Murhabazi Namegabe has been awarded the World’s Children’s Prize for his work in the DR Congo.

“You’re going to die tonight. Eat your last meal!”
Murhabazi read the short message that beeped on his mobile phone. He was in an important meeting with the UN, discussing children who were being forced to become soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He looked around cautiously. Had someone in the room sent him the death threat?

Murhabazi has made many enemies during his struggle for the thousands of children being exploited and tortured in war-torn DR Congo.
“The fight for children’s rights here is a matter of life and death. And I’m prepared to die in that fight, every day,” says Murhabazi Namegabe.

Murhabazi Namegabe has been nominated for the World’s Children’s Prize 2011 for his 20-year long perilous struggle for children in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since 1989, Murhabazi and his organisation BVES has freed 4,000 child soldiers and more than 4,500 girls who have been sexually assaulted by armed groups, and taken care of 4,600 unaccompanied refugee children.

His 35 homes and schools offer some of the world’s most vulnerable children food, clothes, a home, healthcare, therapy, the opportunity to go to school, security and love. Most of the children are reunited with their families. Thanks to Murhabazi, some 60,000 children have passed through the doors of BVES’ various centres and been given a better life.
Murhabazi and BVES represent children in DR Congo by constantly urging the government, all armed groups, organisations and everyone else in society to look after the country’s children.

Not everyone supports Murhabazi’s struggle. He has been imprisoned and assaulted and is constantly receiving death threats. Seven of his colleagues have been killed.

…in the U.S. anyway.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. – There’s a political shift in many states across the country, including Missouri, where lawmakers are trying to pass tougher abortion restrictions. Those watching these bills say the number filed has dramatically increased nationwide, with bills in more than 30 states. They include measures that would require an ultrasound before an abortion, restrict insurance coverage on abortion or ban late-term abortions because of alleged fetal pain.

According to reproductive health advocates, changes in the political composition of state legislatures after last fall’s elections have played a role in the increased number of such bills filed. The Rev. Rebecca Turner with Faith Aloud says the economy and jobs were on the minds of voters last fall, not abortion.

“This is definitely the most extreme swing to the right that we have seen. It has been building for quite a number of years. This happened at this particular time because of a bait-and-switch in the last election.”

Many sponsors of these bills argue they would give women more information before making a decision about an abortion. Turner calls that information misleading and inaccurate.

I vehemently disagree with just about everything Rebecca Turner says, and this article is no exception. Ultrasounds are misleading? Anyhoo, the times are changing, and that’s a good thing.

Surrogacy carries so many ethical, emotional and biological unknowns that many countries ban it outright, France being one of them. You may have given your French DNA to a surrogate in the U.S., but in a time of dwindling resources, which country takes responsibility for this new life? Apparently not France.

In a ruling that affirmed France’s ban on surrogacy, the country’s top court refused on Wednesday to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States who carried the babies for a French couple. The Court of Cassation said that a California county went too far by ruling that a French couple are legally the twins’ parents. The ruling exposes the legal limbo that many would-be parents find themselves in because of inconsistencies on surrogacy between countries like the United States, which legally recognizes it, and those that ban it. While the court ruled that the girls could not be listed in France’s civil registry, it also said that nothing prevented them from living with the couple in France. The couple’s lawyer said they planned to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Last summer, I read Margaret Somerville’s article on children’s rights to their biological origins in the Globe & Mail.

Adoption is our longest-standing experience of dealing with a situation where children have been intentionally disconnected from their biological parents.

In the past, adoption records were permanently sealed. We now recognize that as being harmful to the adopted person and potentially so to the birth family, and unethical. Yet donor-conceived Canadians do not know who at least one of their biological parents is, because donors here are allowed to remain anonymous, which is no longer the case in a growing list of countries (including Britain, Australia and New Zealand among many others). That also is unethical and, if we continue with gamete donation, it must be changed.

Adoptive parents were once advised by “professionals” – as the parents of donor-conceived children have been and still often are – not to tell their children of their origins; they were told that secrecy was best.

At the time, I disagreed. I thought forcing parents to reveal their identities would deter already apprehensive parents from going through with adoption on both ends of the process. However, a recent experience may change my mind.

A few weeks ago, I was watching NBC’s ancestry reality show called “Who Do You Think You Are?”, which is essentially a very long advert for the website Ancestry.com. I had used this website years ago, but never found much. The show prompted me to give the site another chance. For me, the search entry has always been the same, looking for my biological father. I knew his name but not how to spell it, had his photograph but no year of birth, had his birth country but not his current location. The search on the site? Well, it turned up a matching name with the correct spelling, his year of birth and a matching country of origin.

I think I was a little shocked at first. It was funny, how something I had put so much time and energy into years ago was suddenly so easy. I found more about him through a Google search, his location, more recent photos, details about his life. This wasn’t particularly impacting, I had put to rest my expectations of finding this person years ago. What was shocking was the difference it seemed to suddenly make in me. And it was sudden. One minute I couldn’t have told you where my biological father was or if he was still alive and the next, I could. The effect was instant. There was a confidence perhaps that wasn’t there before. I won’t say something was “missing”, because that implies desiring it to return, but something that was not present before was now present.

We are the stories we tell ourselves, so do I think all children have a right to know their story? I don’t know if it’s a “right”, but I will say…it is, in an inexplicably intimate way, better to know than not know.

…then what’s the worry?

The Department of Health (DH) is set to launch a legal challenge against a ruling that the full statistics on late abortions must be made public.

Following a request from the anti-abortion ProLife Alliance (PLA), the Information Tribunal ruled in October 2009 that the data must be disclosed under freedom of information laws.

The decision was hailed by the PLA as a victory for ‘transparency’, but ministers fear that releasing the figures could lead to the identification of patients and doctors involved in late abortions.

While abortion on ‘social’ grounds is only legal in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, under Ground E of the 1967 Abortion Act it is legal to abort a foetus right up to birth if there is a substantial risk of ‘serious’ physical or mental abnormality.

Campaign groups like the PLA are concerned about cases where mothers opt for late termination because their unborn babies have been diagnosed with conditions such as a cleft palate and club foot.

They claim that the rules are being flouted to weed out ‘less than perfect’ babies, where doctors say such conditions can usually be corrected by surgery.

The concern seems to be the identification of women and doctors who have participated in such abortions, because they do in fact violate the UK’s 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act:

Women who consider abortion are referred to two doctors who then advise her whether abortion is suitable based on the decision of which of four conditions apply; only when the doctors reach a unanimous decision is the woman allowed to terminate pregnancy.

Pregnancy can be terminated under one of the following circumstances, if the pregnancy:

1. puts the life of the mother at risk
2. poses a risk to the mental and physical health of the pregnant woman
3. poses a risk to the mental and physical health of the existing children
4. shows there is evidence of extreme foetal abnormality i.e. the child would be seriously physically or mentally handicapped after birth and during life.

But is that a good reason for a government body to continue to release inaccurate statistics?

I’ve been reading this article today that addresses the teen pregnancy issue and offers a solution: Give disadvantaged young girls options and purpose.

For all the noise and clatter about encouraging abstinence or handing out condoms in schools, many close to the issue are convinced that teenage pregnancy is less a matter of morals or sex education or access to birth control than it is a matter of a girl — or boy — feeling that they have a future. Or not.

“Simply put, girls with prospects do not have babies. It is not just the disadvantaged, but the ‘discouraged among the disadvantaged’ who become teen mothers,” Janet Rich-Edwards, a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Some even theorize that many teenage girls don’t have babies despite being poor. They have babies because they are poor. Teen pregnancy is well established as a cause of poverty. It may also be a result of poverty.

Lisa Piscopo, a Colorado Children’s Campaign researcher, said she suspects many teen pregnancies among disadvantaged kids aren’t accidents.

“I believe girls choose to have babies when they don’t have a vision of any other options,” she said.

That’s something we should all agree on. While I don’t adhere completely to some of the articles’ finer points, it seems, at least in Colorado, people are finally addressing the why behind teenage pregnancy instead of focusing solely on the how. It continues,

In 2009, a University of Chicago study reported that by age 17, one-third of young women in foster care reported having been pregnant. By age 19, that proportion had risen to nearly half. The study’s author, Amy Dworsky, found that as many as one third of girls interviewed for the study said they wanted to become pregnant. It’s likely, Dworsky told a congressional panel in 2009, that those girls want “to create the family they don’t have or fill an emotional void.”[…]

“And they’ll ask, ‘Why wait? Wait for what? I’m not going to college.’ “

The last time there was a federal government shutdown in the US was 1995.

Today’s conflict is again over health care, with the headlining debate over defunding Planned Parenthood. Though this is a meager, financially speaking, part of the proposed 2011 budget cuts, it has a heavy emotional weight with the voting population. Last night, it was proposed that the Planned Parenthood rider be separated from the budget proposal.

Durbin later qualified his statement. He told reporters that negotiators had mulled the possibility of separating the Planned Parenthood rider. He said he did not know whether House Republicans would accept the compromise.

“We’re hoping,” he said. “[There’s] a procedural way to deal with that.”

Last year, $75 million of Title X funding went to Planned Parenthood affiliates, which Republicans object to and attempted or are attempting to remove from the fiscal year 2011 budget. Planned Parenthood provides abortion services but can’t use federal money for them. Republicans argue there’s no real way to segregate the private dollars dedicated to abortion services and the federal dollars backing other areas of care.

That disagreement was major stumbling block in negotiations for most of Thursday and Friday.

No one wants a shutdown, but I don’t want the funding issue to be put on the back burner either. While it’s not a lot of money in federal terms, the principal idea is certainly not democratic. Planned Parenthood receives federal money to provide a service that the federal government should really be providing themselves in order to allow citizens the shape the service. Some states have had success in regulating Planned Parenthood, while others have been threatened with costly lawsuits and have been unable to “have their say” about clinic procedures, even though their citizens’ tax dollars are funding the organization. There’s something fundamentally wrong about that. I don’t want a shutdown, but I don’t want to stop talking about Planned Parenthood.

We’ve covered a lot about breast milk in the past couple of months on PWPL, and finally, here’s a story about putting it to good use.

Several Nova Scotia mothers have donated their breast milk to help a terminally ill girl in British Columbia.

Julie Bickford was so moved by the story of little Anaya Cassin-Potts, she organized a milk drive through her infant’s clothing store.

The response was overwelming, she said.

“I had so many comments that they’d read it and got goosebumps or cried. It just touches home for so many people.”

Anaya has infantile Krabbe leukodystrophy, a degenerative disorder that attacks the nervous system. The 19-month-old can only digest breast milk.

Anaya drinks about one litre of milk a day. Her mother, Camara Cassin, reached out to nursing mothers across the country when her own breast milk began to dry up.

Cassin’s heart warms every time a frozen package is delivered to her door in Nelson, B.C.

“I pumped myself for 11 months. You know, it’s not fun, and it takes time and commitment, and I just really appreciate every drop,” she said.

Bickford has collected a deep-freeze full of milk — enough to feed Anaya for four months.

Anaya is not expected to live past her second birthday. Cassin hopes the gift of milk gives her more time with her daughter.

If you would like to donate or learn more, here is Cassin’s blog Healing Anya.

…in a pop can?

The Christian media is swarming with accusations that Senomyx, a San Diego-based research and development company, whose clients include food heavy-hitters Nestle, Campbell’s Soup, Kraft Foods, and PepsiCo, is conducting research with HEK293, originally derived from human embryonic kidney cells.

These accusations began with an action alert issued by Largo, Florida-based Children of God for Life, a nonprofit, pro-life organization focused on the “bioethical issues of human cloning, embryonic, and fetal tissue research.” In the alert, Debi Vinnedge, executive director of Children of God, calls for the public to “boycott products of major food companies that are partnering with Senomyx, a biotech company that produces artificial flavor enhancers, unless the company stops using aborted fetal cell lines to test their products.”

[…]

I asked Rosenberg if Senomyx had a position on stem cell research. “We’ve never been asked that,” she replied, “We don’t have a position on anything. We’re dedicated to finding new flavors to reduce sugars and reduce salt. Our focus is to help consumers with diabetes or high blood pressure have a better quality of life.”

[…]

So what exactly is HEK293? It’s a cell line that started in the 1970s from human embryonic kidney cells. The line was cultured by scientist Alex Van der Eb in the early 1970s at his lab at the University of Leiden, Holland. Since then, the cell line has been cultured and grown in laboratories (you can buy some here). It’s primary use is as a protein or a protein vessel — sort of a natural test tube. It’s also pretty common and seems to be available at most laboratory supply companies and used by many R&D facilities. In short, maybe not such a big deal.

[…]

The cells they’re talking about have “technically” originated from aborted fetus cells, but it’s not like scientists are putting fetus body parts into blenders while laughing. Think of the fetus cells as sort of “ancient ancestors” to the new cells that are readily used today as “building blocks” and receptors in many commonplace scientific experiments in universities, hospitals, and commercial labs.

If we’re going to discuss whether or not to use these cells, wouldn’t we all rather be arguing over something more important than ‘flavor flakes’? And if not, maybe it’s time to reassess our relationship with food:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

 

__________________________ 

Andrea adds: I read the article, and the author draws attention to this issue, while thinking that it doesn’t matter. I personally do think it matters. I very much wish we wouldn’t ever use a fetus at any stage for scientific experimentation or development. But once we as a culture decide we are, I’m not sure it matters whether it’s for taste development at a food company or vaccines: both are equally disturbing to me.

If Marie Stopes International and the International Planned Parenthood Federation could be personified into a cartoon character, it would have to be Ursula from the Little Mermaid. They basically deliver the same message and ask for the same payment. Have a look and see whether you don’t agree.