Unborn have no legal right to life -Court of Appeal ruling

The Court of Appeal has just released its findings on the Right to Life case. Right to Life has been pursuing actions against the Abortion Supervisory Committee for several years, and in 2008, as a result of their action, Justice Miller found "reason to doubt the lawfulness of many abortions". However the Court of Appeal has quashed his findings. They also found that the unborn child had no legal right to life. Here is the article on Stuff:

The Court of Appeal has upheld a High Court judge's ruling that unborn children do not have a right to life.
It also dismissed comments made by the judge about many abortions being granted "on request".
Right to Life sued the Abortion Supervisory Committee for allegedly failing to review whether certifying consultants were lawfully granting women abortions... more

Teen abortion in the news again

This is cross-posted from The Culture Vulture.


The Sunday Star Times has today published yet another story about informed consent, abortion, a young girl, and a lack of parental consent…

Two years ago Natalie’s daughter discovered she was pregnant after taking a store-brought pregnancy test. A scan by a doctor confirmed the test, revealing she was more than three months’ pregnant.
Natalie, who was overseas at the time, said her daughter didn’t feel she could confide in anyone and decided to have a termination.
Four weeks later, and after a number of consultations, her doctor arranged for her to see a counsellor at Hastings Hospital. Her daughter told the Star-Times she was given a piece of paper at the hospital and asked to read and sign it.
She said no one went through it with her or explained what it meant.
“I quickly skimmed through it… to get it over and done with,” she said.
During the session the counsellor contacted Wellington Hospital and arranged for her to head down to the hospital that day, as Hastings Hospital cannot perform second-trimester abortions.
“At no time were the pros and cons of having a termination or keeping the baby discussed with her. They never sat down and went over anything like that,” Natalie said.
“She just said, she got asked, `Do you not think you can be a mother?’ and she said no.” Natalie acknowledged more information may not have changed her daughter’s mind as “at the time she didn’t want the baby”.
Her daughter was given petrol and accommodation vouchers, then drove to Napier to pack her bags. Her boyfriend’s sister drove her to Wellington.
Natalie wondered why her daughter wasn’t at home with the nanny, so rang her estranged husband. When he discovered where his daughter was, he drove to Wellington.
“He was devastated,” she said.

What is really important to note about this incident is that as soon as the father spoke to the girl and assured her of his support, the young girl changed her mind and decided to keep the baby. Tragically though, she had already been given the first stage of the abortion, the cervix dilation and labour inducing drug (even thought she hadn’t been fully informed about how the procedure would actually work).
She went home intending to keep the baby, but sadly she miscarried the baby a month later – which is one of the possible outcomes of taking the cervix dilation/labour inducing drug that she took.
She now has her baby’s name, along with a set of tiny footprints, tattooed on her back as a memorial to the baby she lost.
In summation, the three serious issues we have here are:
1. a FIFTEEN year old girl whisked off for a serious surgical procedure without parental consent
2. a lack of proper and accurate information about abortion supplied to the girl (so no proper informed consent was present)
3. young girl and her parents left to deal with the trauma and pain of this event
This tragic and concerning incident could have been totally avoided if parental consent was a legal requirement in NZ, and it provides a very clear (and almost certainly very common) example of how a lack of parental consent is actually NOT in the best interests of the young women it is supposedly intended to protect.
It also demonstrates the fact that many young (and older) women are simply not supplied with the full facts about abortion in this country, and therefore its hard to truly claim that informed consent is actually present in a lot of NZ abortions.
Yep folks, the momentum for law changes around abortion and informed consent and parental consent is definitely growing, and the louder and harder that the pro-choice lobby fights such changes the more it exposes that they really aren’t interested in protecting women, but rather protecting abortion, even abortion without informed consent (i.e. a lack of real ‘choice’ involved).

Mother speaks out on her daughter's secret abortion

I wrote this up over a week ago and forgot to publish it so it's old news now! Oh well, here it is anyway :)

A Kiwi mum has spoken up about her grief over her daughter's secret abortion. Helen (not her real name) found out that her daughter had had an abortion, which was arranged by the school counsellor. Helen was not consulted. And it's all perfectly legal. Stuff.co.nz first covered the story:

A mother is angry her 16-year-old daughter had a secret abortion arranged by a school counsellor.
Helen, not her real name, found out about the termination four days after it had happened. "I was horrified. Horrified that she'd had to go through that on her own, and horrified her friends and counsellors had felt that she shouldn't talk to us," she said.
She had suspected something was wrong, but her daughter insisted her tears were over everyday teenage dramas.
But Helen confronted her daughter's friends, who said the counsellor had taken the girl for a scan and to doctors. "I didn't know that they could do that."
Helen said teachers could discuss how a student was doing in school or phone parents when their child misbehaved, but would then keep life-changing situations such as abortions secret.

Read the rest here.

The New Zealand Herald also did an article on the resulting debate, with comments from Mothers for Choice, ALRANZ, and Family First's Bob McCoskrie, who made an excellent point:

The law currently means that while a parent has to sign a letter for their daughter to go on a school trip to the zoo or to play in the netball team, they are totally excluded from any knowledge or granting of permission for that same child to be put on the pill, have a vaccine, or have a surgical abortion....more

However, in a Herald on Sunday article, columnist Deborah Coddington had something to say about that:

Of course the pro-life groups and Bob McCoskrie's Family First lobby group are outraged.
McCoskrie says if parents must give consent for students to go on school trips, then they should have to do the same for abortions.
It's a fair argument but he's missing the point. The kids have already done something the parents would go ballistic over - had unprotected sex.
Isn't it a bit late to start fussing about consent forms when there's an unwanted baby on the way?

Apart from the fact that her logic is absolutely ridiculous, it's nice that she condescended to call it a "baby".
She continues:

What will a 12, 14 or 16-year-old do if mum won't sign the consent form and boots her out of home? Live with McCoskrie?

So basically, some parents may disown their pregnant daughters, therefore no parents, caring or otherwise, should be legally entitled to know if their daughter wants an abortion.

Hmmm.

And the idea that Bob McCoskrie (or any other pro-lifer) would take a pregnant girl into their home is ridiculous. I mean, everyone knows that pro-lifers don't really care about anyone who's already born. 

And what life will that unwanted baby have?

Deborah Coddington should be ashamed of herself- this is such basic pro-abortion fallacious rubbish. Basically, "the child might be abused/battered/neglected/violently killed after it's born, so it's much better to violently kill it* before it's born".

Pro-lifers have no right to ruin a young girl's life and a foetus is just that. It can't survive on its own so has no claim over the mother.

Wow, go tell every pregnant woman out there that their "foetus" is just a life-ruiner. Oh, I forgot- if it's wanted, it's a baby, but if it's unwanted, it's a foetus. And the whole "it can't survive on its own" argument is so blatantly fallacious but so widely touted that I'll have to do another blog post on it.

There were also two articles with opposing views from counsellors. Chris Hooker from the Association of Counsellors says:

We would rather work with parents. It's more comfortable and productive when we can, but I come back to that basic thing – if it's not confidential, kids won't get the help they need... more

And Steve Taylor, director of private counselling practice 24-7 Ltd, says:

The fact is that no client of a Counsellor has a right to blanket confidentiality, and extreme care must be taken when the client is a young person, particularly a young person in crisis... more

In closing: doesn't it seem a bit ironic that a person must be 16 years old to consent to sex, but girls of any age are able to get an abortion without parental notification or consent? Does it not occur to those people who advocate a girl's "right to privacy" that many girls under 16 who get abortions may well be victims of statutory rape? Is it helping an underage rape victim to get her an abortion (thereby eliminating evidence of the crime) without at least notifying her parents? It's not rocket science that sexual predators use abortion to cover up their crimes. In any case, the fact that a parent has no say in their child's welfare in such a traumatic situation is a travesty. How ironic that the law that enshrines this "right" of underage girls to have an abortion without parental consent should be called the Care of Children Act.

*Just out of interest- why are we still saying "it"? The baby/unborn entity/fetus/whatever is never an "it". From the moment of conception the "it" is a he or a she. Using "it" is just one more way that the dehumanisation of the unborn has entered our vocabulary. If in doubt, just be politically correct and say "she".

The Hand of God

I am currently reading a book called The Hand of God by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, and it is so brilliant I thought I would relate a few passages. The Hand of God is Dr. Nathanson's autobiography and the record of his involvement with the abortion rights scene in the USA. Over the course of his life Dr. Nathanson performed or presided over 60,000 abortions, including one of his own children. He was one of the founders of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (now the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), otherwise known as NARAL. His book delivers a fascinating account of how he and his counterparts in NARAL and other organisations manipulated the political situation in America to rapidly overturn the existing abortion statutes in what he terms a 'political blitzkrieg'. Nathanson was the director of the Centre for Reproductive and Sexual Health, the largest abortion facility in the western world. Yet he changed his mind on abortion after seeing the unborn child on ultrasound, and in the last thirty years of his life he was a passionate pro-life advocate. One of his greatest contributions to the pro-life cause is the documentary The Silent Scream, which contains the ultrasound images of a 12-week old unborn child being aborted (most abortions happen between eight and eleven weeks). Nathanson relates the beginnings of the documentary with his typical raw honesty:

When ultrasound in the early 1970s confronted me with the sight of the embryo in the womb, I simply lost my faith in abortion on demand[...]

By 1984... I had begun to ask myself more questions about abortion: What actually goes on in an abortion? I had done many, but abortion is a blind procedure. The doctor does not see what he is doing. He puts an instrument into a uterus and he turns on a motor, and a suction machines [sic] goes on and something is vacuumed out; it ends up as a little pile of meat in a gauze bag. I wanted to know what happened, so in 1984 I said to a friend of mine, who was doing fifteen or maybe twenty abortions a day, "Look, do me a favour, Jay. Next Saturday, when you are doing all these abortions, put an ultrasound device on the mother and tape it for me."

He did, and when he looked at the tapes with me in an editing studio, he was so affected that he never did another abortion. I, though I had not done an abortion in five years, was shaken to the very roots of my soul by what I saw.[...]

[T]he response to the tape was so intense and dramatic that finally I was approached by a man named Don Smith, who wanted to make my tape into a film. I agreed that it would be a good idea. That is how The Silent Scream came about.[...] 

The Silent Scream depicts a twelve-week-old fetus being torn to pieces in utero by the combination of suction and crushing instrumentation by the abortionist. It was so powerful that pro-choicers trotted out their heaviest hitters to denounce the tape. They very cleverly deflected the impact of the film into an academic cul de sac: a dispute regarding whether the fetus feels pain during an abortion. [...]

Is someone who feels little or no pain (a patient under anesthesia, a cancer victim having undergone dorsal rhizotomy, or a chronic invalid on heavy analgesic medication) somehow diminished in the personhood sweepstakes?

You can watch The Silent Scream here.

Dr. Nathanson also recalls a moving encounter with pro-life demonstrators from Operation Rescue, a vocal pro-life organisation which stages protests at abortion facilities:

I attended an action by Operation Rescue against Planned Parenthood in New York City in 1989. I was planning an article to be published in an ethics journal on the moral and ethical aspects of such demonstrations: Were they legitimate protests or domestic terrorism--that is, the denial of constitutionally based rights to pregnant women?

The morning of the Rescue was bitterly cold. I joined the legion, approximately twelve hundred demonstrators, at their rendezvous in the west forties in Manhattan and proceeded with them by subway and foot to the clinic on Second Avenue and Twenty-first Street. They sat themselves down in rows in front of the clinic, effectively blocking entrances to and exits from the abortion clinic. They began to sing hymns softly, joining hands and swaying from the waist. I circulated on the periphery at first, observing the faces, interviewing some of the participants, making notes furiously. It was only then that I apprehended the exaltation, the pure love on the faces of that shivering mass of people, surrounded as they were by hundreds of New York City policemen.

They prayed, they supported and encouraged each other, they sang hymns of joy, and they constantly reminded each other of the absolute prohibition against violence. It was, I suppose, the sheer intensity of the love and prayer that astonished me: They prayed for the unborn babies, for the confused and frightened pregnant women, and for the doctors and nurses in the clinic. They even prayed for the police and the media who were covering the event. They prayed for each other but never for themselves. And I wondered: How can these people give of themselves for a constituency that is (and always will be) mute, invisible, and unable to thank them?

You can read Nathanson's testimony here.
You can buy The Hand of God, and Nathanson's other book, Aborting America, at Amazon.