International Newsletter - March/April 2001

International Right to Life Federation, Inc.
Vol. 12 No. 2
(March/April 2001)

Officially, the new Swiss law legalizes abortion through 12 weeks. We understand, however, that mothers can kill their unborn babies through all nine months. The abortionist must merely state that the abortion is necessary to preserve the “physical integrity” of the mother or to alleviate her from a state of “profound distress.” Clearly, this allows for abortion for any reason at all during the entire nine months. The Christian Peoples Party will attempt to collect the 50,000 signatures needed for a national referendum to block this new law. They must do this within 100 days of its passage.

Mexico – Big Trouble

The mayor and a majority of the city council of the Federal District of Mexico City have voted to legalize abortion in Mexico City. This federal district contains almost half of the total population of the nation of Mexico. Pro-lifers immediately looked to their new president, Mr. Fox, for help. According to Jorge Serrano, president of Mexico’s national pro-life organization, Fox has stated that he personally feels there are no absolute values and that he will be supporting the same feminist agenda that has been being pushed at the United Nations by the European Union and the Clinton administration. So, no help there. Through the efforts of Dr. Willke, president of IRTLF, thousands of Spanish books and tens of thousands of brochures and posters have been delivered to Mexico City. These have been distributed widely and hopefully will be having a pro-life impact.

Pro-life representatives from nations across all of Eastern Europe will convene for a 3-day meeting in Warsaw 18-20 April. For information regarding this, contact our Netherlands office or our Cincinnati office.

On 20 March, a Belgian parliamentary committee voted 17 - 12 to agree to a draft law that will legalize euthanasia in Belgium. Christian Democrats have staunchly opposed it. The Socialist-Liberal-Green Coalition has been supporting it. The proposal is similar to the proposed Dutch legislation. It also applies to “terminally ill” patients and patients with “incurable diseases” who are in extreme pain. Experience in the Netherlands has shown that doctors ignore all of these regulations. Your editors expect it to be no different in Belgium. The next step will be a full vote by the Upper House to be followed by the Lower House.

This year’s national census in India reveals 937 girls for every 1,000 boys in the 0 to 6 age group. In 1991, the ratio was 945 to 1,000. This decline is due to improved prenatal sex identification and abortion of females. It also is due to female infanticide.

The Philippines have a new president – Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She has replaced the former Estrada government whose family planning policies resembled those of President Clinton. The new president said that she would hold to traditional Philippine culture and would protect human life and families. “We will push for responsible parenthood and a population policy that is in keeping with our culture. I do not think there should be a specific line item in the budget, in the Department of Health, for contraception.” She argued against compelling the poor to use condoms, saying, “You don’t go and dictate birth control to them.”

Netherlands – Killing is Legal

Despite peaceful protests from 10,000 pro-life people surrounding the Parliament, the Upper House of the Netherlands legalized euthanasia on 10 April 2001. The Lower House had approved it already. The bill formalizes in law what had been common practice for almost two decades. In a series of decisions, judges had legalized euthanasia and laid down conditions almost identical to those now embodied in this formal law. Called mercy killing, assisted suicide, assisted death, etc., the fact is that doctors can now, with full legal approval, kill a patient. Publicity has been given to the “requirements” that must be observed by the physician. They include:

The patient makes a voluntary and carefully considered request with a clear mind.
Patient has unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement.
The doctor has told the patient about his situation and prospects.
There is no reasonable alternative available except death.
Consultation must be had with one independent physician who has given written approval.
The doctor must kill the patient “with due medical care and attention.”

The above conditions are almost identical to those laid down over the years by judges. Your editor has an office in the Netherlands and has gotten to know many Dutch doctors personally. It is the unanimous report from them that their colleagues who kill have routinely ignored all of the above so-called requirements. Now the Parliament has set these in formal law. Having routinely ignored the judge-made requirements, my colleagues in the Netherlands fully expect doctors there to ignore the same requirements now formalized in law.

For details, consult Dr. Willke’s book, Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, Past and Present, available through the Cincinnati Right to Life office. This is probably the only source in English that tells the full story of what actually is happening in Holland rather than the continued repeat of the “requirements”, with the full assumption that these are being observed. They are not. Over half of the patients killed in Holland are killed by doctors without the patient’s knowledge or consent, and the list deteriorates from there.

In a San Francisco, California, Planned Parenthood abortion chamber, one of a pair of twins was removed in an abortion. The woman was told the procedure was complete. Later, she found out that she still had one of the babies inside of her, but that it had an arm and a leg cut away. Planned Parenthood later paid for a second late trimester abortion. She entered a lawsuit and was awarded damages of $672,000.

The Shire Pharmaceutical Group, based in the United Kingdom, has discontinued sales of Preven in Canada. The reason given is lack of sales. This company has sold less than 10% of its stock since it was placed on sale in pharmacies in October. They cut the price from $22 to $5, but it still flopped. Waiting on the sidelines is a second emergency abortion pill, Plan B, now available in the provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and soon to be available nationally.

In Santiago, an appeals court halted the sale and distribution of emergency “abortion” pills in that country.

Some time ago, the aggressively anti-Catholic group, “Catholics for a Free Choice”, initiated a campaign at the United Nations to have the Vatican removed from its permanent observer seat at the U.N. Through a statement claiming that the Holy See is not a state, and therefore should not participate in U.N. debates, they were able to obtain the signatures of more than 500 groups. The reaction from pro-life groups was swift and massive. Accordingly, representatives of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute recently presented to the Vatican the results of this counter effort. They presented names of 4,207 groups who had signed a declaration in support of the Holy See retaining its position at the U.N.

This was the five-year conference follow-up to the Habitat U.N. Conference in Istanbul. Three delegates from Concerned Women for America spent three weeks in Nairobi at this conference. Wendy Wright, Julie Neff and Patricia Riggs came back with the story: “What a difference one election can make. During the Clinton years, the U.S. delegation to U.N. conferences always took the lead in pushing an extremist agenda of radical feminism, homosexuality, abortion, population control, centralized government planning and world government by unelected, unaccountable U.N. bureaucrats. At Nairobi, with new leadership and a new vision, the U.S. delegation took the lead in promoting respect for the family, protection of national sovereignty and preservation of civilized standards.” At the conclusion, Wendy Wright asked a member of the Holy See’s delegation what he thought of the conference. His comment: “The walls of Jericho have just come tumbling down.”

As noted above, the Bush administration has dramatically changed the policy of the United States at the U.N. Prior to the above meeting, the first major indication of this was a statement by U.S. Ambassador Michael Southwick. He veered sharply from previous U.S. policy on parents and family. He noted that the last decade has produced “an erosion of parental authority” and that the new document should emphasize “the vital role the family plays in the upbringing of children.” He used the singular “family”, meaning traditional family, instead of what the Clinton delegates had constantly spoken of, which was “families”, which included homosexual liaisons. He sharply criticized a document produced by a small number of states, with the guidance of UNICEF and its director Carol Bellamy, a radical pro-abortion feminist. He said that the draft document on children, as submitted, “falls far short of our objective” and was “a confusing mix of political and legal actions with ill-defined major goals.” Clearly, the new U.S. delegation will attempt to substantially rewrite the document.

Bishop Peter Kang Woo-il of the Seoul Catholic Diocese, representing the 20 bishops of South Korea, has presented to the National Assembly a petition signed by 1.2 million people. It asks the government to protect the right to life of the unborn.

Dr. Lut Van Damme of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium presented a surprise to a shocked audience at the International AIDS Conference recently in Durbin, South Africa. She reported on a huge study involving 990 prostitutes in four African countries. It was on Nonoxynol-9, the active ingredient in most contraceptive crèmes, gels, suppositories, foams, films and sponges. Her findings showed that this chemical makes women more vulnerable to the AIDS virus and to genital lesions. This confirms a study reported a year earlier in the August 20^th edition of AIDS of a smaller study conducted with prostitutes in South Africa that found similarly that Nonoxnol-9 was closely associated with increased genital lesions and infection of the AIDS virus.

The total fertility rate measured by the latest U.S. census is 2.06 children per woman in her lifetime. This is just under replacement level. Add to this substantial immigration and prolongation of the life span and we have the reasons for the increase in U.S. population.

Doctors at a hospital in the Persian Gulf country of Abu Dhabi delivered a baby 21 weeks and three days old. It was from an emergency Cesarian section from a woman suffering from cancer. His birth weight was 524 grams (1lb.2½ oz.). According to the Gulf news, The Indian Express, February 4, this is a world record. It certainly is close, but in Dr. Willke’s files are 11 cases of survivors at 22 weeks (after last menstrual period), ranging in weight from 339 grams to 666 grams. There are two cases at 21 weeks and two at 20 weeks. Small weight does not always coincide directly with early age because placental insufficiency can retard growth. Accordingly, the smallest infant in our records was one born 25 to 26 weeks after LMP, weighing 280 grams (10 oz.).

A report by BBC News on Line on 19 March reports that both a mother and her unborn child died as a result of an amniocentesis test. She apparently became infected from the needle, developed septic shock and died of a cardiac arrest. Her unborn infant died with her. It is well known that there is a one to two percent fetal mortality rate resultant from this invasive test. Maternal deaths, however, are highly unusual. In this case, both died as a result of the test.

The well-known international charitable organization, Save the Children, has a website which contains the following policy statement: “Save the Children includes women’s reproductive health as a critical part of its comprehensive health efforts…” As our readers know, “reproductive health” used in this international context, and defined as such by the World Health Organization, means complete free access to abortion on request. Those who have been contributing to this organization should know this information.

The Financial Times, 24 February, and Daily Mail, 26 February, report that scientists in California have produced mice in whose brains a quarter of the cells are human. The team injected human neuronal brain stem cells into the brains of newborn mice and observed that these had converted into active human cells within seven months. The author, Professor Weissman, is now considering injecting human stem cells into the brains of mice whose own brain cells have been programmed to die as the animal develops. He explained, “In that way we might be able to produce mice in which the vast majority of neurons are human.” He says that this has therapeutic potential.

The January issue of the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience found that 70% of women who stop taking anti-depressant medication during pregnancy reported a variety of problems, with one-third considering suicide. In examining those who did continue to take anti-depressant medication, they found that there is “no evidence that most anti-depressants pose a higher risk of birth defects.” Yet doctors often advise women to discontinue such drugs during pregnancy, either out of ignorance or fear of lawsuit if a child is born with a problem. They go on to note that some potent chemotherapeutic drugs are also essentially safe during pregnancy. Some drugs, such as ACE inhibitors (for high blood pressure), are safe during certain periods of pregnancy and harmful during others. One of the few drugs that is always “clearly very dangerous to the fetus at all times” is the anti-acne medication, Acutane.

Since February 1997, when Dolly the sheep was born as a genetic clone of a single parent, “between 3,000 and 5,000 cloned animals are on the ground.” This, according to Dr. Richard Seed, a physician, scientist and philosopher with several degrees. “There are eight species of mammals cloned,” he said, “about 2,000 mice, 300 cows, and then there are sheep, goats, pigs, rats and two or three other species.” He states that, “It would be bizarre if you could not clone human beings,” and that “It will happen sooner than anyone thinks.”

In Dallas, Texas, an 18-year-old woman was in a coma induced by a car accident. She was pregnant at the time. Two months after the accident, she delivered a normal child two months prematurely. Right after delivery she regained consciousness and told the Dallas Morning News, “I just woke up and the baby was there.”