Life Site News has an excellent – but very disturbing – series of articles on the ironically named “Women Deliver” conference held this past week in Washington D.C. The conference, supposedly intended to promote maternal health and reduce maternal mortality throughout the world, turned out to actually be all about pushing the abortion agenda. The fact that women deliver babies and that they have babies in the womb was virtually ignored, in spite of pro-lifers’ attempts to call attention to this fact.
Among the conference attendees were many of the world’s ministers and parliamentarians, including: Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund; Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services; Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization; Gill Greer, Director-General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; and Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who gave the keynote address.
Conference sponsors included several UN agencies, government departments from the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the U.S. (USAID), and Canada, as well as fortune-1000 companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, and Merck & Co.
The speakers at the conference put forward strategies for how to get past laws banning abortion in countries where it is illegal, how to legalize abortion where it is illegal, and of course, to expand contraception everywhere. The claimed that the best way to reduce maternal mortality rates throughout the world was to promote abortion. They also constantly trashed religion and “fetus fundamentalism.”
Pro-life leaders who attended the conference, however, point to a Lancet study published in April that showed, contrary to what the UN and the international pro-abortion lobby have long claimed, that maternal mortality around the world has dropped drastically in recent years. In addition, the study nowhere mentioned legal abortion as a significant causal factor in the reduced death rate.
“This is a classic case of their ideologies trumping the science,” said conference attendee Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women of America. Even when the science contradicts their goal, they don’t change their ideology.”
The science of fetal development was also completely unwelcome at the conference.
Volunteers from the National Right to Life Committee were handing out pink “Celebrate Motherhood bags outside the conference. They contained a small plastic fetal model of a 12-week-old unborn child, a small replication of an unborn child’s feet at 10 weeks gestation, a brochure on prenatal development, and a brochure containing information on proven means of reducing maternal mortality rates worldwide (the supposed focus of the conference).
Many attendees took them – only to have them confiscated by conference staff once they got to the door of the convention center, by staffers who told them they were “anti-life” and “anti-woman.”
One attendee who received a bag told LifeSiteNews.com that she was interrogated in an intimidating manner by an organizer who said that “you need to throw away” any pink bag handed out by the “anti-woman” demonstrators, because “they’re trying to ruin our conference.”
However, one pro-life volunteer said that the aggressive approach taken by conference staff may have been for the better: when attendees, including UN delegates, asked about the confiscated material in clear plastic bags, they were told by pro-lifers that the materials could not be handed out because “they don’t want you to have this information.”
“It was great for what we’re getting across,” said the volunteer.
The pro-lifers were later able to collect the confiscated bags.
Jeanne Head, NRLC Vice President for International Affairs and UN Representative for National Right to Life, and a registered nurse, said she was frustrated at how the conference hijacked the issue of maternal mortality to push an agenda harmful to women.
“We’ve known how to save lives in the developing world for over 70 years, and women are still dying in the developing world,” Head told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN). “It’s aggravating to me that they’re spending all this money and all this talk about how to save women’s lives and it’s very simple.”
“Good health care, prenatal care, emergency obststetric care, antibiotics, clean blood, clean water, good nutrition. And they’re talking about all this garbage instead of doing the job.”
Concerned Women for America president Wendy Wright, who was present at the conference, said the treatment of the pro-life materials illustrated the conference’s hypocritical message.
“Here they are the whole conference saying: information, give women information and they’ll have power,” Wright told LSN, “and then they take that information away so that they’ll be powerless to argue against the indoctrination they’re getting.”
Wright further noted that the conference revealed how the pro-abortion movement’s “zeitgeist” is “all about power.” “They think that we’re driven by the same things that they’re driven by. They’re driven by rage and power. It’s just the opposite for us - we’re driven by love to serve others,” she said.
For starters she has her feast-days wrong. Today is not the feast of St. Joseph the Worker (that’s on May 1), but the feast of St. Joseph the Husband of Mary, not to mention protector of the Christ Child.
Just think of it: Joseph agreed to protect Mary and take her into his home as his wife when (for all the neighbors knew) she was carrying another man’s child. He watched over Mary as she gave birth. He took the Child and his Mother to Egypt when Herod was slaying the innocent babies of Bethlehem to try to get to Him.
In other words, Joseph protected Jesus against the threats on his infant life.
No wonder Madame Speaker “forgot” to mention this aspect of the feast and of St. Joseph’s life!! How on earth can she think it proper to suggest that St. Joseph might support the passing of a bill that will lead to more slaughter of the unborn? Even worse, she is proclaiming that the bill is “life-affirming!” I hope some bishop calls her out publicly on this.
Even though Pelosi has forgotten St. Joseph’s role, let’s not forget it ourselves.
St. Joseph, Patron of the Unborn, pray for our nation, and for all those babies now being sacrificed on the altar of self. Protect those unborn children who are in danger of abortion as you once protected the Son of God on earth. St. Joseph, pray for us!
Good old SNL! They have Obama’s smugness down pat.
Yet, at the same time they’re laughing at the health care debacle, they can’t or won’t admit what’s really at stake — which is human lives. The unborn, the old, the handicapped and the generally undesirable-because-unproductive are all in danger of death by government deathcare. Some joke.
An urgent message from Americans United for Life. President Obama is now trying to ram the abortion-filled Senate Health Care bill through the House. Everyone needs to act now!
This, to me, is really big. I’ve known a few people who not just pro-choice but ardently so; they were also unrelentingly bitter and furious at pro-lifers. I just figured they couldn’t or wouldn’t change.
It seemed that Ashley was one of those. She is a young woman, in her 20’s, who has visited Jill Stanek’s pro-life blog a number of times over the past few months, spewing venom against pro-lifers. (She uses her full name on the site and it’s her real name; you can find to other online information about her, but I’ll use only her first name here). She was unrelenting in her ridicule of the pro-life position. She was also bitter because of what happened when a prolife ob-gyn had refused to do a D and C on her mother after learning that the baby she was carrying hadn’t survived. She told Ashley’s mother to wait to deliver her dead baby naturally but soon she was rushed to the hospital with serious complications that she barely survived. Ashley was convinced that pro-lifers do not care for women, and prefer the fetus, that we constantly put women’s lives at risk, and that we were all anti-woman — in spite of the fact that at least half and probably more of the pro-lifers regularly visiting the site are women!
Several pro-life nurses on the site pointed out that there was no difficulty in conscience for a pro-life ob-gyn in doing a D and C or other form of extraction on a dead baby, but that there is usually no good reason to do a D and C, which does have medical risk and could possibly puncture the uterus and leave scars, while medical complications like those her mother suffered are usually unforeseeable.
Ashley didn’t seem to be affected by all this. In fact, we hadn’t heard from her in a while, but evidently she still kept visiting the blog. She began to read other articles Jill had posted, including many news items about men who had murdered their pregnant girlfriends when they refused to get an abortion. Then there was a discussion about John Edwards, who had tried to get his pregnant mistress to abort. She has begun commenting in shock about this, realizing how much of the time abortion only serves men; wondering “where are feminists” when these things happen? Her tone is now reasonable rather than bitter. She has begun to understand that there are lies behind the pro-abortion position. She isn’t yet in the pro-life camp by any means, but she is much more of a joy to have around. She engages now in reasonable debate and is honestly seeking information. Here is the thread where we learned about her change of heart.
We can rejoice, but we can also pray for “Artemis,” who also regularly visits the site. She is the kind who is much less likely to change. You see, she is one of the first generation of feminists. She has told us that she is from the class of ‘66, making her roughly 62 years old. A dyed-in-the-wool radical who proudly tells us she left the Catholic Church after graduating from a Catholic girls’ academy, and regularly attacks religion in a mocking tone. She also tells us that her mother had an illegal abortion and never regretted it (she’s now in her 90’s), and that she herself had self-aborted with a turkey-baster sometime back in the late 60’s or early 70’s. She is hate-filled, but of course would never describe herself that way. She resists all attempts to tell her that post-abortive guilt may be responsible for her anger, which in the end is really directly against herself. . .
The same with a post-abortive young woman named “Megan,” who has no regrets, she says, — and constantly visits the site to tell us so, over and over again, while launching bitter tirades against us and our beliefs.
The young like Megan can change. In fact, I think it is this generation that will finally realize what is going on, and will rise up and change things. Artemis may be too ideologically set in her ways. But her kind is growing old and will die out.
In the end, they all need our help and prayers because this battle will only be won one heart at a time.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The history of the Catholic missions is by now a long road: at the beginning of that road is the Father of Mercy, who holds out his arms to all his children. All those who encounter the missionaries encounter the Father. And they also encounter the Son, the first missionary, who, obeying the Father, comes to earth, becomes flesh in human nature, is one of us, in solidarity with our misery (except for sin) and ends up dying for us in order to then return to heaven, carrying on his shoulders the human race his has won back.
Out of the same mold are the missionaries, who repeat, in some way, his journey. They too leave their fathers and families and depart to go among a foreign people. They too strip themselves of the refined culture they have acquired in their homelands; and of their native customs and habitat, of a hundred little comforts, in order to be in solidarity. With who? With a people who are on one hand naked and poor, and on the other rich in possibilities, which the missionaries intend to respect, value and elevate."
Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I), to the people of his diocese of Vittorio Veneto, on his return from the diocesan missions in Africa in 1966
