We recommend visitors read this excellent post which asks some very searching and pertinent questions about the whole issue of Choice?

Again worth reading.

A flame war between the writer of this article “The Radical Feminist” and a person who supports [...]]]> This is the title of a recent post on the Prolife New Zealand Website.

We recommend visitors read this excellent post which asks some very searching and pertinent questions about the whole issue of Choice?

Again worth reading.

A flame war between the writer of this article “The Radical Feminist” and a person who supports the right to kill unborn children bears testimony to the convoluted, illogical and poorly thought out arguments of those whose aim is to support the pro-abortion viewpoint.

Southland Times.

Dear Sir

Abortion Clinic Opposed

The proposal of the Southern District Health Board to establish abortion facilities in Invercargill should be opposed by the citizens and churches of Southland. It is always wrong to kill the innocent and  we all have a duty to defend the right to life of [...]]]> Editor,

Southland Times.

Dear Sir

Abortion Clinic Opposed

The proposal of the Southern District Health Board to establish abortion facilities in Invercargill should be opposed by the citizens and churches of Southland. It is always wrong to kill the innocent and  we all have a duty to defend the right to life of every human being especially unborn children who are the weakest and most defenceless members of the human family. Abortion is not a genuine health service and there is no place for a culture of death in the Kew hospital which is dedicated to protecting  the life and the health of patients.  It is abhorrent that healthy babies in potentially normal pregnancies should be terminated in pseudo legal abortions in a hospital where heroic efforts are made to save premature babies. Abortion  is also damaging to women’s health. It can result in a lifetime of sorrow and regret for the mother, sterility and premature deliveries in subsequent pregnancies. Women who face an unplanned pregnancy deserve compassion and help in bringing their child to birth. Doctors and nurses at the Kew Hospital should seek the protection of section 46 of the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act and refuse on conscience grounds to be involved in abortion.

Yours faithfully

Ken Orr

Spokesperson

The following recent study from Chile   gives the lie to this long standing belief that has somehow become embedded as a ‘fact’ in our culture.

The ramifications of this study are enormous and should cause a major rethink to one of [...]]]> The Pro-abortion lobby have always claimed that banning abortion results in increased maternal mortality.

The following recent study from Chile   gives the lie to this long standing belief that has somehow become embedded as a ‘fact’ in our culture.

The ramifications of this study are enormous and should cause a major rethink to one of the principal rationales to legal abortion worldwide.

A well known symbol of this widely distributed symbol of this fallacious belief  “the coat-hanger”  is often used by Pro-abortion groups in New Zealand and world-wide.  Perhaps it is time they removed it.

Hon Paula Bennett,

Minister of Social Development and Employment.

Dear Ms Bennett

Green Paper – Child Abuse

Thank you for the invitation to contribute to this important debate on child abuse. This submission is made by Right to Life New Zealand Inc. The fundamental object of our Society is to [...]]]>

Hon Paula Bennett,

Minister of Social Development and Employment.

Dear Ms Bennett

Green Paper – Child Abuse

Thank you for the invitation to contribute to this important debate on child abuse. This submission is made by Right to Life New Zealand Inc. The fundamental object of our Society is to uphold the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death. We commend you and your government for seeking solutions to the abuse of our vulnerable children. It is a cause of national shame that New Zealand has the third highest rate of child abuse in the OECD. We fully support you in the measures that will flow from this discussion document. As a nation we must succeed in protecting our children.

Our Society is disappointed that this discussion document concerns only those children who have been born. Human life commences at conception and the first nine months of the child’s life is critical for the future development of the child. Unborn children are the weakest and most defenceless members of the human family. An abortion is violence against the child. It entails the violent dismemberment of the child.  The killing of the unborn child by abortion is the ultimate in child abuse. You advise that New Zealand is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which sets out basic rights for everyone under 18. This Convention in its preamble states; “the child because by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”. It is the view of this Society that to exclude the child before birth in this discussion paper  is discrimination. It is disappointing that the violence against unborn children is sanctioned and funded by the government. Professor Philip Ney an eminent child and family psychiatrist of Canada has completed extensive research into the relationship of the violence against the unborn with abortion and the child abuse of the born child.  We believe that there is an important link for the following reasons:

Abortion lessons respect for the sanctity of life

Abortion is freely available in New Zealand, it cheapens the value of children and results in a loss of respect for the right to life of unborn children. Abortion thus results in a loss of respect  for the human rights of born children. 

Abortion lessons the restraint on exercising violence against children

We have a natural restraint to inflict violence on children. This natural restraint is impaired when we give consent to inflicting violence against the unborn child who is the weakest and most defenceless member of the human family. As a consequence of damaging this natural restraint by consenting to violence against the unborn it  is easier to lose control and fail to restrain the infliction violence against born children.

Abortion impedes bonding with future children

It is instinctive for a mother to bond with a child in her womb. This bonding is  destroyed when her child is violently destroyed by abortion. As a consequence a mother who has aborted a child could have difficulty bonding with future children, first in the womb and then when they are born. A failure to bond fully with her child, could result in the neglect of the child and make it more likely to abuse that child.

Abortion destroys a woman’s self esteem

Abortion destroys a woman’s self esteem as she may consider herself a failure as a mother that she was unable to protect and care for her child. A consequence is that with low self esteem she could consider herself as unworthy of being a mother which could lead to neglect and abuse of her born children.

Our Society’s response to the questions raised in the Green Paper are as follows:

Parents and caregivers

We support government agencies intervention when there is imminent danger of physical or psychological harm to the child.

Communities

The government is prepared to sanction and fund violence against unborn children as a core health service with freely available abortion. The government is providing the community with a very poor example of care of children. The message the government is unfortunately giving to the community is that you may kill the child in the womb but once it is born you may not smack it.

Vulnerable Children’s Action Plan

As the vast majority of cases of child abuse tragically occur within the Maori community, we believe that in partnership with Maori leadership an action plan needs to focus primarily on the protection of Maori children.

Legislation Changes

Under the Crimes Act 1961, the law does not recognise the unborn child as a human being, this is a great injustice. Human life begins at conception and every child is a unique and unrepeatable miracle of the Creator. To provide increased protection for children we request that the government amend the law to recognise that from conception the unborn child is a human being endowed with an inalienable right to life that is entitled to our respect and protection. This important action would reduce the killing of children in the womb and enhance the value of born children.

In conclusion Right to Life commends the Minister for this important public discussion about the future of our children. We trust that our submission will contribute  to a better and safer future for all of our children both born and unborn.

Yours sincerely

Ken Orr

Secretary

Right to Life New Zealand Inc.

Nathaniel Centre director and euthanasia opponent John Kleinsman has hit back at Maryan Street’s euthanasia bill during a debate tonight. Both were among speakers at an open forum at the Dunedin Public Hospital tonight titled euthanasia and [...]]]> The following article is written by WILMA MCCORKINDALE  and is from the Political section of the Stuff.co.nz  website

Nathaniel Centre director and euthanasia opponent John Kleinsman has hit back at Maryan Street’s euthanasia bill during a debate tonight. Both were among speakers at an open forum at the Dunedin Public Hospital tonight titled euthanasia and assisted suicide: A discussion we need to have.

Labour MP Street delivered details of a private member’s bill to legalise end of life options she was supporting on behalf of a Nelson group…..

Wellington-based Kleinsman, director of his organisation’s Nathaniel Centre, slammed Street’s ideas for protections.

"I don’t think there is any law that can adequately protect against the risks. In fact the law would remove the most protective barrier," he told a full house at the hospital’s Colquhoun Lecture Theatre.

He launched a scathing attack on the Government’s inadequate funding of palliative care,  saying it was driving people to assisted suicide.

To read the article on the Stuff website click here          John Kleinsman’s article Assisted suicide – right to die or duty to die?  can be viewed here

To Pro-life advocates ‘proof of life’ has entirely different meaning. Those who deny the humanity of the unborn child are finding it more and more difficult to argue their case especially when advances [...]]]> Proof of life is a term well known to kidnapping negotiators and perhaps made famous by the movie of the same title

To Pro-life advocates ‘proof of life’ has entirely different meaning. Those who deny the humanity of the unborn child are finding it more and more difficult to argue their case especially when advances in 3D and 4D techniques make it so very clear that the ‘entity’ growing within a mothers womb is a human child.  For example take the video below entitled ‘Baby Steps’ from American Life League which features 4D Ultrasound.

The TED  Ideas worth sharing website recently featured a talk by image-maker Alexander Tsiaras in which he shares a powerful medical visualization, showing human development from conception to birth and beyond. A YouTube video of this presentation is shown below. Again the images leave little room to believe  what the so called Choice faction  adamantly term ‘The Products of Conception’.

The Endowment for Human Development website whose motto is “Improving lifelong health one pregnancy at a time”, shows high quality photos and videos of the developing child. The graphic below is just one of hundreds which can be viewed online or downloaded

Inspite of all the evidence to the contrary, there a people in New Zealand actively seeking to make the procuring of an abortion even easier than it is today. They seek the complete decriminalisation of abortion.

Go figure New Zealand.

Kirsty  has come up with this idea for saving lives – not only of unborn children but of their mothers from a life [...]]]> Kirsty Burton Brown a  Pro-Life advocate who is a pro-bono legal attorney in Colorado. She also runs the website The Lost Generations and has written a book of the same name.

Kirsty  has come up with this idea for saving lives – not only of unborn children but of their mothers from a life of heartache and guilt. She says..

‘A few years ago, a post asking for help on a pro-life Facebook group caught my eye. A young girl considering abortion was seeking advice on Yahoo! Answers, and the person on Facebook wanted pro-lifers to respond. (For those of you unfamiliar with Yahoo! Answers, the website allows users to ask questions and receive answers from other individuals online.) Multiple people from the group responded and encouraged the woman to keep her baby. The effort paid off, and the girl chose life for her unborn child.’

To see her full comments on her website Lost Generations click here.

The following article by Kirsty BurtonBrown  is from Live Action News.

Daily Mail has published an article, written by U.K. author Kate Spicer, who tells her tragic story of abortion, regret, and childlessness. Her story haunts me as well because her baby would have been born in 1987, my own birth year. Though Spicer [...]]]>

The following article by Kirsty BurtonBrown  is from Live Action News.

Daily Mail has published an article, written by U.K. author Kate Spicer, who tells her tragic story of abortion, regret, and childlessness. Her story haunts me as well because her baby would have been born in 1987, my own birth year. Though Spicer has still not come to the full realization of what her abortion did to her child (in one paragraph she talks about her “fetus” whom she did not allow to become a “child,” and in another paragraph she refers to her baby as her “son”), her story illustrates how many women come to regret their choice of abortion once they see the full picture, years later.

Even more tragic, Spicer writes that “sensible girls” got abortions back then and that she would advise her 17-year-old god-daughter to get one today if she became pregnant. Even all the years of wondering what could have been, the years of empty arms, the years of sad infertility have not fully convinced Spicer that abortion is a choice that will come to haunt every woman one day. Regardless, Spicer shares the details of her own dilemma, caused by abortion, and how she thinks of her loss each day. Her story serves as a warning for teenage girls – or anyone – who believe that abortion is an easy choice, free of the haunting death of an innocent child. It is anything but…

Picture shows  an unborn child at 9-10 weeks, the age of Spicer’s baby at abortion.

In 1987, Spicer found out she was pregnant at the age of 18. After trying two “home remedies” (neat gin and falling down the stairs), she scheduled an abortion. The doctor, in a possible attempt to give her more time to think about her choice, told Spicer she would have to wait two months – until her second trimester – to have the abortion. Once her parents found out she was pregnant, though, they hurried the procedure, and Spicer had her abortion at nine weeks. (A nine-week-old baby, by the way can wriggle, shift, and dance. He has fingerprints and can grasp objects in his hands. Apparently, babies at this age love to feel anything they can touch.)

Now Spicer is 42, and this baby has been her only child. Even when she went off contraceptives, she has still been unable to get pregnant. Spicer writes that it is good that she was not forced to keep her baby’s father in her life, but she admits that he was not the only answer to her keeping her child:

Yet if someone had told me then: ‘This is your only chance to be a mother — it’s now or never’, I suspect that between us, my mother and I would have made a fair fist of raising the child. Now, at the age of 42, it is the ‘if only I had known’ that haunts me. The idea that I passed up my only chance to have a child. If I dwell on this thought, it is disturbing, so I try to avoid it.

Spicer writes that the year she had an abortion, she “became a statistic, one of the 174,000 women who had a termination that year.” Furthermore, she dispels the myth that the immediate relief some women feel after an abortion is lasting:

The euphoria far outweighed any physical discomfort when I left hospital. Any shame had gone, together with the nine-week old foetus: I was free again, I could breathe.

In fact, and rather alarmingly, I felt incredibly grown up. To my mind, the abortion was almost a rite of passage to being a proper woman.

Terminating a pregnancy seemed far cleverer than pushing double buggies in small-town Devon, which is what some of my peers were doing after their O-levels.

Today, I feel more emotional, guilty almost, about that bundle of cells I got rid of. In the bitterest of ironies, that terminated pregnancy remains the sum total of my reproductive history.

Spicer reveals that, years later, when she felt her maternal instinct, she was shocked at its force. She relates an “overwhelming desire” she had to protect and care for a street boy she met in Brazil. And she tells how her tough attitude was merely a façade to cover the regret she held inside:

The family unit … looked dull, claustrophobic and suburban. I was in denial, but every now and again my real feelings would break through the tough-girl rationale. …

I began imagining what he might have been like — a tall and sandy-haired boy, who would have been 17 at the time. I was 35, the age when the experts say your eggs and fertility start declining.

Spicer publicly analyzes her life after abortion and her feelings. She wonders if she chose some of her romantic relationships because she believed she never deserved to have another child. She introduces her niece and nephews, who “have brought into even sharper relief the phenomenal love and caring instinct inside the average woman.” Simply put, you could say that Spicer seems to believe that every woman was cut out to be a mother – at least the mother of any child she conceives. It is against a woman’s nature to kill her child. And oh, the pain when the one child you kill turns out to be the only child you ever have.

Spicer left me with two compelling thoughts…one that should cause us all to question how we talk to the women and girls around us, and one that should cause us to question the schizophrenia of the society we live in.

May we be bold enough to help others live with no regrets. Photo credit: quinn.anya on Flickr

First, Spicer shares the story of a successful author who kept her child, even in an inconvenient pregnancy, and admits to wondering what she would have done if someone had urged her not to have an abortion. Indeed, what would she have chosen? What would the women and girls around us choose if we would have the courage to urge them to choose life – even if it causes us to lose friendships? Undoubtedly, some would choose life and not have to live with the pain and regret of death.

Finally, Spicer quotes her father. His words should give us all pause:

More than 40 years in medicine have left me with a disgust for the absurdity of terminating perfectly viable life in the obstetrics department while down the corridor, in reproductive medicine, life is being forced into the bodies of women who are past their child-bearing prime.

Indeed, lost life always has its own consequences.

To see this article on the Life Action New website follow this link.

Right to Life asks readers to compare the very previous post on our site concerning a pledge signed by  Republican [...]]]> The following post is from the Uncommon Descent website and concerns a woman named Merle Hoffman. She is the founder and owner of one of the first and largest abortion clinics in the United States.

Right to Life asks readers to compare the very previous post on our site concerning a pledge signed by  Republican Presidential Candidates,  with this post and in particular this  statement from Hoffman, “We’re looking at a very dim future if any of these Republican candidates occupy that Oval Office.” 

Hoffman has been in the abortion industry since 1971 and is the cofounder of the National Abortion Federation.  She has a new book out, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom.  In it she writes, “the anti-choice movement claimed that if women knew what abortion really was, if only the providers had told them the truth, they would never have killed their babies. . . . But women did know the truth, just as I knew it, deep down, when I allowed myself to recognize it.  Mothers saw the sonogram pictures, knew that sound bites assuring them that abortion was no different from any other benign outpatient surgery were false—knew that, as the antis say, ‘abortion stops a beating heart.’” 

But, according to Hoffman, these women were making a “decision so vital it was worth stopping that (babies) heart.”

Hoffman says, “I wasn’t immune to the physicality of abortion . . . but I quickly came to realize that those who deliver abortion services have not only the power to give women control over their bodies and lives but also the power—and the responsibility—of taking life in order to do that . . . acknowledgment of that truth is the foundation for all the political and personal work necessary to maintain women’s reproductive freedom.”

Dostoevsky wrote:  “‘But,’ I asked, ‘how will man be after that? Without God and the future life?  It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. And he laughed. ‘Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,’ he said.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 589.

Hoffman is Dostoevskey’s observation personified.  When a person ceases to believe in a transcendent lawgiver and the law He has given, she is free to replace it with anything.  Hoffman replaces “thou shalt not murder” with “it’s OK to murder innocent babies as long as your politics are right.”  And in her godless world who is to say she is wrong or that such a thing as “wrong” even exists as a concept that means anything more than “I personally disagree”?

thanks to Rob Ward for alerting us to this particularly succinct article which we believe exposes the crux of the pro-abortion lie.

To read the article on the uncommondescent website click here.