Life Insight

A Publication of the NCCB Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities
Vol. 13, No. 1 January-February 2002
In This Issue...

Looming Issues:
An Overview

With concerns of national security taking center stage on Capitol Hill after September 11, pro-life initiatives, such as the Child Custody Protection Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, moved no closer to passage. One notable pro-life victory was achieved, however.

The foreign operations spending bill normally specifies the amount of the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund (commonly known by its former acronym "UNFPA") for its international "family planning" activities. This year's bill sets a ceiling of $34 million for UNFPA, but establishes no minimum amount, giving the President discretion to determine the amount of funding between zero and $34 million. Also retained in the bill is the Kemp-Kasten amendment, which provides that no U.S. funds will go to an organization that supports or helps manage a program of coerced abortion or involuntary sterilization.

Both supporters and opponents of UNFPA funding are now vigorously lobbying the White House. A decision may be imminent. It is very important that President Bush knows there is widespread opposition to funding UNFPA, an organization which contributes to a program using coercive abortion and sterilization in China. Evidence gathered in China by the Population Research Institute, and reported to Congress last fall, demonstrates that UNFPA continues to condone and coverup such human rights abuses. (See below, "Making Pregnancy a Crime – Part I.") Please contact the White House comments line at (202) 456-1414 to request that no tax dollars go to UNFPA.

A second issue calling for prompt action from the pro-life community is human cloning. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) recently described human cloning as the "key social issue" of our time and a "watershed time" for humanity (Cybercast News Service, 2/1/02).

The Human Cloning Prohibition Act (S. 1899), sponsored by Sen. Brownback and 20 others, is identical to H.R. 2505, which last July passed in the House of Representatives on a lop-sided, bipartisan vote of 265-162. It bans all human cloning, whether to produce a full-term infant (dubbed "reproductive" cloning) or to destroy the child in the first two weeks of life for his or her stem cells (so-called "therapeutic" cloning).

Almost everyone supports a ban on creating cloned human embryos to produce a full-term baby. But many proponents of human embryo research argue that future therapies using embryonic stem cells could require creating and killing clones of patients, to circumvent the problem of tissue rejection.

Two competing human cloning bills were introduced in late January: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is chief sponsor of S. 1758; Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) is chief sponsor of S. 1893. Both bills purport to ban "reproductive" cloning while allowing "therapeutic" cloning. In fact, they allow unlimited creation of human embryos by cloning, so long as all cloned embryos are killed. The only act banned by these bills is the transfer of a cloned embryo to a womb to allow him or her to survive. A Senate vote on these bills is expected in March. (Please see below, "Making Pregnancy a Crime – Part II" for more information on these bills.) And please call your Senators at the Capitol switchboard 202-224-2131 to ask them to cosponsor and vote for Senator Brownback's bill, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act, S.1899.

Human cloning and embryonic stem cell research have forced policymakers to confront the most fundamental questions concerning human life. Once conception has occurred, is it possible to consider the developing, growing entity that possesses a complete human genetic code as anything other than a human being? What rights, if any, are inherent to that human being? Could a policy which exempts any category of humans from the protections accorded other humans ever be considered wise or just?

Denying the humanity of unborn children has always been part and parcel of abortion advocacy. And this explains the apoplectic reaction of abortion lobbyists to two recent initiatives. On January 31, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson announced a proposed rule change to expand coverage under the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) to cover children beginning at conception (rather than at birth, as under the current rule) so that low- income mothers will be eligible for prenatal care. The reaction of Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt was typical. She called the proposal "inflammatory, unnecessary and simply un-American," and fumed that it "effectively relegates women to second-class status" by "elevating the status of the fetus above that of the woman" (PPFA press release, Jan. 31, 2002). For more information on this proposed rule change, please see below, "Seeing Through the Abortion Lens, Darkly."

The second pro-life initiative is a bill Congressman Cliff Stearns (R-FL) plans to introduce that would provide $3 million in federal funding to crisis pregnancy centers for the purchase of ultrasound equipment. Centers currently offering women the opportunity to see their unborn children through ultrasound imaging report a 3-fold increase in women who decide to continue the pregnancy. At some clinics that means over 90% of abortion-minded women are choosing life. Naturally, abortion lobbyists "bitterly oppose" this or any attempt to give women accurate information about their pregnancy and what abortion does. Details can be found below under "An Ultra Sound Idea."

Making Pregnancy a Crime – Part I

UNFPA has worked alongside the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) at least since the early 1980's, observing first-hand the "success" of the one-child per family policy, while always claiming the program was purely voluntary.

A recap of China's family planning program can be found in the September-October 2001 Population Research Institute Review. Briefly, women are not permitted to marry until age 23. All out-of-wedlock unborn children are aborted. Married couples are permitted one child, after which the woman is forced to use an IUD. Permission may be given for a second child four years after the birth of the first. Any unauthorized pregnancies are aborted. After the birth of a second child, the couple (usually the woman) will be sterilized. Those who fail to comply face imprisonment, the detention of their relatives, destruction of their homes, and/or crippling fines.

In 1998, UNFPA announced a new $20 million, four-year deal with the Chinese government, and emphasized that it would operate only in 32 counties of China where neither birth quotas nor coercion would be used (unlike the other counties, one can reasonably infer).

Those familiar with China's policy, reaffirmed in recent years, were skeptical that any counties would be coercion-free. One such skeptic is Steve Mosher, president of Population Research Institute (PRI), who has been documenting and publicizing human rights abuses in China for over two decades since he observed firsthand implementation of the one-child policy while living in a rural village in China.

Prior to the vote last Fall on UNFPA funding, PRI presented new evidence to Congress of on-going forced sterilizations and forced abortions in a county of China where UNFPA works hand-in-glove with Chinese population cadres.

PRI sent investigator Josephine Guy, Director of Governmental Affairs for "America 21", along with two translators and a cameraman, to Sihui county in the province of Guangdong. This is a county where UNFPA supports the allegedly coercion-free family planning program. It took only four days for the team to amass extensive, credible and harrowing proof of coercion in villages and family planning clinics within a few miles of the office shared by UNFPA and the county government's Office of Family Planning. Interviews were recorded on audio- and videotape, on film and in notebooks.

Among the many examples they found, a 19-year old woman was forced to undergo abortion because "she was too young to be pregnant." A woman who had become pregnant after officials had tried forcibly to sterilize her was subjected to a second forced sterilization procedure, under threat of her house being torn down. Women with unauthorized pregnancies often attempt to hide in neighboring villages or caves to avoid a forced abortion. While one woman was in hiding, nine relatives were imprisoned for four months and their homes were destroyed with jackhammers. The relatives were released only after the child's parents paid a "crippling fine" equal to about three years' wages. Cadres also conduct nighttime raids on the homes of those suspected of having unauthorized children.

UNFPA officials greeted these findings with incredulity reminiscent of Inspector Renault's line in Casablanca: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here." Fearing that these revelations would provide a basis for President Bush to block funds to UNFPA, the agency unleashed a barrage of press releases and talking points to the nation's media and to influential members of Congress. Using strikingly similar language, one editorial after another warned President Bush not to hold the lives of women and children "hostage" to politics. We are told that the $34 million he may forgo sending to UNFPA "could help prevent 77,000 child and infant deaths, 60,000 maternal infections or injuries, 4,700 maternal deaths and 2 million unwanted pregnancies." Naturally, the figures are unsupported. Left unmentioned is the fact that the $34 million would simply be redirected to groups that provide the same services without lending support to coercive programs.

Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt recently analyzed the accuracy of the hysterical maternal and infant mortality predictions UNFPA and Planned Parenthood disseminate each year in their efforts to block the Mexico City policy (denying family planning funds to organizations that perform or promote abortions overseas). Eberstadt found their dire forecasts "unwarranted," "undocumentable and unsupportable" ("Bush, Abortion, and Foreign Aid," The Weekly Standard, Feb. 11, 2002). No doubt the same can be said of the current campaign's figures. Please call the White House to express your view on UNFPA funding before it's too late.


Making Pregnancy a Crime – Part II

In a recent column, Richard Doerflinger explains the drawbacks of the two cloning bills, sponsored by Senators Feinstein and Harkin, which now compete with Senator Brownback's genuine ban on human cloning (S.1899):

To call these bills [Feinstein and Harkin] pro-abortion is to say too little. Current abortion laws allow the destruction of human embryos, as if they had a tenuous claim on human dignity. These proposals would require their destruction, as if they were rabid dogs.

Morally insensitive as these proposals are, they are also ineffectual in preventing even "reproductive" cloning. The bizarre and difficult aspect of cloning, the part that will take months or years of further research, is the act of producing viable embryos by this procedure in the first place. Once this is achieved, transferring an embryo to a woman's womb will take mere seconds. And once that happens, how would the birth of cloned children be prevented? By imprisoning pregnant women and forcing them to have abortions?

No, the prospect of an enforced ban of this kind is too terrible to contemplate. If it's any consolation, the sponsors of these bills may have no intention of enacting them into law. They are offering them as spoilers, to draw support away from the genuine cloning ban. When the Senate last debated human cloning, in 1998, a similar proposal was used to undermine support for a real ban–and then abandoned by its sponsors once the real ban was dead.

So to address a fundamental policy issue, the Senate may now consider proposals that are morally horrendous, legally ineffectual and politically disingenuous all at the same time. And pollsters wonder why Americans sometimes feel out of touch with their government.
Passage of Senator Brownback's Human Cloning Prohibition Act is by no means certain. Supporters of so-called "therapeutic" cloning seem to have convinced many Senators that their aim is only to rid mankind of dreaded disease by replicating cells and tissues–glossing over the fact that the desired cells and tissues originate in a cloned human embryo who is destroyed for these cells.

Almost weekly reports of new research using adult stem cells confirm their versatility, therapeutic successes and barely explored potential. Visit www.stemcellresearch.org for the latest breakthroughs. And, please, urge your Senators to support the Human Cloning Prohibition Act (S.1899, sponsored by Sen. Brownback) and reject the morally objectionable substitutes (S.1758 sponsored by Sen. Feinstein and S.1893 sponsored by Sen. Harkin).


Seeing Through the Abortion Lens, Darkly

Young audiences often react with surprise and skepticism when told that legalized abortion is an aberration. They assume that if the Supreme Court says "it's" not a child with a right to life until birth, then "it" is basically nothing, legally speaking. But this is not so.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), upheld a Missouri statute which states the following: 1) "the life of each human being begins at conception"; 2) "unborn children have protectable interests in life, health, and well-being"; and, 3) other Missouri laws should be interpreted as providing unborn children "all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state" (492 U.S. 504-505, quoting the Missouri statute).

In at least 25 states, homicide laws protect human beings during all or part of their sojourn in the womb. In 29 states, laws expressly affirm that the life of a human being begins at "conception" or "fertilization." (See D. Avila, "The Present Standing of the Human Embryo in U.S. Law," 1 National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (2001), 203, 213-215.) Many state court decisions have assessed damages for harm done to embryos and fetuses under personal injury laws. In a number of states, laws have been enacted or are under consideration to protect unborn victims of violence.

But many abortion supporters see all issues relating to prenatal life through the distorting lens of abortion. The unborn child must always and everywhere be considered a nonentity or people might begin to feel squeamish about abortion. Whether the issue is embryonic stem cell research or human cloning, postponing a pregnant woman's execution until she gives birth or seeking damages against a reckless driver for the death of an unborn child, the defining question is "Will it ‘chip away' at abortion rights?" The Wall Street Journal compares this outlook to the Brezhnev doctrine, under which even trivial departures from complete orthodoxy were swiftly crushed, lest the entire edifice of the Soviet State (or in this case abortion "rights") collapse.

Thus it was with the proposal to expand eligibility under the State Children's Health Insurance Program to include children from conception onward. Abortion advocates and editorial boards were incensed, calling it: "a transparent and cynical effort to continue eroding women's constitutional protections" (Kim Gandy, NOW); a "barren plan for women," "dishonest and distressing" (Boston Globe); "a guerilla attack on abortion rights" "devious and dangerous," (Bob Herbert, N.Y. Times); and, "us[ing women] as pawns to keep anti-abortion supporters happy" (The Tennessean).

Showing selective amnesia, The Washington Post declared the proposed change "the first time that a federal program has attempted to define childhood as beginning before birth" (A. Cooperman and A. Goldstein, "HHS Proposes Insurance for Fetuses," Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2002, A1). The historical inaccuracy prompted a Letter to the Editor containing this history lesson from HHS Secretary Thompson:

In fact, the Department of Health and Human Services' policy (as well as that of the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare) has previously allowed welfare benefits and Medicaid coverage for not-yet-born children.

As early as 1941 the Bureau of Public Assistance ... determined that unborn children could be covered under the Social Security Act of 1935. The board determined that under the act, federal funds could be provided to the states for the aid of unborn children.

The agency's 1946 Handbook of Public Assistance Administration permitted the inclusion of unborn children among those eligible for state plan aid "on the basis of the same eligibility conditions as apply to other children." The operating policy remained unchanged through 1971, when it was placed in the Code of Federal Regulations. ...

At the time of the institution of the Medicaid program, many state social service agencies adopted similar eligibility definitions. ...

These approaches were later changed through a decision by the HEW secretary. ...
Why is the HHS proposal a sensible solution from the point of view of healthcare and public policy?

Look for notice of public comments on this proposal, and be sure to express approval of both the expanded coverage and the means chosen to put it in place.

An Ultra Sound Idea

For all of the reasons given above, abortion lobbyists are also fuming at the prospect of giving pregnancy care centers ultrasound equipment (and, to compound the horror, using tax dollars!). Gloria Feldt, Planned Parenthood's president–who on a recent "O'Reilly Factor" could not form her mouth to concede that a "fetus" is an "unborn child"–charged: "They're using medical technology as political propaganda." If so, it's still a better use of ultrasound technology than the use it serves in Planned Parenthood's clinics to guide the tools of dismemberment.

NARAL president Kate Michelman also denounced the idea: "It never fails to amaze me how little respect they have for women's capacity to understand what goes on in our bodies. I faced a crisis pregnancy after having three children, and I didn't need anyone to show me a sonogram to inform me that my pregnancy would result in giving birth to a person." Supporters of the proposed legislation, "have one purpose in mind – to intimidate women out of choosing abortion, and using government money to do that. That is wrong." Oh, sure. Government funding is a good and necessary thing for UNFPA to support coercive abortion and sterilization overseas; government funding is "a matter of equal justice" to pay for abortions for teens and low-income women; and it's great for the full arsenal of abortifacient "contraceptives," condoms, and "how-to and why-not" sex education courses, but somehow it's wrong if it'll make a woman think twice before rushing into an abortion decision that she's likely to regret the rest of her life.

That's the real problem with ultrasound equipment–it's BAD FOR BUSINESS. It reveals the humanity of the child, a fact pointedly neglected in abortion clinic counseling and paperwork with its language of procedures and tissues and products of conception. Few women are so utterly driven to desperation that they will choose death for the little child seen nestled under their heart, whose wriggling arms and toes and lively heartbeat awakens a profound instinct in both parents to love and protect their "baby."

At "A Woman's Concern" pregnancy help center in the greater Boston area, about 40-50% of clients would decide against abortion before they offered ultrasound. Now, 77% of those receiving ultrasound decide to keep their baby. At a center in Columbus, which before ultrasound had only about 20% of clients choosing life, that rate grew to 95% of clients who have seen their babies on ultrasound. According to Tom Glessner, president of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, centers typically see a three-fold increase in the numbers of abortion-minded clients who choose life, bringing that category into the 90% range and better.

All things considered, the $3 million Rep. Stearns will seek to put ultrasound equipment in qualified pregnancy help centers sounds like money that will be very well spent.
Life Insight*
is a publication of the NCCB Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities
3211 Fourth Street, N.E.Washington, DC 20017-1194
Phone (202) 541-3070; Facsimile (202) 541-3054
Made possible through the generosity of
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*The materials contained within are intended for use by the Catholic dioceses and organizations, and permission is not required for reproduction or use by them. All other uses must be authorized. For reprints, questions, or comments contact Susan E. Wills, at the above address.






__________________________________

Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
3211 4th Street, N.E., Washington, DC 20017-1194 (202) 541-3070
June 11, 2003 Copyright © by United States Conference of Catholic Bishops