BIG BLUE WAVE

Pro-life protest in Montreal

2012-05-30T21:50:00.001-04:00

In support of a Russian Pro-Life group, "Warriors of Life":

NEW YORK, NY, May 28, 2012 – On June 1st, the international anti-abortion movement “Warriors of Life” will conduct a public campaign aimed at prohibition of abortions in Russia, Ukraine, USA, Poland, Canada. Campaign will include picketing of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

New York, NY: At 11am on June 1st, June New Yorkers will bear witness to picketing of the United Nations Headquarters (45th Street and 1st Avenue) with a call to protect the most defenseless members of the society – the unborn children. Protests will be led by Orthodox Christians group “The Awakening”.

Washington, DC: At 11am on June 1st, a picket in front of the Russian Embassy (2650 Wisconsin Avenue Northwest Washington) will be organized by the Center for Bioethical Reform (CBR), based in Lake Forest, California and take place in support of the “Warriors of Life” open letter written to Vladimir Putin requesting an Institutional Court investigation into the legality of abortion-permitting clauses. According to the legal analysis done by “Warriors of Life”, these clauses are unconstitutional.

Montreal, Canada: At 1pm on June 2nd, Conservative organizations will gather in front of Russian Consulate General (Montreal, 3685, Avenue de Musee), supporting the “Warriors of Life” campaign to put an end to abortions.

Russia: “Warriors of Life” will protest in front of Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow and Ukrainian General Consulate in Saint-Petersburg. At this time, Ukrainian Legislature (Verkhovnaya Rada) is considering the law aimed at curbing discretionary abortion. During the diplomatic mission protests “Warriors of Life” will call on Ukrainian elected representatives to pass this law and continue legislative process even further (since the law under consideration still allows some abortions).

The protest campaign will continue on for several days in Moscow, St. Petersburg, including sea-boat protests within the boundaries of the city, other cities in Russia, Warsaw (Poland), and Kiev (Ukraine).

Current anti-abortion campaign is dedicated to the memory of the Saint Constantine, a Roman Emperor called by the Orthodox Church equal-to-the-apostles. The memory of Saint Constantine is celebrated on June 3rd on Gregorian (contemporary) calendar. Emperor Constantine put an end to many pagan atrocities in the Eastern Roman Empire. “Warriors of Life” are intent on putting an end to a new paganism- ‘lawful’ killing of the unborn children.

I just want to say:

Catholics do not recognize Constantine as a Saint. Just wanted that to be clear.

What North Korea is Like

2012-05-30T01:18:00.001-04:00

Check out this neat photo gallery.

Abortion Caravan Schedule of Events Across Canada

2012-05-29T23:12:00.003-04:00

Information here.

Abortion Restrictions Associated with Lower Complication Rates

2012-05-29T20:09:00.000-04:00

Willard Cates writes in the Journal of Public Health Policy:

Abortion policies should be based on evidence. Over the past four decades in the United States, we have accumulated more data about the practice of legal abortion than any other surgical procedure. This evidence has documented the public health impact of increased access to safer abortion. In recent years, state laws to restrict abortion access have gained momentum. An accompanying article in this issue of JPHP uses extant data to examine whether two restrictive policies have had a measurable effect on abortion morbidity. The analysis found an unexpected result – states which imposed restrictions had lower levels of abortion complications than those who did not. Various explanations exist for these findings. Caution is needed to interpret observational findings, especially with polarizing issues like abortion.

Abstract to the accompanying article:

Although US federal law requires all American states to permit abortion within their borders, states retain authority to impose restrictions. We used hospital discharge data to study the rates of major abortion complications in 23 states from 2001 to 2008 and their relationship to two laws: (i) restrictions on Medicaid – the state insurance programs for the poor – funding, and (ii) mandatory delays before abortion. Of 131 000 000 discharges in the data set, 10 980 involved an abortion complication. The national rate for complications was 1.90 per 1000 abortions (95 per cent CI: 1.57–2.23). Eleven states required mandatory delays and 12 restricted funding for Medicaid participants. After controlling for socio-economic characteristics and the pregnancy complication rate, legal restrictions were associated with lower complication rates: mandatory delays (OR 0.79 (0.65–0.95)) and restricted Medicaid funding (OR 0.74 (0.61–0.90)). This result may reflect the fact that states without restrictions perform a higher percentage of second-trimester abortions. This study is the first to assess the association between legal restrictions on abortion and complication rates.

Source
Journal of Public Health Policy advance online publication 24 May 2012; doi: 10.1057/jphp.2012.15
Abortion policy and science: Can controversy and evidence co-exist?
Willard Cates Jr.a
University of North Carolina Gillings-Chapel Hill, School of Global Public Health

Journal of Public Health Policy advance online publication 24 May 2012; doi: 10.1057/jphp.2012.12
Legal restrictions and complications of abortion: Insights from data on complication rates in the United States
Joshua A Rolnicka and John S Vorhiesb
Stanford University Department of Medicine, 300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Stanford University Department of Orthopaedics, 450 Broadway Street, Pavilion C, Redwood City, CA 94063, USA.
Correspondence: Joshua A Rolnick, E-mail: Joshr1@stanford.edu

82% of Catholics say contraception is ‘morally acceptable’

2012-05-28T22:44:00.001-04:00

I'm shocked it's that low. I would have said over 90%.

“I’m not afraid to admit that we have an internal catechetical challenge—a towering one—in convincing our own people of the moral beauty and coherence of what we teach. That’s a biggie,” said Dolan. “We have gotten gun-shy ... in speaking with any amount of cogency on chastity and sexual morality.”

Gun-shy. That's a charitable way of putting it.

No, it's not just priests are gun shy. A heckuva lot of them openly (and sometimes actively) oppose Catholic teaching...and the bishops allow that to happen.

QUOTATION: Pro-choice and the fetus

2012-05-28T14:36:00.001-04:00

Many pro-choice advocates developed a language to assert that the fetus isn't a person, and this, over the years has developed into a lexicon of dehumanization.

-Naomi Wolf, "Our Bodies Our Souls", The New Republic, 1995

I regret my IVF

2012-05-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

Amanda Platell

In my late 30s, after a series of operations to try to rectify what doctors thought might be the reason I hadn’t got pregnant after a decade of trying, I had to face the harsh reality that being a mother was not a God-given right. It is not an entitlement, as I’ve heard women and men wanting a late baby claim on radio shows this week, demanding their right to costly IVF on the NHS.

I spent my own hard-earned cash paying for my treatment as I considered it morally reprehensible for the state to pay for my desire to have a baby. It was anathema to me that hard-working families should subsidise something that wasn’t an illness.

What right did I have to bump an elderly lady with dementia off the waiting list for drugs to ease her suffering because of my maternal longings? Why is a woman’s right to motherhood more worthy than a man with prostate cancer?

...

And what they don’t tell you about when you’re an older woman having IVF is the terrible cycle of hope and despair. If they’d only told me at the beginning that I’d have more chance of winning the Lottery, instead of allowing me to fill my mind and heart with dreams of a child of my own — dreams that were dashed by the ghastly reality that hardly any older women get pregnant using fertility treatment.

IVF has a terrible success rate for women over 40. About 17 per cent of women aged 40 to 42 who use it get pregnant and about half of these miscarry. At £3,000 a cycle, it’s hardly money well spent, especially at a time of postcode lotteries for life-saving treatment and drugs. Only yesterday, we learnt that half of diabetes patients are not getting the treatment they need to prevent the disease becoming deadly.

Do you know when you have the most "choice"?

When you're in your twenties. At that age, you can have a baby. Or not.

At age forty, not so much.

QUOTATION: Avoiding the Hard Questions

2012-05-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

Men, not having been able to cure death, misery and ignorance, have imagined to make themselves happy by not thinking of these things.

--Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 2

Taken from The Catholic Breadbox

I have no idea what this is but...

2012-05-26T14:48:00.003-04:00

I just thought the imagery was cool:

Guttmacher Institute Inflates Number of Illegal Abortions

2012-05-26T14:35:00.001-04:00

Poor-choicers grossly mistate abortion stats. Heard that one before:

A recent article in a medical journal in Mexico completely debunks the Guttmacher Institute numbers on “unsafe” abortions in several Latin American countries. The study found that the Guttmacher methodology is not only unsound scientifically, but unprofessional. According to the authors Guttamcher did not only obtain estimates that are empirically impossible through unsound methodology, but they failed to validate their numbers with estimates that are readily attainable through tested and established epidemiological methods.

The article is a very important addition to the growing number of studies on abortion that conflict with the conclusions of well funded organizations that promote abortion worldwide. For years abortion activists have claimed that there is an overwhelming demand for abortion in Latin America. What has been surfacing in recent years is that Guttmacher, IPPF, WHO and other well-funded large organizations have been using inflated figures to make a case for free access to abortion in developing countries. They claim that unless abortion is legal it substantially increases maternal mortality and morbidity. It looks as though the numbers are finally catching up with them.

The article, authored by Elard Koch and other Chilean doctors and academics, focuses on the findings of a Guttmacher Report that estimated 400,400 clandestine abortions per year in Colombia for the year 2008. The experts in epidemiology conclude that the Guttmacher Report overestimates the number of induced abortions in Colombia by a factor of 18. That is the actual induced abortion numbers for Colombia in 2008 were more like 22,000.

The study first criticizes the Guttmacher methodology for estimating the number of illegal abortions in latin American countries, and then attempts to offer an alternative methodology to obtain results that are empirically verifiable.

THE GUTTMACHER METHOD

The Guttmacher authors first estimated the number of hospitalizations for induced abortions in Colombia for the year 2008. To do this, they simply went to a select number of medical institutions (300 out of over 1200), without any specified reason for choosing those, and solicited replies to questionnaires from the head of those institutions on the number of abortions performed or treated there. The opinion surveys did not ask for hard numbers but for recollections of the numbers of induced and spontaneous abortions of the most recent month. Those figures were then multiplied for the twelve months of the year. The result was an estimated 115,325 abortions of which a mere 19% (21,898) were not induced. That result should raise alarm bells, and the Koch article probes into these numbers.

Next, to estimate the total number of illegal abortions, the Guttmacher report multiplied the results obtained above by a factor between 3.29 and 5.29, on the basis of a survey of 102 professionals “who are knowledgeable about the subject”. Of these 102 interviewees 47 were medical service providers, and 55 were researchers, political analysts and human rights defenders. Koch compares this method of obtaining a multiplier to a politician launching a survey into his approval ratings among 102 of his party members. The result of this methodology resulted in an unnecessarily alarming number of induced abortions in Colombia for the year 2008: 400,400.

THE KOCH REVIEW

Koch and his co-authors re-created estimates of 2008 hospitalizations for abortions in Colombia, whether induced or not, by using methods accepted in the epidemiological field. They used the known ratios between conception, pregnancy and abortions from Chile (which has an class A vital records registry) and applied them to Colombia’s official vital records data for 2008. According to this estimate, there were between 84,824 and 105,190 abortions in Colombia for 2008, of these only approximately 11% would have been induced abortions.

Next, to estimate the total number of abortions (including illegal abortions), Koch and his co-authors used the ratios of Spain, a country that does not prohibit abortion, and also has excellent vital records. Using the Spanish ratios on the Colombian numbers the results were surprising. For 2008 Colombia would have had 21,978 abortions, a far cry from the 400,400 estimated by Guttmacher. The Guttmacher estimates were that there were 400,400 ilegal abortions, 18 times more!

The Guttmacher Report, and similar studies, are used by abortion advocates of evidence of the need for “safe abortion” in countries that do not allow the destruction of human life from the moment of conception. The Report is conveniently made available in power point format on their website.

Koch’s article points out that similar methods have been employed to estimate abortion demand in other Latin American countries since the 1990s. The figures in these studies and reports, that have gained an audience in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, are not empirically possible, the Koch article insists. A recent study in Mexico City, also conducted by Guttmacher, estimated between 0.7 and 1 million abortions in the year 2006-2007, prior to abortion restrictions being removed. This figure may have been inflated by a factor of 40. Unofficial estimates of actual demand for abortion in Mexico’s capital is more like 16,000 per year.

Koch cautions that alarmist publications like the ones from Guttmacher and other abortion activists are totally unnecessary. What is necessary to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity in developing countries is the provision of pre-natal care, skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetric care and other basic necessities. The scientific evidence that the reduction of maternal mortality is linked to these simple medical services has been known for some time and is overwhelming. According to one recent study published in PLoS One, so called “unsafe abortion” is simply not relevant in increasing maternal mortality. Unfortunately, this scientific evidence is unlikely to sway abortion advocates who are hell bent on imposing their ideology on others.

LifeNews.com Note: Stefano Gennarini, J.D., writes for the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. This article originally appeared in the pro-life group’s Turtle Bay and Beyond publication and is used with permission.

QUOTATION: God as the Foundation of Law

2012-05-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

When human affairs are so ordered that there is no recognition of God, there is a belittling of man. That is why, in the final analysis, worship and law cannot be completely separated from each other. God has a right to a response from man, to man himself, and where that right of God totally disappears, the order of law among men is dissolved, because there is no cornerstone to keep the whole structure together.

-- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Spirit of the Liturgy, 2000

Taken from The Catholic Breadbox

VIDEO: Scott Klusendorf on the State of the Pro-Life Movement

2012-05-26T02:00:00.001-04:00

I have independently come to many of the same conclusions as Scott Klusendorf.

If prolifers ever hope to obtain fetal rights, we need a body of professional, full-time activists who train people on how to engage on right-to-life issues.

I know it's rather long, but it's worthwhile.

VIDEO: NDP MP Blows Up in HofC

2012-05-25T18:46:00.001-04:00

Warning: This hurts to watch. A lot. Turn down your speakers. It's in French, so you're not missing much.:D

And yes it's two months old, but still, kind of entertaining, the way skateboarders falling on their faces is entertaining.

Man Arrested for Selling “Roasted Fetuses” for Good Luck

2012-05-25T15:00:00.004-04:00

The grisly discovery follows news that Chinese pharmaceutical companies are selling “health pills” made from the bodies of babies dying in abortion and miscarriages.

Chinese hospitals and abortion clinics are notifying pharmaceutical companies when a baby dies. The companies purchase the bodies of the deceased children and reportedly store them in private refrigerators of families who are paid to help the companies avoid suspicion by locating the bodies off site.

The highly-secretive process involves putting the babies’ bodies in a medical drying microwave and grinding them into pills. The ground baby powder is then placed in a capsule and sold as a stamina enhancer, according to the documentary.

The South Korean television crew acquired the dead baby capsules and ran DNA tests on them — finding they were 99.7 percent human. The tests also found hair and nail remnants and the results were able to identify the sex of the baby whose life ended.

Around the world, feminists yawn.

Spanish woman obtains child support from abortionist who failed to abort her child

2012-05-25T13:18:00.001-04:00

“When the day comes for me to explain to my son what happened I will tell him hoping he understands,” she said. “I didn’t want him when I went to have an abortion but that’s not the case now.”

So why are you suing the abortionist? Does this child not have a father?

Love the judgement:

Judge Jose Perez Martinez, a judge on the island of Majorca in Spain, ordered the doctor to pay 978 euros ($1,226) a month until the child turns 26, and an additional 150,000 euros ($180,00) in “moral damages.”

I wonder how the kid will feel knowing that his life is sustained by someone who wanted to kill him.

Queens abortion mill shut down after 37-year-old mother dies in horrific botched abortion

2012-05-25T13:14:00.000-04:00

Robert Hosty, who ran the A-1 Women’s Center abortion clinic in Queens, New York, has had his license revoked after Operation Rescue staff filed a complaint against him for the death of Alexandra Nunez, a 37-year old single mother of four. The revocation order, dated February 6, 2012, was only recently obtained by Operation Rescue.

Nothing to see here, folks! Abortionists disciplined, or charged, or having their licenses revoked on a weekly-- if not daily--basis.

Nothing to see here!

QUOTATION: Religion in the Public Square

2012-05-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

Forcing religious faith out of a nation's public square and out of a country's public debates does not serve democracy... What it does do is impose a kind of unofficial state atheism. To put it another way, if we ban Christian Churches or other religious communities from taking an active role in our nation's civic life, we're really just enforcing a new kind of state-sponsored intolerance -- a religion without God.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

Taken from The Catholic Breadbox

QUOTATION: Religion in the Public Square

2012-05-24T09:00:00.000-04:00

To wish to draw an exact line of separation between religion and life, between the natural and the supernatural, between the Church and the world, as if they had nothing to do with each other, as if the rights of God were valueless in all manifold realities of daily life, whether human or social, is entirely foreign to Catholic thought and is positively anti-Christian.

--Pope Pius XII, On Christian Rebirth, 1947

Taken from The Catholic Breadbox

VIDEO: Stephen Woodworth at the March for Life

2012-05-23T23:15:00.000-04:00

QUOTATION: Trials

2012-05-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

-- C.S. Lewis

Taken from The Catholic Breadbox

Indian abortionist fed fetuses to dogs

2012-05-22T23:49:00.001-04:00

In order to destroy the evidence.

Abortion attracts the scummiest characters.

H/T: JivinJ'

VIDEO: The Abortion Caravan

2012-05-22T22:22:00.001-04:00

Column: Democracy hurt by abortion stats secrecy

2012-05-22T13:57:00.001-04:00

Margaret Somerville:

In the past, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care has refused a request under FIPPA for information regarding OHIP records related to abortion, citing “danger to life and physical safety”, “danger to security of a building”, “endangering the safety of service providers”, and a danger of pro-life “violence”, if the information were released. On appeal, the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner ordered the ministry to disclose the requested statistics.

What if the people who want the information don't have an abortion agenda?

Too bad for you.

A Paramedic Talks About His Experience with Abortion

2012-05-22T09:26:00.000-04:00

Catholic Exchange:

Our city’s Fire and Rescue departments receive multiple 911 emergency calls from that clinic every month. Despite the fact that this clinic must be shut down due to its health and safety issues, I am simply writing this to expose to you another side of abortion and its negative fallout, particularly on first-responders. Many people believe that, besides a women’s immediate family and friends, the only other people exposed to the procedure are the doctors and nurses at the clinic and hospital. Yet, has anyone ever wondered how the bleeding woman [following a botched abortion procedure] was transported to the hospital in the first place? EMS professionals such as myself and many of my friends are the ones who have to deal with the abortion before the doctors do. We are simply providing physical care for the women as we transport her to the hospital. That explains why she is usually in a more “stable” state when she arrives.

...

Can you imagine what it is like arriving onto the scene of a botched abortion? One of my fellow paramedics told me just the other day that he and his crew had to run a call for a woman who had just undergone an abortion. As he started to tell me the story, he grew very quiet and eventually trailed off into silence. I won’t give any details of the accounts like this but my observations have led me to believe that no one knows just exactly how to describe dealing with a post-abortion victim. The entire ordeal is very traumatic, especially for first-responders. We are often taken for granted and some of us eventually just lose any feeling of fear, disgust, or sympathy for the victims we deal with on a day-to-day basis. It is simply by nature of our line of work: we see horrific car accidents and burn victims all the time and at one point, you just don’t feel anything for them anymore. That is why people never hear from first-responders about, say, abortion clinic victims. It’s just simply something that doesn’t cross your mind because, as a paramedic, you’re used to it.

...

First-responders are often times the only witnesses to the death of a botched-abortion victim, yet they always remain silent. Well not today. You have heard my story. You now know that we hold on to these things. Please, if you or anyone you know is in touch with a firefighter or paramedic, do not hesitate to ask them if they want to talk about their experiences. It is very similar to what a soldier goes through with post traumatic stress. Oftentimes, first-responders are still hurting from traumatic abortion-related calls; they just don’t want to think about it. Abortion hurts everyone and it’s about time that first responders started speaking out. If we could get more people to give their first-hand accounts, to really open up about their darkest memories, maybe, just maybe, we can end this curse of abortion once and for all. You see, my fellow Catholics, oftentimes it is those who are there for us who are also secretly in need themselves.

Poor-choicers try to remind people what it was like when abortion was illegal. Whole hospital wards used to be filled with women with their guts hanging out, they said.

This is why abortion should be legal, they said.

The thing is, they pointed to the wrong problem.

They thought the problem was that the abortion was poorly done.

But the problem is abortion itself.

If you reject abortion, this.will.not.happen.

I know that people say "but women die of pregnancy."

Bull. Women die of underlying conditions concurrent with pregnancy.

The pregnancy is not the problem. The concurrent condition is the problem.

If you are a healthy woman, your chances of dying from pregnancy in the West are close to nil. You have more chance of being hit by a bus walking down the street.

If you have an underlying problem, and you have prenatal follow up, your chances of surviving pregnancy are excellent.

I hope more responders speak up about what they have seen. Because if abortions are still being botched, then legalization did not solve the problem. Legalization only hid the problem. Because now no one wants to compromise abortion access.

For Immediate Release: Anti-Abortion Activists Highjack Abortion Rights’ Pet Project

2012-05-22T09:10:00.000-04:00

Anti-Abortion Activists Highjack Abortion Rights’ Pet Project

Younger Generation Rises Up with Jaw-Dropping, Bloody Abortion Campaign

May 22, 2012. Young adults with the anti-abortion group, Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform have released details today about their plan to take a project once used to advance abortion rights, the 1970 Abortion Caravan, and to instead abolish abortion with their own spin-off: The New Abortion Caravan.

In one week’s time, 20-plus young people ranging in ages from 19-36 will be driving box-bodied trucks with 7-foot tall and 22-foot wide posters of aborted children, demonstrating on street corners with similar graphics, and circulating postcards at peoples’ homes. They are starting their campaign in Vancouver on May 29, travelling across the country and ending in Ottawa on Canada Day.

CCBR’s executive director Stephanie Gray explained the historical significance of her group’s tour: “We have taken the sacred cow of Canada’s abortion rights movement and are using it to advance the cause for pre-born children.”

The group’s announcement comes after the circulation of a mysterious teaser video two weeks ago, with a riddle that left groups on both sides of the debate confused: “It once signaled the coming of a great injustice. Now it will make the invisible victims visible.”

The answer? The (New) Abortion Caravan.

In 1970, a group of radical pro-abortion feminists gathered outside the Vancouver Art Gallery to start a cross-country trek to Ottawa. They had two goals: 1) Repeal of the abortion laws, and 2) Free abortion on demand. 18 years later, they got what they wanted with the Supreme Court’s Morgentaler decision.

In a master’s thesis on the 1970 Abortion Caravan, Francis Wasserlein writes, “The Abortion Caravan brought into the homes of the vast majority of newspaper-reading, television-viewing Canadians the reality of abortion in a manner unprecedented in Canada.” The New Abortion Caravan will do the same, says Gray, but she pointed out that the focus will not be on choice in the abstract sense, but on what is being chosen.

Gray explained the historical significance of her group’s use of the opposition’s tactics: “Last year, we announced our new EndtheKilling plan to eradicate abortion from our country in our lifetime. We have given ourselves an 18-year deadline to achieve justice for the pre-born. Our journey will begin with how the opposition began: With a caravan. They did graphic, bloody dramatizations of illegal abortions. We will demonstrate with graphic, bloody images showing the reality of all abortions.”

Gray said her group believes women in crisis need help but that abortion isn’t the solution: “Abortion doesn’t make a poor woman rich,” she said, “Nor does it unrape the rape victim. And it certainly doesn’t turn the frog of a boyfriend into a prince. So if we truly want to help women, we need to eliminate a woman’s crisis, not exterminate a woman’s child.”

The project is sure to cause significant controversy. One of their images shows a 24-week aborted fetus with the caption, “If sex-selection abortions are wrong, why not all abortions?” Another shows a 9-week aborted fetus next to a pregnant woman lighting a cigarette, with the caption, “Cigarettes Hurt Babies. Abortions Kill Them”.

Gray defended the group’s approach saying, “The pictures of abortion are shocking because abortion is shocking. The images are disturbing because killing a child is a disturbing thing.”

Gray said that besides displaying bloody images and debating the public, they will do presentations in each community they go to.

For more information, contact CCBR spokesperson and executive director Stephanie Gray: 403-200-0777 (cell).