Conflicts of interest

If research funded by the tobacco industry just happened to come to the conclusion that smoking carried no serious health risks, would you be just a teensy weensy bit sceptical? Me too. I might just be of the opinion that they had a vested interest in ensuring people lit up as often as possible.

That being the case, it is a little odd that the usually sceptical press have not picked up on the fact that a study claiming that women who have abortions do not suffer adverse psychological effects was funded by Planned Parenthood. One of its authors also just happens to be a former member of the Alan Guttmacher Institute's board of directors (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) and is heavily involved with the abortion industry.

But the press is quite selective about what it chooses to be sceptical about and the ulterior motives behind this latest piece of junk science are unlikely to be questioned very publicly. In the meantime, women will continue to be lied to by the abortion industry in the name of choice and will continue to suffer the consequences.

Planned Parenthood covers up rape

This undercover film, made by the Mona Lisa Project, clears shows a Planned Parenthood nurse in Indiana covering up the statutory rape of a patient who claimed to be 13 and pregnant by a 31-year-old. The nurse is shown repeatedly saying that she doesn't want to know the age of the man involved and that she will not tell the authorities even though she is legally obliged to do so. She then gives the girl a cover story - that her boyfriend is a teenager - and shows her how to obtain an abortion in another state to avoid Indiana parental consent laws.

The nurse has been suspended pending a full investigation, but this is just one of many videos the Mona Lisa Project made during its investigations earlier in the year.

Pro-life pharmacist racially attacked

A man has been convicted of racially abusing a Muslim pharmacist who refused to sell him and his partner a morning after pill. According to the prosecution, Chris Mellett shouted: “United Kingdom, Great Britain, not for people like you!" and “Shut your ******* mouth you black ******* you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The comments in the combox are varied but generally side with the racist rather than the pharmacist who committed the apparently un-British crime of sticking to his principles. Even the article itself puts the word 'ethical' in inverted commas when reporting the pharmacist's refusal to dispense the abortifacient drug on ethical grounds. It says something for the way the UK is going that a racist is regarded with more sympathy than a pro-lifer, but at least the law could see who the real criminal was.

Murder by any other name...

A man who was convicted of two murders after he killed a woman who was eight months' pregnant, failed to convince a Texan court that only religious people believe life begins at conception, according to a news report.

Interestingly, though, Jacob Eguia has a point when he says that if he is guilty of murder for killing an unborn child, so are abortionists who do this for a living. State law gets around this awkward state of affairs by making an exception for abortion, but giving abortionists a get-out clause only renders the law more absurd. Since the state recognises that human beings have the right to legal protection from the moment of conception, how can it allow human beings to be butchered simply because the person committing the act of killing is a doctor and the murder scene is a clinic?

The core issue in this case is that of personhood, the court found that personhood begins at conception. Over the cunturies the issue of personhood has been used by elites to deny the humanity of a person, a group or even an entire race. It was on the basis of denial of personhood that hundreds of thousands of men and women of African origin were kidnapped, transported and forcibly enslaved in the colonies. Women in past centuries have also been treated as non persons. In this age it is the turn of the unborn baby to be treated as non persons in order to establish the radical feminist dream of a so called "right" to abortion. This decision is therefore a vitally important step in the articulation of the rights of babies before birth and because of this will undoubtedly be challenged.

More on Children as Commodities

A couple of days ago, I mentioned the disturbing phenomenon of people who think they can buy anything, including IVF babies of their preferred sex.

Just to confirm my worst suspicions about the Brave New World society we live in, in which children are valued only as far as they satisfy the needs of adults, LifeSite reports a couple facing jail for selling their baby on Ebay. The couple from Belgium, sold the baby for an undisclosed sum to a Dutch couple to whom they handed the baby in a hospital car park.

According to the report, this is not the first incident involving the online sale of a baby, with another case in America earlier in the year involving a newborn baby being advertised for $10,000.

The Catholic Church warned in Donum Vitae that this sort of behaviour would be the inevitable consequence of the "dynamic of violence and domination" so characteristic of abortion and IVF. The document states:

“The abortion-mentality which has made this procedure possible...leads, whether one wants it or not, to man's domination over the life and death of his fellow human beings and can lead to a system of radical eugenics.”

“The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered as an object of ownership: rather, a child is a gift, ‘the supreme gift.’”