ProWomanProLife

Because “There is no avoiding the issue, except through suppression.”

It is World Down Syndrome Day, I learn today from this article:

For World Down Syndrome Day 2012, I wish I could write more on the gifts that our fellow citizens with Down syndrome give to their families, friends, community and the world. The fact of the matter is, though, that unless regulations and laws are changed, there will be fewer people with Down syndrome to celebrate on future World Down Syndrome Days, making this year the high water mark of lives with Down syndrome. Because these individuals should be celebrated, they deserve more and better representation by those who have sworn oaths to their medical profession to do no harm, and by others who have sworn to provide equal justice for all, and to promote the general welfare to ourselves and our posterity.

When you have come to view abortion as the killing of the powerless by the powerful, as I do, then there is no more egregious an example of this than the targeted killing of those with disabilities. (Filing under eugenics.)

While sex selection isn’t the only bad reason to have an abortion, it’s one that many people have an opinion on. What the issue of sex selective abortion does is create a space to discuss abortion in the social and political realm that might not have existed otherwise. For a lot of people, sex selection is their line in the sand.

This article refers to sex selection as an “abuse” of rights. In my opinion, that’s a good place to begin discussions about what is currently an unrestrained use of legality (ie. abortion anytime, anyplace, for any reason).

While it is a woman’s right in Canada to continue only wanted pregnancies, exercising rights and abusing them are two very different things. Making an inherently sexist decision based on the fact that it’s your right as a woman is definitely an abuse of that freedom.

Compared to China and India, where millions of female fetuses are aborted, and many girls who are born are told they are unwanted, the problem may seem small—but that doesn’t make it less important.

While I disagree that immigration is responsible for Canada’s abortion rate, and while any abortion because a child is “unwanted” is an abuse of rights, articles like this give me hope that the nation is beginning to publicly question what’s been happening behind closed hospital doors. The number of comments these articles get is also an indicator that people want to discuss the current legislation.

Brigitte Pellerin, no stranger to ProWomanProLife and now at Sun News, writes well about the death of Rick Santorum’s baby:

Dennis Miller once explained that he considered “everyone and everything to be comedic fair game, except for the helpless.” You’d think Down Syndrome kids and dead babies would count as helpless. But no – some people simply have no shame.

Once again, a pro-life student group is having a rough start to being granted club status.

Dec. 19, 2011. Fredericton, New Brunswick:  Pro-life students at the University of New Brunswick’s (UNB) Fredericton campus were shocked last week to learn from their student newspaper, TheBrunswickan, that their club would not be recognized by the Student Union due to a “lack of information”.

“The whole situation has been incredibly frustrating,” says Amanda Magee, the President of UNB Students for Life.  “We have given the Student Union information.  We have offered to be present to answer questions.”

UNB Students for Life applied for club status in October, not anticipating any issues given that a pro-life club is active at the UNB Saint John campus and had also existed at the Fredericton campus only a few years previous.  When their contact on council, Andrew Martel, requested additional information from the club, they replied, ensuring that the information would be received before the next Council meeting on November 20th.  Despite this, Andrew Martel stated at the meeting, according to the Nov. 20th minutes, that he did not receive any information from the club.

“We’ve had to rely on the student newspaper and the minutes of the meetings to piece things together,” adds Magee.  “And the Dec. 4th minutes still aren’t available so we’re not entirely sure what happened.”

Read the entire press release here.

We create laws because certain acts violate the moral and ethical codes of a society. Abortions based on sex and race violate the moral and ethical code of the majority of people in the US and Canada, so why hasn’t it been banned?

NEW YORK — The practice of sex-selection abortion, usually targeting a female fetus due to parental preference for a son, has few defenders in the United States. Yet a proposed federal ban is drawing vehement opposition from liberal advocacy groups who call it a veiled attempt to undermine broader abortion rights.

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., would outlaw abortions done on the basis of gender or race. Women who had such abortions would not be penalized but those who performed them — or pressured a woman into having one — would face up to five years in prison.

…doctors may not tell you. Last night I saw a documentary on Rock Center about women from North Carolina that were unknowingly sterilized in the 1960s. While it was heartbreaking to hear each woman recount her experience and the loss of her ability to conceive, it was the stories of women who were told they were being sterilized but were not fully aware of what that meant that haunted me. The doctors spoke in terminology those young girls didn’t understand, but the outcomes were irreversible. I imagine there are many parallels between these stories and those of women who have undergone abortions, the women felt “butchered” and violated.

A group of 12 nurses are suing the hospital where they work in New Jersey because the hospital is telling them to assist in abortions or lose their jobs. This is the dream of many a pro-choice fanatic, that all doctors and nurses would be forced to learn and participate in abortions. One hears whiffs of this in Canada every so often, too. Not altogether “pro-choice,” that view.

From The New York Times,

A new test was introduced Monday that can determine if a fetus has Down syndrome using a sample of the mother’s blood. [...]

…most women who find they are carrying a fetus with Down syndrome, which causes mild to moderate mental retardation, terminate the pregnancy. [...]

“Will we slowly start to see babies born with Down syndrome disappear?’’ asked Dr. Skotko, who has a sister with the condition.

He and some colleagues recently published the results of a survey in which nearly 99 percent of people with Down syndrome said they were happy with their lives.

Parents of such children also said they were happy. About 79 percent of parents said their outlook on life was more positive because of their child.

There is also an upsurge in efforts to develop drugs to improve the learning ability of those with Down syndrome. One of the drug researchers, Alberto Costa, who has a daughter with the condition, told The New York Times Magazine:

“It’s like we’re in a race against the people who are promoting those early screening methods. These tests are going to be quite accessible. At that point, one would expect a precipitous drop in the rate of birth of children with Down syndrome. If we’re not quick enough to offer alternatives, this field might collapse.’’

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) acts primarily an advisory council to the European Union, and their recommendations often carry a lot of weight. However, the recent warning from the PACE on the dangers of sex selection may be contrasting to the EU’s very pro-abortion tradition, a tradition the EU may want to reconsider as it negotiates membership for countries like Armenia.

  On October 3, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted the “Prenatal sex selection” resolution, which says that the disproportion in sex selection is “alarming” in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Albania. [...]

The PACE resolution appeals to “investigate the causes and reasons behind skewed sex ratios at birth; to step up efforts to raise the status of women in society” throughout the whole territory of Armenia. [...]

Doctor-gynecologist at the Armenian-American Mammography Wellness Center Nelly Avagyan’s experience showed that majority of abortions is because of a child’s sex.

“This is an Armenian way of thinking – to have sons by all means, even though abortions of boys are also registered, but the number of aborted girls prevails,” Avagyan says.