Recently there have been several stories about Marie Stopes’ patients requiring medical aftercare to save women’s lives, some have died before that care was recieved. Their answer to that problem? The organization is urging these women’s home countries to clean up their mess.

WOMEN returning to Ireland after having abortions in the UK put their lives at risk by not seeking adequate aftercare, according to a leading figure at Marie Stopes International.

On Saturday, the General Medical Council struck off Dr Phanuel Dartey after he carried out botched procedures on a number of women, including an Irish patient who became seriously ill after returning home in 2006.

The Ghanaian doctor who worked at the Marie StopesInternational clinic in Ealing, West London, left parts of the foetus inside the Irish patient, which led to her suffering a perforated uterus.

The Marie Stopes clinics, which carry out about 2,700 terminations for Irish women each year, said the case involving Dr Dartey was an “isolated incident” and Tracie McNeill, the group’s international vice president, said one of their main concerns as a healthcare services provider involved Irish patients returning home.

“We are worried that many Irish women are not visiting their GPs to receive any aftercare help.

“Many are too embarrassed and ashamed to tell their own doctors about their termination and it’s not uncommon to hear of some who’ve become ill after going back.

Botched procedures on a number of women are not “isolated incidents”.

In Brazil abortion is not part of the cultural framework, and abortion laws are very restrictive in the country. As a result when children are born with abnormalities, even very extreme abnormalities, we have women and families who warmly welcome these new lives without hesitation. It’s inspiring really. Welcome to the world conjoined twins Emanoel and Jesus.

A Brazilian woman who has given birth to a baby with two heads, admitted she had initially expected twins. […]

Mr Vasconcelos added that at no point did the mother, who has three other children, appear distraught that her son has two heads.

He said: ‘On the contrary, the baby was received with much happiness by the family.

‘The mother fed both mouths and the baby stayed with her in her room the whole time. Her desire was to take her baby straight home.’

Two dutch TV hosts, alive, eat each other’s flesh, that they’ve had surgically removed, simply to see what it tastes like.

I’m deeply sorry to post this item so close to Christmas, but we here are in the business of drawing attention to those things which detract from human dignity. Are we so bored, so rich, so spoiled that this is what makes for entertainment today? Sometimes depravity takes the form of a Dutch TV show.

This petition came to me via Alberta Pro-Life:

Today, MP Stephen Woodworth has bravely called on Parliament to address the issue of abortion. It is already all over the news.  Our Parliament may not want to touch the issue, but the reality is that we are one of the few countries in the entire world (along with China and North Korea) that have no abortion legislation. Day after day children are being killed. It doesn’t stop around Christmas.

Take Action: Add your voice to this! Click here for a petition calling on Parliament to restrict abortion to the greatest extent possible. Please print off extra copies and distribute them at your school, church, business, and elsewhere. Also, please forward this to your contacts and other pro-life organizations, encouraging them to do the same. The petitions can then be submitted to your local MP (no need to have hundreds of signatures – they can read them in Parliament with as few as 25). Even if your MP is pro-abortion you can still give them the petition and ask him or her to read it in Parliament as your elected representative. We need a loud and clear voice from Canadians in defence of those who have no voice.

We know you are busy this Christmas but please make time to protect the innocent children being killed in our country. Don’t wait. Print the petition off now, circulate it, and then send it to your MP because we must act now.

The way I see it, any time is a good time to discuss the collective insanity that brings us abortion on demand, and petitions like this provide another opportunity.

…into the Croydon Day Surgery clinic (now known as Maroondah surgery of Marie Stopes International Australia).

A 42-YEAR-OLD woman died days after attending a controversial abortion clinic in Croydon last week. […]

It is the fourth investigation involving the clinic in six years.

Anaesthetist James Latham Peters allegedly infected more than 50 women with hepatitis C at the same clinic in 2008 and 2009. Peters, who was bailed on a $200,000 surety, will return to court in May for the remainder of the committal hearing.

The surgery’s owner, Dr Mark Schulberg, was in 2009 found guilty of unprofessional conduct for failing to gain legal consent to perform a late-term abortion on an intellectually disabled woman.

And earlier this year it was revealed that a 40-year-old woman was left fighting for her life in the Box Hill Hospital after Dr Schulberg performed a late-term abortion surgery on her.

Well, I can’t actually vote in the Republican nomination. But if I were able to, I’d vote Ron Paul. Check out his latest ad. He’s been pro-life from the get-go, and he’s an obstetrician by training, so this is not a political ploy designed to cater to a pro-life base.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkAsLPrnJGc]

A call from MP Stephen Woodworth to re-examine limits on abortion in Parliament, as reported in the Globe.

An Ontario Conservative MP says Parliament must take another look at whether unborn babies deserve to be treated as human beings, a move that could ultimately challenge the ability to terminate pregnancies with abortion. Stephen Woodworth, the member for Kitchener Centre, said in a news release Wednesday that a majority of Canadians wrongly believe the law protects the fundamental human rights of children before birth in the later stages of gestation. “In fact, the opposite is true,” Mr. Woodworth says in his release. “Canadian law provides no human rights protection whatsoever for children before the moment of complete birth.”

Way to go Mr. Woodworth. Rare is the politician who speaks his mind on these matters, and who speaks plain English, too. (“I believe in a woman’s right to choose” is one big euphemism from beginning to end and is indicative of a politicians who has never given any thought to the issue.)

I believe that many women are coerced into abortion, but not by gun-wielding thugs. It might go something more like this:

In Terry, McGovern implies that when he and his wife learned that their 15-year-old girl was unexpectedly pregnant, they agreed with their family doctor’s decision that she should travel to Florida for an abortion. He describes the impact of the abortion this way: ‘An important part of Terry was devastated by the abortion. Her innocence, her fun-loving nature, and her self-confidence were all deeply shaken, first by an unpleasant sexual experience and then by a pregnancy that she feared and yet did not want to terminate. She later told me of these feelings and then added: ‘I thought that my special relationship with you was over.’ I never knowingly conveyed such an attitude toward Terry. I never expressed anger, nor did I ever hint at any concern about possible political consequences. But Terry felt shamed and reduced by this episode. In retrospect I wish I had gone out of my way to reassure her that for me she remained a ‘special person’ whom I both loved and admired despite her teenage mistakes.”

McGovern’s dueling statements on abortion do not reflect well on his intellectual integrity. Publicly, he believes that pregnant women alone should decide whether or not to abort. Privately, he did not grant this power to his own daughter, who did not wish to abort.

This McGovern quote is taken from his book Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism. From Wikipedia we learn that Terry struggled with alcoholism for three decades, dying tragically at age 45. This traces the alcoholism back to age 15, the age at which she had the abortion. Tragic.

This story does highlight many things: that small people in utero are nonetheless people, for starters. And yes, it’s been said a thousand times, but I might as well say it again (why not?)–this baby could easily have been aborted on another floor of the hospital even as extraordinary measures were taken to save her life here.

Thing is, I’m not in favour of the extraordinary measures… not because I think the possibility of disease or illness would make her “quality of life” less worth living, but because in this case, the doctors saving her life in this manner may mean they are playing God. I am personally against in vitro fertilization, for similar reasons. I’d like to be able to flesh out my discomfort with this more fully, so if you agree or disagree with the extraordinary measures taken to save this baby born at 24 weeks, I’m all ears.

C.S. Lewis wrote that the more we use a word outside of its true meaning, the less meaning that word will eventually have. Take for example the word “gentleman”, which used to mean someone who was independently wealthy and did not need to work. The term was used so often outside this definition, that now we simply address people as “ladies and gentlemen” without it having any real meaning at all.

We’re at risk of this happening to the word “person”. I assume that most people probably use the term to refer to all human beings (who can also be referred to as “natural persons”). However, the words “person” and “personhood” are starting to provide we “natural persons” with strange peers.

…the category of “person” may be taken to include such non-human entities as animals, corporations, artificial intelligences, or extraterrestrial life

Are corporations people? And if these invisible and artificial creations are “persons”, does saying someone is not a person really truly mean anything at all?