Washington: The Vatican has not dropped its request that the 24 American nuns who signed a “freedom of choice” ad last year should retract their statements or be dismissed from their religious orders. Cardinal Jean Jerome Hamer, the Vatican’s top official for religious life, reiterated the demand for retraction at the end of a U.S. visit in August. He said the nuns [...]
“I hate picketing” Join the club, so do I! Through all the years of my conscious life, I have looked askance at picketers. Rallies are different. Whenever I saw a crowd of a few thousand people something or defending something, I often felt I could join them and get lost in the throng. But 10 or 20 people walking up and down [...]
At the end of August, the political stalemate over Morgentaler took an unexpected turn in Ontario. Instead of showing some backbone and legally closing down the illegal abortuary in Toronto, the Liberal government showed itself to be as spineless as the previous Conservative administration. Attorney General Scott’s wheeling and dealing is covered fully elsewhere in this issue, but I want to address [...]
International While many Catholics (including Catholic politicians) remain determined opponents of abortion, some of the politicians are changing their former “sit-on-the-fence attitude” into one of open support for abortion. It is not clear, yet, whether this change in attitude is accompanied by a break of ties with their Church. In June, Senator Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) proposed an amendment to the State [...]
Victoria The Catholic Women’s League passed a resolution condemning the funding of pro-abortion propaganda by the National Film Board. The League met at its national convention here during the week of August 19-23. League members also identified the film Behind the Veil: Nuns as anti-Catholic. Like the abortion movies (Morgentaler and Stories North and South) it, too, was produced by the NFB’s [...]
It has been 10 years since I first decided the IUD was the best possible form of birth control. The Pill, in my mind, was just another medication and all medications have side-effects. Hence, for me, the Pill was out. When I made my decision, I was assured by statistics and the medical profession that the IUD would work. When I asked [...]
Editor’s note: the following article about recognizes leaders of feminism is the first of several dealing with the nature of secular feminism. Subsequent parts will examine the feminist influence in Canada and among Canadian religious communities. The controversy over feminism which has agitated so many over the last three decades – spreading also into Christian circles with the issue of women’s ordination [...]
It seems that the “quality of life” ethic now encompasses more groups of people than the “unwanted” unborn, handicapped and elderly. In Britain, the Oxfordshire District Health Authority decided that a 44-year-old would no longer receive life-saving kidney dialysis treatment because “he would have died within weeks or months from his hypertension.” Both the British Kidney Patients Association and Labour MP Lewis [...]
Marguerite Liegeois, aged 73, a founding member of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, committed suicide in late February. According to a Reuter’s report from Paris, she sent a letter to the group’s members explaining that her health was failing and that the “only way to a dignified and upright death is to voluntarily interrupt life.” [...]
Helen Charlotte Hough, 60, divorced mother of four children and author of children’s and mystery books, was jailed for nine months after helping a friend to commit suicide. Mrs. Hough admitted to the attempted murder of Anneta Harding, age 83, described as frail, deaf, nearly blind, arthritic and lonely. She put a plastic bag over Miss Harding’s head after [...]
Rumours have circulated for some time that human embryos from abortions are being sold to industrial firms to be used for cosmetic products. The first time that I was confronted with such rumours was some months ago. A journalist told me that after a road accident in the north of France, a lorry had turned over and lost [...]
Exposing an unborn child to x-rays more than doubles the chance that the child will contract cancer before reaching adulthood, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 27. An unborn child “may be especially sensitive to the carcinogenic effects of ionizing radiation,” say the authors, who compared sets of twins who did [...]
John Jenkinson, whose British parents were advised to abort him when a prenatal blood test showed he had spina bifida, is today a healthy two-year-old. His parents, a Rotherham, Yorkshire, couple are so dissatisfied with medical and Health Authority answers to their questions that they have now written to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, asking her to find out why a [...]
Delegates at the 1983 Life Conference heard Mr. John Murphy, MD, FRCPI, MRCOG, of the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, present a fascinating and important paper: Maternal mortality – is there ever a case for abortion? Mr. Murphy’s hospital is the largest obstetric unit in Great Britain and Ireland, indeed, one of the largest maternity hospitals in the developed world. [...]
The week-long Conference on Population, organized by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, (IUSSP) ended Wednesday (June 12) in Florence leaving the distinct impression that something less (or more) than scientific had taken place. Despite the best academic window-dressing and all the trappings of respectable scholarship that money could muster, one could not help [...]