National Campus Life Network

This post was written for Saint Paul Students for Life by fradriansharp. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

There is a great reflection over at Bridges and Tangents by Fr Stephen Wang: 40 Days for Life London: Is it a good thing to pray outside an abortion clinic?

Read the comments at the Saint Paul Students for Life website.

This post was written for Saint Paul Students for Life by fradriansharp. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

There is a great reflection over at Bridges and Tangents by Fr Stephen Wang: 40 Days for Life London: Is it a good thing to pray outside an abortion clinic?

Read the comments at the Saint Paul Students for Life website.

This post was written for University of Toronto Students for Life by prolifepharmacist. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

It makes me laugh when people accuse me of proselytizing on the job just because I tell patients how certain medications can work. I thought it was my job as a pharmacist to know the different mechanisms of action of drugs but apparently I am getting this information from Psalms or St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

Here is an example:

A third way is by changing the womb lining, making it difficult for a fertilized egg to attach to the lining of the womb (implantation). A fertilized egg (embryo/unborn baby) needs to attach to the womb to receive blood and nutrients and continue to grow. If an embryo/unborn baby does not attach, it cannot survive.

Man, that must be straight out of the Epistle of James! Actually, this is from the patient counselling leaflet of a popular contraceptive, Alesse.

Imagine a woman, who believes that life begins at conception, taking the pill for contraceptive purposes for years and never knowing about the potential abortifacient properties of the pill. Imagine yourself as a health care provider and having that same woman come back to you and saying, “Why didn’t you tell me if you knew?” Yes, the vast majority of women do not care. However, the vast majority of patients do not care if their antibiotic can sometimes cause diarrhea but I still tell them.

Women are being lied when they think that a pill is only contraceptive in nature. Sure, a group of “experts” magically changed the time when a woman becomes pregnant but it does not negate the fact that some women truly care if they are ending a life 7 days after conception. They deserve to know full well what is happening when they take the pill. It is not about proselytizing, it is about informed consent.

Read the comments at the University of Toronto Students for Life website.

March 7th, 2012: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ABORTION DEBATE ON BC CAMPUSES

Vancouver, B.C. University pro-life clubs across British Columbia are bringing the abortion debate to their campuses in an unprecedented manner. Over the next week, six B.C. university campuses will be hosting multiple events, seeking to engage their peers on the issue of abortion.

“Our universities are places where ideas should be shared and contentious issues discussed,” states Anastasia Pearse, Western Campus Coordinator for the National Campus Life Network, a national pro-life student organization. “A recent CIHI report reveals that over a quarter of abortions are performed on university–aged students. If this is a choice young women are making, it is important that they consider what precisely they are choosing and know what abortion alternatives exist.”

Despite Prime Minister Harper’s repeated refusal to reopen the abortion debate in Parliament, pro-life student groups across the country have continued to be active on this issue, even amidst censorship and discrimination like that experienced most recently by Youth Protecting Youth at the University of Victoria.

Events include academic debates, resource distribution, information tables, and abortion imagery projects, all aimed at educating and engaging students in dialogue on the abortion issue. These clubs are also calling on their local politicians, asking them to bring the abortion debate to parliament.

Along with Canadian campus groups, others across the country are also working to raise awareness on the need to dialogue about abortion. Jakki Jeffs, director of Ontario’s We Want the Debate Campaign, has stated that, “the suppression of any debate in a democratic society is unacceptable.” The Alliance for Life of Ontario campaign is demanding that, “the current censorship of the debate around abortion be ended, and that an open and informed discussion be held in public.”

Abortion takes the lives of approximately 300 Canadian preborn human beings every day. Canadian pro-life students refuse to remain silent or be censored while such an injustice is occurring in our society.

Abortion Debates:
Capilano University: March 8th, 1:30 pm, Cedar Building Room 122
University of British Columbia: March 12th, 5:00pm, UBC-Woodward 1
University of the Fraser Valley: March 13th, 6:00pm, UFV Abbotsford Room B101
Simon Fraser University: March 14th, 6:00pm, SFU Burnaby, room TBA

For further information contact:
Anastasia Pearse Western Campus Coordinator, National Campus Life Network westerncanada@ncln.ca 604-365-3484

This post was written for uOttawa Students For Life by uOttawa Students For Life. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

From Aborting Women’s Rights:

So prevalent is this trend that the delicate balance required to maintain healthy populations is becoming badly skewed. According to an article in The New Atlantis:

“The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe – and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new ‘missing baby girls’ each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.”

When feminists talk about abortion, they do so in terms of women’s rights. Legalized abortion empowers women, they assert, because it puts them in control over their bodies; it gives them the choice whether or not to bear a child who has been conceived. What these proponents of “liberty” fail to consider, however, is that in many cases women are “choosing” abortion at the behest of someone else. Cultural pressures, fear of retaliation, and other factors are driving them to end the lives of their unborn children because daughters are deemed undesirable. Thus, abortion is being used as an instrument of oppression against females, not as a tool of liberation.

No doubt abortion advocates would argue that it is not abortion that is at fault here, but backward cultures that are misusing the tools of liberty in order to further their misogynistic agendas. Third world abortion might be an abusive, repugnant phenomenon, but that says nothing about its use in the western world. Such logic is nothing short of delusional. When it comes to questions of life and death, there is little gray area. You are either an advocate of life, a supporter of inherent human dignity, or you aren’t. You can’t justify the killing of the unborn the name “choice” and then complain when others exercise that choice in ways you find objectionable.

So this leaves the feminists of the west in somewhat of a pickle. What will they make of these new demographic trends? Will they stick to their guns and defend the use of abortion even as a tool of gender-based infanticide? Will they attempt to somehow construct a “morality of abortion” in which only certain motivations for the procedure are deemed justifiable? Will they evade the issue altogether?

For the sake of millions of unborn women around the world, here’s hoping this trend puts some pressure the pro-abortion movement to reconsider the implications of their inhuman and inhumane conception of human “rights.”

Read the comments at the uOttawa Students For Life website.

This post was written for University of Toronto Students for Life by prolifepharmacist. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

So, it looks like my post from last week has some critics. I thank Christine for the post and I was hoping for a little discussion on equality and rights for the unborn, but maybe next time (I guess debating the personhood of the unborn is tough?). In the comments section Christine said something interesting:

…and if my side is reactionary, yours is nothing but self-righteous…

That got me thinking. Are pro-lifers self-righteous? Do we feel morally superior to pro-choicers? Are we so absorbed with the rights of the unborn and abortion that we fail to find common ground with pro-choicers and work with them?

First, it is important to note that I am pro-life because I believe the pro-life side to be true. There is no other reason for me to be on this blog unless I am convinced that the unborn are persons and that others need to come to this realization, as well. Therefore, it is not a matter of I am right because I am so smart and wonderful, but rather it is a realization of the truth of the pro-life side and a desire to spread that message of the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.

Furthermore, I am not pro-life so that I can put other people beneath me and tell them what to do. I respect everyone’s freedom and choices because we are all human beings with free will. However, and I think even pro-choicers will agree with me, when that freedom impedes or harms another person, then you have crossed a line. Pro-choicers believe that by outlawing abortion we are impeding and harming women. However, any society that has to resort to abortion has failed women. If a woman has no support, is frightened and has no other alternatives then abortion is not a choice but rather a necessity. The last thing authentic pro-lifers want to do is to put women down or to make them feel even more scared than they may already feel. We understand that an unplanned pregnancy is a difficult situation to face for any woman. Therefore, there are pro-lifers who run crisis pregnancy centres so that women can have the support and care they need to ensure they choose life for their children. Crisis pregnancy centres have gotten a bad rap recently but, minus the media bias, they do more than Planned Parenthood when it comes to taking care of mothers and their children.

Now, I will grant the pro-choice side the fact that they truly want choice. I just want to ask a question: What are pro-choicers doing to ensure that pregnant women actually have a choice? I do not know of any pro-choice pregnancy centres but if they are helping pregnant women in any way, please let me know.

I think pro-choicers may also believe we are self-righteous because there are some pro-lifers, although not all, who disagree with birth control. Not only are we taking away a woman’s right to choose, but we are telling her what to do in the privacy of her own bedroom (nevermind the fact that there are pro-choicers in the States who would like to keep us out of their bedrooms but pick up the tab, but that will be for another post). The University of Toronto Students for Life has no opinion on birth control (unless, of course, they can act as abortifacients) but you cannot deny the link between birth control and abortion. In fact, the United States Supreme Court had this to say in the 1992 ruling of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey:

But to do this would be simply to refuse to face the fact that, for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.

In other words, abortion has to remain legal because for the last few decades it has been available as “back-up birth control”. It is quite logical once you think about it. However, pro-lifers bring it up because it is true not because we are so wonderful at self-control and we think that women who use contraception are heathens.

In addition, pro-lifers are not trying to solely work through the courts to get rid of abortion. We are, primarily, trying to raise awareness on the ground level through dialogue and education. We do this in sun or rain and whether it is warm or freezing cold. We realize that raising awareness for the rights of the unborn is something that needs to be done not for our sake but for the sake of those who do not have a voice.

Finally, the reason pro-lifers usually do not try to find common ground with pro-choicers is that we believe in the personhood of the unborn and they do not. If you truly believe that the unborn are human beings who have rights then abortion can never be a choice. How can you justify murdering someone when you acknowledge that they have rights like you and me? Does that mean it is okay for someone to murder you for any reason? If pro-choicers, for example, want to help at crisis pregnancy centres that is great. However, we will not allow anyone to tell a woman that if all else fails then it would be alright to murder her child. That should never be a choice. The most bogus claim is when a person says that they believe that the unborn are persons but they themselves should stay out of the woman’s “choice”. That is not acceptable. If your neighbour was beating his wife every night would you say to yourself, “spousal abuse is wrong but I am going to stay out of it.”? I would hope you would have the courage to call the police. All it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. Again, it is truth that drives us to speak up against abortion, not that it makes us feel good and mighty.

I hope I have done a good enough job at pointing out why pro-lifers are not self-righteous. If I have missed anything, please comment

Read the comments at the University of Toronto Students for Life website.

This post was written for University of Toronto Students for Life by prolifepharmacist. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

Really? I thought that’s what pro-lifers have been saying for the last little while, but don’t trust us! Trust the experts!

Seriously, though, this article in the British Medical Journal is callous. It really goes to show what kind of mentality arises when there is no respect for life. What stood out for me is that for a medical journal article there is a lot of talk about “personhood”, which is really a philosophical issue instead of a scientific one. And in terms of verbal gymnastics, check out this little somersault on the issue:

we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’,
to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.

Disgusting. In order to feel better about the killing of a newborn they use the euphemism of “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide”. Not only does it lessen the personhood of the newborn, it sounds nicer too. Win Win! Again, I ask why is there talk of moral status of an individual in a scientific journal? How can you perform experiments in a lab regarding personhood?

Science already has a term to describe a fetus, a newborn and a child: Human life.

Read the comments at the University of Toronto Students for Life website.

This post was written for University of Toronto Students for Life by prolifepharmacist. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

Really? I thought that’s what pro-lifers have been saying for the last little while, but don’t trust us! Trust the experts!

Seriously, though, this article in the British Medical Journal is callous. It really goes to show what kind of mentality arises when there is no respect for life. What stood out for me is that for a medical journal article there is a lot of talk about “personhood”, which is really a philosophical issue instead of a scientific one. And in terms of verbal gymnastics, check out this little somersault on the issue:

we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’,
to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.

Disgusting. In order to feel better about the killing of a newborn they use the euphemism of “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide”. Not only does it lessen the personhood of the newborn, it sounds nicer too. Win Win! Again, I ask why is there talk of moral status of an individual in a scientific journal? How can you perform experiments in a lab regarding personhood?

Science already has a term to describe a fetus, a newborn and a child: Human life.

Read the comments at the University of Toronto Students for Life website.

This post was written for University of Toronto Students for Life by prolifepharmacist. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

Facebook may have taken down this picture but here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Read the comments at the University of Toronto Students for Life website.

This post was written for University of Toronto Students for Life by prolifepharmacist. It does not necessarily represent the views of NCLN.

Facebook may have taken down this picture but here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Read the comments at the University of Toronto Students for Life website.