Surrogate mother shuns cash for abortion to give birth to child with defects – United States

March 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A SURROGATE mother fled across the United States to save the child’s life when the couple whose baby she was carrying demanded she have an abortion after discovering the girl would be severely disabled.

Crystal Kelley, 30, learned five months into her pregnancy that the child she was carrying on behalf of another couple might be born with disabilities, including a cleft lip and palate, a cyst in her brain and heart defects.

The intended parents said that they no longer wanted the child – a girl and told Kelley she should have an abortion, saying it was “more humane”. They offered her $10,000 (NZ$12,000) to terminate the pregnancy.

Kelley did not believe in abortion and refused. The couple then said that they would take the child and put her into foster care.

Kelley, who was to be paid US$32,000 for the pregnancy, also opposed this proposal. She decided to move 1100 kilometres from her home in Connecticut to Michigan, one of only a few states in the US where a surrogate mother’s legal right to decide the child’s future would trump those of the parents – and find adoptive parents for the girl.

The child was born on June 25.

“I think I did what was right for her,” Kelley said. “I gave her a chance that no-one else was prepared to give her.

“I am proud I stood up for what I believe was right.”

Kelley, already a mother of two daughters aged 3 and 4, decided to become a surrogate parent in August 2011. She had previously had two miscarriages and said her motivation was to help families who could not conceive.

She was put in touch with a couple and in October 2011 became pregnant using frozen embryos that the couple had stored following in vitro fertilization. But in February last year, when Kelley was 21 weeks’ pregnant, an ultrasound scan showed that the child had a cleft lip and palate, a cyst in the brain, and a heart condition.

Doctors said that while she would survive, there was only a 25 percent chance she would have a “normal life” and she would require several heart operations.

Kelley then received a letter from a doctor on behalf of the intended parents that read: “Given the ultra-sound findings, [the parents] feel that the interventions required to manage [the baby's medical problems] are overwhelming for an infant, and that it is a more humane option to consider pregnancy termination.”

Source Telegraph Group

The Dominion Post 7 March 2012, p. B2

Filed Under: Abortion, Pro-life Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Challenge Weekly – owned by registered charity – highlights “University ProLife Win”

July 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Challenge Weekly Newspaper, owned by a legal entity that was incorporated in 1975 and registered with the Charities Commission as a charity on 30 June 2008, runs a story on its front page this week “Prolife elated with win: University [Prolife] club survives expulsion bid.”

A student-run prolife group is celebrating a vote by its peers at the University of Auckland not to disaffiliate the club.

Prolife Auckland won the vote 227 to 125 at a special general meeting attended by a large and noisy crowd on July 18 and club president Amy Bowers is pleased with the result for a number of reasons.

“We had support from many students who are not members of our club and have no intention of joining. But clearly they recognised that freedom of expression is a right worth protecting for everyone, in particular in a university setting where academic freedom must be paramount.”

After a single anonymous complaint regarding the club’s ‘Right To Know’ pamphlets that were distributed around campus, the Auckland University Student Association (AUAS) executive put forward a motion to deny ProLife Auckland the right to exist as an affiliated club.

“The club ran this campaign in May which promoted a women’s right to know the facts when faced with a crisis pregnancy, which included the health risks of abortion and full statistics. Ironically, this attempt to shut us down has given us the chance to reach a far wider audience with our message, and that’s the whole reason that we exist as a club,” says Ms Blowers.

Prolife Auckland’s sister club at Wellington’s Victoria University is also thrilled with the result.

“Freedom of speech is a vitally important right in a society that truly claims to be open, free and democratic,” says LifeChoice Victoria president Mary-Ane Evers.

“University is the perfect place for discussion of controversial issues. Student Associations should encourage free and frank discussion and not shy away from these topics.”

Celebration has continued throughout the wider prolife community in New Zealand.

Right to Life spokesperson Ken Orr was delighted at the resounding victory for the right to free speech upheld by the students. “We congratulate the members of Prolife for its defence of free speech…” said Mr Orr.”The battle for recognition of the inalienable right to life of every human being from conception to natural death will be won or lost in our universities.”

Source: Challenge Weekly. July 23, 2012, Vol. 70 Iss. 27, p.1.

Filed Under: Abortion, Pro-life Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Challenge Weekly – owned by registered charity – applauds ProLife’s pamphlet upholding “sancity of life”

July 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Challenge Weekly Newspaper, owned by a legal entity that was incorporated in 1975 and registered with the Charities Commission as a charity on 30 June 2008, has just published the following “Publisher’s Letter” dealing with ProLife issues, including “the sanctity of human life … made in the image of God”…….

The Power of One: by John Massam [23 July 2012]. It seems incredible that a complaint from one anonymous student, about the distribution of a pamphlet, ‘Right to Know’, at Auckland University, would propel the Auckland University Student Association (AUSA) executive to ban ProLife from affiliation as a club on campus.

But rather than accepting the decision the group challenged it, and at a special meeting called to consider their right to exist as a club, won a resounding victory. The vote was 227 for to 125 against.

What is hard to fathom is how a pamphlet advocating the right of women to know about health risks associated with abortion and the alternatives available to them, so they can make an informed decision, should provoke such a reaction. Particularly when the material used came from peer-reviewed academic studies with medical statements which were supported by footnote references to reputable journals.

It is proper that philosophy student Amy Blowers. President of ProLife Auckland, would be elated by the support given by students, many of whom, she said, had no intention of being members of their club. Beyond that she sees freedom of expression as a right worth protecting, particularly in a university setting, where academic freedom must be paramount.

Sadly, we are seeing values that we have taken for granted being replaced and worse still, denigrated. The very people who demand the right to promote alternative values appear to believe that they have the right to silence anyone who holds a different view. They very cunningly picture those who oppose their view as driven by phobia.

What is needed are more people committed to addressing a particular issue, such as William Wilberforce did with slavery. People who are passionate and determined about something they commit themselves to, believing that it is non-negotiable and recognising that if they present the truth then the truth will speak for itself. What is hard to fathom is that so many are blind to the truth.

Those in the pro-life movement are committed to upholding the sanctity of life. They see it as a God-given gift to be valued and upheld. They believe that we denigrate and disrespect it at our peril. In bold terms, they regard the taking of human life as murder, which has disastrous effects on both the perpetrator and society.

Even if upholding the sanctity of life is not the issue we are personally dedicated to uphold, we must affirm our support for those, particularly young people committed to doing so.

One thing we can do, however, is refuse to use weasel words like abortion, fetus and unborn that are intended to lull people into a false acceptance of murder, the killing of a child conceived in the image of God.

Source: Challenge Weekly, 23 July 2012, p. 2.

http://www.challengeweekly.co.nz/editorial.html

Filed Under: Abortion, Pro-life Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Family First NZ – a registered charity – calls for abortion law change

June 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The latest figures released by Statistics NZ on June 19 show a drop in abortions. There were 15,863 abortions performed in New Zealand in 2011 as compared to 16,650 in the previous year, the lowest number since 1999.

To grasp the size of this number, one can compare it with the current population figures for three vibrant rural NZ towns: Tokoroa (14,200), Cambridge (14,400) and Ashburton (16,100).

If all the inhabitants of each of these three towns were killed, one town at a time per year, over three years, through the medical intervention of skilled registered health practitioners, funded by the tax-payer, pro-lifers argue that this would gives us a good comparison (numbers-wise) of the devastating impact of removing the same number of unborn children under our present system of (effectively) “abortion on demand”, over the last three years.

In the case of the elimination of foetuses (unborn children), the ability of these “victims” to respond to, protest, retaliate against, call for “human rights protection”, or seek refuge, from impending surgical removal; is somewhat muted compared to the elevated, hysterical, well-educated and strident calls for mercy that would come from the more mature denizens of Tokoroa, Cambridge and Ashburton, if they were faced with surgical elimination (genocide).

But of course, this gulf between the level and quality of the hypothetical ‘protest actions’ mounted by foetuses, compared with those  mounted by those actually able to speak for themselves; is perfectly comprehensible. The latter group, faced with elimination, are treated under current law as, in effect, “a superior class of human beings” – one that is “mature”, “fully sentient”, and “highly educated” (relatively speaking) and worthy of full “human rights” protections – while foetuses in contrast are “the unborn” – a mere “category” of “non-sentient” development tissue (sub-human/less than human).

The “passing” (elimination) of a foetus does not warrant the erection of a tomb stone or a national memorial, nor a death notice in a local paper, nor the awarding of a posthumous Queens Honours award for crowning achievements. Their crowns are not yet fully-formed, nor their tongues, nor their language-functions, nor their sensory apparatus, when they were aborted.

On average 55 teens have an abortion in New Zealand every week, 17 per cent being performed at 12 weeks or later despite the research on foetal development that has revealed the exquisite beauty and wondrous complexity of the organ and tissue structures of the unborn child, even as early as 12 weeks.

Challenge Weekly (June 25) reports that Family First NZ, a charity registered with the Charities Commission, “is calling for a law which requires informed consent, including ultrasound, for all potential abortions, and counselling to be provided only by non-providers of abortion services. Parental notification of teenage pregnancy and abortion should happen automatically except in exceptional circumstances approved by the court.

“It is incorrect to label abortion as ‘pro-choice’, because nobody chooses to be in the situation of unwanted pregnancy and having to make such a difficult decision,” said Mr McCoskrie.

The fact that 6042 women were recorded in NZ as having had a repeat abortion in 2011, has raised serious concerns among  members of pro-life groups.

References

1. Source of quotes from Family First NZ: Challenge Weekly, June 25, 2012, p. 3.

2. Statistics NZ – report released 19 June 2012

3. Cities Population data http://www.tageo.com/index-e-nz-cities-NZ.htm

Note: The SPCS has as one of its objects: “To promote recognition of the sanctity of human life and its preservation in all stages” (s. 2[b] of SPCS Constitution). Approved by the Charities Commission on 17 December 2007 (Reg. No. CC20268).

For more material from a Christian perspective on abortion see chapter 6 of Dr William Lane Craig’s Hard Questions, Real Answers. Online here:

http://christian-apologetics.org/2012/abortion-hard-questions-real-answers/

Filed Under: Abortion, Pro-life Tagged With: , , , ,

Ethicists advocating infanticide open way to horrors of Nazism

March 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Karl du Fresne, a regular columnist for The Dominion Post, has written today:

When I read recently that two medical ethicists had suggested it should be legal to kill newborn babies, my first thought was that they must be anti-abortion campaigners choosing an unusually dramatic way to make their point.

After all, what’s the difference, ethically speaking, between aborting a baby at 20 weeks’ gestation or waiting until it’s born, then quietly suffocating it or administering a lethal injection? None that I can see.

That’s exactly the point made by doctors Francesca Minerva and Alberto Giubilini in a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics. As it turns out, the two ethicists are not opposed to abortion. Far from it. They are simply advancing, in a clinically dispassionate way, the argument that it doesn’t make any difference whether babies’ lives are terminated in the womb or after birth.

Newborns aren’t actual persons, they suggest, merely potential persons. Neither the foetus nor the newborn baby is a person with a moral right to life. Only actual persons can be harmed by being killed.

It’s a proposition that would shock decent people. Yet it exposes the fundamental flaw, both logical and moral, behind abortion laws such as those that apply in New Zealand.

Most people who think it’s OK to abort babies in the womb would recoil in horror at the thought of snuffing their lives out once they’ve been born.

But I ask again, what’s the difference? Some babies that are legally aborted under present law (there were 16,630 in 2010) have reached a stage in their development when they are capable, with intensive medical care, of surviving outside the womb.

Newborn babies also need intervention to survive. So at what point do we decide a baby has a right to life – at six months old, one year, only when it’s capable of feeding itself and walking?

No civilised society would countenance the killing of babies at any of these stages. It would equal the worst horrors of Nazism.

Yet the Australian state of Victoria already allows babies to be aborted right up to the time of birth and pro-abortion lobbyists would like the same law adopted here. It’s only a short step from there to infanticide.

And why not? After all, Minerva and Giubilini make it clear there is no ethical difference between killing babies in the womb and murdering them after birth. Any point after conception at which society decides it’s legally permissable to end their lives is entirely artificial and arbitrary.

One chilling argument advanced by the ethicists is that parents whose babies are born disabled without warning, as often happens frequently, should be able to have them killed.

A society that considers itself humane would draw back in horror from such a proposal, but it’s simply a logical extensioin of what we’re doing now.

Source: The Dominion Post. Tuesday, March 13, 2012.

Note: The Society for Promotion of Community Standards Inc. (SPCS) has as one of its seven objects in its constitution:

Section 2(b) “To promote recognition of the sanctity of human life and its preservation in all stages.”

This written purpose has been approved by the Charities Commission, headed by Trevor Garrett, as a “charitable purpose”. The publication of the opinion piece above by Karl du Fresne is relevant to this “charitable purpose”.

Filed Under: Abortion, Crime, Human Dignity, Moral Values, Pro-life, Violence Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Medics suggest legalising infanticide

March 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

 Two medical ethicists have controversially claimed that doctors should be allowed to kill disabled or even unwanted newborn babies because they are “not actual persons”.

In an article published by the British Medical Journal, Francesca Minerva and Alberto Guibilini argue that parents should be given the choice to end the lives of their children shortly after they are born because, at this stage, they are “morally irrelevant” and have “no moral right to life.”

In the article,entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live”, they argue that infanticide is no different morally to abortion since both a foetus and a newborn baby were only “potential persons”.

“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a foetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual,” the authors claimed.

“Both a foetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a person in the sense of subject of a moral right to life.”

The authors suggested that the practice of infanticide, which they termed as “after- birth abortion” should even be permissible where a child was perfectly healthy if the birth was unwanted, inconvenient or too expensive for the parents.

They concluded that: “What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the new-born is not disabled”.

Criticism

Academic peers, however, have criticised the article for being “chilling” and an “inhumane defence of child destruction”.

For more see article published 02/03/2012:

http://www.christianconcern.com/our-concerns/medics-suggest-legalising-infanticide [Read more...]

Filed Under: Abortion, Crime, Pro-life Tagged With: , , ,

Christian midwives lose conscience case

March 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Two Christian midwives lost their case this week and will no longer be able to opt-out of assisting in abortions. The midwives, Mary Doogan and Mrs Connie Wood, argued that they had a right to refuse to direct or assist other midwives performing abortions due to the conscience clause in the Abortion Act 1967……. …. the Court ruled that the midwives’ role is not covered by the conscience opt-out in the Abortion Act. The two women will now be considering whether to appeal ….

Published 1st March 2012

http://spuc-director.blogspot.co.nz/2012/02/midwives-must-take-charge-of-abortion.html [Read more...]

Filed Under: Abortion, Pro-life

Abortion increases mental health risk

November 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

New research published in a prestigious medical journal has found that abortion increases the risk of serious mental ill-health by 81%.

The meta-analysis by Dr Priscilla Coleman, professor of human development and family studies at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, was published in the September 2011 edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Dr Coleman analysed 22 peer-reviwed studies published between 1995 and 2009. They covered 877,181 women, of whom 183,831 had undergone an abortion. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Abortion, Pro-life

Pro-life testimony – celebrating Christian tradition

November 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

World renowned Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, who has sold more than 70 million albumns worldwide, in an interview with Bryony Gordon of the Telegraph Group, told her that religion has “first place in my life. I do not think anyone can ever do anything without the help and will of God”.

Speaking in pidgin English,via a translator, he stated: “I am a very passionate man,” and “I do haf a verry beeg reeespect for sex.”

Gordon writes:

He is passionately pro-life, and last year filmed a video expressing his views which, when posted on the web, was hailed by anti-abortion campaigners as “one of the most beautiful, authentic things ever seen”.

In it, Bocelli sits at a piano and tells the camera that he wants to recount a “little story” about a young pregnant woman who is admitted to hospital with a misdiagnosed case of appendicitis. After tests, “the doctors advised her to abort the child. They told her that would be the best solution because the child would doubtless be born with some kind of disability. But the courageous young wife decided not to terminate the pregnancy, and the child was born. The woman was my mother, I was the child”. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Abortion, Celebrating Christian Tradition, Human Dignity, Moral Values, Pro-life Tagged With:

Family First NZ calls for a new law on abortion

October 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“Family First NZ is calling for a law which requires informed consent (including ultrasound) for all potential abortions, and counselling to be provided only by non-providers of abortion services. Parental notification of teenage pregnancy and abortion should happen automatically except in exceptional circumstances approved by the court.” Family First NZ.

Family First NZ, a registered charity with the Charities Commission, issued the following Media release today entitled -

“Reduced Abortion Rate Welcomed But Still Concerns”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Abortion, Pro-life
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