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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2011 10:00:35 GMT
The old prolife thread was very long. Can we start a new one here, the government are appointing a 14 member panel within the next few weeks to respond to the European Court of Human Rights. I wonder if we can keep this for updates in the present and the other one for discussion of what went wrong? Please send this if you are prolife, we have a lot of people reading the forums and not participating here, you don't have to be a member of the boards to click the link. prolifecampaign.ie/vpcdec2011/
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 24, 2012 13:16:09 GMT
The IRISH CATHOLIC recalls Professor Jerome Lejeune, the geneticist who discovered the cause of Downs syndrome, and the price he paid for his pro-life advocacy. Santo Subito! www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/08/24/professor-lejeune-a-patron-saint-of-downs-syndrome/EXTRACT Lejeune became friends with another pro-life champion, the late Pope John Paul II who named him as the first president of the new Pontifical Academy for Life. He once told his daughter, without any bitterness, that his championship of life alongside academic research was to cost him the Nobel Prize. It also made him an outcast within the scientific community and his funding was withdrawn. He was not deterred. His daughter remembered that her father once came home to lunch and told the family about a little boy with Down’s syndrome who had seen a programme about pre-natal testing and who had begged him to save him from “those who want to kill us.” Clara Lejeune relates, “He was white and he said, “If I don’t protect them, I am nothing.” Professor Lejeune’s cause for sainthood is now being investigated... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 24, 2012 21:43:03 GMT
TO clarify - I'm restarting this thread for pro-life material which doesn't fit into the other two threads; "Abortion 2012" on current events, and "Prolife movement - what went wrong?" on strategy and tactics. There are also some posts/links about deceased prolife veterans on the "Prayers please" thread
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Post by Deleted on Sept 10, 2012 15:43:04 GMT
How timely!
"Experts in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, mental health, and molecular epidemiology presented new research, and shared clinical experiences on issues surrounding maternal healthcare to the packed Symposium attended by more than 140 Irish medical professionals.
Particular attention was paid to the management of high-risk pregnancies, cancer in pregnancy, foetal anomalies, mental health and maternal mortality.
The Symposium's conclusions were issued in the DUBLIN DECLARATION ON MATERNAL HEALTHCARE which states: “As experienced practitioners and researchers in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, we affirm that direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman. We uphold that there is a fundamental difference between abortion, and necessary medical treatments that are carried out to save the life of the mother, even if such treatment results in the loss of life of her unborn child. We confirm that the prohibition of abortion does not affect, in any way, the availability of optimal care to pregnant women.”
Professor Eamon O'Dwyer said that the Symposium was timely given that the issue of abortion was one of current public debate, and that attempts were being made to confuse legitimate medical treatment with abortion.
“Irish Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have previously pointed out that treatment for conditions such as ectopic pregnancy are not considered abortion by doctors, yet misinformation in regard to this abounds in public debate. The Symposium clarifies that direct abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of a woman, and that’s good news for mothers and their babies,” said Professor O’Dwyer
Dr Eoghan de Faoite of the organising Committee for the Symposium said that the research presented at the Symposium provided clear evidence that best practice medical care for pregnant women does not involve abortion.
"It was fascinating to learn about new therapies involving the safe delivery of chemotherapy during pregnancy and the exciting field of in-utero fetal surgery" he said. "When discussing matters of pregnancy and medicine it is vital that the voices of the real experts, those that actually care for pregnant women, be heard. This Symposium puts an end to the false argument that Ireland needs abortion to treat women, and it was encouraging to hear the international speakers commend Ireland's high standards of maternal healthcare and low rates of maternal mortality."
The Medical Advisor to the Life Institute, Dr Seán Ó Domhnaill welcomed the outcome of the Symposium. "The Dublin Declaration stating that abortion is not medically necessary was a statement of fact agreed by medical experts and relected best medical practice in maternal healthcare", he said. "This is a globally significant outcome, which shows abortion has no place in treating women and their unborn children."
Rebecca Roughneen of Youth Defence said that the outcome of the Symposium affirmed the pro-life position which had long held that abortion was not medically necessary to preserve women's lives. "Ground-breaking research and new clinical practices were presented at this hugely important Symposium, and the good news for mothers and babies is that experts agree that abortion is not necessary to save the life of a mother," she said."
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 24, 2012 10:46:35 GMT
This is one argument that we should keep an eye on, because I have seen it used by pro-choicers with some knowledge of Celtic studies. Some early mediaeval Irish saints' lives (Cogitosus' LIFE OF ST BRIGID is an example) contain stories in which a woman who has become pregnant, through rape or consensual intercourse, has her pregnancy miraculously ended and her virginity miraculously restored through the saint's intervention. This is used by pro-aborts as showing that the Church has not always disapproved of abortion, with the implication that its present opposition is worthless. The answer, of course is that saints' lives are not necessarily historically correct (Cogitosus writes long after St Brigid - so much so that it has been questioned whether she really existed) and are marked by the limits of understanding of the society which produced them (anyone think murderers should be left off with a fine, the amount to be determined by the victim's social status?) Furthermore, the right of the unborn to life rests on a concept of human rights and on the value of the human person which ultimately rests on the Christian message but can be held independently of it. This is also a reminder of why the utterly uncritical retailing of every legend about a saint as if it was as well attested as (say) the life of St Bernadette, such as we see in the CATHOLIC VOICE series on Marian shrines, is utterly counter-productive, because people who take an uncritical attitude to every saint's legend are the most likely to be disturbed by this stuff. Here is a Politics.ie thread on "The Abortifacient Saints of Early Ireland". Expect this sort of stuff to get greater publicity as the debate intensifies. www.politics.ie/forum/culture-community/196670-abortifacient-saints-early-christian-ireland.html
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Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2012 20:47:30 GMT
Did ye see this episode of Primetime? www.rte.ie/news/av/2012/1002/primetime.htmlIt would seem that RTE have seen a draft report. We're looking at next week but it keeps being backdated. Part of me thinks that if James Reilly is pushed through the nearest exit soon then the whole issue will be put on the long finger. What are your own opinions on the postponements? The notion of specific hospitals being chosen blows my mind. Do they seriously think that midwives are going to turn their whole duty of care on its head to kill some of their patients? That's not how midwifery is taught here. That hospitals staffed by Indian and Filipino nurses as well as Irish nurses who have grown up in a culture where we care for patients to their natural end are suddenly going to comply with a culture of induced death on the wards? It's all very well for politicians and barristers to yammer on but they won't have to handle the corpses now will they, to forget all their training and start compartmentalising who gets to live and who doesn't. They won't have to deal with it, the theory is cowardice, the practicality of it all is horrific.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 15, 2012 19:53:07 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 18, 2012 11:04:50 GMT
I don't think "conservative" Catholics should idolise Congressman Paul Ryan, Governor Romney's running-mate. I don't approve of the liberal-Catholic demonisation of him as a Randian either, but I think there are real problems about someone who treats someone (Rand) who declared altruism immoral and selfishness a virtue as any kind of role-model, no matter how many qualifications are involved. This comes to mind particularly because I have just been reading a Catholic commentator on the Great Irish Famine who remarked that belief in absolute right to do as one pleases with one's own property sits very badly with the description of the condemnation of the unrighteous in Matthew 25 ("Lord, when did we see you hungry and never feed you...") But there is one point where Paul Ryan deserves applause and that is his outspoken defence of the right to life of the unborn. In his debate with Vice-President Biden he defended the right to life of the unborn and recalled seeing his daughter on his wife's first ultrasound scan and realising this was a living being, the same as the daughter (of whatever age) she grew into. For this (and for saying that his actions are informed by his faith and it's not possible to separate them completely) Ryan was denounced in the NEW YORKER by Adam Gopnik, one of their regular feature-writers who might be described as a professional sceptic who thinks principles are generally bad and lead to slaughter, so everyone ought to agree with his principles which are different because they are not principles but self-evident truths. (This may be parodic but it's quite close to the original, including the way in which he evades the obvious difficulties of such a position.) Gopnik in turn is called to account by Ross Douthat, a token conservative writer for the NYT (i.e. the NYT employs him so that it can point to him as proof of its impartiality, while its fanclub implicitly regard him as not really "one of us" and so not to be taken seriously). I suggest we should pay attention to this for two reasons. The first is that the NEW YORKER does in fact have a certain circulation in Ireland (at least since the mid-90s) and one of the functions of the NEW YORKER has always been to popularise for the rubes in the backwoods (as the NEW YORKERITES see them - those who read it of course see only their neighbours in that light) the interests, attitudes, topics etc which they ought to take up if they want to be (or to see themselves as being) as truly cool as the sophisticated inhabitants of Babylon-on-the-Hudson. One of said attitudes is the view not only that pro-lifers are mistaken, but that it is unthinkable that they might NOT be mistaken and hence they are simply to be ignored, or ridiculed and reviled when it is not possible to ignore them. This, along with so much else in imported popular culture, will have its inevitable impact on the attitudes of Irish wannabe sophisticates. SECOND, because Douthat exposes some of the sophistries used by Gopnik to avoid facing up to what is really at stake. Some of these sophistries - "we can't really know anything so the individual should have an absolute right to choose" [unconsciously Randian in its conclusion if not its premises] - or the argument that because an embryo is very small it can't be human or possess rights - were among the slogans waved on the placards of the "MArch for Choice" I saw recently in Merrion Square. [There were at least two placards with a small circle saying "This is the actual size of a 10-week-old embryo", the implication being that it was too insignificant to matter.] Douthat's dissection of the way Gopnik seizes on Ryan's nickname of "Bean" for his embryonic daughter and presents it as if an embryo actually is a bean is a nice example of how a metaphor can be used as substitute for an argument and how vital it is this shouldn't be got away with. Of course this will have no effect on the hardline pro-aborts but it's always important to promote clear thinking and expression. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/of-beans-and-abortion/ douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/adam-gopnik-vs-paul-ryan/#more-17917EXTRACT But Gopnik, alas, is only warming up. His secularism pursues Ryan even when the VP candidate seems to concede a distinction between his private beliefs and his public duties. “He went on to make it quietly plain that his principles are uncompromising on this,” Gopnik writes of Ryan’s comments on abortion in cases of rape and incest, “even if his boss’s policy may not seem so,” and then quotes Ryan on the difference between his own convictions and the Republican ticket’s official position: [RYAN QUOTED BY GOPNIK] All I’m saying is, if you believe that life begins at conception, that, therefore, doesn’t change the definition of life. That’s a principle. The policy of a Romney administration is to oppose abortion with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. [END RYAN QUOTE] This prompts Gopnik to play the ayatollah card again: [GOPNIK QUOTE] Our system, unlike the Iranians’, is not meant to be so total: it depends on making many distinctions between private life, where we follow our conscience into our chapel, and our public life, where we seek to merge many different kinds of conscience in a common space. Our faith should not inform us in everything we do, or there would be no end to the religious warfare that our tolerant founders feared. [END GOPNIK QUOTE] But … but … but isn’t Ryan is making precisely the kind of distinction that Gopnik wants him to make, distinguishing between his moral principle on the one hand and the kind of public policy that’s possible when we “merge many different kinds of conscience in a common space”? And yet for this, he’s again accused of tiptoeing toward Qom – because he needs to be making “many” distinctions and not just one? How many? What is Gopnik talking about? Then the piece turns to the abortion question itself: [GOPNIK QUOTE] Ryan then went on to say something oddly disarming in its inherent lack of self-awareness. He talked about how, looking at a first sonogram of his daughter, he was thrilled by the beating heart in the tiny “bean” on the image, so much that he and his wife still call that child “Bean.” As someone who is not often accused of being indifferent to the joys of fatherhood, I recognize the moment—and in fact still have that same early ultrasound picture, two of them. But Ryan’s moral intuition that something was indeed wonderful here was undercut, tellingly, by a failure to recognize accurately what that wonderful thing was, even as he named it: a bean is exactly what the photograph shows—a seed, a potential, a thing that might yet grow into something greater, just as a seed has the potential to become a tree. A bean is not a baby. [END GOPNIK QUOTE] Somebody lacks self-awareness here, but it isn’t Paul Ryan. Gopnik is taking the congressman’s nickname for his unborn child and literalizing it – not, as he thinks, in the service of delivering some hard facts about the nature of life in utero, but in the service of obscuring those facts in the service of the pro-choice cause. On the one hand, calling an embryo a “bean” makes embryonic human life sound like a form of vegetative life — not an uncommon rhetorical move in these debates, but also one that collapses on the barest scrutiny. A bean is not remotely like a baby, certainly, but neither is a baby remotely like a full-grown bean plant, and that difference has a more obvious bearing on the debate over embryonic and fetal rights than the facile comparison between plant embryos and human ones. Outside of the world of level five veganism, neither the bean nor the plant have a strong moral claim on us, and it’s their essence as vegetables, rather than their level of development, that makes all the moral difference. Not even the most ardent enthusiast for the idea that ontology-recapitulates-phylogeny has ever argued that developing human life passes through a vegetable phase on its path toward full adulthood. Biologically speaking, we begin as we end up — which is one reason why any normal person would be rightly horrified to find the beans switched out for human embryos in their favorite cassoulet. What’s more, even as a more indirect analogy the “bean” line is misleading, because it invites the reader to imagine the embryo in a kind of stasis — like a kidney bean in your cupboard or an acorn on the ground, awaiting favorable conditions to actually crack its shell and grow. It’s an image that evokes the old folk wisdom about “quickening,” which informed English common law on abortion in days before we knew much about what actually happens inside the womb. But if there’s anything that ultrasound technology has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s that an embryo is “quick” long before the mother feels its movements. What Ryan saw on in the ultrasound photo is rather obviously a growing life – a shoot or a sapling, if you insist on pushing the tree analogy further, which doesn’t just have the “potential” to “grow into something greater.” No less than a newborn or a teenager, albeit at a much earlier stage, it is already in the process of growing into full maturity, and that process will necessarily continue unless someone intervenes to put a stop to it. The rest of Gopnik’s piece offers a variation on the conventional pro-choice argument about the impossibility of knowing when a human life is finally “fully grown and when it isn’t” — or phrased more philosophically, when “the formed consciousness that distinguishes human life from bean life arises” — and why this uncertainty requires us to err on the side of (his words, not mine) “every woman for herself.” The broader argument-from-uncertainty is less implausible than the direct comparison of embryo to an acorn, but for a supposed champion of enlightenment the combination is still a strange one. In the name of science and progress, Gopnik is offering dubious embryology plus a view of human rights that’s essentially mysterian — abstracted from biological identity, agnostic about its own parameters, more comfortable evoking folk wisdom than reckoning with the science that’s replaced it. He’s draping himself the mantle of secular reason even as he talks misleadingly about biology and declares that some of the most crucial questions about justice, the law and human rights are eternally inaccessible to reason. And for this combination – bad science married to mysterianism and question-begging — we’re supposed to banish religion to the sidelines of our common life? I’ll pass, thanks. END OF DOUTHAT POST To return to Paul Ryan, BTW, note that the standard RTE/IRISH TIMES attitude to him includes sneering not only at his economic policies (arguable) but also at his pro-life views, in a manner which is really content-free except for the same "Don't-be-a-rube" attitude found in the NEW YORKER.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 18, 2012 23:11:43 GMT
Melanie Phillips discusses the response to a "personally-opposed-to-abortion-though-it should-remain-legal" article published by Mehdi Hasan in the NEW STATESMAN last week. Her left/right analysis is a bit simplistic, but what she is describing is exactly the take-no-prisoners mindset I witnessed at the Dublin March for Choice: phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2012/10/the-biters-on-the-left-are-bitten.htmlEXTRACT Hasan insisted that this did not make him any less left-wing and pleaded for his fellow-lefties to understand and respect those who held such views rather than demonise them as reactionaries or medieval misogynists. Fat chance! Hasan was promptly engulfed in a Twitter firestorm, in which he was repeatedly told there was simply no debate to be had on this issue; being ‘pro-life’ was synonymous with evil. Hasan subsequently wrote: ‘It slowly dawned on me, at about 5pm on Sunday evening, that no matter how politely, gently and sensitively the anti-abortion case is expressed in the future, people on the ‘pro-choice’ liberal-left will never want to hear it.’ Welcome to Planet Reality, Mehdi. So nice of you to drop in. He was subjected to more of the same on the Today programme this morning, when his opponent Suzanne Moore scarcely allowed him even to finish a sentence, apparently on the grounds that she was fed up with having to debate abortion once again with men. How dreadful for her! Of course men shouldn’t be allowed to say anything on this subject! Mehdi Hasan’s point was duly made for him. Today asked whether abortion really was a left/right matter. As with so many issues, there is nothing intrinsically right-wing about having reservations about the abortion time limit or opposing it altogether. It’s a religious and moral issue instead. And there are conservative voters who believe that abortion should be legal and that it is a woman’s right, just as there are lefties who believe the time limit should come down or that it is morally wrong altogether. Nevertheless, being ‘pro-choice’ as opposed to ‘pro-life’, and expressed in those terms, certainly is a left-wing position. This is because essential to the left is, first, a secularist onslaught against Biblical morality -- including the acknowledgement of the innate value of human life and the need to respect it -- and its replacement by the unchallengeable authority of subjective desires. And second, the left is governed by the Manichean belief that everything not the left is the right; that the left is the embodiment of virtue; and that the right is therefore irredeemably evil. Two things follow from this. First, Biblical morality and the innate respect due to all forms of human life become an evil right-wing position. In fact, not just on abortion but across the board the left is not compassionate, generous or humane at all but is defined by selfish individualism, callous utilitarianism and narcissistic self-regard. Second, lefties are totally obsessed with defining themselves as on the left. That’s because they really do believe that the left is synonymous with virtue. That’s why both Orr and Hasan are so desperate to maintain their left-wing purity – and why the inevitable left-wing witch-hunt against such heresy on abortion is so unendurable for them. Third, and as a result of the above, the left shuts down freedom of speech and thought itself, by substituting vilification and demonisation for reason and argument. The abortion issue stands proxy for the closing of the western liberal mind. END This is the central point behind any debate on pro-life tactics. We are increasingly facing a society in which the defence of unborn life is not merely opposed but is treated as fundamentally evil, on a par with racism (cf Finola Meredith's latest rant in the IRISH TIMES on how the non-extension of British abortion law to Ni amounts to "crazed theocracy... policing women's bodies"). www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/1018/1224325412766.html In the same way, as I have often pointed out, the "cool" and "respectable" view of Catholicism in contemporary Ireland and the west is that it is self-evidently ridiculous and need not be investigated or taken seriously; at best it is regarded as a slightly shameful eccentricity which can be tolerated in private among consenting adults, at worst as malevolent lunacy to be suppressed by any means necessary - it couldn't possibly be true. How can we open such hardened hearts? By bearing witness in every way we can, not only with our words but with our lives - in the everyday and if need be before hostile tribunals. Remember the Greek for witness is martus. St Margaret Clitheroe, pray for us.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 23, 2012 13:20:34 GMT
Here is a piece by John Zmirak (with reference to Mitt Romney's long history of malevolent hypocrisy on the pro-life issue, and the views of some pro-lifers who prefer to vote for third-party candidates in preference to him) arguing that there is a moral obligation to vote for a nominally pro-life candidate, however lousy, against an out-and-out persecutor, in preference to voting for a no-hope purist candidate who will not win but who may divert enough votes to let the persecutor in. Regular readers of this board will know that I have a lot of issues with John Zmirak, and he is being his usual rude and insulting self to anyone who disagrees with him (remember, this is a man who said that because the majority of Hispanics in the US vote for Democrats, who are pro-abortion, anyone who does not support drastic restrictions on immigration is in fact pro-abortion; this is exactly like saying that because blacks mostly vote for pro-abortion Democrats, anyone who supports blacks having the right to vote is pro-abortion) - but his point about the "Onan vote" does come to mind when I consider how the pro-life No voters of 2002 have ended up being cited by pro-choicers as having voted for abortion on demand. Any thoughts? www.ncregister.com/blog/john-zmirak/he-spilled-his-vote-upon-the-ground/#ixzz29PbBuNXK
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Post by Deleted on Nov 15, 2012 17:12:31 GMT
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Post by gemmagal on Nov 15, 2012 21:07:56 GMT
I believe that there have been statements by doctors who have said that septicemia is not stopped by abortion, nor is abortion a cure for any health condition in any case.
Mrs, Halappanavar's death is a tragedy, not only for the Halappanavar family, but for Ireland.
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Post by annie on Nov 16, 2012 0:36:18 GMT
During this month of November, between the 16th and the 24th, a Travelling Icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa ('The Black Madonna') will be in Ireland. It is part of the Ocean to Ocean pilgrimage (www.fromoceantoocean.org) which seeks to encourage and promote the entrustment of the Civilisation of Love and Life into the hands of the Mother of God. In the Republic of Ireland, the visit is organised and sponsored by Family & Life and in Northern Ireland the visit is organised by Precious Life The Icon, touched to the original miraculous image of Our Lady of Jasna Góra, and blessed by Archbishop Nowak of Czestochowa, has been travelling since June 2012. It has gone from the eastern coast of Russia across Europe (20 different countries) and its final destination before the end of this year is Fatima, Portugal. Our Lady, Mother of All the Living, is coming as a Pilgrim inviting us all to pray for the restoration of the Culture of Life and to proclaim and defend the Gospel of Life. An icon is not just a painting or artistic depiction. It is traditionally considered to be almost a living presence of the person who is venerated. The icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa has a fascinating history of its own. Tradition holds that St Luke the Evangelist himself “wrote” the icon of what has now become known as “Our Lady of Czestochowa” on a cypress wood table in the home of the Holy Family. Though icons belong more to the Eastern Christian tradition, even in the West, the faithful have over the centuries venerated images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and called on her intercession in times of great distress. Acts of entrustment to the Most Holy Mother of God are an ancient practice among the faithful both in the West and the East. In crucial times throughout history, the faithful have often turned to the Blessed Mother with a renewed confidence in her intercession and sought refuge in her motherly protection. In more recent times, in the year 2000, for example, Pope John Paul II and the bishops entrusted themselves and the Church in the new millennium to Mary. The motto of John Paul II’s entire episcopate and pontificate, 'Totus tuus’ ("All Yours") was itself an act of entrustment to Mary. Just last month, Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, entrusted the Year of Faith and the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelisation to Mary. He entrusted to the Most Holy Mother of God all the difficulties affecting our world and he prayed for Mary’s intercession in responding to the “problems of the many families who look anxiously to the future”. In the icon of Jasna Góra, Our Lady is depicted holding her Child and Our Redeemer, true God and true Man. She thus reminds us that Christ joined all humanity to God in Himself. That includes the humanity of the unborn. She invites us also to consider that before Christ could be found in her arms, she carried Him in her womb for nine months. Thus faith in the Incarnation commits us believers inescapably to the defence of unborn children. We are called to be messengers of the sanctity and dignity of every unborn child. Ireland is very blessed with the visit of this Travelling Icon at a time when we all need to act and pray fervently - perhaps more than ever before - for the protection of human life and the family.
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Post by annie on Nov 16, 2012 0:43:30 GMT
Schedule-The Icon of Jasna Góra in Defence of Life The Icon will be venerated at the following locations across Ireland: BELFAST—Saturday, 17 November, St Peter’s Cathedral (11 am, Veneration; 12 noon Holy Mass) LIMAVADY—Saturday, 17 November, Drummond Hotel, Ballykelly (3 pm, Holy Mass) LIMAVADY—Saturday, 17 November, St Mary’s Church (7.30 pm, Vigil Mass, Veneration until 10 pm) LIMAVADY—Sunday, 18 November, St Mary’s Church (9 am & 11 am, Holy Mass) BALLYMENA—Sunday, 18 November, All Saints Church (3 pm, Veneration; 4 pm Mass) Queen’s University Catholic Chaplaincy (Mass at 8 pm and veneration after Mass) KNOCK—Monday, 19 November, The Icon arrives at the Shrine before the 12 noon Mass and remains for 24 hours. KNOCK—Tuesday, 20 November, The Shrine (the Icon will leave at 1pm after the 12 pm Mass) GALWAY—Tuesday, 20 November, The Icon arrives at the Cathedral at 3.30 pm for Rosary and Mass. GALWAY—Tuesday, 20 November, Poor Clare Convent (veneration throughout night) GALWAY—Wednesday, 21 November, The Cathedral (9am – 1 pm) DUBLIN—Thursday, 22 November, Family & Life Office (10am – 4pm by invitation only). DUBLIN—Friday, 23 November, Disciples of the Divine Master, White’s Cross, Stillorgan (7.25 am – 4.00 pm, Mass & Adoration) DUBLIN—Friday, 23 November, Ss Peter & Paul Russian Orthodox Church, Harold’s Cross (6 – 7 pm, Akathist to the Mother of God). DUBLIN—Friday, 23 November, St Saviour’s Church, Dominick St (8pm – 9.30 pm, Holy Hour, Compline/Night prayer) CORK—Saturday, 24 November, St Augustine’s Church, Washington St (9 am – 12 noon, Masses) Sunday, 25 November, Leaves for France. If you would like to attend the private veneration of the Icon at our office in Dublin on November 22 and have not already registered, please call the office (01 855 2790) so that we can plan for what numbers to expect. For further details about the visit, please see www.familyandlife.org and www.prolife.ie/events/ocean-ocean- czestochowa-icon-black-madonna
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Post by gemmagal on Nov 18, 2012 16:59:04 GMT
I found this article about the mayhem called forth by the media over the recent Indian woman's death:
BY HILARY WHITE ROME, November 16, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – At LifeSiteNews.com, we like to report facts. Things that are actually happening, that people are actually doing and saying. Speculation on things that might be happening, or things that might have happened, is a realm for irresponsible tabloids and the leftist gutter press. Which is why I was hesitant to produce a piece talking any further about the case in Ireland that is arousing passions around the globe.
But I dive in because it seems as if the whole world has suddenly fallen into a frenzy to murder Irish children. I’ll say it again, just so we’re clear: the calls for legalisation of abortion in Ireland, always carefully framed in the media and parliaments as a matter of “women’s rights,” is a call for the unrestricted slaughter of innocent children.
Having got the basic facts of the argument clear, perhaps we can look at the details. We know that a young mother died on October 28th in University Hospital, Galway after she came in presenting symptoms of miscarriage. The hospital has said she died a few days later of septicaemia. At some point, exactly when is unclear, the woman’s husband went to the press, or perhaps the abortion lobbyists, and said that the hospital and the country’s laws, “Catholic ethos” and medical antipathy towards abortion caused his wife’s death.
All else after that is carefully couched around in journalistic disclaimers like “reportedly” and “…he alleged.” Meanwhile, the bereaved husband, in-laws and parents of the young mother have retreated to India and are demanding that Ireland liberalise its abortion laws. This demand is being joined by the Indian Ambassador to Ireland, the legalisation-pushers in Ireland’s parliament, the secular media and professional abortion lobbyists, as well as, perhaps most strangely, the official opposition party of India, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
Savita Halappanavar, whose death has been seized upon by Irish and international pro-abortion activists This despite the fact – as has been pointed out several times in editorials, press releases, blog posts and hundreds of comments boxes both Catholic and non-Catholic – that abortion is not a medical treatment for either miscarriage or for severe systemic infections and no one has any idea whether Savita Halappanavar really wanted an abortion, or whether “early induction” of labour would have saved her life.
Indeed, one doctor in India has pointed out that abortion in such a case would probably have only hastened Savita’s death. Gynaecologist Hema Divakar, resident-elect of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India (FOGSI), has told The Hindu, “Based on information in the media, in that situation of septicaemia, if the doctors had meddled with the live baby, Savita would have died two days earlier.”
In response to the media frenzy the Irish government has launched an investigation – giving the family first say as to what is and is not investigated and made public – and has said that nothing will be decided until the full facts of the case have been made clear. Galway University Hospital is already conducting an internal investigation and the Health Service Executive’s investigation will be joined by an independent external expert in obstetrics and gynaeocology.
So far the story makes a modicum of sense, but quite a bit of the rest of it does not add up.
Ireland’s Minister for Health, Dr. James Reilly, has said he is in possession of facts that cannot at this time be revealed, but that he has no evidence that the “Catholic ethos” of Ireland or the hospital prevented Savita from receiving proper medical treatment.
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Even pro-life advocates have pointed out that the current law and medical guidance include the possibility of abortion in the “rare” cases where the woman’s life may be endangered. The University Hospital would certainly have known this, it being the standard of gynecological care throughout the country. Indeed, I was told today by a reliable Irish source that on the gynecological staff at that hospital is at least one “rabid” pro-abortion doctor who would certainly have made sure that this would have happened had it been medically possible. Eilís Mulroy has written in The Irish Independent, under the headline “Pro-choice side must not hijack this terrible event”, asking, “Was Ms Halappanavar treated in line with existing obstetrical practice in Ireland?
In light of these facts, it seems extremely unlikely, except perhaps in the dreams of rabid anti-Catholics, that the doctors at the hospital would have simply said, “This is a Catholic country, we don’t do that here.”
I also hope I am not the only one wondering why the Indian Ambassador to Ireland has decided to weigh in, adding his voice to the pressure of the abortion lobby/Labour Party/media consortium who have been pressing for years for legalisation. Why is the Indian Ambassador suddenly so interested in Ireland’s abortion laws? Is it really normal practice in modern diplomatic circles to join in partisan demands of a sovereign country to change so fundamental a law?
Mr. Debashish Chakravarti may have revealed more about his own country’s problems than Ireland’s when he issued a statement today claiming, with no more evidence than anyone else has, that Savita Halappanavar “would still be alive if she had been treated in India.” Since when does a diplomatic attaché tell the host country which laws to overturn?
Perhaps someone just forgot to show Mr. Chakravarti the report by the World Health Organisation showing that Ireland, with its abortion restrictions, has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world, one that is vastly better than India’s.
How much better? The WHO’s document shows that from data gathered up to 2005, Ireland had one maternal death. Yes, one. India had 450 per 100,000 live births for a total of about 117,000. Under India’s current law allowing abortion virtually on demand, about 11 million children are (officially reported) killed by abortion annually – just under two and half times the entire population of the Irish Republic – and around 20,000 women die of complications related to these legal abortions.
But calm deliberation on medical, legal or demographic facts has never been the M.O. of abortion lobbyists or their supporters in media or parliaments, and the country is in an uproar with the media/abortion lobby demanding legislation, right NOW, to legalise abortion. Pro-life people I’ve spoken to in Ireland fear that the pressure may prove too much for the waffling and half-hearted pro-life Irish politicians.
The Irish Times ran the first piece on the case on Wednesday, written by the daughter of one of Ireland’s leading Trotskyite abortion lobbyists, with the completely unbiased and totally objective headline, “Woman ‘denied a termination’ dies in hospital”. This shot the journalistic pinball around the mainstream media world, bringing predictable headlines from the usual suspects: the Guardian: “Ireland’s abortion ban: a history of obstruction and denial,” the BBC: “Woman dies after abortion request ‘refused’ at Galway hospital,” the Toronto Star: “Senseless death of Irish woman exposes grim reality for women”.
In this atmosphere of impartial objectivity, Indian newspapers are taking up Mr. Chakravarti’s cry, issuing such headlines as, “Ireland murders pregnant Indian dentist” and “Indian woman died pleading, Irish abortion laws denied a termination”. Several Indian television stations are running footage of Savita’s mother saying, “In an attempt to save a four-month-old fetus they killed my… daughter. How is that fair you tell me?” Demonstrations have been organised by India’s main opposition, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party with women carrying placards saying, “Catholic Ireland can’t allow the murder of innocent women”.
Praveen Halappanavar is in India now, also issuing demands that Ireland change its laws. “I have lost my wife, but would like to continue the fight for justice. I will return to Galway and continue the fight. The Indian government should wake up and prevail upon the Irish government to make changes to their law,” he said.
I have several other questions that I imagine will not come up in the medical investigations. For starters: the connections between the Halappanavar family and the abortion lobbyists and the rabidly pro-abortion media remain unclear. How exactly did the Irish Times become aware of the case? They quote Praveen Halappanavar extensively, but did he contact them or did he speak to someone in the abortion lobby first?
Because a leaked e-mail obtained by pro-life activists makes it clear that the Irish Choice Network knew the story was going to come to light by November 11th. Who tipped them off in time to organize their “spontaneous” demonstration outside the Dail on Wednesday? Finally, does anyone else wonder and marvel at the fact that this story “broke” on the day that the long-awaited report from the government’s Expert Group on Ireland’s abortion law was released (but still not published)?
Of course, the whole world, competing with each other to show how deeply they care about the tragic death of a beautiful young woman by calling as loudly as possible for the legalization of the killing of Ireland’s unborn children, are going to pour into our own commboxes demanding to know how I can be so callous and unfeeling. All I can say is, it’s a sort of tick of mine to use my brain, especially when stories don’t add up.
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