Commentary on the Children and Family Relationships Bill 2014

Pursuant to the publication of the General Scheme of a Children and Family Relationships Bill on the 30th January 2014, it is important to point out some of the unseen consequences which will arise should the bill be enacted in its present form We understand that the aim of the Bill 2014 is to ‘put in place a legal architecture to underpin diverse parenting situations and to provide legal clarity on parental rights and responsibilities in such situations’.

The Bill known as ‘Shatter’s Bill’will serve neither children nor mothers, according to a press release by the Association for the Defense of the Family and Marriage ADFAM 

[Heads of the Children and Family Relationships Bill 2014]

·       The definition of ‘embryo’ indicates a profound lack of respect, and that of ‘parent’ ignores the fact that the Family according to Article 41.1.1° of the Constitution of Ireland has ‘inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law’; and ignores the definition of ‘family’ given by Mrs Justice Susan Denham in McD. –v- L & anor (2009), point 62, where she says ‘Therefore arising from the Terms of the Constitution, “family” means a family based on marriage of a man and a woman.’ The Bill implies that biological parents can transfer such rights to commissioning parents in cases of surrogacy. [Part 1, Head 2: Interpretation (1)]

·       This Bill would discriminate between the biological father and the biological mother by persisting in the contested principle that the woman who gives birth is the legal mother. The birth mother in a surrogacy case would be the legal mother, and then the commissioning couples would become the legal parents. [Part 3: Head (10)]

·       This pre-empts the judgement of the Supreme Court on the appeal by the Government against the Abbott judgement [The High Court, March 5, 2013]. The Abbott judgement acknowledges the right of the genetic mother to be recognized as the legal mother. [Part 2, Parentage and Presumption of Paternity, Head 5: Parentage (2)]

·       The Bill ignores the evidence that children living in the care of non-marital couples, including same-sex couples, are 8 times more likely to be harmed than children living with married biological parents [Abuse, Neglect, Adoption and Foster Care Research, National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4), 2004-2009, March 2010, (Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation)]; and are 50 times more likely to die of injuries, than children residing with two biological parents [P. G. Schnitzer, ‘Child death resulting from inflicted injuries: household risk factors and perpetrator chararcteristics’, Pediatrics 116 (2005) 687-93.] [Part 3, Head 10: Parentage in cases of assisted reproduction other than surrogacy]

·       This Bill, in effect, would make a reproductive slave of the surrogate mother, and would embed the practice of IVF which, as ordinarily practised, relies on the foreseen wastage of 96% of human embryos conceived in vitro [i.e. ‘on glass’]. Surrogacy, as practised, frequently involves the deliberate abortion of one of the embryos conceived and implanted. A recent Chinese study has confirmed the strong link between abortion and breast cancer [‘A meta-analysis of the associaton between induced abortion and breast cancer risk among Chinese females’, Cancer Causes Control, November 24, 2013]. [Part 5, Surrogacy Arrangements: Heads 17 to 23]

Issued by the Alliance for the Defence of the Family and Marriage [ADFAM]

Belgium passes euthanasia law for children

The 13th of February 2014 like Dec 7^th 1941 is a day that will go down in infamy. On this day a new and horrifying law on euthanasia for children was passed by the Belgian Parliament. Doctors will be allowed to kill children "under 18" who have been diagnosed as being terminally ill. 

This of course begs the question of how accurate is any diagnosis and in particular one that will allow life and death decisions will be made on the basis of quality of life issues?  Both the existing and the new law appear to be in contravention of the United Nations Disability Convention which in Article 25. f} calls for prevention of ‘discriminatory denial of health care or health services or food and fluids on the basis of disability.’ 

Euthanasia has been legal in Belgium since 2002 but since its enactment has been prohibited for patients below 18 years of age. The newly approved law allows minors to seek euthanasia under certain conditions and to extend the right to request euthanasia to adults with dementia. There is no age limit but the children who are euthanized would have “to possess the capacity of discernment.”

The decision to kill a child will have to be approved by the parents and the physicians in care. In addition the implications of his/her condition must be explained to the child including the fact that euthanasia means being killed.

This expansion of the current law makes it unique in modern Europe and is reminiscent of the Nazi era in Germany.

Many concerns have been expressed in relation to the original law on the basis that the number of euthanasia deaths in Belgium has shown a rapid increase, the 2012 increase being 25%. Recent studies indicate that up to 47% of all assisted deaths are not being reported, 32% of all assisted deaths are being done without request and nurses are killing their patients, even though the law restricts euthanasia to doctors.

--> One can only guess at this stage what the implications of the new law will be and how it will be administered.

Belgian pediatricians said that the law was not necessary as "palliative care teams for children are perfectly capable of achieving pain relief, both in hospital and at home". Many members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe signed a declaration saying that this law "betrays some of the most vulnerable children in Belgium" and "promotes the unacceptable belief that a life can be unworthy of life which challenges the very basis of civilised society". 

Following the adoption of the law by the Belgian Parliament it is now up to King Philippe of the Belgians to sign it into law and appeals are being made to him to refuse to do so. It will be remembered that his uncle the former King Baudouin refused to sign the law that liberalized abortion in 1990 by abdicating for a day.

Belgian euthanasia law may be expanded to include children and dementia sufferers

We reported last week that euthanasia was out of control in Belgium. We now report that the Justice and Social Affairs Committee of the Belgian Senate on Wednesday Nov. 27th, approved a bill aimed at extending the 2002 euthanasia law to include children and dementia sufferers. The Committee approved the measure by 13 votes to 4 votes against.

     

The bill will now be considered in a plenary session of the Senate and will also be examined and approved by the Chamber (National Assembly). The schedule however has not yet been set.

It should also be noted that there are other bills in the pipeline aimed at extending or facilitating euthanasia for, “persons affected by an incurable cerebral illness” (such as Alzheimers).

The president of the Belgian bishops’ conference joined other faith leaders in criticising the proposed legislation, warning the measure risks “destroying the functioning of society”. See article in the Catholic Herald. 

“We are also opposed to suffering, whether physical or moral, and especially the suffering of children,” Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, conference president, said in a joint statement with Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders.

“But to suggest minors can decide on their own euthanasia is to falsify their power of judgment and their freedom. To suggest persons with dementia can also be euthanized is to deny their dignity and hand them over to the arbitrary judgment of decision-makers.”

We can also report that on Tuesday evening prior to the approval of the bill by the committee a number of peaceful protesters were harassed by the police .

According to reports the peaceful protestors who came as "Veillerus" ("watchers") to express their disapproval of the new euthanasia in front of the Senate were warned to move on, and some were even arrested.

The protesters posed the following question to the police: 

"Why are you arresting us, the peaceful Watchers? Should not you rather arrest the doctors who admit publicly to infringe the current legislation on euthanasia by not denouncing those who perform it?"   

Human Rights Council attempt to include radical anti life documents in resolution on children under 5 years of age

The Human Rights Council during its recent 24th session sank to a new low in attempting to use a resolution on children under 5 years of age, as a vehicle to further their attack on human life and the family, by the inclusion of a pro-abortion and pro- sexual orientation agenda in the resolution.

The resolution which was tabled by Ireland along with Botswana, Austria, Mongolia and Uruguay, included references in the early drafts of the text to recently published, highly controversial documents, issued by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), known as ‘General Comments 14' and 15' in which the Committee attempt to expand the scope of the actual Convention on the Rights of the Child by the inclusion of issues such as, safe abortion, sexual orientation and gender identity, sexuality education and confidential counseling and advice for children without  parental knowledge or consent.

One might ask, as the Holy See negotiator Rubén Navarro did during the negotiations, 'what relevance do have these issues have to under 5 child mortality'?

General Comment 15, whilst it includes a very short section on children under 5, asserts that the UN CRC grants children the right to:

• “confidential counseling and advice without parental or legal guardian consent”

• “sexual and reproductive freedom”

• “safe abortion”

• sexual education, reproductive health services and medical treatment “without the permission of a parent, caregiver or guardian”

• rights related to “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”

General Comment 14 also states that a child has a right to preserve their identity and that this identity can include their sexual orientation.

This deliberate misrepresentation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the accompanying attempt to get UN Member States to unwittingly advance sexual rights for the youngest of children should not only be opposed, but these comments should also be roundly condemned and denounced by all responsible countries in the world.

Many of the delegates had no idea that General Comments 14 and 15 contained such harmful provisions for children and their families, and were very appreciative when the harmful agenda was drawn to their attention.

Ultimately the references to General Comments 14 and 15 were deleted from the resolution when they were strongly resisted by delegates from many Member States, however one has to remain vigilant in the lead up to the upcoming International negotiations for the post 2015 period and the proposed sustainable development goals (SBG's) which will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDG's) 

Our Colleagues in Family Watch International have published an analysis, of the methods used by those who wish to advance their so called 'sexual rights' agenda, which is reprinted below

The 12-Step UN Program to Advance Sexual Rights.

While UN Committee “Comments” like Comments 14 and 15 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child are not legally binding, the strategy used by “progressive” developed countries to give fictitious sexual rights legal weight is brilliant and usually very consistent.  Here is what they usually do and what they tried to do with the recent resolution in Geneva.

Step 1. Collaborate with a UN committee, agency or expert to produce a document, resolution, report, or comment purporting to solve a serious world problem.

Step 2. Give the document a nice-sounding name so that other nations will look bad if they oppose it.  (In this case the document was called “General comment No. 15 (2013) on the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health (art. 24)” issued by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.)

Step 3. Make sure the document has multiple pages so that most busy diplomats, especially those from developing countries who don’t have multiple colleagues to share their workload, will likely not have time to read the whole thing.

Step. 4. Fill it with good provisions that most nations agree and sprinkle it with controversial “sexual rights” couched in the most deceptive/euphemistic language possible.

Step 5. Make sure the fictitious sexual rights are positioned as essential elements to a “rights-based approach” to solving the serious world problem.  Position everything in your sexual agenda as a “human right.”

Step 6. Make up your own data and facts and repeat them over and over again until people believe them (i.e., 8.5 million women have complications due to “illegal” abortion every year, therefore we have to legalize abortion as human right.  This figure was given at the side event at this session of the Human Rights Council at an event pushing for the decriminalization of abortion).

Step 7. To make your cause popular, organize a side event at the UN promoting the “rights-based approach” to solving the world problem you are addressing while downplaying or concealing the controversial sexual “rights” you plan to propose as the solution.

Step 8. Introduce an important-sounding resolution to solve the world problem to be negotiated by Member States, co-sponsored by one or two like-minded countries who are in on the plan.  (In this case the resolution was entitled, “Preventable mortality and morbidity of children under five as a human rights concern.”

Step 9. Recruit a strategic, unsuspecting developing country or two to co-sponsor your resolution (with the hidden sexual rights) to show cross-regional support for it. Make these developing countries out to be heroes for taking on this serious world problem.

Step 10. Insert a reference in the draft resolution to be negotiated endorsing the nice-sounding document created as per above (in this instance Comments 14 and 15 from the CRC Committee). If nations catch on to your plan and realize the controversial elements in the document you are  trying to get them to endorse, convince them to focus on all the positive elements in it that will be lost if it is not endorsed.  Make them feel responsible for the world problem not being solved if they do not go along with your plan.  (In this case make it appear they do not support preventing the death of children under 5.)

Step 11. If all else fails bribe or blackmail developing countries with threats to pull financial aid if they do not go along with the plan.

Step 12. Once your document establishing controversial sexual rights as legitimate rights essential to solving a world problem has been endorsed by UN Member States, take this to the national level.  Go into developing countries and convince their courts that all nations are under obligation to change their law to advance the specified sexual rights because they were endorsed in a UN resolution or document.  During UN country review processes (Universal Periodic Reviews) call these countries to account if they do not change their laws to advance these sexual rights.

And this is how it is done.

Human Rights Council side event on ‘Preventable Child Mortality and Morbidity and Human Rights’

The World Health Organisation recently issued a study on ‘mortality among children under five years of age as a human rights concern’ and the Human Rights Council will, during its current 24^th session, debate a resolution on the issue. In this context an important side event on ‘Preventable Child Mortality and Morbidity and Human Rights’, took place on Tuesday 10 ^th September.

Ms Bernadette Daelmans of the World Health Organisation (WHO) presented an outline of the WHO report on under 5 mortality and told the meeting that Just under 7 million under-five children died in 2011; nearly 800 children every hour but that this represented substantial progress towards achieving MDG4 in that about 14 000 fewer children died every day in 2011 than in 1990, the baseline year for measuring progress. Ms Daelmans told the meeting that globally, under-five mortality has decreased by 41%, from an estimated rate of 87 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to 51 deaths per 1000 live births in 2011. This decline translates into an average annual decrease in child mortality of 2.5%, which remains insufficient to achieve the MDG4 target of reducing under-five mortality rates by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. Numbers of under-five deaths have declined from nearly 12 million in 1990 to 6.9 million in 2011.

Ambassador Yvette Stevens of Sierra Leone told the meeting that significant progress has been made in her country resulting in under 5 mortality being reduced by 50 %.  The improvement according to Ambassador Stevens related to improvement in Public health issues such as access to medicines, clean water and hospital delivery of newborn babies.

Dr David Olayemi explained that there are 6 geopoitical zones in Nigeria and that conditions vary in the different zones. He told the meeting that malnutrition is a major health and development issue that contributes to as much as 53% of the under 5 mortality.

Professor Paul Hunt of the University of Essex told the meeting the UN had done an incredible job in drafting and agreeing a large number of International human rights instruments but that the right to health needed to be mainstreamed. He also called for technical guidance to help in the mainstreaming. He said technical guidance on child mortality would be a terrific way forward but it is a two way street and the various actors needed to listen to one another.

Following the formal presentations when the chairman opened the floor for questions. The panel were thanked for their contributions and reminded that the preamble of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) tells us that the Child by reason of his mental and physical immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth which raised some critical questions.

1.     Why is the largest and most vulnerable group of children, the approximately 45 million unborn babies who are slaughtered every year, ignored when preventable child mortality is under discussion?  Surely, they were told, this is contrary to the provisions of the CRC and in point of fact represents a double standard.

2.     The panel were also asked to explain how legislating for abortion improves child mortality the whole point of which is to terminate babies’ lives resulting in a direct increase in child mortality? In this context the panel were asked if this is not also contrary to the whole concept of prevention of child mortality.

The chair on hearing the questions decided to wait for a number of additional questions, before any answers were attempted, by the panel and a number of questions ensued on issues such as communicative and non communicative diseases.

The two questions remained unanswered except for a reference by the WHO representative, who referred to the problem of maternal mortality instead of dealing with the issues raised.

Shock report: Hooking Kids on Sex

LifeNews.com reports, you will be shocked when you view American Life League’s latest video report.

Directed toward adults only, the report Hooking Kids on Sex contains jolting, unedited pictures from Planned Parenthood’s community efforts to indoctrinate children and teens into a sick culture of sex. This report is not for the faint of heart.  It is, however, a long-overdue wake up call.

It provides the ammunition that concerned citizens need to get Planned Parenthood out of local schools and community organizations, and is an indispensable aid in defunding the predatory organization.

The report drives home the fact that the abortion giant is given millions of dollars of taxpayer money annually and unfettered access to our children to provide smut that it terms “age appropriate” so it can turn them into sex addicts. “‘Age appropriate’ is a standard concocted by Planned Parenthood itself so that it can sell pornography to kids as science,” says Michael Hichborn, producer of the American Life League Report. “If a dirty old man in a park showed ten-year-old children the graphic images Planned Parenthood pedals as education, he would be arrested.  Planned Parenthood shows this smut to children and is awarded with more taxpayer money and the ability to determine the efficacy of its sex indoctrination, so it can get even more taxpayer money.  It is time to stop this madness!”

It is with this backdrop of children being legally abused by the sex indoctrination machinery of Planned Parenthood that we ask you as Americans to urgently reach out to your representatives in Washington, D.C. and demand that they immediately end all federal funding to Planned Parenthood. We have crafted a letter that you may use as is or easily edit by following this link to our Defund Planned Parenthood Action Center.  Please act today!

While most Americans associate Planned Parenthood with abortion, this organization is also in the business of promoting a deviate and dangerous sexual agenda that in the long run will benefit the abortion giant’s bottom line, while creating a destructive and broken society for the rest of us.

Planned Parenthood has proven that it is a sex business that self-perpetuates itself by first developing obscene sex education materials that promote indiscriminate and risky sexual behavior to our youth through America’s public schools, families and community organizations.

The second step kicks in once the organization has created an environment of sexual risk-taking behavior among youth. It then markets and promotes contraceptive products and programs that have proven to be ineffective in preventing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Once the ineffective contraceptives fail, Planned Parenthood completes the cycle selling abortions to the teens it has sucked into its deadly cyclone. Tax-paying Americans who work diligently to contribute to strengthening our country are unwittingly funding the absolutely pornographic and child sexual abuse agenda that Planned Parenthood pushes on our society.

We invite you to share this explicit, extremely important video with every elected official, community leader, church pastor, school teacher and parent that you are able to reach out to. When the headlines scream of a broken economy, why are we funding Planned Parenthood’s sick and opportunistic plan to destroy America’s future?