From an Al-Jazeera reporter:
Category Archives: Abortion
Forced abortion in China
In the people’s paradise of Communist China, the state – an institution whose malevolence increases in proportion to the amount of power it wields – dictates how many children a couple may have. The preposterously named “family planning commission” of the Siming district decided that Xiao Aiying was about to have one too many, so they murdered the eight month old unborn baby – what we, in the enlightened West call a foetus – in her womb.
From here:
An eight-months pregnant woman was dragged from her home and forced to have an abortion because she had broken China’s one-child-per-family law.
Twelve government officials entered Xiao Aiying’s house where they hit and kicked her in the stomach, before taking her kicking and screaming to hospital.
There, the 36-year-old was restrained as doctors injected her with a drug to kill the unborn baby.
Her husband Luo Yanquan, a construction worker, yesterday described the moment officials burst into his family home.
‘They held her hands behind her back and pushed her head against the wall and kicked her in the stomach,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if they were trying to give her a miscarriage.
‘Our ten-year-old daughter has been excited about having a little brother or sister but I don’t know how I can explain to her what has happened.’
He recalled how a month before the child was due to be born officials told the couple they weren’t allowed to have another baby because they already have a daughter.
His wife, who was filmed in hospital with large bruises on her arms and her dead child still inside her, said: ‘I have had this baby, feeling it moving around and around my belly. Can you imagine how I feel now.’
Her harrowing experience in Siming, near the city of Xiamen, south-west China, on October 10, comes a month after the government in Beijing said there would be no relaxation in strict family planning laws.
Most Chinese families are allowed only one child to reduce the 1.3 billion-plus population and cut unsustainable demand on resources.
Laughing 17 week old foetus
In a sane world this would at least make abortion doctors pause and reflect; in a sane world.
From here:
Transformed by a beaming smile, this is the tiny face of a foetus just 17 weeks old.
The scan implies that a baby can experience feelings such as happiness and pain much earlier in its development than previously thought.
It will prompt further calls from doctors and campaigners to lower the upper abortion limit from 24 weeks…..
Professor Stuart Campbell, who took the picture at his London clinic with 3-D and 4-D scanning equipment, said it did not necessarily show the unborn child had feelings – but it was certainly displaying human behaviour.
‘This is a joyful expression of the humanity of the foetus. I have seen a foetus making a crying face at around 18 or 19 weeks, but not a nice smile.
‘This is the earliest on record – it is just a delight.’
Late term abortion in Canada
From here (my emphasis):
The lack of detailed reporting by hospitals and clinics means that the Statistics Canada numbers for second and third trimester abortions represent a fraction of the total. In the report to Canadian Physicians for Life, Statistics Canada has information on gestational age for 36,874 abortions, only about one third of the total. If that one-third paints an accurate reflection of all the abortions performed, we have a fairly high number of abortions that occur after the first trimester, information that most people in Canada have never heard.
Here’s what the report shows: There were 31,994 first trimester abortions, or 87% of the 36,874 that included gestational age in their report. There were 4,479 abortions performed between 13 and 20 weeks gestation. The Canadian Medical Association considers 20 weeks to be the point of viability, that is, the point at which babies can survive outside the womb. After the 20 week period, there were 401 abortions, 366 between 21 and 24 weeks, 18 between 25 and 28 weeks, 12 between 29 and 32 weeks and 5 abortions reported at 33+ weeks.
Keep in mind, if this pattern applies to the over 60,000 abortions for which there is no gestational information, it means there were about 1,200 post-viability abortions in Canada in 2004, with more than 100 in the third trimester and 15 in the final six weeks of pregnancy.
It is true that every abortion, no matter at what stage it occurs, destroys a tiny human being. Each one also coarsens our society’s view of human life and increases our tolerance for the brutality of abortion. Two decades ago, about 98% of abortions occurred in the first trimester, when women and men could be convinced the embryo was a “clump of cells.” Now a growing number of women are choosing abortion when they can feel their baby move and they know with certainty that this is a tiny human being. Just as disturbing, there are doctors willing to take these lives.
Where is the outcry against this from protestant mainline churches?
Aborted babies being left to die
From here:
BABIES that are surviving late-term abortions at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital might be being left on shelves to die, according to an Anglican minister.
Dr Mark Durie, minister of St Mary’s Caulfield, said staff were finding it hard to cope with a reported six-fold increase in late-term abortions at the Women’s since abortion was decriminalised in Victoria two years ago. He said because conscientious objection by medical staff was now illegal, the hospital could employ only people who endorsed late-term abortions.
Dr Durie is bringing a motion about late-term abortion to the annual Anglican synod, which opened in Melbourne last night.
He calls on the state government to answer five questions about late-term abortions:
■ How many are happening, and how late?
■ What are the reasons for the abortions?
■ Are those born alive receiving medical care, or what is their cause of death?
■ What has been the effect on staff morale at the Royal Women’s Hospital?
■ What has been the effect on staff recruitment?
He said in one case – not at the Women’s – a trainee was deeply traumatised when she was told to drop a living foetus in a bucket of formaldehyde.
The Anglican diocese of Melbourne backed decriminalising abortion in its submission to the Victorian Law Reform Commission review in 2007. Archdeacon Alison Taylor told The Age at the time that in some circumstances, such as foetal abnormality, abortion was the ”the least problematic solution”.
The Anglican diocese of Melbourne was, predictably, on the wrong side of this issue; let’s hope that that changes.
Abortion in Canada has been legal and unrestricted since 1988. In spite of its pretensions to speak on social justice matters with a “prophetic voice”, the Anglican Church of Canada continues to maintain a mealy-mouthed silence about abortion, including late-term abortion and the fate of aborted babies that survive – until being dropped into formaldehyde.
Carleton University pro-life student demonstrators arrested
From here:
Jason MacDonald, Carleton’s director of communications, told LifeSiteNews that student groups are not normally permitted use of the quad for displays. “In addition, the content of the Genocide Awareness Project has been found to be disturbing and offensive to some by the courts and human rights tribunals in other jurisdictions (BC for instance),” he wrote in an e-mail.
Apparently, the right of an adult not to be offended outweighs the right of an unborn child not to be murdered.
Ireland: Recession might save the life of unborn babies
That should have been the headline, but it isn’t: the actual headline is “Recession Might Limit Irish Women’s Access To Safe Abortion”.
All of which goes to show what a self-destructive, decadent, corrupted state Western Civilisation now finds itself in.
Economic hardship might be leading more Irish women to seek abortions and obtain the procedure illegally because they cannot afford to travel to Britain, where abortion is legal, Reuters reports. Ireland, a mainly Catholic nation, permits abortion only when a woman’s life is in jeopardy. The policy is one of the strictest in Europe, and women who violate the law can face life in prison.
A Canadian prisoner of conscience
Yes there is one: her name is Linda Gibbons, a harmless grandmother who happens to believe that murdering unborn babies is wrong. Unlike Omar Khadar, who is seldom out of the media and undoubtedly deserves to serve a stretch in the clink, Linda Gibbons is largely ignored by the mainstream media, although there is this article in today’s National Post:
Linda Gibbons, an anti-abortion activist who has spent eight of the past 16 years behind bars for continually breaking a temporary injunction around a Toronto abortion clinic, has been abused by a legal system that has failed to deal with her in a proper venue and in a timely fashion, her lawyers told a provincial court judge on Tuesday.
The underlying behaviour of the Crown has been to delay doing its duty “and now 16 years later is taking advantage of its dereliction,” lawyer Nicolas Rouleau told Judge Mara Greene in a Toronto courtroom.
Daniel Santoro also argued that Ms. Gibbons should never have been arrested nearly 20 times for breaching the temporary injunction, which a civil court issued in 1994 at the request of the then NDP government.
Once inside the courtroom, her supporters stood silently as the 62-year-old defendant, whose skin looked nearly grey and who walked with a noticeable stoop, was brought in handcuffed. Ms. Gibbon sat through the two-hour hearing with her head down. She has never spoken at any of her court appearances, believing silence is part of her protest for the “voicelessness of the unborn,” a supporter, Father Tony Van Hee, explained.
Fr. Van Hee has held a 21-year vigil outside of Parliament Hill to make abortion a criminal offence. He and others think Ms. Gibbons is a prisoner of conscience.
Eight years in prison; not for committing a crime but for having the guts to stand against real criminals – abortion providers and those who support them. All brought to you by the party of compassion, the NDP.
Abortion viewed from two perspectives
Support for Cardinal Ouellet’s denunciation of abortion has come from two unexpected people: a rape victim who aborted her child:
Angelina Steenstra may seem like one of the likeliest candidates on earth to be offended by Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s much-criticized statements, made earlier this week at a pro-life conference in Quebec City, that abortion is wrong in all cases, even in the case of rape.
As a teenager Steenstra was the victim of a traumatic date rape that resulted in an unwanted pregnancy – a situation that led her to choose an abortion.
But this week Steenstra told LifeSiteNews (LSN) that, far from joining those politicians and media who have blasted the cardinal (in the case of one journalist, even going so far as to wish a “long and painful” death on the cleric), she would like to express her gratitude to him.
Steenstra, who has come a long way since those dark days in her teenage years, is now the National Coordinator of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. She told LSN that the cardinal’s remarks were a “wake-up call to women who are given the misinformation that abortion will solve their problems – even the problem of a child conceived by rape.”
“I wish I had heard his message when I was a teen and was raped and then aborted my daughter,” she said. “I am deeply grateful to the Cardinal for proclaiming the truth that abortion, even in the case of rape, rather than helping the victim of rape, actually adds a second victim – the unborn child.”
Angelina said that her abortion as a teenager led to a consuming self-loathing, and that eventual healing only took place after she faced the truth that the killing of her child through abortion was wrong.
“I was told abortion was no big deal. That it would solve my problem,” she said. “Finally I caved into my fears and made the phone call that would end the life of my child and begin a lifetime of suffering and regret.
And a woman conceived as the result of rape:
I am extremely grateful to and proud of Cardinal Ouellet for speaking up to defend the lives of those of us conceived in rape,” says Deborah Morlani, a wife, mother of five children, pro-life speaker, Catholic writer, registered nurse and grad student working on her Master of Theology degree.
These women both know – from opposite perspectives – that an unborn child is a human being, created by God in his image, a person to be loved and cherished no matter how difficult his or her conception.
PQ leader outraged that Canadian Cardinal is too Catholic
From the CBC:
Several female politicians and women’s rights activists have denounced anti-abortion remarks made by the Catholic Church’s top Canadian official over the weekend.
Cardinal Marc Ouellet, attending the Campagne Pro-Vie conference in Quebec City on Saturday, suggested that abortion can never be justified, even in cases where a woman has been raped.
He called abortion a “moral crime” as serious as murder.
Ouellet said he understands how a sexually assaulted woman has been traumatized and must be helped and that her attacker must be held accountable.
“But there is already a victim,” he said. “Must there be another one?”
Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois, Liberal cabinet minister Marguerite Blais and the president of the Quebec Women’s Federation have spoken out against Ouellet.
Marois, speaking to a weekend PQ policy conference, said she was “absolutely outraged” by the remarks, adding that the archbishop of Quebec was trying to undo rights that were won decades ago.
There’s nothing quite as enjoyable as the secular howl of indignation when a Christian is consistent.