Today, campus-based Pro-Life NZ has launched their ‘Right to Know’ campaign at several campuses across the country.

Their website states:

Women have the right to know about all of the reasonable risks associated with abortion, and the harms that could result. They have the right to full and frank information, so that they can be empowered to make a free and fully informed choice.

Women also have the right to know about all the different options, not just that of abortion, that are available to them – options which, on discussion, may be more beneficial to their personal situation. This shouldn’t be about the politicisation of information. Instead women should be trusted with all of the available facts, and thenallowed the freedom and space to make a properly informed decision.

For more about their campaign click here.

“We have to recognise the allure of abortion and why each year around 16,500 girls and women choose to go through the procedure…it promises to resolve their problem. We know it is not that simple. A minimum of 20% will have ongoing serious mental problems as a direct result,” said Anetta. 

“Eighty-nine percent of abortions are done because of danger to women’s mental health, but abortion causes depression.”

She added that Voice for Life’s main role is education, and that women who choose abortion need not be judged, but helped.

Click here to read the full article.

To F O’Keefe-Jones and Jack Havill (April 26 and 27): the “slippery slope” I referred to (letter April 23) related to safeguards being ignored and/or abused and the logical ramifications that followed. The June 2011 Royal Dutch Medical Association’s guidelines widened the understanding of suffering to include non-medical issues, social factors such as loneliness, strained financial resources, and loss of social skills. End-of-life mobile visits to patients are now planned.

In Oregon, assisted suicide was made legal in 1997. People requiring treatment have been offered assisted suicide instead by their insurance company. In Belgium, a paralysed woman was asked to donate her organs for transplant. “Couple euthanasia” was allowed when one was terminally ill and the other healthy. Right to die has become a duty to die.

Voice for Life Inc is very concerned about the eroding of the right to life and disagrees that life’s problems are solved by killing, whether in the womb, in a rest-home or elsewhere. What message are we giving to our young people when we are trying to reduce the suicide rate? Life is the cardinal right in our society and all other rights are derived from it.

We need increased palliative-care funding, not killing. Were a poll to be conducted asking whether people wanted palliative care or assisted suicide, what would be the result ?

John Fong

Secretary

Central Waikato Branch

Voice for Life Inc

” Blind forced abortion opponent Chen Guangcheng has “disappeared” from his lengthy house arrest under the Chinese government, according to a source who contacted human rights group Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. Another Chinese human rights group reported Friday that Chen is “100% safe” and has possibly found refuge in the U.S. Embassy. ”  

Thank you to all who signed the petition for Chen !  

For more information on Chen and China’s One-Child Policy, read more.

The French Council of State in its study on the revision of the bioethics laws in 2009 stated that:

“Eugenics may be the fruit of a policy deliberately carried out by a state. It may also be the collective result of a series of converging individual decisions taken by future parents in a society that seeks the production of the “perfect child” or the least one unaffected by numerous serious diseases”

It is one of life’s great paradoxes that the most gentle, loving and enduring amongst us have always been the target of the eugenicists – those with Down syndrome: the very people who embrace those defining human qualities of unconditional love and compassion so needed in this age.

Eugenics became popular in the early 20th century then quickly fell out of favour after the holocaust. It has now been resurrected under the guise of prenatal health care, reproductive choice and human rights. It is inflicting serious harm on our unborn children, parents and the disability community. The Down syndrome community is first in line now, as it was in 1939 at the start of the holocaust. A case now before the European Court of Human Rights seeks to declare a fundamental human right to kill one’s unborn baby because it has Down syndrome through selective abortion. This is nothing new, and we do it now here in New Zealand.

It was back in the spring of 1939 that Adolf Hitler signed a decree that was to become known as the infamous Action T4 programme, the so-called euthanasia programme of the disabled. It had its origin in Binding’s and Hoche’s 1920 paper “Authorisation for the destruction of life unworthy of life”. The initial decree required midwives and physicians to report all infants born with disabilities to be reported to the T4 authorities. Number one on the list was “Mongolism”, that dated and offensive term of the time for people with a third 21^st Chromosome: Trisomy 21 or Down syndrome. The first killings of the children started in October 1939 and quickly moved to adults. 70,000 disabled people were eventually killed as part of the holocaust that went on to include the gypsies and then the Jews. All in the name of racial hygiene and the eradication of those deemed to be unworthy of life. The Nazi Doctors involved where found guilty of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and the practice of persecuting minority groups has been prohibited under international law ever since.

But the scourge of eugenics was to gain momentum in New Zealand in 1977 with the Royal Commission’s report on abortion, some 32 years after the holocaust.  The Commission dealt with the issue of “handicapped” persons, stating:

“ It is not immoral to terminate a pregnancy where the fetus is likely to be born with a severe physical or mental handicap, because the burden of the handicapped person to himself and to his parents may be greater than the sum total of their happiness.”

Again, Down syndrome was the target of discussion, based in eugenic ideas that people with disabilities have “life unworthy of life” and their degree of burden exceeds their happiness. Of course any one with Down syndrome, or their families, will testify to the joy and love of their lives and the enrichment they bring to our society. New Zealand legalised the death of unborn children with disabilities in 1977, laying the grounds for eugenic abortion.

Under the radar the Ministry of Health has been running a screening programme for Down syndrome here since 1968 and the slippery slope was set in motion. In 2004 the National Screening Unit (NSU) began to review the programme, adding grease to the slope. They quietly noted enthusiastically that one of the purposes of their programme was to “allow couples at risk of anomaly to embark on having a family, knowing they may avoid the birth of seriously affected children through selective abortion”.  At the time the NSU were concerned that too many “normal” babies were being killed as a result of invasive tests and resulting miscarriages whilst trying to find the “defective” ones and that current practice had “failed to reduce the numbers of babies born with undiagnosed Trisomy 21”. And so in 2010 the NSU brought in the “quality improved” programme to improve detection rates in spite of the basic facts that there is no therapeutic benefit in the programme and that participation in the screening pathway imposes more harm than benefit to an unborn child, through miscarriage and morbidity due to diagnostic testing.

The practice has more to do with money. It costs around $70,000 to detect an unborn child with Down syndrome and the governments consider this to be cost effective and cheaper than providing additional care, should it be required. Our children are reduced to a valueless disposable commodity.

Not to be outdone, the NSU mandates that all health practitioners are required to offer screening to all pregnant women in New Zealand, in open defiance of the provisions for conscientious objection in New Zealand Law, a tactic reminiscent of the Nazi area where the defence at Nuremberg was that “we were only following our orders”.

Further grease was added to the slide with the introduction of new blood tests for Down syndrome in early pregnancy in America this year that are now being promoted in Europe, Australia and some Asian countries. In March 2011 Philippos Patsalis of the Institute of Neurology and Genetics in Nicosia, who discovered the new technology, told reporters that “the cheaper and quicker method of blood sampling rather than collecting fluid from the womb will encourage more couples to take the test and therefore slowly eradicate the disease.”. So there we have it, no beating about the bush, it’s a disease and it needs to be eradicated through killing the person before birth. Classic eugenics worthy of Action T4 honours.

But it doesn’t stop there though, now the deselecting of the unborn with Down syndrome is being proclaimed as a human right. Forget the well greased slippery slope of eugenic screening programmes and selective abortion; bring on the play ground slide for eradication as a right.

First there are a number of successful “wrongful birth” law suits in Europe and American where parents have successfully sued Doctors for not diagnosing their child with Down syndrome in the womb so that they could have killed them.

Then we had the two “bioethicists” in Australia argue that infanticide of children with Down syndrome should be permissive as “such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole”. Bioethicists? Yeah right – the new name for Eugenicists.

And now we have a case before the European Court of Human Rights seeking to declare a fundamental human right to kill one’s unborn baby just because it has Down syndrome. This goes beyond the current possibility for abortion under European states that is subject to various controls (as is the law in New Zealand) and seeks to establish the practice as a fundamental right.

Faced with the danger of prenatal screening and elimination becoming enshrined and consecrated as a human right the European Down syndrome community has launched an urgent mobilisation to petition the court. The petition appeals to the conscience of the Court and to European institutions to recognise the humanity, and protect the right to life, of people with Down syndrome and all disabilities.

Recognising as a human right the elimination of children with Down syndrome before their birth would stigmatise a human group selected on the basis of their genetic difference. A favourable ruling would simply deny the humanity of the persons with disabilities and setup in law the mechanism for their elimination.

Already, the systematic elimination of children with Down syndrome children in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand constitutes a real violation of human rights. The race is on for every genetic marker to be detectable in uteri to enable deselecting our unborn.

What is at stake now is how we define humanity. We can choose to embrace human diversity in all its glory or descend into the deselecting of the human race in a relentless pursuit for perfection.

Mike Sullivan

www.savingdowns.com

Conservationists for Down syndrome

Savingdowns.com on Facebook

The Stayin’ Alive Pro-Life Internship is an intensive six day event which offers in-depth formation in pro-life ethics, philosophy and apologetics, as well as important practical skills such as leadership training, event/project management and media training.

If you’re looking for a more in-depth pro-life formation event that also offers training in important practical skills such as leadership, media and project management, as well as the opportunity to discuss pro-life issues in greater detail, and to meet and build friendships with other young pro-lifers from all over New Zealand, then the Stayin’ Alive Internship could be for you.

For more information & to apply visit: http://stayinalive.org.nz/internship/

Anti-abortion message spreading

Jo Moir

Graphic videos showing the reality of abortion are part of the changing tide of Voice for Life and their growing younger audience.

Voice for Life, an anti-abortion group formerly known as SPUC, held a meeting in Stratford for its Taranaki members last night where national president Bernard Moran was speaking about developments within the organisation.

Mr Moran is the first male president in 25 years and although membership sits around 9000 it’s a far cry from the 46,000 members they had in the 1970s when the group was founded.

“We now have things like graphic videos on pro-life websites that have a lot of strict warnings around viewing them but are widely watched and make the process more realistic for people,” he said.

In the last two years more than 400 Auckland University students have become active Voice for Life members and Mr Moran says the interest from the younger generation came completely out of the blue.

“We don’t really know how it happened other than one of our members in Christchurch started to spread the word through the internet and it just took off,” he said.

“We’re at a point of transition and have made a lot of changes to our website and are aware we now need to use things like social media to drive discussions and education.”

Mr Moran said other universities across the country have students setting up pro-life groups and attracting members.

Click here to continue reading.

New Zealand has a unique wildlife that our Conservation Department rightly needs to protect.

The Wildlife Act 1953 Section 67A states that it is an offence punishable by up to 6 months in prison and/or a fine of up to $100,000 plus $5000 per extra head of wildlife or egg disturbed or destroyed.

What constitutes an offence includes: capturing, hunting, killing, buying, robbing or disturbing the nest of absolutely protected wildlife.

How can we have such strong punishments for harming unborn kiwi birds yet the taxpayer pays for the destruction of so many thousands of unborn kiwi children every year?

Source: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1953/0031/latest/whole.html?search=sw_096be8ed8072f58b_%24100%2c000_25&p=1