Washington – U.S. President George Bush declared legalized abortion “a great American tragedy” on January 23, his first working day as President. He urged the Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 decision which opened the gates to a flood of abortions. He told 45,000 cheering pro-life demonstrators at the White House on the anniversary of the decision: “I think the Supreme Court decision was wrong and should be overturned.”
Ottawa – On January 1, 1989, baby bonus cheque went up 36 cents a month, from $32.74 to $33.28. With current inflation at 4.1 per cent, the purchasing power of the monthly cheques will be about $1.00 less in 1989 than in 1988, according to Canadian Press.
Moscow – Ninety per cent of all first pregnancies in the Soviet Union end in abortion and hundreds of women die each year as a result of it, the weekly Moscow News says. Women are treated as though they are on an assembly line. (Reuter, Toronto Star, January 20, 1989).
Toronto-Vancouver – Dr. Robert Casper, head of the University of Toronto’s division of reproductive technology, has begun aborting unwanted fetuses in women faced with multiple births because of fertility pills. Casper calls the “procedure” done at Toronto General Hospital “selective reduction.” The same approach is being applied in Vancouver’s Shaugnessy’s Hospital by Duncan Farquharson, M.D., who calls not doing it “unethical.” Morgentaler, too, has always argued that abortions are truly “ethical” and those who oppose them are immoral.
