Pro-LIFE NEWS

Vol. 21 No.1 - Spring 2005                                                      Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042

Contents:

- Winds of Change?
- Editorial
- Tumor Growing in US Democratic Party
- Over to You
- One Mum's Nightmare Won't Go Away
- Abortion Distortions
- "All their tomorrows depend on your love"
- World View
 

 

The outcome of the October 9 Australian Federal Elections, prolife United States President George Bush's convincing re election, followed by a very vigorous debate about Australia's high medicare funded abortion toll, has given much hope to the prolife movement. Who this time last year would have expected someone of the standing of Governor General Michael Jeffery to express his wish that our nation's abortion toll be reduced to zero? Overall campaigns supporting pro life candidates in individual seats were mostly successful. In the lead up to the elections Melbourne's HeraldSun newspaper, October 10 published The Greens policies, including "Medicare funding for sex change operations including forcing private religious hospitals to undertake such operations and abortions" The Greens, widely expected to poll strongly, only increased their vote slightly. The demonstrably antilife Australian Democrats recorded a big fall in their vote, so that the combination of these pro-abortion parties is weaker than it was before the election. Alternatively, the combination of socially conservative small parties, Democratic Labor, Christian Democrats and Family First polled far more strongly than expected, particularly by a shocked media! The best that can be hoped for the Opposition Labor Party is that it takes heed of the electorate, that its prolife and socially conservative members now say 'We told you so ....... just like the Republicans in the U.S. have been telling the Democrats there for years and have the courage to move away from the agenda set for so long now by the social radicals of the party.

Herald-Sun Vote Line - 9 November 2004

On September 26, in the lead up to the elections an extraordinarily courageous letter was published in the Catholic Leader from Queensland National Senate candidate Barnaby Joyce: It was disturbing that after Mass recently the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council, an agency for the Catholic Church, started handing out their how to vote card. The number one issue in this country is abortion, front and centre, because if you kill your children then you will have little hope of looking after your visitors, reconciling with indigenous members in the community or delivering on any other relevant issue. I am very tired of people shifting the moral paradigm to a more convenient issue and I am not going to sit idly by now that it has started in my Church. If you want social justice then have the courage to start with the number one issue that brings the death of 100,000 defenceless Australians every year. Take up that fight in an open and vociferous way, tell me which way the politicians will vote on that issue, have my local priest hand me that flier at the end of Mass and I will start taking you seriously.

On Friday October 29 Barnaby Joyce was photographed on the front page of The Australian newspaper, in his "local celebrating his election to the Senate and declaring he wanted public funding of abortion stopped!

The ensuing debate on Medicare funding of abortion puts the Australian prolife movement in campaign mode. In the coming year the urgent issue of child destruction as it is being practised on a massive scale, along with the devastating effects on women as well as society, must be brought home to the people of Australia and our Parliamentarians. The immorality of taxpayer funded abortions must be faced. We have been given an opportunity that will not come our way again in a long time. 2005 could well prove to be, a watershed year for the Australian prolife movement.

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I really felt like a lie in on Saturday morning September 18, but 1 reminded myself it was the morning of the Annual Freedom to Be Born March and dragged myself out of bed. As I walked along in the Spring sunshine between Melbourne's Treasury Buildings and the edge of the leafy Treasury Gardens, I thought of all the other Marches I had attended since the first ever in May 1973 when the McKenzie Lamb Bill was debated in Federal Parliament. And wondered just how many more I would have to roll up for before the pro life movement succeeded in winning protection for unborn children in their mothers wombs. My weariness at the thought of all the challenges surrounding us in the culture in which we live these days, was not improved by the droppings of a bird perched in one of the trees above upon my nice new outfit. 1 can't win," I thought. "A lovely Spring morning and outfit ruined!" By then, however I had been joined by a mother, pushing a pram and accompanied by what 1 can only describe as a "gaggle of kids," all chattering excitedly in anticipation of an outing and the balloons on view ahead of them. I thought if any one needed a lie in it was this mother! But no, there she was, chatting ever so cheerfully, laughing and smiling all the way up the incline. The good humour of this family was infectious. I immediately felt like joining in the fun with them and the assembling crowd. The speeches being delivered on the back of a truck were well under way when I saw her. Jodie McInness, Right to Life Australia's Executive Officer, was holding a baby on her hip, a baby she was obviously minding for someone else. I only had a back view and decided to move closer and ask whose baby she was holding When I did so the baby turned around and I found myself gazing into the most beautiful of faces. And eyes gazing steadfastly back at me. She was of an age when babies do just that. Look at you as if they are seeing right into the very depths of your soul. She was fair with light blue eyes and a lovely serene countenance. I felt she knew me and all my imperfections. She was the very embodiment of innocence. It was then I asked Jodie to whom the baby belonged. She indicated the young woman delivering a speech on the back of the truck who was telling us all her baby had been conceived in an act of rape. She told the assembled crowd of the severe trauma she suffered following the incident, her disrupted studies and life plans, the despair she suffered and the times she considered abortion as a way out of her unjustly deserved condition. But she also told us of the unswerving support she received from her mother, the prayers, her own and those of other kindly people that had sustained her throughout her ordeal. And she told us the birth of her baby had made her a better person, brought her untold joy, pride, comfort and serenity. As I continued to look into the lovely little face 1 couldn't help but think: "This is what it is all about. This is why 1000 or more of us are here this morning and will continue to come together like this for years to come. Until we have achieved the right to life of all unborn children." And l made a mental note that I would turn up again next year and the year after, even if it is in a wheel chair or an ambulance! The vision of that little face will remain with me forever and ensure that I do.

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Austratian Labor Party Take Notice" ... Editor

My wife is a Democrat. Her family home in Chicago is lined with photos of the Kennedys. As a child, she remembers Saul Alinsky organizing neighborhood groups in her living room at the invitation of her mother and father. She volunteered on the Eugene McCarthy campaign. She worked as a floor runner at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Adlai Stevenson was a household icon.

My wife is a Democrat. Always was, always will be - at least in her heart. But she hasn't voted for a major Democratic candidate in more than 25 years. And therein lies a lesson for any Democrat who wants to understand the debris of the 2004 election.

I met my wife before I had returned to my childhood faith.

One day I made the mistake of poking fun at those Neanderthal Catholic views on abortion. What I got for my ignorance was a kindly but memorable tutoring on the sanctity of human life.

For my wife and her family, being a Catholic meant being a Democrat, and being a Democrat meant fighting for the little guy - literally. That included the poor, the homeless, racial and ethnic minorities, and the unemployed. It also meant defending the unborn child.

For my wife, arguing whether an unborn child was a "full human person" or a "developing human being" was irrelevant - or worse, a kind of lying. The dignity of the unborn life involved was exactly the same, whatever one called it.

In the years since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion on demand, my wife and I have struggled many times with the choice of voting Democratic. Our youngest son has Down syndrome, and Democratic policies often benefit the disabled in ways Republican policies don't.

But it's also true that children like our son are becoming extinct in part because the abortion lobby has a stranglehold on the Democratic Party platform, with all that it implies for legislation and judicial appointments. The easiest response to handicapped children is to kill them before they arrive. That's not a solution. That's homicide.

We can't build a just society while killing a million unborn children a year. No matter how much good we try to do, we can't outrun the effects of that most intimate form of violence against women and children.

Not so long ago, leading Democrats understood this. Robert P. Casey, governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995, embodied the deepest ideals of the Democratic Party: pro-worker; prominority; pro-economic and social justice; and also thoroughly pro-life, from conception to natural death. In arguing for the rights of the unborn child, he worried that the Democratic Party was becoming 1ittle more than an auxiliary" of the abortion industry.

For his candor, the Clinton machine publicly humiliated him at the 1992 Democratic Convention. Other prominent "Catholic" Democrats - including fellow governor and media darling Mario Cuomo - looked the other way.

In his 1996 autobiography, Casey warned that:

"Many people discount the power of the so-called 'cultural issues' -and especially the abortion issue. I see it the other way around. These issues are central to the resurgence of the Republicans, central to the national implosion of the Democrats, central to the question of whether there will be a third party... [The] Democrats' national decline - or, better, their national disintegration - will continue relentlessly and inexorably until they come to grips with these values issues, primarily abortion."

Bob Casey isn't around to see the 32-state crater his party left in this year's election. He died in 2000, loyal - to the end - to his party, his Catholic faith and his convictions about the dignity of all human life, born and unborn.

But after a decade of "ethnic cleansing" within the party by the abortion goon squad, is anybody left to learn from Casey's warning? Don't count on it. Hundreds of thousands of traditional Democrats, barred from any real voice in the party, have simply left. And the tumor within the party has only worsened as the culture war has widened from abortion to the nature of marriage.

California's Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein warns cluelessly that gay marriage was pushed too fast - as if the troglodytes in the red states (and, oh yeah, in Oregon) need more time to see the light. Others point to Bush's personality, or Karl Rove's evil genius, or John Kerry's bumbling campaign team. The list of excuses is endless.

The 2004 election wasn't about "personality." It was about character - the Bob Casey, moral values kind. Democrats used to be able to tell the difference. That they no longer can is why my Democratic wife, and millions of people just like her, had no trouble at all pulling the lever for Republicans on November 2.

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With someone no less than our Governor General and an unprecedented number of Parliamentarians lamenting the abortion toll this last month, we have been given a wonderful opportunity to call on our Federal Government to stop Medicare funded abortions. Now is the time to write to our politicians. Short simple letters are best. Remember, it is up to the Government of the day to help women give birth to their babies, not offer them money to pay doctors to kill them. That is the stark message we should be conveying to our elected representatives. Medicare is funding child destruction on a massive scale in Australia. This is a deep stain on our Nation. Australia is not "The Lucky Country" for up to 100,000 preborn children a year. We want to regain our integrity. We want to share our country with all Australians, preborn and born!

Begin by writing to:

The Right Honorable John Howard
Prime Minister
C/- Parliament House
Canberra 2600

The Honorable Tony Abott
Minister of Health
C/- Parliament House
Canberra 2600

Your own Federal Member of Parliament
(Telephone the Electoral Office 132326 or
WebSite: www.parliament.vic.gov.au/handbook)

Senator LF Allison
1st Floor, 62 Wellington Parade, East Mebourne, 3002

Senator KJ Carr
62 Lygon Street, Carlton South, 3053

Senator J Collins
Unit 6, 410 Burwood Highway, Wantirna South, 3152

Senator SM Conroy
Suite 1B, 494 High Street, Epping, 3076

Senator MP Fifield
10A Napier Street, Warragul, 3820

Senator The Honorable CR Kemp
12 Pascoe Vale Road, Moonee Ponds, 3039

Senator GM Marshall
102 Victoria Street, Carlton, 3053

Senator J McGauran
Suite 17, 45 Collins Street, Melbourne, 3000

Senator The Hon KC Patterson
Shop 3, 10-40 Burwood Highway, Burwood East, 3151

Senator RF Ray
Suite 3, Level 2, 424 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, 3004

Senator T Tehan,
1013 Whitehorse Road, Box Hill, 3128

Senator The Honorable JM Troeth
Unit 1, 322-332 St Kilda Road, St Kilda, 3182

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Like most mothers, all Leanne wanted was the best for her daughter.

What was thought best has now destroyed their lives, resulting in unimaginable physical and psychological suffering.

When 16-year-old Sarah discovered she was 12-weeks pregnant, she told her mother and they talked it through.

Sarah was young. She was not in a stable relationship - the baby's father was a much older man and involved in drugs. And Sarah herself had been taking amphetamines.

A former community welfare worker, Leanne, whose marriage had broken up years before, had a heart condition and was on a disability pension.

'Things were difficult, we didn't have much support," says Leanne. "But in her heart of hearts, if things had been different, I think she would have kept the baby.

Everyone they spoke with advised abortion as the easiest way to deal with the problem.

"They all said abortion was the best option. It was safe and legal. No risks were mentioned."

So they left their home in North Queensland for a clinic in Townsville. But when they got there, Sarah's boyfriend took off with the money they'd put together to pay for the procedure. They returned home and contacted a local youth centre which referred them to Children by Choice, a well-known pro-choice group.

"They arranged the whole thing," recalls Leanne. "They booked us into the Campbell Street Centre [Planned Parenthood, Bowen Hills, Brisbane]. They got us a motel. They said they'd pay for the termination. We just had to buy air tickets.

"I was so worried by then because Sarah was 17-weeks-along now. But the Children by Choice people assured us everything would be fine and that it was safe."

At the Planned Parenthood clinic, Sarah was given Medicare forms to sign. She then saw the doctor who carried out an ultrasound. The counsellor then summoned Sarah. Sarah and her mother wanted to see the counsellor together, however were told this was not allowed. According to Leanne, Sarah was then given papers to sign but wasn't sure what they were.

"Because she thought she had to sign, she signed. I would like to have seen the papers. I could have read them and helped Sarah understand them. She was only 16," Leanne says.

Sarah then ran out, agitated and crying. Upset about being put in a brightly lit room facing a large window with no curtains and her legs put up in stirrups she had asked for a blanket to cover herself. According to Leanne, Sarah was told to "grow up and stop being so stupid." Sarah was eventually persuaded to go back in.

What happened next turned into a nightmare from which they have barely emerged.

1 was sitting in the waiting-room. Only five to 10 minutes had passed when I suddenly heard ambulance sirens. I went cold. I saw nurses running around everywhere," Leanne says.

1 asked the counsellor, 'What's wrong. Please check on my daughter.' I could hear the sirens coming closer.

"The counsellor said 'We're a bit concerned and, to be on the safe side because she's got a small tear in her uterus and is losing a bit of blood, we'll transfer her to the Royal Women's.`

On seeing her daughter, Leanne was shocked.

"When I saw Sarah she was pale, bleeding, moaning, crying, semi-conscious," she says.

"She was crying 'my tummy, my tummy'. She was asking, 'Is my baby alright?' She didn't want the baby to be hurt."

By the time they arrived at the hospital, Sarah was writhing in agony and given morphine. She was rushed to theatre where 11 medical staff, including five surgeons, treated her over the next five hours.

Sarah's perforated uterus had to be removed and repaired - a procedure involving 200 stitches. Her right fallopian tube was completely severed, two feet of small bowel hanging outside her body had to be removed. So did the baby's head and other body parts.

1t was just horrific," Leanne recalls.

"When they showed me photos of my daughter's injuries, to see that, to see my daughter's uterus between her legs, where he'd ripped her fallopian tube, and bubby's head still inside her, and to see from the picture that it was a baby girl ... I took a turn and woke up in emergency."

Leanne then sat by her daughter's bedside for 11 days. 1 couldn't leave her bed, I couldn't eat," she says.

'We had no idea this could happen. No one explained the procedure to us. We just thought it would be a safe abortion.

'We thought it was meant to be done over two days because she was so far along. But the doctor seemed to want to get it all over quickly.

"Everyone who came in said 'Oh, no, not another one from there. 'I was told they'd seen eight like Sarah so far that year, and have since found out there's been at least three more since her."

They filed charges with the Brisbane police, there was a bedside interview, but nothing happened.

Sarah developed a morphine addiction in hospital and has begun a rehab program. "The morphine helped her blank out the pain. She didn't want to go off it, she couldn't face what had happened," Leanne says.

"She refuses to see doctors. She's lost her trust. She'd have to be sedated before she'd let a doctor examine her.

"She's got an inch-wide scar from her naval down which will remind her of what happened forever. She may never be able to have another baby.

"When I look back now, I think - we could have managed. She could have had that little baby girl and not gone through all this suffering."

Two months later, Leanne reached desperation point. She was having nightmares - the photos of her daughter's injuries replayed in her head every night. "Everywhere I looked 1 saw baby's heads."

She couldn't get free of the depression that now plagued her. She saw her daughter suffering every day.

Leanne overdosed on prescription drugs and drove to the local harbour. She wanted to be just conscious enough to be able to plunge the car into the water. She woke to her dog (who she thinks must have snuck into the car unnoticed) licking her face and her mobile phone ringing. There were 16 missed calls from her three children, who had become worried.

She decided then to get help and has since had counselling and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The obstetrician/gynaecologist who was involved in repairing Sarah ("that doctor saved my daughter's life", says Leanne) said he sees almost a woman a fortnight needing treatment after arriving at his hospital from surrounding abortion clinics. He has just performed another hysterectomy on an abortion-injured patient - one of six in recent times. He cannot count how many times he has had to remove retained foetal parts from women.

"It's devastated us," says Leanne. "How many more young women have to suffer at these abortion clinics? We want him to be stopped so he can't do this to anyone else."

Melinda Tankard Reist is author of Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief After Abortion (Duffy& Snellgrove NSW 20001 2002). She also advises Senator Brian Harradine on bioethical and human rights issues.

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There is no denying the power of the "No coat-hangers" cry raised by abortion pressure groups in response to recent public statements by politicians, but it is the power of emotional blackmail. It says to citizens, if you put any limits at all on abortion, women will die again in the backyard, and you will be responsible.

If that vision is valid - of women dying as a result of making certain abortions illegal - then of course no democracy will enforce the law. Even those people who are dismayed at the prospect of unlimited abortion, at any stage of pregnancy, by any brutal method, are even more dismayed at the thought of women dying again in droves at the hands of backyard butchers. Debate is paralysed.

If however, that vision is an illusion: if the whole backyard butcher scare campaign can be discredited by a few historical facts and we understand that women need not die as a result of laws limiting abortion, then the debate can move on.

Fact one: Making abortion legal or illegal has never, historically, made the slightest difference to the safety of women. This is because of fact two: Medicine alone, not the law, has achieved all the gains in maternal safety.

These gains were made by medical breakthroughs such as the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, blood transfusion, improved surgical techniques and emergency services, and were achieved before there was a single liberal law or "safe legal clinic". If these legal changes made any additional contribution to safety, it is too small to show up in the historical records.

By studying the entire Australian Bureau of Statistics data on Causes off death 1906-1996 it can be observed that the death rate for illegal abortions plummeted from about 100 deaths every year in the 1930s (before antibiotics) to just one death in the whole of Australia in 1969 (the last year of the old "backyard" regime) -and this was before there was a single "legal" clinic anywhere in the country.

All this was thanks to medical advances alone, with the legal status of abortion unchanged and irrelevant. It is also noteworthy that maternal deaths from all causes - childbirth, miscarriage and abortion - dropped exactly in parallel, for the same medical reasons. Abortion deaths have always been about one fifth of total maternal deaths. Note that in the 1egal seventies, further small gains in average abortion mortality exactly matched further gains in childbirth mortality - but nobody suggests childbirth had been recently legalised: Medical progress, not legal agitation made abortion (whether criminal or medical) and childbirth, irreversibly safer.

Facts one and two dispel the cherished illusion that  legal means "unsafe" and that "therefore it must remain legal - the trump card of the abortion lobby. This is beginning to be acknowledged even by abortion supporters. Writing in the US journal Women's Quarterly, Candice Crandall reluctantly accepts that medical advances, not legal changes, were responsible for improved safety, 1n fact, it wasn't Roe v Wade (the Supreme Court ruling in 1973 to legalise abortion) that made abortion safe, it was the availability of antibiotics beginning in the 1940s".

She also confirms "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, backalley abortion".

Thousands of women? In fact, she notes, the US death toll had dropped to 41 in the year before Roe v Wade, not the 10,000 figure promoted by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL). Co-founder of NARAL, Dr Bernard Nathanson, writes, 1 confess that 1 knew the figures were totally false - but the overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible". Whatever it takes.

Yes, genuine limits on abortion would again drive some selfish abortions "underground".

But we should not over dramatise the dangers of going underground. Historically the so-called "backyard" usually was, and would be again, the "backroom" of a qualified doctor's surgery. Past Director of Planned Parenthood, Dr Mary Calderone, admitted in the American Journal of Public Health that even in the illegal 60s in America, with its ghettoes of black and Hispanic poverty, 90 per cent of all "backyard" abortions were in fact carried out by trained physicians. In Australia any covert abortions could simply be reclassified as "curettes" and done on Medicare in the "backroom" of a colluding doctor's surgery. Or alternatively, done by experienced amateurs using the cheap sterile suction pump seen on the My Foetus film. In these covert but clean circumstances, and with routine backup at casualty, the immediate physical risk of illegal abortion would be very ordinary.

I say immediate physical risk, because there are other profound injuries, moral and emotional, sustained in creating a place of death in one's own body, which are far from ordinary. Delayed risks such as breast cancer are not yet well defined. But here the discussion is of death by coat hangers, not the deathly effects of abortion upon the inner life of the mother.

Enforcing genuine limits on abortion does not place women at any dramatic physical risk, because medicine has minimised that risk; it might drive a few women to a safe and secret backroom, but not to the propagandist's "backyard", nor to his anachronistic "coat hanger".

The current alternative is to have no limits, to permit the wholesale slaughter of unwanted unborn children - "children", as writer Bob Ellis put it, "who would have loved you" - and the wholesale scarring of mothers 'and fathers' hearts, which might lose the capacity to love at all.

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BULGARIA - Three people from Bulgaria have been charged with baby smuggling and are due to be tried in a court in Athens, BBC reports.

Baby trafficking in Greece, particularly concerning women from Albania and Bulgaria, is not uncommon as there is a low birth rate in the country and a chronic shortage of babies available for adoption. The three are accused of detaining a pregnant Bulgarian teenager in order to sell her baby.

UNITED KINGDOM - A British comedian has made a feature for BBC Newsnight about his wife's pregnancy to raise awareness about what he describes as 'the inequality in the current abortion law for babies with impairments.' Laurence Clark and his wife have cerebral palsy and whilst he does not oppose abortion, they would not consider aborting a baby on grounds of disability. Doctors have described them as 'irresponsible' for refusing prenatal screening, leading Mr Clark to comment: 1 suppose such attitudes aren't surprising when, nowadays, scarcely a day goes by without a news story about assisted suicide to relieve us of our 'suffering' or doctors trying to pull the plug on yet another disabled baby." [BBC, 27 October] Alison Davis of the disability rights groups No Less Human said: "Mr. Clark's view implies that killing is wrong only if the victim is disabled. Prolifers need to reach out to disabled people who hold this view, gently pointing out that all abortion discriminates against the unborn, and that it is wrong whether or not the baby has a disability."

UNITED KINGDOM - The father of a teenage girl who died after taking the RU-486 abortion drug has said that new safety warnings are not enough to protect women after a third death was linked to the drug. Monty Patterson said that RU486 should be banned, asking "how many more deaths is it going to take before the FDA takes more action to remove this drug from the market?" 676 women reported complications when using RU-486, including 72 women who required blood transfusions after heavy bleeding.

SOUTH AFRICA - A survey of attitudes to abortion in South Africa has found that the majority oppose abortion, All Africa reports. The study by the Human Sciences Research Council found that 70% opposed abortion on financial grounds and 56% opposed eugenic abortion. Government policy does not reflect public opinion however and Parliament has just passed a bill allowing nurses to perform abortions. The Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa was said to be unhappy with the bill and concerns were raised that nurses would leave the profession if they were forced to perform abortions. [All Africa, 15 November] A girl at a Durban secondary school is suing her school after it arranged a secret abortion for her. The 18-year-old who attended Danville Park Girls' High School is acting as a co plaintiff with her mother and the organisation Doctors for Life. They are suing for damages, stating that the late-term abortion left both mother and daughter in a state of post-traumatic shock, with the daughter suffering severe depression. Legal action is also being taken against the Rose Clinic where the abortion was carried out, on the grounds that the abortion was third trimester and illegal.

UNITED KINGDOM - Professor lan Wilmut, one of the scientists who cloned Dolly the Sheep, has applied for a licence to clone human embryos. Professor Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh has emphasised the fact that his team wants to use embryos for research purposes only and will destroy them after experimentation. [Sky News, 28 September] When the news first came to light, Paul Tully SPUC's general secretary commented: "What Dr Wilmut is effectively calling for is the genetic engineering of human beings, involving the deliberate and calculated destruction of human embryos. It was irresponsible of a respected scientist to support publicly a proposal that is profoundly unethical on so many levels."

UNITED KINGDOM -A UK teenager who hit the headlines after she underwent an abortion without her mother's knowledge has become pregnant again. Her mother said that she was 'hell-bent on replacing the one she lost' and that the family would support her.

UNITED KINGDOM - The parents of baby Charlotte Wyatt are seeking to overturn a court ruling that doctors should not resuscitate her if she stops breathing, saying that her condition is improving. Charlotte was born three months premature and according to her parents can now respond to sound and focus her eyes on her baby brother.

UNITED KINGDOM - The UK teenage pregnancy rate continues to rise in spite of costly government programmes, The Guardian reports. Over half of pregnant teenagers give birth but the majority of under-16s have abortions. The Department of Education and Skills were undeterred by the evidence, insisting that they have a 10-year strategy and that it takes time for changes to occur.

AUSTRALIA - Dr Ellie Lee, a pro-abortion campaigner who believes in infanticide has dismissed 4-D ultrasound images of unborn babies as 'damaging.' In a letter to the Guardian newspaper, Dr Lee claimed: "They [scientists] know that a foetus is not sentient, even at late gestational stages, and so cannot smile, laugh, cry or feel pain." [The Guardian, 29 October] In August 2000, a pro-abortion professor, Vivette Glover suggested that anaesthesia should be used during abortions on unborn babies as early as 17 weeks because "between 17 and 26 weeks it is increasingly possible that it starts to feel something."

AUSTRALIA - The director of the Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics in Melbourne, Australia, has said that embryonic stem cell research has no ethical justification. Speaking at the International Conference on Cloning and Stem Cell Research, Fr Norman Ford stated that many people view the human embryo as a mere commodity without any value, but that belief in the value of human life at all stages of development goes back thousands of years and is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures.

MALTA - Malta has been targeted by the UN human rights committee alongside Morocco and Poland with demands that it change the law to allow abortion. A member of the UN committee' Mr Franco Depasquale is Maltese. [di-ve news, 11 November] A spokeswoman for SPUC said: "The UNHRC has no authority to impose its dictatorial policies on an independent sovereign state. Let the UNIIRC focus on genuine human rights abuses rather than demanding the exploitation of women and the ending of innocent lives through abortion." [SPUC source] The retiring rector of Krakow's Pontifical Academy of Theology has criticised the UN committee's interference. Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek stated: "I wonder who has given the UN the task of indicating what is right and what is wrong." He pointed out that the right to life is a fundamental principle of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

UNITED KINGDOM - Tony Blair is launching a five year plan with the aim of making the UK the science capital of the world, particularly in the area of stem cell research. Mr Blair is a strong supporter of embryo research and human cloning, and is expected to say at the launch: 'We will not stop this research. The potential benefits are huge." [Sky News, 17 November] In a press release, SPUC drew attention to the Prime Minister's anti-life record on embryo research, cloning and abortion, and appealed to him to promote policies that respect the human right to life.

UNITED KINGDOM - A scheme that involved giving 18,000 women advance packs of the morning after pill has been found to have no effect on the abortion rate, BBC reports. Women were apparently 'too embarrassed' to ask for the morning after pill in advance, leading Dr Sally Wyke of Dundee University to comment: "Enthusiasm for distributing advanced supplies of emergency contraception may be misplaced." She added that other ways had to be found to get the pills to women.

USA -The US Ambassador to the UN delivered a statement to mark the 10th Anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, highlighting US funding of maternal health assistance, AIDS relief programmes and the fight against the trafficking of persons. Sichan Siv told the General Assembly that abstinence and fidelity should be the focus of HIV prevention programmes, along with the empowerment and protection of women and that the US had made a priority of 'respect for motherhood, the rights and responsibilities of parents, and the family as the basic and fundamental unit of societies everywhere'. Sweden condemned the US for stopping its funding of UNFPA, stating that "the Swedish Government will continue to argue that every woman should have the right to choose a legal and safe abortion."

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