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MATERNAL MORTALITY?
By Samantha Singson
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A new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) shows that countries with restrictive abortion laws are often the leaders in reducing maternal mortality, and those with permissive laws often lag behind.
According to the report published December 2009, the pro-life nation of Ireland has topped the global rankings once again with the best maternal health performance.
Abortion advocates have attempted to push an international “right to abortion” claiming that restrictive laws force women to seek unsafe abortions, which in turn leads to high maternal mortality.
In October, the Guttmacher Institute released a report on global abortion calling on states to “expand access to legal abortion and ensure that safe, legal abortion services are available to women in need.” Sharon Camp,developing world, abortion remains highly restricted, and unsafe abortion is common and continues to damage women’s health and threatens survival.”
An examination and comparison of several countries included in the WEF survey show that legal abortion does not mean lower maternal mortality rates. Both Ireland and Poland, favourite targets of the abortion lobby for their strong restrictions on abortion, have better maternal mortality rates than the United States.
Ireland ranks first in the survey with 1 death for every 100,000 live births. In recent years Poland has tightened its abortion law and ranks 27 on the list with 8 deaths per 100,000. In the United States where there are virtually no restrictions on abortion, the maternal mortality ratio is 17 deaths out of 100,000 live births.
Other regions of the world show similar trends. The African nation with the lowest maternal mortality rate is Mauritius, a country with some of the continent’s most protective laws for the unborn. At the other end of the spectrum is Ethiopia, which has decriminalized abortion in recent years in response to global abortion lobby pressure. Ethiopia’s maternal death rate is 48 times higher than in Mauritius. South Africa has the continent’s most liberal abortion laws and also a high maternal mortality ratio of 400 deaths per 100,000.
Chile, with constitutional protection for the unborn, outranks all other South American countries as the safest place for women to bear children. The country with the highest maternal mortality is Guyana, with a rate 30 times higher than in Chile.
Guyana has allowed abortion without almost any restriction since 1995. Ironically, one of two main justifications used for liberalising Guyana’s law was to enhance the “attainment of safe motherhood” by eliminating deaths and complications associated with unsafe abortions. Similarly in Asia, Nepal, where there is no restriction on the procedure of abortion has one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. The lowest in the region is Sri Lanka, with a rate 14 times lower than that of Nepal. According to the pro-abortion public interest law firm ‘Centre for Reproduction Rights’, Sri Lanka has among the most restrictive abortion laws in the world.
Pro-lifers emphasize that the WEF report reinforces their contention that skilled birth attendants and access to emergency obstetric care should be the focus of maternal mortality reduction efforts, rather than increasing access to legal abortion.
Source: LifeNews.com
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WHAT MAKES A COUNTRY LOVELY?
Haven Bradford Gow
(Mr. Gow is a researcher/writer for the National Journalism Centre in
Washington D.C.)
‘For us to love our country,’ said Edmund Burke, ‘our country must be lovely.’
If Burke meant -- only if a country is lovely, can its people love the country, then he was mistaken. For many Germans loved Nazi Germany, a nation that couldn’t be considered completely lovely. But if we take Edmund Burke’s remark to mean that for a country to be worthy of admiration, it must be lovely, then Burke certainly made a valid observation.
But was causes a country to be lovely? The eminent 18thCentury British statesman and political philosopher had a ready and trenchant reply. The country that is lovely, declared Burke, is permeated with the spirit of religion and the spirit of the gentleman, qualities without which no civilized society can endure.
The “spirit of religion” is a complicated phrase. What Burke meant is a reverence for God and a corresponding acknowledgement of an authority higher than the state. For Burke, it also meant the recognition and protection of God-given rights and the performance of corresponding duties. And for Burke, the ~ “spirit of religion” meant a commitment to shared values and the religious foundation for those values such as tradition, liberty under the law, courage, love, integrity, honour, decency, the dignity of the individual, personal freedom and responsibility.
When Burke spoke about the “spirit of the gentleman”, he was referring to something more than mere social poise and the ability to win friends and influence people. Cardinal John Henry Newman once described the gentleman as one who is “tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant and merciful towards the absurd… He never speaks of himself unless compelled, never defends himself by mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip…”
The gentleman, continued Newman, is “patient and forbearing”; he resigns himself to suffering because “it is inevitable, to bereavement because it is irreparable and to death because it is his destiny.” And if the gentleman engages in controversy of any kind, said Newman, “his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, but less educated minds, who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean; who mistakes the point in argument, wastes their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary and leave the question more involved than they find it."
Burke would have agreed with Newman’s sentiments; he meant much more than external gentility. Burke also was talking about the ethical and intellectual discrimination needed to distinguish between truth and error, right and wrong, the noble and the base: The nobility of mind and character which elevates one above the social, intellectual and moral fads and foibles of one’s group and of one’s times.
As social critic and philosopher Russell Kirk observed, Burke believed that the spirit of the gentleman meant “that elevation of mind and temper, that generosity and courage of mind and that habit of acting upon principles which rise superior to immediate advantage and private interest…”
Were Burke alive today, he would find little of the spirit of religion and the spirit of the gentleman in our country. He would discover little respect for the canons of civilized and rational discourse; and he would find little observance of the norms and traditions of civility.
Rather, Burke would find the spirit of religion and the spirit of the gentleman considered “effeminate” by those most doubtful of their own sexual identity; he would encounter widespread indifference, if not hostility, towards religion in both private and public life.
Burke would find increasing numbers who think in slogans; who shout down speakers and who refuse to listen to or consider views contrary to their own. He would see a denigration of the concepts of personal freedom and responsibility; he would witness in our society a virulent assault by those without a sense of community upon the delicate balance between freedom and order, between liberty and license, between tradition and change. And Burke, to his dismay, would discover a violent and tragic rupture of the bond of human affections, the ties that promote unity and communion rather than division; the ties, that is to say, that bind a person to his neighbour, to his family, to his church, to his country.
The fight today for the resuscitation of the spirit of religion and the spirit of the gentleman would seem to be a lost cause.
But no great cause is ever truly lost. Consequently, for so worthy a cause we must continue to struggle until these qualities prevail: Qualities that cause a country as well as an individual to be lovely.
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RIGHTS OF UNBORN CHILDREN RECOGNIZED!
Steven Ertelt.
LifeNews.com editor has sent this report from Rome, Italy. December 8 2009.
A member of the Italian parliament has introduced legislation that would recognize the rights of unborn children. The measure, sponsored by Carlo Casini, president of the Pro-Life Movement and Member of the European Parliament, would recognize that unborn children have rights beginning at conception.
Casini says that his Bill has the backing of leaders of the Italian Parliament, including Maurizio Gasparri, Gaetano Quagliarello and Laura Bianconi.
A Zenit report indicates he filed the Bill at the beginning of December 2009 and, during a press conference on it, explained that it is not an attempt to rewrite Italy’s abortion law.
Instead, he said it would go along with the law by stopping the distortion of it “to the point of denying the one conceived the dignity of person and of using abortion as a contraceptive; two conditions that the law rejects.”
Casini told Zenit the bill spells “progress in the judicial culture” and that recognizing the rights of unborn children “is a more solid and lasting support for the rights of everyone.”
Casini said that the key is in how abortion law is interpreted and he said Spain and Poland have similar abortion laws, but Spain interprets its law liberally to allow 120,000 abortions annually, while Poland has just 313 each year.“The essential difference lies in that Polish law refers to the conceived in the first point as a person, whereas for a certain Spanish culture, the conceived is 'something' a mass of cells that has no rights," he said, according to Zenit.
Bianconi has said the bill is an attempt to “move the whole debate” under the auspices of the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
“A defence of childhood, which must be both before as well as after birth, must provide recognition of human life until its birth,” she said.,
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CAN WE DEVELOP COMPASSION?
By Elaine Halton, A.T.C.L. Dip. Ed.
Many people may not have even bothered to ponder on the word compassion. What is it? Why is there a need for it? Is life all right without it? Let us now ponder on these questions and find out more.
I attended a remarkable Fringe Meeting last September, whilst at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. It was entitled “Can We Fix Broken Families?” It came to light during the speaker’s input, that there have been many studies carried out by the medical profession, in the hope that leads would emerge as to why some youngsters and adults behave in a manner devoid of compassion. There certainly has emerged really interesting information and perhaps a new way of dealing with problems in the future.
To have no compassion is to live a life without emotions. Kali Wendorf, funding editor of ‘Kindred’ wrote a thought-provoking article for the magazine “Resurgence” – May/ June 2009. In the article she begins by
posing three questions: “Are we a peaceful species or a violent one? Are war, tyranny and ecological destruction inevitable? Are we motivated by love or fear?”
If one reads widely and deeply, there is plenty evidence that “human beings are biologically ordained for love and connection – not violence, greed and fear,” as Kali Wendorf so eloquently puts it. Groundbreaking research has uncovered our greatest potential, that is, how we are nurtured determines the
kind of people we will grow up to be. It is clear that love, empathy and compassion are a part of human nature and the potential begins in the infant’s brain. But this potential does not develop in the prefrontal cortex of the baby’s brain unless there are sensory inputs such as: touch, smell, taste, movement and vision, breast-feeding, skin to skin contact, eye gazing, emotional nurturing, and the movement experienced while being held in the arms of the parents or carers. All these practices are necessary to the development of the emotional side of the child.
Many moons ago, when I became pregnant, my Mother explained to me how important it was that while the baby was in the womb, I should read happy books, watch happy films, listen to classical music, as well as exercising daily. My Mother was adamant, that whatever the pregnant woman experiences, would also be absorbed by the baby in my womb. This is now often referred to in science as a “continuum of connection”, experienced in utero, through birth, and in the first three years of the baby’s life. The biological need for “connection” continues after this, but through wider circles of the family and the community.
As Kali Wendorf asks: “So if we are hard-wired for love, what has gone wrong? Modern Western culture is increasingly at odds with this kind of nurturing.”
She believes, like many other researchers, that the dissolution of family life and community, and the resulting ‘outsourcing’ of parenting, and over-reliance on the T.V. as a baby sitter, interfere with critical procession of ‘connection’ in the “small developmental window of the first three years of life.”
It has become evident to the researchers that without a foundation of bonding and connection, children will grow up exhibiting stress signals. Like what? You may well ask and the answer is depression, attention deficit syndromes, aggression, suicide, and failure of relationships and solvent abuse. One only has to read of the street children in Colombia to see this displayed. Also some of the Eastern European countries, like Romania, where children in orphanages were left on their own for hours and hours, where there is sometimes complete non-development of the brain.
Anne Manne, in her book “Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children?” describes how ‘care’ is a different word to love. She says , “that the trend to put very young children into long day-care centres, is leaving us with a behavioural time-bomb! She firmly believes that this kind of template for raising children will produce societies noted for their “waning of emotion or affection.”
Robin Grille, a psychologist and author, says in his groundbreaking book “Parenting for a Peaceful World” that “the suffering of children ends up with human rights abuses. Every war, every genocide, has been a direct consequence of society’s war against children.” As Kali Wendorf enlarges on Robin Grille’s findings, she states that delinquency is the product of violence or neglect experienced in childhood.
So, I wonder whether if this whole cycle has somehow made some adults impervious to the maternal instincts and devoid of the capability of compassion and love? As has been stated by so many people in the past, it is
just incredible how any person could want to abort an unborn baby, but would this be the outward sign, perhaps, of a man or woman who has no compassion or love?
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