Posted on 03/14/2010 1:54:56 PM PDT by quintr
I saw a poster that struck me as one of the most powerful I'd ever seen relating to the right to life.
It was simply a black and white photo of a month old baby. The caption said, If you kill this baby when it's thirty days old, it's murder. If you kill this baby thirty days before it's born, it's an abortion.
Once a month or so, we get a bulletin insert at church from the Lutherans for Life organization. In this month's insert, there is a note that "the Kenyan National Council of Churches and the Catholic Church have helped to ensure that the draft Kenyan constitution does not facilitate a right to abortion."
The draft of this document defines life as beginning at conception and ending at natural death. Pro-abortion language, such as the right to reproductive health, has been deleted.
Pray for Kenyans to adopt this new constitution. However, according to Marie Smith, director of Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues, the Committee of Experts to the Parliamentary Select Committee is trying to add language allowing abortion back in that says, "...if in the opinion of a trained health professional, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law."
According to Smith, "There is absolutely no universal right to abortion and abortion is not a human right. The world rejected such beliefs at Cairo and clearly stated so in the Program of Action."
Smith hopes that the Kenyan Parliament holds firm on authentic African values which revere the family and instill those principles in the constitution to ensure that unborn children and their mothers are protected from the violence of abortion."
The draft is expected to be debated and voted on before it is presented for a referendum in July. read more: http://www.lifenews.com/int1477.html
According to another study conducted by Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, there's been a real change in the picture of women who get abortions. Jones and her colleagues analyzed annual data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by periodic surveys that Guttmacher has conducted of abortion providers between 1974 and 2004. The Guttmacher Institute is a nonprofit reproductive health research organization.
During this thirty year period, proportion of abortions obtained by young women younger than 20 fell from 33 percent in 1974 to 17 percent in 2004.
For females younger than 18, the rate fell from 15 percent of all abortions in 1974 to 6 percent in 2004.
Not so safe for babies whose mothers are older than 20, though. The proportion of abortions given to women in their 20s increased from 50 percent to 57 percent, and the share for women aged 30 and older rose from 18 percent to 27 percent.
Ethnicity shows a great disparity too.
In 2004, there were 10.5 abortions per 1,000 white women ages 15 to 44, compared with 28 per 1,000 Hispanic women of that age and 50 per 1,000 black women.
Jones attributed the difference in those data to a focus on reducing teenage pregnancy and on increasing contraceptive use. read more: http://womensphere.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/study-finds-major-shift-in-us-abortion-demographics/
According to the Guttmacher Institute, there are 3,200 babies killed through abortion every day in the United States.
However, according to the National Center for Health Statistics for the year 2006, an increase of 3 percent shows for the national teen birth rate. And an increase between 2005 and 2006 is the first increase in the U.S. teen birth rate after 14 years of steady decline.
Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teens and Unplanned Pregnancy, says that "Although teen pregnancy and birth rates have declined by about one-third since the early 1990s, many recent signs -- including trends in teen sex and contraceptive use -- seemed to have stalled or perhaps gone in the wrong direction. Let's hope that this sobering news on teen births serves as a wake up call to policymakers, parents, and practitioners that all our efforts to convince young people to delay pregnancy and parenthood need to be more intense, more creative, and based more on what we know works."
The U.S. birth rate of 41 per 1,000 in 2004 was much higher than Canada's 14 (in 2003), England and Wales' 27 (the highest rate in Western Europe), Japan's six and the Netherlands' five (the lowest in Western Europe). *
More than 30 percent of girls in the Unites States become pregnant before they reach age 20 and many become pregnant a second time before their 20th birthday. *
And nearly half of all 15- to 19- year olds in the United States have had sex at least once.*
* According to the Guttmacher Institute.
It's sad and ironic that our own President appears to detest these Kenyan values so much.
ain’t it the truth?
o’Zer0 is a very rebellious teenager, at 15, now, and forever.
So, of course he will rebel against any constraints put on him.
If abortion were legal in 1961 he probably wouldn’t be with us.
Hey, you, Ruth Bader Ginsberg...here’s an international law you could cite in your next decision.
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