CONDOM USE AND FAILURE
The following letter to the editor appeared in the October 20, 1990 issue of Great Britain’s leading medical journal, The Lancet.
I was surprised that in your Sept. 22 note “A good fit?” you reproduce the London Rubber Company’s statement that “most condom failure is due to incorrect usage”, without exercising the same critical evaluation that applies to the rest of your journal. We have shown that 52 per cent of those who had obtained condoms from our family planning clinic had one or more either burst or slip off in the three months before our survey. As might be expected, regular users reported more accidents than occasional users, and I do not believe that most of these failures were due to snagging with fingernails, use of oil-based vaginal lubricants, or use of out-of-date stock.
I firmly support the general move towards the use of barrier methods of birth control; but we do the public no favour by promoting the idea among medical staff that it is all the fault of the user when things go wrong.
Rosemary Kirkman, Family Planning Centre, Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, U of Manchester, Withington, Manchester.
BLACKOUT BAN
New Zealand Judge Cecile Rushton ordered a complete blackout on publishing details about the trial of 13 pro-lifers, the April 1991 issue of Humanity New Zealand’s pro-life monthly, reports.
In late February, Judge Rushton suppressed all information about:
The defendants
The charges
The complainant
The evidence
The Convictions
The penalties imposed.
The judge said she did not want her court used to “aid and abet martyrdom.”
Despite the protests of defence counsel Lorraine Smith, the Auckland Council of Civil Liberties, the media and an appeal on behalf of one of the defendants to the High Court in March (which adjourned because Judge Rushton’s instructions were not available to it), the order still stood at time of printing.
The Humanity editorial quoted several previous legal judgements backing the view expressed by one judge – that the practice of allowing free publication…is “the negation of the police state, and our chief guarantee and bulwark against it.”
MURPHY/DODD WEDDING
London. The March 17, 1991 issue of the Sunday Express (circ. 2.5 million) gave prominence to the Greg Murphy/Barbara Dodd wedding. (The Interim May, 1991). “Abortion battle lovers wed and plan big family,” ran the headline.
Miss Dodd told the Express that she had been swept along by the pro-abortion groups who masterminded her case.
“They said it was my right not to have the baby. They never stressed that I was killing a human being. They pushed and manipulated me,”she said.
ABORTION KIDNAPPING
Also in London, a High Court judge ordered a 12-year old girl to have an abortion. The girl was thought to be 20 weeks pregnant.
Her mother opposed the abortion and had declared herself willing to care both for her daughter and the grandchild. But social workers seized the child, had her made a ward of the Court and handed her over to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Britain’s largest abortion agency.
The court ruling has now set a legal precident. Britain’s Catholic bishops condemned the judge’s decision as revealing “in a stark way, the values which are becoming accepted in our society.”
Jack Scarisbrick of the pro-life group LIFE called the move “frightening.”
“Surely we have learned to be suspicious now of the over-mighty Social Service departments that can invade a home and impose their views on helpless children,” he remarked.
Pro-life MP David Alton tabled a motion in Parliament protesting the High Court’s decision.
In the field of social work, the prevailing view favours abortion, he stated. Only recently, he said, the deputy director of social services of Nottinghamshire was suspended from duty after he commented on
a television program that abortion was the worst form of child abuse. His superiors are considering disciplinary action on the grounds that his religious beliefs conflict with his job.
Source: Sunday Mail, May 12; The Tablet, May 18, 1991.