QUOTES

Always Remember

Coerced Abortion

Whoops. The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, ABC, NBC, and CBS news all missed it, but Pittsfield High School administrators and the Western Massachusetts Family Planning Clinic are being sued for attempting to coerce a 16 year-old woman into having an abortion. Guidance counselors actually wrote false reports for the woman, saying she was in school, when in fact she was being given a pregnancy test off school grounds. When the test turned out positive, counselors urged the woman to seek and an abortion, but she decided to carry the baby to term.

Communique, 11/17/95

Babies and Pain

According to a report in the November/December issue of the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, "inadequate assessment of pain in neonates is a persistent, unresolved problem that has serious implications for effective pain management."

Recent evidence corroborates earlier studies that show pre-term and term infants responding to pain at birth. Sensory fibre development begins at approximately 7 weeks gestation (editor's note: which is before many abortions are performed) and is completed by the 20th week. In fact, because the endorphin system may not be completely functional in terms of analgesia, the preterm infant may be more, rather than less, sensitive to pain. Infants also are thought to be capable of remembering pain, with alterations in behaviour occurring long after the initial painful stimulus was removed.

JOGNN, November/December 1995

Fetal Pain is Real

"Five or ten years ago, people thought newborns didn't feel pain, and now analgesia for new-born surgery is widespread. This study is the first direct evidence that the human fetus may experience pain too." So says Dr. Nicholas Fisk in an upcoming July 9th issue of The Lancet a British medical journal. Dr. Fisk's study found that fetal babies who had needles inserted into their abdomens "displayed biochemical reactions suggesting that they found the event stressful." The report urges doctors to use pain killers when operating on intrauterine babies and "possibly also for termination of pregnancy, especially by surgical techniques involving dismemberment."

Ohio RTL Education Bulletin, May, 1995

Adopted Children Do Better

Adopted children are far more likely than fatherless children to wear seat belts, see a dentist, live in a smoke-free home, and have a regular bed-time, according to new research data released by the National Center for Health Statistics. The studies show that children from adoptive two-parent homes are at significantly lower health risk than children in fatherless homes.

In Focus, FRC Publication

It Doesn't Exist, But We'll Help You Through It

After years of publicly denying the seriousness of post abortion trauma, Planned Parenthood is getting into the post abortion counseling business. Planned Parenthood of Seattle has begun holding support groups for women who have had abortions. Sessions run for 6 weeks, two hours a night, and include discussion of feelings, thoughts, and "life-changes" since the abortion experience.

National & International Religion Report, 4/3/95

"Fetal Reduction" Trauma

A report in the February issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology shows that 65% of the 100 women studied who underwent "fetal reduction" while carrying three or more babies "recalled acute feelings of emotional pain, stress, and fear during the reduction procedure." It continues, "The anguish they remembered experiencing in making the decision to terminate a few to preserve the lives of one or two left nearly all the women with lingering feelings of sadness and guilt."

Communique, 3/24/95

Politically Correct Fascism

H. Douglas Anderson, a Seattle-area psychologist, has been fined $1,500 by a state examining board, put on one year's probation, and ordered to take a series of ethics courses for a "breach of ethics" that "fell below professional standards." The crime? A patient had asked what he thought about her impending abortion. He told her that it would be wrong.

National Review, June 17, 1996

Another Abortion Death

Caroline Gutierrez of Miami, Florida became one of the latest victims of "safe," legal abortion. The 21 year-old woman had her uterus punctured multiple times, leading to a blood infection that was so severe she went into septic shock. The clinic had provided Gutierrez with a sheet warning about possible complications, but the sheet was written in English, which Gutierrez can't read. Gutierrez tried to contact the clinic on at least three occasions. The first time, they hung up on her. The next two times, they neglected to return her calls. Finally, her family took her to the hospital, but the infection had spread so far that recovery wasn't possible. The abortion clinic voluntarily closed their doors following the announcement of Gutierrez's death. Even Susan Silver of the National Abortion Federation was shocked by the clinic's malpractice. "This was an avoidable tragedy," she said. "The idea that [Gutierrez] called and left messages that weren't returned is unconscionable."

Care Net Communications Brief, March 1996

Illegal Abortion

The jury in the case of a top surgeon accused of illegally carrying out an abortion an a woman who desperately wanted children have adjourned for the night after failing to reach a verdict, Nottingham Crown Court heard today that the jury of seven men and five women could not reach a unanimous verdict after just under two hours deliberation in the case of 59 year-old Reginald Dixon. Mr. Dixon, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Kings Mill Hospital in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, denies illegally procuring a miscarriage on 38 year-old college lecturer Barbara Whiten in March 1993. The three-week long trial has heard childless Mrs. Whiten claim that Mr. Dixon flippantly told her he had aborted the 11 week-old male foetus the day after her surgery.

Mr. Dixon says that he continued the operation as he believed she did not wish to be pregnant and he feared for her mental health after being aware that she had tried to commit suicide on two previous occasions. The jury were called back into court this afternoon after passing a note to the judge saying that they had so far failed to reach a verdict. Mr. Justice McCulloch adjourned the case until 9:30 am tomorrow when the jury will continue their deliberations and told them: "Go home and forget about the case overnight and come back to court tomorrow to continue your deliberations."

Eileen Murphy, PA News, December 20, 1995

"Choice" to Kill Means "Freedom" to Abandon
Says Fathers' Front

Hartford — A men's rights group is searching in Connecticut and several other parts of the country for dads who never wanted to have children. The National Center for Men is planning a federal lawsuit — based on the premise outlined in the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision — aimed at allowing men more of a choice when it comes to fatherhood. The US Supreme Court's 1973 decision gave women the right to choose whether they would become parents [sic.]. The center believes that if a woman can choose abortion, a man should be able to relinquish his parental responsibilities, said Mel Feit, Executive Director of the center based in Bethpage, N.Y.

"Women have choice and freedom, and the idea that they can force a man to be a father creates a situation that is so out of balance," Feit said. Should the group find a candidate for their suit, they would ask a judge to allow men to legally relinquish parental responsibilities. Their partners then would have the option of raising the child without financial support from the father, putting the child up for adoption, or aborting the child, Feit said.

Women's rights groups are neither sympathetic nor worried. "I think basically it's a silly lawsuit," said Deborah Ellis, legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.

'Men's Rights Group Rallies for Fathers', Boston Globe, December 27, 1995

J's Story

J is a 32 year-old married woman with an 18 month-old child. They have just purchased a new house. She has a new job which they need. If she carries to term she fears they couldn't handle it financially and she might lose her job. Does not want her daughter to be hurt by this in any way. Very abortion-minded, but needs to know more about it and about the after effects. Wonders if she could actually go through with it. Emotional, wiping tears before starting to talk. Showed her An Informed Choice and she said she would find abortion scary, but she has no choice. Touched on adoption, abortion's physical and emotional risks, and parenting. Her mother is supportive; she and husband were having a rough time in their relationship with financial stress, even considering splitting. Asked for information regarding where to go for an abortion. She was surprised at the fetal development at this point, but felt she should go through with abortion as soon as possible. She asked to give me a hug before she left and 1 told her I would be praying for her.

During the following week I spoke to J and she informed me she decided to carry-to-term and parent. They will work out something financially. Said the video An Informed Choice (the abortion information) and fetal development information helped her to decided. Offered her support if needed.

After J had her baby I gave her a call. She says everything is working out beautifully. The baby girl was born after a short labour. The baby sleeps well and is content. The two-year-old is into 'terrible twos' but is fascinated with the baby. Their marriage is still working out and they are in their new house still. Everything is fine and they are so happy we were here when she was so distraught. She thanked us.

Crisis Pregnancy Centre of Winnipeg, Canada, 1996 (Minor details were changed to protect J's identity.)

Science Gives Face to Fetus: Naomi Lakritz

When is a fetus a baby? When scientists treat it just like any other human patient. Researchers working for Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical firm, have developed genetic engineering treatments for use on fetuses. According to the Wall Street Journal, the treatments involve altering defective genes in fetuses which left untreated would destine them to suffer from immune deficiency ailments in childhood. The scientists want to start testing the treatments on pregnant women this summer. Their plan is to extract cells from the umbilical cord and inject them with a genetically engineered virus carrying the healthy gene. Once the cells are infused back into the fetus, the corrected genes will eliminate the threat of future disease.

The Sandoz team says treating fetuses, whose cells are fewer and divide very fast, is easier than treating children whose bodies have millions of cells. They predict eventually being able to treat genes in embryos as young as the eight-cell stage. There are some dangers to this gene-therapy business. It's so new that researchers don't know if tampering with genes could increase a person's risk of cancer. Nor do they know if correcting defective genes might also destroy any benefits those genes produced.

But probably one of the biggest dangers fetal gene therapy poses is to the rationale of the pro-choice movement. Up to now, their illogical reasoning has been based on situational ethics. If a woman is happy to be pregnant, it's a baby. If she isn't happy, then it's just a blob of tissue to be disposed. Along comes gene therapy for first trimester fetuses. How are the pro-choicers going to rationalize that away? In developing and using gene therapy, the Sandoz people are clearly acknowledging the personhood of the fetus. By treating a fetus to prevent later childhood disease, the scientists affirm that they're dealing with a human patient, a unique individual whole life is a continuum and who just happens to be at an early stage in that continuum.

The pro-choicers like to argue that the fetus is not an individual because it can't survive on its own. But a two-year-old can't survive on its own either. Such limitations reflect a person's stage of life, not his or her essential humanity. Will the pro-choicers now claim that a fetus who receives gene therapy is a baby while one that does not retains its blob status? They have arrogantly claimed the right to assign merit to the lives of unborn human beings. Now a handful of pragmatic scientists has neatly shot their philosophy full of holes.

Winnipeg Sun, April 16, 1996

Naomi Wolf: The New Republic, October 16, 1995

Clinging to rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs, and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish, and casually destructive men and women.

We need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.

Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus in its full humanity must die. But it is never right or necessary to minimize the value of lives involved or the sacrifice incurred in letting them go. Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement, and responsibility can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position — and consolidate the support of the center.

The New Republic, 1995

Re-Examining Human Rights

"Words are seldom innocent or neutral and we can often be fooled by their slipperiness, their always- changing implications," writes Robert Fulford. Is Mr. Fulford referring to the comments of abortion advocates on t he cases of three pregnant women?

The first, Brenda Drummond of Ottawa stands charged with attempted murder. The Crown states that she fired a pellet gun into her womb two days before she went into labour and delivered a baby boy alone in the bathroom of her townhouse on May 30, 1996. Doctors detected the pellet after doing a brain scan on the child, named Jonathan, who was suffering from meningitis. Jonathan is in the care of his father.

Abortion promoters are crying that a charge of attempted murder can't stick. According to Section 223 of the Criminal Code a child becomes a human being only after it has exited the mother's body. Because Jonathan wasn't legally a human being when he was shot, the abortionists claim there is no victim.

The second case is that of a woman in England who aborted one of the twins she was carrying because she "was too poor to raise two children" (July 1996). The world was horrified because a healthy unborn child received a lethal injection into his heart. The dead baby would be delivered at the same time as his surviving sibling. What is all the bother about, wonder abortionists. This dreadful deed is just like any other abortion.

The third case is the Winnipeg woman, five months pregnant, who made headlines in August because of her solvent abuse. Child and Family Services and the woman's family applied to the Courts for an order to place the pregnant woman into treatment. Her three children are currently in the care of the state, two of them suffering from brain damage. Using the general power of the court to protect people who cannot protect themselves, Judge Perry Schulman ordered the woman into treatment. His ethical decision was struck down by the higher court because the law does not allow for the protection of the child in womb.

In commenting on these three cases, abortionists cried, "... admitting that a fetus may not be just another lump of tissue threatens a woman's right to abort." But these cases prove to the public that there is more than "just cells" in every abortion. A human being is destroyed every time an abortion is executed.

Okay, the abortionists say, there is no question here of whether the child in the womb is or is not human. It is a human being, who will be granted human rights only if the mother chooses to carry her baby to term. When the woman's choice is to kill, the child in the womb has no rights. The abortionist's reasoning is that all it takes for a child in the womb to be granted rights as a human is a magical statement of intent by the mother; that the mother's right to choose includes the right to abuse her unborn children and deprive them of their human rights and a humane future.

The three cases make it clear to the public that the rights and autonomy of an individual are not absolute. Autonomy runs out when an individual harms another individual. Society cannot allow preventable, irreparable and grievous harm to its innocent members and is reasserting the rights of its most innocent and defenceless.

Abortionists say and do everything to make sure the law denies personhood to unborn children. If the law supposes these three babies were not persons who sustained injuries, then Charles Dickens was right, "the law is an ass". The lives of these three babies demonstrate that it is flagrant discrimination to arbitrarily strip certain human beings of their right to be deemed persons. Those who wish to deny them their human rights are refusing to recognise them as "persons". The raw, illogical exercise of judicial power in Canada's court decisions make babies in the womb the victims of this type of discrimination.

The failure of Canadian law to recognise them as persons harkens back to the dark ages before 1929 when the highest courts in the land held that women were not persons. These three cases make it impossible for the courts to uphold the legal fiction that we are not persons until we are born.

D&X in Canada?

We know that top medical experts agree, "There are absolutely no obstetrical situations encountered in this country which require a partially delivered human fetus to be destroyed to preserve the life of the mother."

Still, on behalf of the federal government, Mr. Hedy Fry has said, "I know that (brain suction abortions) are very rarely performed in Canada." How rarely? Ontario's health minister doesn't know ... Nova Scotia and PEI health ministers have denied that any are performed there. In BC they merely fund women to have their D & X done in the States.

We have an interest between Western Report journalist Celeste McGovern and Dr. Ian Bailes, chairman of Alberta's Out-of -Country Health Services Committee (excerpt below):

Celeste: Do you know if the Committee has ever approved partial-birth abortions? I don't think they're ever done in Canada.

Dr. Bailes: Well they are actually.

Celeste: In Alberta?

Dr. Bailes: Yes, they're done in both Edmonton and Calgary ... but it certainly can be done (elsewhere) in Canada too.

RU-Ready?

The long, sad march of legalised chemical abortions in the United States keeps moving forward. The Food and Drug Administration has officially declared that RU-486 is "safe and effective" and announced that it will approve the drug once its sponsor, the Population Council, provides additional information on such issues as manufacturing practices and labelling. A spokesperson for the Population Council said she expected that RU-486 would be marketed in 1997. (The Washington Post, 9/19/96)

Richard Glasow suggests that prolife advocates can inform women of the following short and long-term effects and dangers of an RU-486 abortion, as all of these effects are based on documented studies:

excessive bleeding (often for weeks)
nausea, vomiting, pain (often requiring narcotics)
the ingestion of two powerful synthetic hormones
there is no data on possible long-term adverse side effects, such as damage to internal organs
three visits to an abortion facility
lower abortion rate (93%-95%) than surgical abortion (99%)
at least 2 women out of 100 will have incomplete abortions that require surgery
about 1 out of 100 will have a continuing pregnancy, which will require a surgical abortion or risk delivering a deformed child
about 1 in 100 will be hospitalised
about 1 in 100 will require a blood transfusion
about 40% abort at home or work
the possibility of seeing a dead baby (The RU 486 Report, 9/96)

Miscellaneous Quotes

"The heart that loves is always young." Greek Proverb

"Life's most urgent question is: what are you doing for others?" Martin Luther King Jr.

"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so you apologize for truth." Benjamin Disraeli

"Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others." Helen Keller

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." T.S. Eliot

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." Eric Fromm

"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so." Bertrand Russell

"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway." Elbert Hubbard

"Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born." Ronald Reagan

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein

"Dying to me don't sound all that good." John Cougar Mellencamp

"No child who does not want to be alone, should ever have to be." Sister Geraldine MacNamara

The Los Angeles Times requires their writers to use the term "pro-choice" and "anti-choice" in all their articles.

While 39,000 women who-have-had-an-abortion are in NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League), 245,000 women who-have-had-an-abortion are members of the National Right to Life.

"A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus."
Warren Hern, "Operative Procedures and Technique" Abortion Practice, p. 154.

"I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity."
World Medical Association's Declaration of Geneva, 1948.

"A doctor must always bear in mind the importance of preserving human life from the time of conception until death."
International Code of Medical Ethics, 1949.

Oath of Hippocrates

I swear by Apollo, the physician, and Asclepius and Health and All-Heal and all the gods and goddesses that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this oath and stipulation: To reckon him who taught me this art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him and relieve his necessities if required; to regard his offspring as on the same footing with my own brothers, and to teach them this art if they should wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation, and that by precept, lecture and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own sons and to those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath, according to the law of medicine, but to none others.

I will follow that method of treatment which, according to my ability and judgement, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; furthermore, I will not give to a woman an instrument to produce abortion.

With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my art. I will not cut a person who is suffering from a stone, but will leave this to be done by practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter I will go into them for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and further from the seduction of females or males, bond or free.

Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I may see or hear in the lives of men which ought not to be spoken abroad I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this oath inviolated may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men at all times but should I trespass and violate this oath, may the reverse be my lot.