Here are some recent stories of possible interest to pro-lifers.
From LifeNews, and hardly surprising,
“The Obama administration is suing the state of Arizona and claiming that its new law revoking taxpayer funding for the Planned Parenthood abortion business runs afoul of federal laws.
The Whole Woman’s Health Funding Priority Act of Arizona (HB 2800) de-funded abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood of state family planning money. The bill is based on model legislation developed by the SBA List and the Alliance Defense Fund, and prioritizes family planning funds away from abortion-centered businesses like Planned Parenthood to entities that provide women with comprehensive health care.
The measure prohibits the state or any local government from using public money to contract with an organization that includes abortions.”
Read more here
Also this from LifeSiteNews, as if we needed another reason to dislike the UN.
“The recently re-appointed UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, has issued a document calling for governments to criminalize organised opposition to abortion by non-governmental groups such as pro-life lobbyists or even family members. The UN Human Rights Council published its “technical guidance” to address maternal mortality and morbidity in July, to “assist policymakers in improving women’s health and rights.”
The document starts from the abortion industry’s assertion that the best way to reduce maternal mortality is to introduce legalised abortion and reduce legal and other restrictions on abortion. Under the “rights-based” approach to women’s health care, the document says, states are “obliged” to use “maximum available resources” to “protect against interference with sexual and reproductive health rights by third parties by enforcing appropriate laws, policies, regulations and guidelines.””
Read more here
And this, from Reuters, who seems to provide lots of details from the pro-abortion side, but very little from those opposed to it.
“Morocco blocked a Dutch “abortion ship” from entering one of its harbours on Thursday during a campaign group’s first attempt to visit to a Muslim country to raise awareness about safe methods of abortion.
The Women on Waves ship, which already has visited traditionally Roman Catholic countries Spain, Portugal and Ireland at the invitation of local women’s groups, had planned to arrive at Smir, northern Morocco, but was denied entry.
“The harbor is totally blocked by warships so no one can get in, and there are a lot of police here,” said Marlies Schellekens, a doctor from Women on Waves who had gone on shore.”
Read more here
Wandering Views 
The HCHR’s guidelines don’t strike me as outrageous, but then I also don’t read sexual and reproductive health as a coded phrase for abortion. And the third party language is much more about denial of health care generally. It’d be good for the reporter to add some context and speak to the causes of maternal mortality and why encouraging gov’ts to do something with respect to discrimination in terms of general health care is a good thing.
It’s this kind of black or white article that assumes the guidelines are really about abortion (they’re not) that doesn’t help promote the idea that pro-lifers are also pro-women.
You can read the guidelines for yourselves here:
Click to access A.HRC.21.22_en.pdf
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Coyote,
You don’t read them as coded huh? I suppose you also don’t call PP an abortion group either, after all, they give out birth control too right? Never mind that abortion is their number one money maker. You’re ignoring the obvious.
Also, these guidelines state that 3rd party “interference” as they call it, should be protected against using the law as a means to limit anyone from daring to try and stop abortion. They also include family members as someone who would possibly “interfere”. You know they mean pro-life demonstrators. Just admit it. It’s right here in your link.
“22. States should protect against interference with sexual and reproductive health rights by third parties by enforcing appropriate laws, policies, regulations and guidelines. States are responsible for exercising due diligence, or acting with a certain standard of care, to ensure that non-governmental actors, including private service providers, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and manufacturers of health-related goods and equipment, as well as community and family members, comply with certain standards.19 States may be held responsible for private acts if they fail to act with due diligence to prevent, investigate and punish violations of rights.”
And this statement from you is really something.
“that doesn’t help promote the idea that pro-lifers are also pro-women.”
And abortion somehow does? How many of those aborted are females? Now how is aborting them pro-women?
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CB: that doesn’t help promote the idea that pro-lifers are also pro-women.
Actually, Christian ethics turn out to be the best “pro-women” position. Christian men and women who stay chaste until marriage and faithful afterwards and don’t indulge in sodomy have virtually no chance of contracting a sexually transmitted disease.
The sexual “revolution” has been a disaster for women who often treated as mere pleasureful sexual objects and in this process come up with multiple diseases and the depressing rigors of abortion.
The Anscombe Society of Princeton puts it as follows:
Outside of the context of marriage, then, sex ultimately reduces the participants to mere instruments serving an incomplete end–be it the desire for emotional intimacy, physical pleasure, or personal security. Even if two people love each other and plan to marry later on, sexual intimacy must articulate a unity and gift of one’s entire self that has yet to take place. To use sex for pleasure or emotional fulfillment alone not only fails to realize the essential purpose of sex, but degrades the inherent dignity of the human being to that of an object–a means to an end.
Secularists may be amused by this, though their position in truth has had on balance a parlous outcome for women. An excellent book on this subject is Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons.
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Sails
Right because all women in the world are Christians and western and totally agree with evangelicals on the point and those who don’t agree with evangelicals are just wrong and silly and sinful, etc. …. What you guys need to take a look at with the UN stuff are the conditions in Africa and Asia.
AJ
Before the Bush Administration sexual and reproductive health care was understood to mean all of the health care issues surrounding female reproduction — including pre-natal care But the Bush Administration — egged on by pro-lifers are the ones who defined sexual and reproductive health care as inclusive of abortion etc by voting against the term and insisting that it meant what they said it did as only a reference to abortion. The Bush Administration also pushed its pro-life view in international venues in a way that was not concurrent to U.S. law — the Bushies tried to establish international soft law that was out of step with U.S. Constitutional law — something they liked to accuse the Clintonites of having done and like to accuse Obama’s Administration of currently doing.
The text itself — do you have any idea how many women are not allowed basic access to health care with respect to non-abortion related care? HIV/AIDS which is primarily transmitted hetrosexually in Africa is one example. Other STD’s and treatment thereto. Look at the whole context, or don’t, makes no difference to me how movement pro-lifers appear to non-movement sorts.
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After the sordid history of international interference in reproduction in the developing world throughout the last half of the 20th century, the UN should back off. How they can promote this in the face of what has happened in China, and India is beyond me. In those places, abortion has actually worsened the prospect of womens rights.
Any honest healthcare provider knows exactly how little abortion does for women’s health. It is brutal, not only to the developing child, but also to the woman. I have seen the same procedures used for sterilizations – it is not conducive to continued fertility to have the uterine lining scraped off by instruments. Besides, abortion techniques are already known in the developing world – it is far easier surgically to do a D&C than to perform a Ceasarean section. Of far greater importance to women is good perinatal care (including access to emergency C-sections, since very often women die or are permanently damaged when their child cannot get through the birth canal) and education on how their bodies work. The claim by promoters of abortion that they are only concerned about the health of the mother is a lie.
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Coyote,
Sorry Coyote, but abortion and birth control are connected. That’s why groups that do one, generally do the other. The left is the ones who wanted to include abortion as “reproductive health”. Now you want them seperated? No, don’t think so.
And what Bush sought to do was ban the US govt from funding abortion here and abroad. And Bush did a fine job of showing how you can support things like Aids relief and prevention without funding abortion along with it. No one in the world has done more for Aids in Africa than Bush has. Billions of dollars for it, but not for abortion. It can, and has, been done. Rather successfully I might add. They don’t need to be lumped together. But they want them linked in order to pay for abortion along with the rest. I have no problem with birth control, or access to it. I view condoms and the pill, even if it’s paid for with tax money, as far preferable to abortion as birth control. Too often, that’s how abortion is used, as a method of birth control. They know people don’t want to fund abortion, even if they don’t have a problem with birth control. That’s why the left lumped them together, as a back door way of paying for abortion too.
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The Real, agreed – the current Canadian government has made it their international policy to promote maternal health. In a wise diplomatic move, considering the poor track record of the West in population control, they announced that they would not fund abortions in their programs. I might add that they operated on advice from experts who work in the field, among them a prominent gynecologist who works not only in Canada, but also in Africa and the Middle East and who happens to be a woman. Instead of considering the motivations behind the announcement, the pro-abortion movement immediately and hysterically accused the Prime Minister and his ministers of failing to promote womens health.
Recently, in a debate on the personhood of the fetus, the minister of Womens Affairs (who is, again, a woman) voted in favour of calling the fetus a person. Her motivation was the growing problem of sex-selective abortions, but again, without reason, she was accused of being anti-woman. I increasingly find my fellow women on the left will become completely irrational when they are contradicted by another woman in the area of abortion. It is as my mother observed when she taught school – girls are much more vicious than boys when they get in a fight.
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AJ
Having had to negotiate the Bush Administration positions for the USG with countries like Canada, I know this particular issue. Pre-Bush the language was vague — in part to keep consensus language so that Arab delegations would not vote on paragraphs referring to sexual and reproductive health of women. The pro-lifers saw the formulation as code after a Canadian delegate said that in Canada’s view abortion was included. The best response from the U.S. delegation at the time would have been to fuzzy it back up — but that didn’t happen because the Canadian comment wasn’t seen as definitive of the issue.
International negotiations are complicated sometimes. The push from the pro-lifers put the U.S. in the same negotiating space as the Arab delegations on women’s issues. And yes, I know this because I had to deal with it — particularly in complaints from Europeans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and even Israelis and compliments from Saudi Arabians, Yemenis, Egyptians and even the Sudanese on the wisdom of the USG position.
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A.J.: I agree. But while I don’t support abortion, I do have compassion for women who have had them. Before coming to Christ, I would have had an abortion had I experienced an unplanned pregnancy. I thank God for sparing me from this. I know many women who regret theirs.
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Annms,
As do I. They’ve bought the Lie. Sadly, it’s not until it’s too late before they realize it. But by the time the psychological effects show up, and the guilt, which are a huge weight on them, it’s too late. This is the part that the Liars telling the Lie never discuss. They’re not big on Informed Consent for exactly this reason.
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The UN is promoting new guidelines for abortion. Last month, I was looking for other documents and saw that the WHO’s featured publication was their new safe abortion guidelines, published this past June: http://www.who.int/hrp/en/
Don’t get me wrong, the WHO has done wonderful work in promoting breast feeding and finding the best practices in treating widescale problems such as malaria and cholera. However, they completely undermine their own promotion of human health by using the same knowledge and skill to promote abortion, which is destruction of healthy, living humans.
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Maybe they’re talking about family members (parents and husbands) who interfere with a woman’s right to carry her child to term by pressuring her into having an abortion. Not.
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Speaking as an atheist, I recognize abortion as one of the most difficult moral dilemmas facing human beings. As an atheist, I think we should reduce abortions as much as we can without punitive methods. Birth control is not abortion to me. People are sexual beings. Most of us engage in sex. Suggesting people — especially people at their sexual and reproductive prime — not engage in sex is just wishful thinking. (As is believing that we won’t die after our physical death.) Pressuring people to marry early is a dubous “solution.” 50% of marriages fail.
Besides sensible birth control, adoption is good. Lots of Christians adopt.
The other elephant in the room is population. Abortion (most commonly in China and Japan, as far as I know) is not a good method of population control.) Refusal to sensibly discuss the need to moderate human population is one of the most irritating features of the discussions here. Breakfast is ready, so I will shut up for now, but I will be back.
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Years ago, science fiction author John Brunner wrote a novel titled Stand on Zanzibar. The title was a sarcastic riff on the argument that all human beings could be placed on the African island of Zanzibar and have a little room left over. I was curious to see if we would take up more room with our current world population. I’ve seen the same kind of calculation involving the state of Texas.
In any case, I’ve been told that the Earth is not overpopulated because there is plenty of physical space to spare. “Overpopulated” is a very subjective term. One can talk about food, water, pollution, and so on, but it’s still difficult to come up with any agreement.
Human beings are animals. We have instincts, drives, what ever you want to call them. One is to reproduce. Although there is no divine being called “nature” that “designs” us. As products of evolution, we have a strong drive to reproduce. Just to make sure we don’t forget to reproduce – because it’s dangerous, painful (at the final stage), and a lot of trouble (especially for females) – we find the initial stages very exciting and pleasurable. It’s called s*x.
Now, again, nature doesn’t “plan” or “design” but it has a sort of balance by accident. So different animals eat each other and defend themselves and no single creature wipes out all the other creatures. However, we are the only creature that learned to think and to wipe out any creature that competes with us. (Except maybe viruses or bacteria, even though they are pretty dumb.) So if we do destroy ourselves by violence or by destroying our “ecology,” who cares?
The bacteria and the viruses, dumb as they are, will still be around, and they won’t worry about it one bit.
On second thought, sex is lots of fun and raising babies and telling them about God is lots of fun, so don’t stop now!
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