from pharmacists who are pro-life. The California Pharmacists Association has adopted a policy which allows pharmacists "to refuse to fill prescriptions based on ethical, moral or religious grounds". In a recent poll of 625 Pharmacists, 82% stated that they "believe they have the right to refuse to fill a prescription for a drug such as RU 486 that would facilitate abortion".

from international Right to Life Federation Newsletter, May/June 1998.

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