Chile’s president, a longtime international supporter of population control, is trying to relax Chile’s strong pro-life laws; The Zika virus is not excuse to abort a perfectly normal baby; and the name of Woodrow Wilson, racist and eugenicist, will remain on buildings and programs at Princeton Univerisity.
PRI Review Podcast
April 20, 2016
Dr. Christopher Manion, Host
As we have reported here in the past, the pro-abortion left feels energized by its successes with the Obama Administration. In fact, two branches of the United States government – the judiciary and the presidency – are now firmly in favor of the radical abortion agenda, while the third, the Congress, has allowed the abortion agenda to proceed even though both the house and the senate are in the hands of the nominally pro-life Republican party.
During the Reagan and Bush administrations, the United States was a diplomatic beacon to the rest of the world advocating the rights of the unborn. Latin American countries considered the United States to be a dependable ally and their struggles in the international community to protect unborn life. But now that Beacon has gone dark, and the pro-abortion movement is all fired up in several countries in Latin America.
So this week, PRI’s Jonathan Abbamonte reports on an unsettling development in Latin America’s southern cone.
Laws protecting unborn life could soon be swept away in Chile, a deeply pro-life South American nation—if socialist Chilean President Michelle Bachelet gets her way.
Chile’s lower legislature on March 17th, for the first time in that Catholic country’s history, approved a bill that would legalize abortion in cases of rape, fetal abnormality, and when the mother’s life is at risk. It remains to be seen how the Senate will act on the measure.
Chile is one of the few countries left in the world today that still protects human life under all circumstances. The vast majority of Chileans have a deep and profound respect for the dignity of motherhood and for the value of every human life. According to polling data from the Pew Research Center, 64% of Chileans believe that having an abortion is morally unacceptable.
Abortion advocates have long claimed that Chile’s laws defending human life place women at risk of higher mortality. They suggest that women are dying from pregnancy-related obstetric emergencies as well as from dangerous illegal abortions.
But research carried out in Chile shows this is not the case.
Since abortion became illegal in Chile in 1989, maternal mortality has actually decreased by 69%.
In fact, there are proportionally fewer maternal deaths in Chile than in the United States where abortion is widely available. The legal status of abortion has had absolutely no detrimental effect on the health of women in Chile. In fact, making abortion illegal may have actually decreased the number of clandestine abortions. Be that as it may, the death and hospitalization rates due to abortion have decreased since 1989.
Bachelet’s abortion bill would have a number of serious consequences.
For one, the bill would put minors at risk of suffering the physical and emotional pains of abortion. It’s also tantamount to child abuse – Bachelet’s bill makes abortion available for girls as young as 14 years of age with parental consent. If both parents do not consent to their daughter’s abortion, she can choose which parent she wants to provide the necessary consent to terminating the life within her.
Rather than making abortion available in only rare circumstances, as abortion activists always want us to believe, the bill has the potential to make abortion in Chile commonplace.
Why? Well, the bill lacks any mechanism for verifying the claim of rape. Women who want to obtain an abortion could—as they often do in other countries—simply claim that they were raped when they want to obtain an abortion. Bachelet’s law would require doctors to take such a claim at face value.
But who would ever falsely claim to have been raped in order to obtain an abortion?
A woman whose ex-boyfriend threatened her if wouldn’t, perhaps.
Or a woman in a country where caring pregnancy centers are rare.
Consider the case in of Ethiopia, where abortion is quite common. Abortion is illegal in Ethiopia except in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, life and health of the mother, and in cases where the mother is deemed “physically as well as mentally unfit to bring up the child.” The vast majority of Ethiopian women who are seeking an abortion claim they have been raped.
As the Global Post reports:
Rape is a well-documented problem in Ethiopia, but clinic workers say the number of rapes being offered these days as reasons for pregnancy termination strain credulity…“Almost all of our clients, the reason is rape,” says Biadig Amsalu, a health officer and clinical nurse at a Family Guidance Association clinic… visitors would be hard-pressed to realize that abortion has any restrictions on it at all.
So the so-called “rape exception” has created a culture of abortion on-demand in Ethiopia.
In the South American country of Colombia, something similar has happened. The Colombian Supreme Court originally ruled that abortion was permissible for only three narrowly defined reasons. It was universally presumed that abortion would remain rare.
However, since abortion was legalized 10 years ago in Colombia, the number of abortions performed for reasons of “mental health” have skyrocketed. In Bogotá alone, 97.4% of all abortions in public hospitals are carried out for reasons of “mental health.”
In Chile, Bachelet’s bill would not only dramatically increase the number of abortions performed in Chile but would open the door to the eventual legalization of abortion on-demand. Moreover, despite her insistence that the legalization of abortion “doesn’t impose anything on anyone,” her bill would in-fact set a dangerous precedent for restricting the religious freedom and conscience rights of health care workers.
Under her bill, doctors who are opposed to performing abortions would be required to submit their objection in writing beforehand to the director of the hospital where they are employed. In essence, the bill automatically makes all surgeons into abortionists. Doctors are required to opt-out of performing abortions if they do not want to perform them, rather than having to opt-in if they want to perform abortions.
Even after doctors submit a writ of conscientious objection, they are still required to report to the director of the medical facility anyone who wants an abortion and qualifies for one of the three exceptions. The director of the medical facility is then obligated to find another doctor at the same facility or at a facility nearby.
This means that doctors who are unwilling to perform abortions will still be required to violate their consciences by facilitating them. And in cases where the mother’s life is “in danger,” doctors will not be allowed to invoke conscientious objection rights. As for the directors of medical facilities, it appears they will be out of luck. Bachelet’s bill insinuates that hospital directors do not have any conscience protections at all.
The abortion bill further gives the Ministry of Health the power of defining which protocols are necessary for conscientious objection. Such a provision would give the Bachelet administration the latitude to bend the protocols in obtaining and processing conscientious objections to their political will.
Leaving conscientious objection rights in the hands of the Bachelet Administration would not be in the best interest of Chileans.
Several peripheral issues have motivated Bachelet’s program. Her presidency has been marred with economic stagnation and scandal. Last year it was revealed that her son, Sebastian Davalos, and his wife profited $5 million dollars off a privileged real estate loan deal. Bachelet’s approval rating has plummeted to the lowest levels for any Chilean president in the past decade. Adimark’s latest poll has Bachelet’s approval rating for March at a dismal 26%, much lower than, say, Barack Obama’s.
In her first term as president, Bachelet made the morning-after pill available and free in state-run hospitals. The morning-after pill was given to girls as young as 14 years of age and without parental consent.
Before Bachelet’s current presidential term, she served as the first executive director of U.N. Women (formerly the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women), a progressive United Nations agency that lobbies for the legalization of abortion worldwide.
As Executive Director of U.N. Women, Bachelet was given an award at the 20th anniversary gala for the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), a radical pro-abortion organization dedicated to legalizing abortion on-demand throughout the world. A lawsuit originally filed by CRR against the State of Texas for its law requiring abortion facilities to follow the same standards required of all other ambulatory surgical centers was recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In her acceptance speech at CRR, Bachelet praised the abortion group saying, “I thank you for all that you [CRR] do[es].” Emphasizing her belief that abortion is a reproductive right, she also said, “until all women can enjoy…reproductive rights, we will draw the line and hold the line. Reproductive rights are absolutely fundamental to gender equality and women’s empowerment.”
As former Executive Director of U.N. Women and as a long-time public servant, Bachelet is expertly versed in the language used by abortion advocates used to shame pro-lifers into legalizing abortion.
Reading from carefully prepared remarks, Bachelet argued that abortion should be allowed in cases of rape: “We cannot force on her the continuation of the pregnancy if she does not want to continue it as a result of its origin.”
Yet never does Bachelet mention in her frequently repeated talking points why unborn children who are the product of rape or who have congenital disabilities should be deprived of the same right to life guaranteed to all citizens. Rather than legalizing abortion,
Why doesn’t she focus on violence against women? Providing services that respect women’s health—physically, mentally, emotionally and financially— should be a priority rather than simply looking for ways to terminate the life within her.
And that’s not all. Bachelet has argued that legalizing abortion is an equality issue. After all, she alleges, wealthy women who want abortions are able to pay high fees to doctors to illegally procure them or are able to travel to other countries such as Uruguay while the poor are forced to obtain abortions from less scrupulous sources.
Bachelet fails to mention, however, that for years she has allowed radical pro-abortion organizations like Women on Waves to operate hotlines in Chile instructing poor women on how to use pills to perform back-alley abortions.
And here’s another important point: Bachelet has stated publicly that her abortion bill is a compromise between what her supporters want and what she believes can be passed by Congress. That is a fair warning that this is only the beginning. We can expect that with the legalization of abortion, Bachelet and abortion activists will continue to push for abortion on-demand.
To put it bluntly, Bachelet’s bill is very bad news for Chile’s women and their babies.
You’re listening to PRI Review from www.pop.org. When we come back, we’ll look at a roundup of news from around the world.
Second Segment
Princeton University has announced that it would not banish the name of its former president, Woodrow Wilson, who later became President of the United States.
A special committee tasked with examining the matter recommended to university President Christopher L. Eisgruber that the former president’s name remain on both the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Woodrow Wilson College.
Apparently some had demanded that his name be removed because he was a racist. They did not mention that Wilson was also a eugenicist. Paul Rahe writes that, with the dictates of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement in mind, in 1907, Wilson campaigned in Indiana for the compulsory sterilization of criminals and the mentally retarded; and in 1911, while governor of New Jersey, he proudly signed into law just such a bill.”
But Princeton is not the only institution beset by demands that names be removed from prominent monuments, streets, and programs.
For instance, a young Catholic freshman at Stanford University has written a brilliant rejection of the demand that Stanford remove the name of St. Junipero Serra from the countless places on campus where it appears. She begins her article with a fascinating account:
“Shortly after their emperors died, the Ancient Romans made an important choice. The emperor could receive either posthumous honors or damnatio memoriae: all statues decapitated, all inscriptions obliterated, erased from history. Modern tourists in Rome can see the blank holes in imperial family portraits where Emperor Geta’s face was removed by his bitter brother, co-emperor and murderer Caracalla.
The brilliant young classics major continues, “While the Romans enacted damnatio memoriae based on events still fresh in memory, she continues, today’s self-proclaimed historical judges challenge longstanding honors given to those who died decades or centuries ago. College students throughout America assail statues, buildings, and other honorific tributes to questionable figures because, by current moral and civil standards, the person deserves condemnation rather than praise. Countless questions arise: does the presence of a name perpetuate a system? Do the moral transgressions of these people outweigh whatever good they did for humanity? What role, if any, should the views and demands of current students play in the university’s decisions of seeking whom to honor?”
That essay opened the door to a full-blown campaign to reinstate Stanford’s core curriculum humanities requirements, which were dropped thirty years ago when Jesse Jackson marched through campus shouting “Hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” The campaign has received coverage in most major news media, because it is so counter-cultural – when you consider that today’s popular culture is thoroughly ignorant and secular.
But wait, there’s more. Princeton and Stanford are not alone. Classics professor Victor Hanson points out that
Amherst, Georgetown, Yale and the University of California, Berkeley have also been assailed with similar demands.
The students have decided that some politically incorrect people from centuries ago are bad, Hanson reports. Other politically-incorrect folks are not quite so bad if they were at least sometimes liberal, apparently; their names can stay.
San Diego State University students are not demanding that the school eliminate its nickname, “Aztecs,” even though the Aztecs enslaved and slaughtered tens of thousands of people from tribes they conquered — often ripping out the hearts of living victims a thousand a day. And should UC Berkeley students and faculty demand the renaming of Warren Hall, named after California Attorney General Earl Warren, who instigated the wartime internment of tens of thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens?
Let’s face it. Today’s students are no less intelligent than those of earlier generations, but they clearly know a lot less than their forbearers. Some of this is by design – universities have been taken over by secular leftists who are now in their second and sometimes third-generation of running the campus. Some of this, to use an old-fashioned word, is due to decadence – the vast majority of students have been flooded with pornography, especially since the dawn of the Internet and the development of portable digital devices.
In fact, few people today know that the Internet – especially Internet billing systems – was pioneered by the pornography industry. Today the BBC estimates that about a third of all Internet traffic is devoted to pornography sites, some of them receiving 4 billion hits a day.
The impact of this tsunami of sludge is not only moral, but also intellectual. Sin dulls the intellect, Thomas Aquinas tells us. As if we didn’t know already. And the many wonderful young students of today have a mountain to climb and keeping their faith and sharing it in the midst of so much ignorance and swill.
Next up: Should Planned Parenthood renounce its founder? Remember, Margaret Sanger was the leading eugenicist of Wilson’s generation. But if Planned Parenthood ever comes to its senses, it will have to renounce a lot more than its founder.
For instance, Family Watch International President Sharon Slater reports that Planned Parenthood is making ‘Lots of Money Off of Sexualizing Children.’
The abortion group’s sexuality education programs in the schools encourage kids “to engage in sexuality activity,” Slater says, because then they become long-term customers of Planned Parenthood’s products and services – including, naturally, abortion.
There is an “intentional, targeted effort to get your children and change the way they think about sexuality,” said Slater, “because if they can recruit children into this worldview and this sexual ideology, then they’ll have the future.”
Slater, whose non-profit group promotes the family, marriage, education, and parental rights at the U.N., made her remarks during a radio interview on the Drew Mariani Show broadcast on Relevant Radio.
Most people don’t know that Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of comprehensive sexuality education in the United States,” she told Drew Maliani on Relevant Radio, a Catholic network based in the Midwest.
Abortionists need customers, and those customers have to be sexually active. Planned Parenthood makes sure they are by encouraging them in every possible way from the age of five.
I recall a woman who worked briefly for our Catholic diocese before she quietly disappeared. She told me how important it was “to desensitize these children of their sense of embarrassment and shame about sex.” She was talking about five-year-olds, and we had a five-year-old daughter at the time, so I remember well how I recoiled from her crass pomposity.
Well, Planned Parenthood is working hard in schools throughout the country to desensitize your children from common sense – including any moral principles you’ve been teaching them at home.
They’re getting it into the classroom all across the United States and in countries all around the world,” she said. “Because you also have international Planned Parenthood that has 65,000 service points in 170 countries, with its radical sexuality education that is designed to sexualize children and change all the gender and sexual norms of society.”
“What most people don’t understand is that there is an intentional, targeted effort to get to your children and change the way they think about sexuality, to encourage them to engage in sexual activity, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual or self-stimulation.”
“Because if they can recruit children into this worldview and this sexual ideology,” she said, “then they’ll have the future, if they can train up the next generation in all these radical ideas. And that’s what they’re after.”
In a moment, we’ll catch up on the Zika virus.
This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.
Third Segment
Abortion is Never the Answer for Pregnant Women with Zika, the latest PRI study reveals.
Abortion advocates have attempted to lobby and shame pro-life Latin American countries into legalizing abortion for women who may contract the Zika virus. Although it has not been proven that Zika causes microcephaly and other congenital disabilities, pro-abortion groups have nonetheless assumed that it does. Apparently abortion activists think they know more about ZIKV than the medical community.
Pro-abortion groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and abortion device manufacturer Ipas have used the recent outbreak for promoting an anti-life agenda and have called on governments hard-hit by the Zika outbreak to “ensure that women have access to…abortion.”
Yet a new study has found that pregnant mothers who contract a Zika virus infection have a less than 1% chance of their babies developing microcephaly.
The findings were recently published in a study in The Lancet medical journal. The study used a statistical model that drew upon data from multiple samples from the Zika outbreak in French Polynesia between 2013 and 2014. The French Polynesia outbreak infected an estimated 66% of the total population.
The results? Fewer than one-half of one percent (0.42%) of all Zika infections in French Polynesia in the first, second and third trimesters resulted in infants with microcephaly.
Before an estimate for risk had been quantified, abortion advocates would have had us believe the risk of microcephaly was much higher than what the data shows.
Recently, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, publically stated that countries dealing with the Zika outbreak should make comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, including abortion on demand, universally available. According to the UN High Commissioner, abortion is an “essential” “human [right]” that every nation should provide “without discrimination.”
If Latin American governments had heeded the calls from the UN High Commissioner to make abortion available for all mothers who contract a Zika infection during pregnancy, as many as 99% of infants aborted could have been perfectly healthy.
According to the statistical model used by Cauchemez et al. (2016), risk of microcephaly appeared to be evident primarily during the first trimester. Women who contract Zika during the second and third trimesters thus appear to have little to no risk for their babies developing microcephaly. But more research is needed to ascertain which gestational periods have the most risk for fetal development with a Zika infection.
Despite the very small risk posed by Zika, pregnant mothers may wish to follow the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in preventing mosquito bites, practicing abstinence and taking precautions when living in or visiting areas where the Zika virus is spread by mosquitoes. The CDC provides a number of resources and tips on common sense ways to prevent mosquito bites, such as wearing long sleeves and using mosquito nets.
Microcephaly is a congenital condition where infants are born with abnormally small heads and brains. Tracking microcephaly in the ongoing outbreak in Brazil has been difficult as diagnostic measures for microcephaly are imprecise. Generally microcephaly has been defined as a cranial circumference under 32 centimeters (≥ 2 SD below normal development) but many infants under the threshold are perfectly normal and do not exhibit any signs of cognitive impairment later in life. In order for a diagnosis for microcephaly to be accurate, small brain size (not just small head circumference) must be verified and below average brain growth or even shrinkage over time must be observed.
The new findings from the Lancet study seem to indicate that previous estimates for the prevalence of Zika related microcephaly may have been too high.
According to the Brazilian Ministry of Health, nearly 6,500 cases of microcephaly have been reported. But over-reporting seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Of the 2,212 cases that have been investigated so far, for example, 1,349 cases have turned out to be infants with normal cranial development, not microcephaly. The number of confirmed cases in Brazil so far appear to be similar to what would be expected from the incidence rates found in French Polynesia.
A recent report summary from the Latin American Collaborative Study of Congenital Malformations (ECLAMC), and translated into English for Nature science journal, claims that due to heightened media attention, more instances of microcephaly in Brazil will continue to be reported than would be the case otherwise. ECLAMC’s Jorge Lopez-Camelo and Ieda Maria Orioli believe that microcephaly cases have been significantly over-reported. They point out that no other risk factor for congenital abnormalities has come close to producing numbers as high as those which have been reported in the current Zika outbreak.
It is possible that the apparent link between Zika and microcephaly was not made earlier during the Polynesia outbreak due to significantly smaller populations in the South Pacific and thus, fewer number of microcephaly cases to alert health professionals.
But virologist in Brazil has indicated that the health community may not have recognized the possible Zika-microcephaly link for another reason. The legal code in French Polynesia does not protect human life in cases of congenital disabilities. The majority of microcephaly cases in French Polynesia that are now suspected to have been caused by Zika were terminated through abortion. It is possible that eliminating cases of microcephaly through abortion could have hindered health professionals from recognizing the Zika-microcephaly link earlier. An earlier recognition could have allowed researchers to develop an effective vaccine by now.
How many perfectly normal babies aborted as a result of the panic over the Zika outbreak died of abortions encouraged, indeed orchestrated, by the pro-abortion movement? And still the advocates of abortion persist in driving the body count ever higher.
