Month: October 2019

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News Briefs

UK company apologizes for pro-life billboard aimed at local MP

October 7, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

London, England, Oct 7, 2019 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- An advertising company has has apologized for displaying a pro-life billboard in the United Kingdom, saying it is removing the ad and will make a donation to a pro-abortion charity.

The billboard was erected in Walthamstow, East London, as part of the #StopStella campaign. The campaign is in reference to local Labour MP Stella Creasy, the leader of a movement to force legal abortion on Northern Ireland later this month. Creasy is now pushing to fully legalize abortion throughout the United Kingdom via amendments to the Domestic Abuse Bill. 

The organization the Centre for Bioethical Reform UK paid for the 20-foot billboard, which featured a picture of Creasy next to an image of a baby who was aborted at 24-weeks gestation. The billboard read “Your MP is working hard…. To make this a human right.” 

Clear Channel, the company that produced the billboard, issued an apology and pledged to donate the money they were paid for the advertisement to Abortion Support Network. The apology followed a series of tweets by Creasy about a seperate billboard from the same campaign which appeared overnight Sept. 30. 

 

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Twitter-can you get me the CEO of <a href=”https://twitter.com/CCUK_Direct?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@CCUK_Direct</a> advertising? how much did you get for this crap? <a href=”https://twitter.com/metpoliceuk?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@metpoliceuk</a> still think this is just 'free speech' and not harassment of women in walthamstow? Am sorry for the graphic images and <a href=”https://twitter.com/patel4witham?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@patel4witham</a> am reaching out to you for help now. <a href=”https://t.co/rOG7Gc3App”>pic.twitter.com/rOG7Gc3App</a></p>&mdash; stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) <a href=”https://twitter.com/stellacreasy/status/1178593407280799744?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>September 30, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

 

In addition to calling out the company, the MP asked to Metropololitan police to invesitgate the ads as “harassment.”

Centre for Bioethical Reform UK, which is the UK branch of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, said that the aim of the billboard was to inform the people of Walthamstow about “the humanity of the unborn child and the reality of abortion.” 

The United Kingdom has different free speech laws than the United States, including on sensitive issues such as abortion. Several jurisdictions in the UK have worked to enact so-called “buffer zone” laws that prevent pro-life activists from demonstrating near abortion clinics. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2014 that similar legislation in America was unconstitutional. 

The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform is known for their controversial “genocide awareness project” that displays images of aborted children on large banners, in public view. In the U.K., the CEO of the Center for Bioethical Reform UK was arrested in 2010 for protesting with similar banners. 

The Democratic Unionist Party, the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly and a member of the coalition government in Westminster, is opposed to changing the region’s abortion law.

Bills to legalize abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormality, rape, or incest failed in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2016.

Recently, Northern Ireland’s High Court ruled that the country’s abortion law was a violation of human rights.

In her Oct. 3rd decision, Justice Siobhan Keegan said that the law violated the U.K.’s human rights legislation. She, however, declined to make a formal declaration of incompatibility, due to the fact that there is already legislation in place that would make abortion legal in Northern Ireland in the near future. 

A bill was passed in July by the British parliament that will make both abortion and same-sex marriage legal in the region if a devolved government is not formed by Oct. 21.

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News Briefs

Tens of thousands protest France IVF bill

October 7, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Paris, France, Oct 7, 2019 / 12:23 pm (CNA).- At least 42,000 people protested in Paris Sunday against a bill that would allow single women and lesbian couples access to IVF. Many French bishops have spoken against the bill.

Police said there were 42,000 at the Oct. 6 protests, while a media-funded researchers estimated 74,000, and organizers 600,000.

Speaking at the protest, former legislator Marion Maréchal said the French government is seeking “to voluntarily deprive a child of a father or to transform him and the mother who carries him into a consumer product.”

Organizers of the protests said the move would weaken the family and thus society, and that it is unjust “to authorize the manufacture of children voluntarily deprived of a father.”

Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris has said that the bill “touches on the most essential foundations on which our human societies are built: filiation, the non-commercialization of the human body, respect of all life from its conception until its natural death, the best interest of the child, a philanthropic and non-commercial medicine, a human ecology where the body is not an instrument but the place of the edification of the personality.”

And Archbishop Eric de Moulins d’Amieu de Beaufort of Reims, president of the French bishops’ conference, commented: “I’m afraid we are going down a very dangerous path.”

The bill passed the National Assembly last month, and will soon be considered by the Senate.

In France, IVF is now restricted to men and women who are married or have cohabited at least two years.

The bill would make women under 43 eligible for artificial insemination and four rounds of IVF treatment fully covered by French health care. According to the Washington Post “women in their mid-30s would also get coverage for egg freezing.”

It would also allow all children conceived through IVF to discover the identity of their biological father.

Last month, the National Academy of Medicine said in a report on the effort to revise bioethics law that while a woman’s desire for maternity is legitimate, “the deliberate conception of a child deprived of a father is a major anthropological break that is not without risks for the psychological development of the child.”

President Emmanuel Macron included the expansion of IVF provision in his 2017 campaign.

Introducing the bill, health minister Agnès Buzyn said, “the criterion that defines a family is the love that unites a parent and child.”

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No Picture
News Briefs

Federal appeals court considering Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban

October 7, 2019 CNA Daily News 1

Jackson, Miss., Oct 7, 2019 / 11:06 am (CNA).- A federal appeals court is considering a Mississippi law ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was signed in 2018 but is not currently in effect.

The law allows abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy only when the mother’s life or a major bodily function is in danger, or when the unborn child has a severe abnormality and is not expected to be able to live outside the womb at full term. Exceptions are not granted for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

Under the law, physicians knowingly in violation can lose their state medical licenses, and receive a civil penalty of up to $500 if they falsify records about the circumstances of the procedure.

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed the legislation March 19, 2018, saying, “I am committed to making Mississippi the safest place in America for an unborn child, and this bill will help us achieve that goal.”

The law was immediately challenged by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which argued that the Supreme Court has held that states may not restrict abortion before the unborn baby is viable – around 23 or 24 weeks.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves issued a temporary injunction against the law one day after it was passed. He issued a ruling against the law in November 2018.

Mississippi state attorneys are appealing to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Arguments in the case are being heard Oct. 7.

In defending the law, the state argued that it has an interest in protecting the life of the unborn, as well as maternal health. State attorneys have pointed to an increased risk of complications for the mother when abortion is performed further into the pregnancy. They have also made a case that unborn babies are capable of feeling pain prior to viability.

“We are saving more of the unborn than any state in America, and what better thing we could do?” Bryant said upon signing the law, noting that he anticipated lawsuits, but that “It’ll be worth fighting over.”

The legislation was also applauded by the bishops of Mississippi for protecting unborn human life.

Prior to the passage of the 2018 law, Mississippi barred abortion at 20 weeks into pregnancy. It also requires that those performing abortions be board-certified or -eligible obstetrician-gynecologists, and that a woman receive in-person counseling and wait 24 hours before receiving an abortion.

Only one abortion clinic remains in Mississippi. Jackson Women’s Health Organization performs abortions up to 16 weeks, the Associated Press reports.

 

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The Dispatch

Sympathy for the devil

October 6, 2019 Carl Kozlowski 5

After dozens of superhero movies in the past 14 years since Batman Begins kicked off the blockbuster hero craze worldwide, all of the flashy costumes and over-the-top effects extravaganzas were starting to blend together. It […]