Pro Life News

From http://www.lifenews.com/nat2308.html


Canada Amnesty International Group Backs Abortion, Pro-Life Orgs Upset

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by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com EditorMay 30, 2006
Winnipeg, Canada (LifeNews.com) -- The Canadian affiliate of the human rights watchdog group Amnesty International has joined its British and New Zealand counterparts in approving adding abortion to the list of human rights the organization supports. Pro-life groups are upset by the move, which leads up to an AI vote on Mexico next year.
Officials with the Canadian affiliate met in Winnipeg last week and endorsed a proposal calling on AI to favor lobbying to overturn pro-life laws against abortions in numerous countries around the world.

But, unlike the British and New Zealand affiliates, the Canadian Amnesty International voted to only support abortion in cases where the woman's life is in danger or she is a victim of rape or incest.
"The majority favored Amnesty going in that direction," Canadian secretary-general Alex Neve told the Toronto Star. He indicated that a large number of Canadian AI officials opposed favoring abortion in all cases.
"People had a wide variety of opinions and there was no consensus. But there was a feeling that this approach was the best one," he said. Neve added that those favoring abortion said they didn't think AI should have no view on the issue when it works with women's issues around the globe.

"Obviously this is a very difficult issue, even in a social justice organization," Neve told the Star. "We have members with a variety of religious beliefs."
Pro-life groups blasted the decision.
"It is unbelievable that a group that concerns itself with human rights as its stated goal should not consider the rights of three million little Canadians killed since 1969," Mary Ellen Douglas, the national organizer of the Canadian Campaign Life Coalition, told the Star.
Douglas said that abortion doesn't erase the pain of a woman's rape and that "the trauma is not wiped out by killing the unborn child."

She indicated her group is worried that doctors and other medical professors will be forced to perform abortions in cases of rape or incest, even if they have moral or religious objections.
Amnesty International is slated to have a worldwide vote on the issue at its next global meeting in Mexico in 2007.
Neve said the more limited Canadian approach could be put forward as a compromise proposal and could win support at an international executive meeting in Portugal AI will have in July.
AI's decision to consider whether or not to take a pro-abortion stance is upsetting human rights campaigners across the globe who say the right to life is the basic human right. Should AI promote abortion, pro-life advocates are concerned at the international effects the decision will have.
AI would likely begin filing lawsuits on behalf of women in nations where abortion is illegal, such as the recent lawsuit that legalized abortion in Columbia in cases of rape and incest or severe fetal handicaps.

"This kind of change will put the lives of unborn children into the hands of one of the most powerful groups in the world," Austin Ruse of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute has said. "They can throw the weight of the international legal community against the unborn."
Thanks to Bush administration officials, the United Nations has not ratified documents declaring abortion an international right and the president will likely work to prevent that as long as he is in office.

However, AI's proposal says it will encourage NGOs who lobby at the UN to press for an international document saying abortion is a human right.
Currently, Amnesty International says it “takes no position on whether or not women have a right to choose to terminate unwanted pregnancies; there is no generally accepted right to abortion in international human rights law.”
TAKE ACTION: Tell Amnesty International that you don't want it to become a pro-abortion organization fighting to make abortion legal worldwide. Go to http://web.amnesty.org/contacts/engindex to contact the group and express your opposition. Also, use the group's web site to find your national affiliate and tell them you oppose the idea.
Related web sites:Amnesty International - http://www.amnesty.org



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From http://www.lifenews.com/nat2309.html


New Study: Pregnancies Lower The Risk of Breast Cancer; Abortions Hurt
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by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com EditorMay 30, 2006

Heidelberg, Germany (LifeNews.com) -- A new study by international researchers finds that a woman's risk of contracting breast cancer is lowered and the decrease is more substantial the more pregnancies a woman has had. As a result, women who have abortions could be losing missing an opportunity to lower their chance of contracting the disease.
Women with mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have an increased breast cancer risk. In the general population, factors such as multiple pregnancies, first pregnancy at a young age and breastfeeding have a protective effect by helping to reduce breast cancer risk.
But, researchers didn't know if those actions had a beneficial effect for women carrying the mutated genes. In order to answer the question researchers in several nations initiated a study called the International BRCA1/2 Carrier Cohort Study (IBCCS).
Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center studied women with inherited mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. They found that a woman's risk to develop breast cancer after age 40 is the lower, the more pregnancies she has had.

All of the women participating in the IBCCS study had the mutated genes and 853 of them had breast cancer.
Professor Jenny Chang-Claude of the German center, French scientist Dr. Nadine Andrieu and other colleagues used the data of 1600 study participants to investigate whether and how pregnancy affects women with the mutated genes.
The found that women with the genes having just one child had the same breast cancer risk as women who had no children.
However, among mothers with several children, the risk of contracting breast cancer after 40 was lowered 14 percent with every child she had.

The positive effect may be accounted for by the fact that the milk forming cells in the glandular tissue of the breast only mature completely during a pregnancy, the researchers said. Scientists suppose that the cells' tendency to transform decreases with increasing maturation degree.
They also found that women with the BRCA2 mutation had double the risk of contracting breast cancer if they gave birth after 20 than those who gave birth before 20. The data suggests teenagers who are considering an abortion should be advised to carry the pregnancy to term.
Carries of the BRCA1 mutations were found to have a lower breast cancer risk when having a child after the age of 30, suggesting that older women should also be advised not to have an abortion.