Canada
Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed nine new senators including the pro-abortion former leader of the Alberta Liberal Party, Grant Mitchell, and Nancy Ruth, co-founder of both the feminist legal outfit Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and the Charter of Rights Coalition. Commentator Adam Daifallah noted on his website of the appointments: “I just love how he appoints two out of the nine to sit as ‘Progressive Conservatives.’ (Is anything ‘conservative’ or even ‘progressive conservative’ about Nancy Ruth? Don’t think so.) These folks are going to sit with the rogue caucus of Joe Clarkites who declined to join the new Conservatives after the merger – Norman Atkins, Lowell Murray, et al. Now Martin can say he is adding ‘diversity’ to the Senate without enlarging the caucus of the Conservative Party. Oh, how clever” … Liberal MP Pat O’Brien (London-Fanshawe) in the House of Commons: “In terms of the clash of rights between religious freedoms and so-called gay rights … that in the last number of years, whenever those rights have clashed, religious freedoms have been trumped in each and every case by so-called gay rights?”
United States
The Supreme Court of the United States rejected without comment the appeal of Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, to overturn the 1973 landmark ruling that enshrined abortion-on-demand … A Harris Interactive poll found that public support for Roe v. Wade has fallen from 57 per cent in 1998 to 52 per cent today … Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas signed a bill into law requiring parental consent before any minor under the age of 18 undergoes an abortion. The law contains loopholes that would allow a secret abortion to be carried out with the permission of a judge in cases of incest or the judge’s determination that the girl is mature enough. Huckabee said: “Life is sacred. It’s special” as he praised the lawmakers who backed the bill as “courageous” … Ohio Governor Bob Taft signed a bill establishing “Choose Life” license plates … Michigan state Rep. Dave Robertson has proposed a bill that would permit but not force women considering an abortion to view an ultrasound of the unborn child. Sarah Scranton, acting executive director of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of Michigan, said, “It would just be another hoop that a woman has to jump through when she has decided to have an abortion” … American Life League announces that the third annual National Pro-Life T-shirt Day will be April 26 and it encourages students to wear pro-life messages to high school and college that day … Last year 37 people from Oregon died via physician-assisted suicide according an official state report. Physicians for Compassionate Care noted that psychiatric evaluation was performed in only five percent of cases … Stanford University’s ethics committee has approved a plan by researchers to breed mice with brains consisting entirely of human cells taken from aborted babies.
International
Writing in the Australian daily The Age, Selana Ewing says that pro-life women are being silenced: “Yet pro-abortion commentators continue to push the lie that only men want an abortion debate, and that women uniformly support abortion. Why? Why do they want pro-life women to be invisible? Perhaps they can’t believe that women might question abortion. Perhaps they think these women are simply puppets. Perhaps it’s ignorance” … At a human rights conference in Seoul, North Korean refugees have described forced abortions in the communist nation, including a case involving an eight-month pregnant prisoner because the father was Chinese. The conference also heard how Chinese women fleeing to North Korea to escape the one-child policy have been tortured, imprisoned and forcibly aborted by officials … Hong Kong is encouraging couples to have three children to counter the Chinese state’s dramatically low birth rate which is currently the lowest in the world (0.94). The Daily Telegraph reports that people are put off by the cost of housing and lack of government support for parents … The Irish Government announced that it will ignore advice from the Irish Human Rights Commission to “introduce legislation to define the circumstances in which abortion can currently be legally carried out in Ireland.” Two members of the HRC dissented from the recommendation, saying that it would “violate the human rights of unborn children up to the time of birth, denying them the right to life, dignity and equality, and would be inconsistent with the democratic will, since the referendum of 2002 demonstrated that the majority of voters oppose such legislation” … Two doctors who committed a late-term abortion on a baby with a cleft palate will not face criminal charges for discrimination under the Human Rights Act. Paul Tully, general secretary for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said, “Clearly the baby who died in this case has suffered an injustice and it appears this will not be redressed.”