Here’s the latest roundup of pro-life news from around the world.
In Canada, the totalitarian instincts of radical abortion supporters continue to manifest themselves. In this latest instance of this, a city councillor in Canada’s capital city has decided at the first city council meeting of 2019 to oppose the selection of a pro-life man to Ottawa’s transit commission—specifically because that man was opposed to abortion. Councillor Shawn Menard did not explain what abortion had to do with transit. Seven virtue-signalling local politicians promptly joined Menard in his strange witch-hunt, asking that the transit selection committee reconsider the nominee’s “viability” as a member of the commission based on his irrelevant views on abortion while remaining silent on their view of the “viability” of the babies it is legal to abort in Canada until birth. Fortunately, less hysterical heads prevailed in this instance and the remaining 16 councillors voted against Menard and the erstwhile social justice warriors.
According to the Euro Weekly News, there’s bad news out of Spain:
The number of abortion carried out in Spain has risen for the first time in five years.
An official report showed 4,000 more pregnancies were terminated in 2017 than the year before, resulting in 10.5 abortion per 1,000 women.
The 2017 figure is still lower than the 2010 number of 11.71 terminations per 1,000 women. That was the same year Spain’s government relaxed abortion laws, legalising them for girls as young as 16 with parental consent. Spain now has the third highest number of abortions in Europe, after France and the United Kingdom.
The pro-life Family Policy Institute of Spain claims official statistics show more than 2 million abortions were carried out in Spain before 2015.
From C-FAM comes the news that the abortion industry is steadily abandoning its long-standing claim that only women should have a say when it comes to abortion—because we’ve recently discovered that men can get pregnant too, apparently:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued medical guidance on abortion intended to reflect the latest scientific evidence in the field. However, its most apparent change was cultural rather than medical. This new report began by insisting it is not only females who can become pregnant, but so can women who think they are men, that is, “those with varying gender identities.”
The guidance further stated that abortion must be provided in a manner promoting health and human rights “including sex and gender equality,” implying a sharp distinction between the two.
In a seeming contradiction, the guidance introduction quotes UN language that “couples and individuals” have the right to decide the spacing and timing of children, however in the following 72 pages, couples are not mentioned even one more time. What’s more, the mother is referred to as the “pregnant individual.”
In short, this means that pro-life men will be told that they need to shut up, and women who are posing as men will be affirmed as men and assured that they, too, can have all the abortions they want. Fortunately, the drive to continue restricting abortion on the state level in the U.S. is continuing apace in 2019. The National Postreports from Iowa:
More than half of the Republican-dominated Iowa Senate has quickly signed on to a constitutional amendment aimed at weakening the state court system’s power to review abortion restrictions, just days after an Iowa judge overturned what would have been the nation’s broadest such limit.
The amendment would expressly state that the Iowa Constitution “does not secure or protect a right to abortion.” Spurred by last week’s legal defeat of a measure seeking to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, it’s a brash attempt at nullifying Iowa Supreme Court precedent declaring that women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies.
Several other conservative states have deployed the tactic of a constitutional amendment, which in Iowa would have to twice clear both chambers of the Legislature before going to voters for ratification.
Finally, calls for the resignation of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam continue. Less than a day after he defended late-term abortion and possibly infanticide during a radio interview in response to a bill put forward by Kathy Tran that would permit abortion until birth, it was discovered that his medical school yearbook page featured a photo with someone in a Klan hood next to a man in blackface. After initially apologizing for the photo (but refusing to reveal which one was him), Northam backtracked the following day and claimed that he wasn’t in the photo, and that he knew this because he remembered a different incident in which he had donned blackface to pose as Michael Jackson so “vividly.”
It seems unlikely that Northam’s career will survive this firestorm as the same Democrats who were more than willing to defend him when he was championing the termination of full-term babies have decided that a racist yearbook photo means that the public “needs time to heal.”
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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.
