Pro Life Campaign welcomes reduction in abortion rate

The latest Irish abortion figures released today by the British Department of Health* show another reduction in the number of Irish women travelling to Britain for abortion.

In 2009, 4,422 Irish women travelled to Britain for abortions, down from 4,600 for the previous year. It is the eighth consecutive year that Irish abortions have declined after more than a decade of upward trends.

Commenting on the latest figures, Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign said:

The Pro-Life Campaign welcomes the downward trend in Ireland's abortion rate.

Some have suggested the reduction in abortions may be as a result of more Irish women opting for abortions in other European countries. But this is purely anecdotal as there is no statistical evidence to back up these claims. Holland is often mentioned as a country where more Irish women may increasingly travel for abortions but the official Dutch figures in recent years show little or no change in the number of abortions on foreign nationals.

Groups advocating abortion in Ireland claim that we need to introduce abortion here to “confront the reality of crisis pregnancy.” This attitude completely ignores the humanity of the unborn child and the latest peer reviewed research showing the negative consequences of abortion for women. Rather than seek to have abortion introduced in Ireland, we should see the latest reduction in the abortion rate as very encouraging and work together to ensure this downward trend continues.

Ireland’s abortion rate is now 4.4 per 1,000 female residents aged 15-44 where Britain’s is 17.5.

*Statistical Bulletin, Summary Abortion Statistics, England and Wales: 2009 (Published 25/05/10)

Sign the Stop Gendercide Now Petition - Help end the lethal bias against baby girls

100 million baby girls are missing - and the number is rising. They were aborted or killed at birth. Why? Because of a preference for baby boys.

It is a human rights violation on a massive scale perhaps the most widespread form of violent anti-female discrimination in the world today.

The mission of Stop Gendercide Now is to highlight the fact that so many baby girls have disappeared through abortion, infanticide, or neglect and to work for political change to remedy this.

By signing the Stop Gendercide Now Petition, you’ll be joining others in sending a strong message to the leaders of countries like China and India, which have deplorable records in defending the rights of baby girls, born and unborn. Your voice can really make a difference.

The number of baby girls’ lives lost through gendercide has risen sharply as cultural pressures against the birth of baby girls are reinforced by harsh inhumane traditions, coercive population control policies as well as political ideologies.

As a result of this, 100 million baby girls who should have been born have been aborted, killed or left to die. It is a human rights violation on a massive scale.

Boy-preference leading to dramatically fewer baby girls being born and surviving is concentrated primarily in China but also in India and other countries.

The mass destruction of girls has produced a systemic gender imbalance in whole populations for example; there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.

The Stop Gendercide Now Petition puts pressure on the governments of countries with significant sex ratio imbalances:

- To introduce measures to ensure that the killing, fatal neglect or abandonment of baby girls because they are girls is ended.

- To carry out and publish an annual audit giving the sex ratio, the measures put in place to address it, and the progress or otherwise of these measures.

The Stop Gendercide Now Petition will also be copied to the Secretary General of the United Nations calling on the UN to adopt a meaningfully proactive leadership role in ending the horrific practice of signalling out baby girls for abortion and infanticide.

Many steps can be taken. Initiatives can be developed to encourage education for girls: reform of laws and customs that exclude or disadvantage daughters in property inheritance; facilitation of women’s participation in all dimensions of public life; requiring family planning officials, midwives and hospitals to publish the birth sex ratios, and reward advances towards the normal balance of girls to boys.

To read about Stop Gendercide Now and to sign the Petition click here

To join this Cause on Facebook click here

To visit the Stop Gendercide Now blogspot click here

Baby boy who survived abortion left to die in Italian Hospital

In ancient Rome, a newborn baby unwanted because of disability or otherwise was legally allowed to be disposed of by exposure as res vacantes, an unwanted thing.

 

Often they were left in the Velabrum, a busy street in the middle of the oil and cheese markets or at the columna lactaria in the Forum Olitorium.

In modern Europe, of course, such things would never happen. Certainly not. Nowadays when we are exposing a child born after an abortion has failed to kill them, they are abandoned exposed in a hospital. Much more civilised.

In southern Italy, last month, an abortion was carried out on a mother, pregnant for the first time, after a prenatal scan suggested he might be disabled. The baby boy, born at 22 weeks, despite the abortion procedure, was left to die by the doctors in the Rossano Calabria Hospital.

He was found 20 hours later by the hospital chaplain still alive wrapped in a sheet, his umbilical cord still attached, still moving and breathing. The priest raised the alarm and the baby was moved to the intensive neonatal care unit in a nearby hospital, but died there the next day.

This is the second case in three years in Italy of a baby aborted at 22 weeks because of suspected disability who survived the abortion living for 3 days.

 

Italy’s abortion 1978 law allows abortion on demand for the first three months of pregnancy but allow it on the grounds of suspected disability in the second three months, but its infanticide law imposes a legal obligation on doctors to attempt to preserve the life of a child who survives abortion. In England, however, there is no time limit at all for abortions where disability is suspected. They can be aborted right up to birth.

Since the purpose of abortion is the deliberate and direct procuring of the destruction of the life of the baby, the doctors expose babies who survive so that they will die.

Since medical ethics require that a patient be informed about the nature of the procedure to which they are to be subjected and consent to it. Are women considering abortion on the grounds of suspected disability informed by their doctor that the abortion involves inducing the birth and that if their baby survives the doctors will be hiding it away and exposing it so that it will die for lack of due care. Are the mothers asked to consent to this protocol of exposure without care where a baby is born alive after an abortion?

The Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health, 2007 commissioned by the UK Government, found that 66 infants survived NHS termination attempts in hospitals in England and Wales during 2005.

Instead of dying during the abortion procedure as intended, they survived, able to breathe unaided. They were exposed without medical care, left to die, some living for half an hour, one for ten hours.

 

The only way to step back from this horror show is to reaffirm the first principle of medical ethics – primum non nocere – first do no harm. Do not deliberately destroy human life in the womb or after birth. Once we step away from that principle of respect for life we find ourselves sliding back down to the columna lactaria in the Forum Olitorium.

Time and Newsweek Magazines highlight 'waning' influence of pro-choice movement

‘Remember Roe!’, an article by Sarah Kliff in Newsweek (21st April 2010), paints a dramatic picture of a greying abortion rights leadership in the US racked by a growing anxiety about who will take over the torch from them when they retire.

One of the strongest abortion rights groups in the US is the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), founded in 1969.

Its current president, Nancy Keenan, described in the article her response to the huge crowds flocking to the March for Life in Washington DC this January - ‘my gosh, they are so young - there are so many of them and they are so young.’

There were 400,000 at the March for Life. Two months earlier, the pro-abortionists held a rally against Congressman Bart Stupak’s proposed abortion opt outs in the Health Care Bill and only 1,300 turned up. Over 300-times as many activists came to the March for Life as bothered to turn up to oppose restrictions on abortion in Obama’s health-care package.

In her Newsweek piece, Sarah Kliff says that the difficulties encountered by pro-choice activists during the recent US health care debate marks ‘the day when they became aware of their waning influence in Washington.’

The Newsweek article said that research carried out by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws found that 51% of under 30s opposed to abortion see it as a ‘very important voting issue’. Only 26% of young people who support abortion see it as a very important voting issue. Their research found a similar though lesser difference among older voters.

This means that it is a live political issue for the pro-life voters especially the young, whereas it is not a hot issue for those who are pro-abortion. So the pro-life activists are pushing an open political door that the pro-abortion activists are not holding shut.

In a separate article in the current Time magazine (3rd May 2010) Terry O’Neill, President of the pro-abortion National Organization for Women, concedes in passing that those on the pro-life side ‘are winning the abortion fight.’

Her intuition was reflected in a number of polls in the last year suggesting that a tipping point may have been reached in American public opinion with the pro-abortion view on the brink of slipping into a minority position as the trend edges in a pro-life direction.

Polls by Gallup and Pew have found rises in the numbers taking a pro-life position and falls in the numbers taking a pro-abortion position. Gallup’s poll exactly a year ago, found ‘51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice”.’

Gallup says “this is the first time a majority of US adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.”

At a time when pro-choice campaigners should be exulting in their current successes – the election of the most pro-abortion politician in America as President, control of Congress by the Democrats, pro-abortion since 1980 - they are instead keenly aware that things are not going their way. Without becoming complacent, pro-life supporters should take heart from these encouraging and uplifting developments.