Pro-LIFE NEWS

Vol. 16 No.1 - Winter Edition 1999                                  Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042

Contents:

- Election Alert
- Editorial
- The bishop's Pro-Life Document: "About Time!"
- Alert! Alert!
- Dead Reckoning
- Inspirational
- Clean-Up & Clean-Out?
- World View

It is in this building that euthanasia maybe legalised in the next four years. Maybe even abortion. The ALP candidate for Prahran, Mr Joseph O’Reilly has already signalled his intention to introduce a Private Members Bill to legalise euthanasia if he is elected to Parliament and Premier Jeff Kennett is an enthusiastic supporter of euthanasia. After the heartbreaking legalisation of abortion in West Australia, former Victorian Premier Joan Kirner revealed abortion "reform" would have been on the Kirner Government’s agenda eventually. Buoyed up by their "success" in West Australia, Victorian feminists and pro-abortionists will be ready to try their luck here in the next four years.

It is in this building that the Victorian prolife movement should be ensuring another William Wilberforce takes her or his seat after the coming elections and courageously introduces an Unborn Children’s Protection Bill, even if she/he has to reintroduce it every year as Wilberforce did for 20 years until it is successful.

Whether or not abortion or euthanasia is legalised in this building in the next 4 years depends heavily on us. A State election is looming. Now is the time for us to act to maximise the number of prolife parliamentarians. Now, not next week, not next month, not next year! For the sake of the babies, we can’t let the opportunity a State election provides, slip by. Everyone who calls him/herself prolife should be phoning their local State MP’s and preselected candidates to seek appointments to discuss the issues of abortion and euthanasia, with particular referrence to Dr Grundmann’s partial birth abortion practice and Dr Nitschke’s euthanasia practice. We must make these two issues the election issues, in the major and local newspapers and on the talkback airwaves.

When it comes to voting, the prolife movement has always held simply "being" prolife does not necessarily qualify one for public office, but being anti-life disqualifies one. No prolifer and certainly no Christian who accepts and respects the Fifth Commandment of God can in conscience vote for a pro-abortion or pro-euthanasia candidate - no matter how good he is on any other issue. One of the most memorable prolife speeches given in Victoria was that given by the American Dr Carolyn Gerster in Melbourne Town Hall in 1977. She titled it "The Disposable Human" and concluded it with the following words. "As a Protestant I was deeply moved by a statement by Pope Pius XI prophetically written in 1931 when the world’s first permissive laws were contemplated by the German Weimer Republic and by the Soviet Union. These words should be read by every Judge and every one elected to public office. ‘Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention, in the first place, infants hidden in their mother’s wombs. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or others, let them remember that God is the Judge and avenger of innocent blood that cries from earth to heaven.’"

Those prolifers who are squeamish about politics or complain the political way has failed should really reflect on whether the "political way" has been truly tried.

Such words should inspire and galvanise the most timid prolifer into action to ensure "those who hold the reins of (our) government" are willing to "defend the lives of the innocent, especially infants hidden in their mother’s wombs." And convince them just how justified is political action on such life issues.

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Instead of our own editorial in this edition of PLV News, we are reprinting this excellent editorial from the US National Right to Life News - June 10 1999 by Wanda Franz, President of the US Right to Life. It is timely, inspiring and an encouraging overview of prolife strategy.

Some prolifers would have you believe that the struggle for public policies promoting the right to life is hopeless. They point to the Clinton presidency, the vetoes of prolife legislation and the still prevalent pro-abortion bias in the media. But they are wrong. You know better. What we do is right, and it works. It works because we have advanced the prolife agenda, we have hindered, frustrated, or stopped the pro-abortionist agenda, our credibility and influence are higher than ever and our strategy is based on a sound rationale.

We can approach the new millennium with confidence; we are on the right track. What we have been doing for more than 25 years has substantially undermined the pro-abortionists’ "culture of death" and will come to full fruition in the next century.

Although we have not yet overturned Roe v. Wade, we have enacted federal and state legislation that has reduced the use of tax dollars for the financing of abortions in the US and abroad, protected the rights of parents, protected teenagers, provided waiting periods and better information about fetal development for women considering abortions, protected the medically dependent and disabled and protected people at the end of life. And even in instances where we have not yet succeeded in enacting our full legislative agenda, we have, in the process, raised public understanding of the issue and gradually shifted public sympathies in our direction.

Equally important, at this point, is that we stopped the enactment of the agenda of the pro-abortion lobby and reduced its effectiveness. (Another thing we have stopped so far is phony "campaign finance reform" that would effectively remove prolife organisations such as NRLC from the process of setting public policy).

After the 1992 election, NARAL presented Bill Clinton with a detailed plan for the expansion of abortion rights. NARAL especially wanted the so-called "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA) and the "mainstreaming" of abortion-on-demand as routine medical care. Clinton and the pro-abortion Democratic leadership in Congress were ready to oblige their friends at NARAL. What happened?

We defeated FOCA. We helped defeat Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Plan that would have made abortion-on-demand routine medical care and a federal entitlement and established a national policy of rationing lifesaving treatment based on "quality of life". The pro-abortionists lost control of Congress and many state legislatures in the 1994 elections. And then they lost their credibility when they opposed our partial-birth abortion ban with their campaign of lies and dishonest propaganda.

We have beaten the pro-abortionists back and back again even though they had the power of the presidency and a powerful media apparatus on their side. Who says our strategy hasn’t worked?

The plain fact is that far from fighting the battle while on retreat we have actually advanced considerably. Today we are stronger and more influential than ever, and our opponents - with all their resources - are weaker than ever. The latest Fortune magazine ratings of lobbying effectiveness in the capital put NRLC at No. 9, up from No. 10 a year earlier. In contrast, NARAL slid from No. 43 to No. 61.

Changing public policy is one of the essential components of any strategy to change and subvert the "culture of death". While the conversion of the heart of each citizen to the culture of life is our hope, waiting for that hope to be realised can be even more frustrating than participating in the slow process of changing public policy. In fact, to be successful, prolife public policies need only the consent of a substantial majority; they do not require the approval of each and every last individual.

The reasons for pursuing a strategy of enacting prolife laws and public policies are threefold:

Such laws and policies restrain or obstruct those seeking and providing abortions, thus they protect lives.

Once in place, such laws and policies teach and promote prolife values.

Even the process of promoting them through legislative and public debate teaches those indifferent to the right to life or ignorant of the facts.

The last point is clearly demonstrated by the success of our campaign to ban partial-birth abortions. Although the legislation passed by Congress was twice vetoed by Bill Clinton, the very process of pursuing the legislation has already produced a significant shift in public attitudes in the prolife direction. This shift has two aspects to it: support for abortion has dropped, and the pro-abortion lobby has been unmasked as a group of shameless liars.

It is useful for us to look at what worked for the civil rights movement. Those who doubt the wisdom of pursuing changes in law and policy should remember what Martin Luther King once said during his struggle for the civil rights of all black persons: "Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless." Thus, even if hearts are not changed, it is still essential to change the law to restrain the heartless and protect the intended victims of heartless actions.

In retrospect, it is evident that both the pursuit and the actual passage of civil rights laws have diminished racial prejudice and softened hearts. Even before civil rights laws were passed, the highly publicised process of seeking their enactment changed hearts and minds. So there is good precedent for our strategy to "regulate behavior and restrain the heartless" and protect the innocent by changing public policy.

Stay the course!

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No matter how devoutly Republican leaders may wish it were so, the issue of life is not going away A few weeks ago, ever so gingerly, the US Catholic hierarchy steered itself toward a direct, public confrontation with "pro-choice" Catholic political leaders.

By a 217:30 vote, the bishops’ conference issued Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics. "As chief teachers in the church, " they declared " we must explain, persuade, correct, and admonish those in leadership positions who contradict the Gospel of Life through their actions and policies."

"[N]o appeal to ... majority will or pluralism ever excuses a public official from defending life to the greatest extent possible," said the bishops. Neither court decisions nor Democrat votes can alter truth. Moreover, being right on other issues does not justify a "wrong choice" on abortion.

The old seamless garment argument, whereby "prochoice" Catholics insisted that abortion was just one of a host of social justice issues, has just been shredded. Now, life - no abortions, no euthanasia, no assisted suicide - is the paramount Catholic issue.

The bishops’ original draft, however, was tougher. It read: "Catholic public officials who disregard church teaching on the dignity of the human person indirectly collude in the taking of human life. In doing so, they jeopardise their own salvation, erode the community of faith, and give scandal to the faithful." That last sentence was dropped at the insistence, says a source, of two cardinals who did not want to confront their famous Catholic politicians.

With 35 million unborn babies destroyed since Roe v. Wade, and two states in 1998 rejecting even a ban on the act of infanticide called partial birth abortion, many might say of the bishops’ call, "About time!" Moral authority, after all, like muscle tissue, atrophies when not exercised, and, surely, that has been happening to the Church.

But better late than never, though some bishops fretted, and others felt compelled to reassure the press that no "pro-choice" Catholic would be denied the sacraments. "We run the risk of creating another anti-Catholic backlash," warns Bishop Howard J Hubbard of the Diocese of Albany New York.

But so what? Like Supreme Court justices, bishops have life tenure and job security; they are not term limited. What do they have to worry about? And how can the bishops continue to indulge pro-abortion Catholics now attacking pro-life opponents, who echo the Holy Father, as "extremists"?

If preaching Catholic truths to a hedonistic society that does not want to hear them reaps a few nasty editorials, doesn’t that go with the franchise? Surely, it is a tiny price compared to what Catholics are paying to uphold the faith in Indonesia, China and Sudan.

The day the conference closed, Bishop Donald W Trautman of Erie, Pennsylvania, applied the Gospel of Life by telling the popular Republican governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, who is "pro-choice", to no longer appear at Catholic events in his Erie Diocese.

Ridge agreed, saying that while he is "personally opposed" to abortion, he still supports a woman’s right to choose.

It will be interesting to see if the cardinals and bishops of Boston, New York, Baltimore and Chicago adopt the unpopular but courageous stand Bishop Trautman did when next they meet their "pro-choice" Catholic governors, senators and congressmen.

Sources say that high among the reasons the US bishops are moving toward confrontation is that, on their episcopal visits with Pope John Paul II, they have been sharply admonished to speak out by a Holy Father frustrated by the timidity of his American prelates.

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The Abortion Providers Federation of Australia, Planned Parenthood of Australia and the International Society of Abortion Doctors are sponsoring a conference "Abortion in Focus" at the Coolum Hyatt Hotel on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast between November 12 and I5. Partial birth abortion specialist Dr David Grundmann is "hosting" it. The aim is to "celebrate our achievements and focus on the future".

protesting that a hotel that promotes itself as being family friendly, is allowing its facilities to be used by a group which makes its living from deliberately killing young babies. Tell him even those rabidly pro-abortion, baulk at the idea of partial birth abortions. Point out that you, your family and friends will not stay at his hotel in the future if the conference goes ahead and that you will be informing people near and far of this abortion conference in his hotel.

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A quarter-century has passed since the US Supreme Court struck down the laws of every state in the nation, in the name of a constitutional right to abortion it had just discovered. In Roe v Wade the Court prohibited any regulation of abortion in the first trimester, allowed only regulations pertaining to the health of the mother in the second, and mandated that any regulation in the third make an exception for maternal health. In the companion case of Doe v. Bolton, the Court insisted on the broadest definition of health - economic, familial, emotional. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon describes the result as the most radical pro-abortion policy in the democratic world. It permits abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason or for no reason. It has licensed the killing of some 35 million members of the human family so far.

The abortion regime was born in lies. In Britain (and in California, pre-Roe), the abortion lobby deceptively promoted legal revisions to allow "therapeutic" abortions and then defined every abortion as "therapeutic". The abortion lobby lied about Jane Roe, claiming her pregnancy resulted from a gang rape. It lied about the number of back-alley abortions. Justice Blackmun relied on fictitious history to argue, in Roe, that abortion had never been a common-law crime.

The abortion regime is also sustained by lies. Its supporters constantly lie about the radicalism of Roe: even now, most Americans who "agree with Roe v. Wade" in polls think that it left third-term abortions illegal and restricted second-term abortions. They have lied about the frequency and "medical necessity" of partial-birth abortion. Then there are the euphemisms: "terminating a pregnancy", abortion "providers", "products of conception". "The fetus is only a potential human being" as if it might as easily become an elk. "It should be between a woman and her doctor" the latter an abortionist who has never met the woman before and who has a financial interest in her decision. This movement cannot speak the truth.

Roe’s supporters said at the time that the widespread availability of abortion would lead to fewer unwanted pregnancies, hence less child abuse. It has not. They said that fewer women would die from back-alley abortions; the post- 1940s decline in the number of women who died from abortions, the result of antibiotics, actually slowed after Roe probably because the total number of abortions rose. They said it would reduce illegitimacy and child poverty, predictions that now seem like grim jokes.

Prolifers were, alas, more prescient. They claimed the West had started down the slippery slope of a progressive devaluation of human life. After the unborn would come the elderly and the infirm - more burdens to others; more obstacles to others’ goals; probably better off dead, like "unwanted children". And so now we are debating whether to allow euthanasia, whether to create embryos for experimental purposes, whether to permit the killing of infants about to leave the womb.

And what greater claim on our protection, after all, does that infant have a moment after birth? He still lacks the attributes of "personhood" rationality, autonomy, rich interactions that pro-abortion philosophers consider the preconditions of a right to life. The argument boils down to this assertion: If we want to eliminate you and you cannot stop us, we are justified in doing it. Might makes right. Among intellectuals, infanticide is in the first phase of a movement from the unthinkable to the arguable to the debatable to the acceptable.

Everything abortion touches, it corrupts. It has corrupted family life. In the war between the sexes, abortion tilts the playing field toward predatory males, giving them another excuse for abandoning their offspring: She chose to carry the child; let her pay for her choice. Our law now says, in effect, that fatherhood has no meaning, and we are shocked that some men have learned that lesson too well. It has corrupted the Supreme Court, which has protected the abortion license even while tacitly admitting its lack of constitutional grounding. If the courts can invent such a right, unmoored in the text, tradition, or logic of the Constitution, then they can do almost anything; and so they have done. The law on everything from free speech to biotechnology has been distorted to accommodate abortionism. And abortion has deeply corrupted the practice of medicine, transforming healers into killers.

Most of all, perhaps, it has corrupted liberalism. For all its flaws, liberalism could until the early seventies claim a proud history of standing up for the powerless and downtrodden, of expanding the definition of the community for whom we pledge protection, of resisting the idea that might makes right. The Democratic Party has casually abandoned that legacy. Liberals’ commitment to civil rights, it turns out, ends when the constituency in question can offer neither votes nor revenues.

Abortion-on-demand has, however, also called into being in America a prolife movement comprising millions of ordinary citizens. Their largely unsung efforts to help pregnant women in distress have prevented countless abortions. And their political witness has helped maintain a prolife ethic that has stopped millions more. The conversions of conscience have almost all been to the prolife side Bernard Nathanson, Nat Hentoff, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. The conversions of convenience have mostly gone the other way, mainly politicians who wanted to get ahead in the Democratic Party - Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt. The fight against abortion has resulted in unprecedented dialogue and cooperation between Catholics and Protestants, first on moral values and now increasingly on theological ones. It has helped transform the Republican Party from a preserve of elite WASPs into a populist and conservative party.

True, few politicians of either party with honorable exceptions like Henry Hyde, Chris Smith, Jesse Helms, Bob Casey, Charles Canady, and Rick Santorum have provided leadership in the struggle. Not because opposition to abortion is unpopular - throughout the Roe era, 70% of the public has supported laws that would prohibit 90% of abortions but because politicians, and the consultants, journalists and big-money donors to whom they listen, tend to move in elite circles where accepting abortion is derigueur and prolife advocacy at best an offense against good taste. Since everyone they know favors legal abortion, they understandably conclude that everyone does. But there is progress even here. The pro-abortion intellectual front is crumbling. Supporters of the license increasingly concede that what they support is, indeed, the taking of human life. Prolifers, their convictions rooted in firmer soil, have not had to make reciprocal concessions.

There can be little doubt that, left to the normal workings of democracy, abortion laws would generally be protective of infants in the womb. The main obstacle on our path to a society where every child is welcomed in life and protected in law, then, remains what it has always been: the Supreme Court, where abortionism is well entrenched.

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Some time last year Pro Life News received the following letter to the editor from a Stephen Clark from Old Trafford in Manchester, England. We saved it up until we had space. We reprint it now for your inspiration.

94 Nortleigh Road, Old Trafford, Manchester, M16 OEQ
Home Phone: 0161.881.1286

April 3, 1998

Dear Editor

I recently read about the success of Cardinal Winning’s initiative in offering financial assistance to mothers-to-be to help them keep their babies. 100 so far have been saved, I understand. Although the Church in Scotland has come under a little criticism for "buying babies", I found it interesting to reflect on a similar incident portrayed in the film "Schindler’s List" that I would like to share with readers.

For those unfamiliar with the film, it tells the story of Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who rescued more than 1000 Jews from death camps in Poland by buying them from the camp commander, supposedly to work in his factory.

Of the many thought provoking scenes there is one where Schindler is compiling the list of people and continually asking the Jewish prisoner who is typing it how many so far. The typist inquires, half joking: "You’re not buying them, are you?" After an extended silence, the typist lifts the list up from the table and looks at it in awe as if it were a sacred object and declares that the list is an "absolute good".

Somewhere in the region of 100,000 descendants of those saved are alive today, qualifying his next statement that "whoever saves one life saves all". Surely the activities of the Church in Scotland are a modem-day equivalent in combating the "silent holocaust" of abortion. Would it not be a wonderful thing if this were extended to the Church in England and Wales, perhaps in partnership with other Christian Churches and Moslems and the Jewish community as we all share belief in the sanctity of human life.

One final scene of note is at the end of the film. when the war is over and those rescued thank Schindler for helping them. But, instead of sharing their joy, he weeps, broken hearted, as he looks at the few possessions he has left and remembers the money he wasted on useless things. "I could have saved more." He looks at his car: 

"10 more Jews." At a gold pin in his lapel: "Another two."

Perhaps we will all weep too, in time, but with the abortion toll at 50 million worldwide: could we save more?

Stephen Clark

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Need to have a ...

Have you ever thought of holding a Garage Sale and donating the proceeds to Pro-Life Victoria?

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Europe bans human cloning: Nineteen European nations have signed an agreement to forbid the cloning of humans. This commits their countries to ban by law "any intervention seeking to create human beings genetically identical to another human being whether living or dead..... At a time when occasional voices are being raised to assert the acceptability of human cloning and even to put it more rapidly into practice, it is important for Europe to solemnly declare its determination to defend human dignity against the abuse of scientific techniques." This text will become a part of the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. This would permit cloning of other cells for research purposes. Countries signing are: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Moldavia, Norway, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Macedonia and Turkey. Unfortunately, neither Britain nor France signed the protocol. Germany did not because this measure is weaker than current German law, which forbids all research on human embryos. In Britain it is because scientists there are at the forefront of cloning and do not want the restriction.

from Right to Life Bulletin Cincinnati, May, 1999.

USA: Birth defects not inherited: Good news has just been reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (4/ 8/99). A story examined survival and childbearing rates for 460,000 females born in Norway between 1967 and 1982. This country maintains a national registry of birth defects found in the baby’s first five days. We recall that 2.5% of babies born are born with some birth defect, one half of these of some significance. Since many birth defects are genetic, the researchers expected to find a higher percentage of problems among mothers, who themselves had a genetic defect. The actual rate was 3.8% as compared to 2.4% in the general population. Although this is an increase, the overall additional risks are small. This is new information. It fills a gap in our knowledge. Happily, the percentage of babies affected is far less than had been anticipated. This should make such parents much more comfortable than in the past.

USA: Abortions lead to jail? In a new twist, post-abortion expert Sydna Masse, writing in the Washington limes links jail and abortion. She has interviewed hundreds of post-abortion women and specifically many post-abortion women inmates in jails. She advances the notion that abortion can cause guilt-ridden women to commit crimes that land them in jail. She sees abortion as only one piece of the puzzle, but a strong piece. "We know it’s a common thread, if you can take a life once, you can do it again." Another authority says that she’s almost never met a woman in prison who doesn’t blame her incarceration on past abortions. Often this involves drugs. The emotional pain from the past abortion led to drug use. Then she took any measure necessary to get money for drugs and she ended up in prison.

from Right to Life Bulletin Cincinnati May, 1999.

Herald Sun, Thursday, August 12, 1999 Yes = 178 (19.6%) No = 727 (80.4%)

¬ Australia: Herald-Sun readers 12/8/99 convincingly reject Dr Nitschke’s call for euthanasia in children as young as 12 years.

USA - Fewer AIDS Babies: According to the 1 July issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, French researchers say that Caesarean sections during birth, coupled with the drug AZT, could nearly eliminate transmission of the AIDS virus from mother to child. In recent years, a baby born to an HIV positive mother has had about a 25% chance of contracting the virus. Giving the AZT drug to the mother alone dropped that rate to less than 8%. Combining this with Caesarean section, according to these studies, drops it to between 1% and 2%. from International Right to Life Federation Newsletter, July/August 1999

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© The Official Newsletter of Pro-Life Victoria, Edited by Denise Cameron

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