Pro-Life World View | December 20, 2024

New Zealand’s official abortion death toll announced [2023]

The Ministry of Health has released the official annual report for abortion in New Zealand, painting an even more grim picture than provisional figures obtained earlier this year.

It is reported that 16,277 chemical and surgical abortions were performed in 2023.

Putting it into perspective, that is 44 pre-born children killed every day of the year, or 313 per week, and roughly two abortions every hour, every day.

FLI’s National Director responded to the news saying, “We must not lose heart. It appears that Satan has won. He has not. We must remain faithful, assisting pregnant mothers in their greatest hour of need and educating people, especially our youth, about the sacredness of human life, and the urgent need to protect the most innocent amongst us, our pre-born brothers and sisters.”

She declared, “Protecting pre-born children is the duty of everyone, not just a few. Without the right to life, there can be no other rights.”

An Advent for truth and true freedom

Monsignor Robert J. Batule’s Advent reflection tells us that what brings us to church at Christmas is a voice “from early in the first millennium, calling us to truth – and to God’s freedom,” and he contrasts what is truly good and what true freedom is, with how the world redefines many sins – such as euthanasia or medically enabled suicide – as acts of compassion.  He observes how we take such things in our stride as if “we have found an endless reservoir of ‘compassion’ to assuage our consciences when yet another moral boundary has been crossed.”

Quoting Pope Saint John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, Monsignor Batule reminds us that the pursuit of freedom and the good cannot ever be at the expense of truth:

“[M]an is no longer convinced that only in the truth can he find salvation. The saving power of the truth is contested, and freedom alone … is left to decide by itself what is good.”

But as the late Pope said elsewhere in Veritatis Splendor when speaking on the ‘law of gift’: “Contemplation of Jesus Christ is … the high road” to true freedom, where “the gift of oneself in service to God and one’s brethren” is the best way to think of freedom.d one’s brethren” is the best way to think of freedom.

Trump commits to keeping abortion pill available

In a blow to pro-life activists, President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to refrain from exercising executive authority to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone.  More than half of all abortions in the US are pill-based chemical abortions.

Mifepristone kills the child by blocking the hormone progesterone, which cuts off the child’s supply of oxygen and nutrients. A second pill, misoprostol, is taken between 24 to 48 hours after mifepristone to induce contractions to induce labour and expel the dead baby.

On the upside, it seems likely Trump will work to free jailed pro-life activists and perhaps will also ban Federal funding of international pro-abortion groups.

Amnesty International says abortionists are human rights defenders

In their campaign to suppress by law the witness of the pro-life movement and the right of health professionals to exercise conscientious objection to participation in abortion, an Amnesty International pro-abortion alliance is calling on the UN to recognise abortionists as human rights defenders.  In a declaration of principles, the pro-abortion alliance promotes abortion as a universal human right by referencing expert bodies and individuals who routinely “cite each other in interpreting a right to abortion in the text of treaties that make no mention of abortion and would never have been adopted if they did.”

UN ‘Gender’ Treaty would wage international lawfare against people who believe men and women are different

Here is another disturbingly Orwellian initiative that seeks to weaponize international law via a UN treaty. The Treaty would create a new but very broadly defined category of crime – that of “gender persecution.”   As noted by the author of the linked article, “[w]ith the new treaty, Western leftists want to label anyone who publicly opposes gender ideology as an international criminal — an enemy of humanity.”

The Vatican has been warning against this Treaty for years now and has been the leader in the development of the Rome Statute, which resulted in a sound definition of gender.  This definition is removed by the new proposal, leaving the Treaty open to unfettered and unjust interpretations and to the prosecution and persecution of “people expressing the wrong kind of opinions about human sexuality” by gender ideologues.

Pray that this latest move can be undone before the Treaty is finalized in 2029.

The paradox of bodily autonomy: From Roe v. Wade to the criminalization of silent prayer

The foundational argument in the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, legalising abortion in the United States in 1973, was so-called bodily autonomy. The argument was no government ought to have the jurisdiction to regulate what was erroneously framed as simply “a woman’s body.” From this came the pro-abortion catchcry: “My body, my choice.” 

Roll forward until today, where pro-abortion advocates cry out for police action against pro-life people exercising their autonomy who are quietly, silently praying – in their own heads – near abortion facilities.  In the UK, police have arrested and/or fined several individuals for silently praying near an abortion facility.  The State has, therefore, presumed a right of control over personal thought. 

There is a logical inconsistency here with a deeply disturbing preparedness on the part of a State to prioritise one set of freedoms over another, “a hierarchy that deems some liberties expendable for the sake of others.”

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