Abortion advocates promote abortion as a solution to the problems generated by an unplanned pregnancy. With regard to abortion and his own daughters, US President Barack Obama has said "If they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."
Doctor Priscilla K. Coleman, research psychologist at Bowling Green State University (USA), recently published the article "Abortion and mental health: quantitative synthesis and analysis of research published 1995-2009" in The British Journal of Psychiatry. She reviewed nearly 15 years of research examining abortion's effects on the mental health of the women who undergo the procedure. Her review encompassed 22 studies from 6 countries; taken together, the studies included over 800,000 women, 163,000 of whom had undergone abortion.
Her results? Subjecting the studies to rigorous statistical methods in order to draw meaningful conclusions, she found "that women who have had an abortion experienced an 81% higher risk of mental health problems of various forms when compared with women who had not had an abortion." In specific areas, women who underwent abortions suffered higher rates of alcohol use (110%), overall anxiety (34%), suicidal activity (155%) and depression (37%) than women who had not had abortions. Coleman also mentioned the common finding that women who carry a child to term have significantly lower suicide rates compared to the general population.
President Obama is right when he suggests that its a mistake to have a child outside marriage; the best situation is to save sex for marriage and to keep it in marriage so that children can be conceived and reared in an environment of support and love. Nevertheless, extensive research demonstrates that fixing the "mistake" of an unplanned pregnancy with abortion punishes the mother.
May Swaziland protect the well-being of her daughters and mothers by saving sex for marriage and keeping it in marriage. May the nation avoid the tragic "One dead child, one wounded mother" syndrome of abortion. No to abortion; yes to love and life.
Rudy Poglitshrpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Abortion Among Other Issues
In considering abortion among other issues, some might say "Well what about unemployment, and inadequate housing, and poverty? Aren't these issues important also? Why then is abortion made to be more important than these other problems?"
Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, puts it this way. "We who are leaders in the pro-life movement do not say that abortion is the only issue. It is, however, the foundational issue....An example will clarify this. We are rightly concerned about the poor, and need to develop programs and policies to advance their rights and enhance their lives. Sometimes people are heard to say that offences against the poor are a more compelling to them than the abortion problem. Certainly, the problems are related, because a consistent ethic of life recognizes that human life is sacred always and everywhere, and that progress in any area of advancing human dignity means progress in all the other areas as well.
But to make a truly equivalent parallel between the plight of the poor and that of the unborn, one would have to imagine a policy whereby a) the poor were officially declared to be devoid of "personhood" under the [American] Constitution, and b) over 4,000 of the poor were put to death daily against their will [as is the case for the unborn in America]...It is one thing to assert that a particular policy does or does not advance the rights of the poor; it is quite another thing to assert that the poor have no right to exist."
Without the right to life, all other rights mean nothing. Any rights to food, clothing and shelter can only be enjoyed by the living; if a baby is killed by abortion, then she cannot enjoy these other goods.
The Catholic bishops said the following in 1998: "Opposition to abortion and euthanasia does not excuse indifference to those who suffer from poverty, violence, and injustice...Therefore, Catholics should eagerly involve themselves as advocates for the weak and marginalized in all these areas...But being 'right' in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life...If we understand the human person as the 'temple of the Holy Spirit'-the living house of God-then these latter issues fall logically into place as the crossbeams and walls of that house. All direct attacks on innocent human life, such as abortion and euthanasia, strike at the house's foundation."
May Swaziland never adopt the abortion mentality, a mentality which denies the first and most important right-the right to life. May the nation respect the lives of all its citizens, from conception through all of life to natural death. No to abortion, and yes to life.
Rudy Poglitshrpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, puts it this way. "We who are leaders in the pro-life movement do not say that abortion is the only issue. It is, however, the foundational issue....An example will clarify this. We are rightly concerned about the poor, and need to develop programs and policies to advance their rights and enhance their lives. Sometimes people are heard to say that offences against the poor are a more compelling to them than the abortion problem. Certainly, the problems are related, because a consistent ethic of life recognizes that human life is sacred always and everywhere, and that progress in any area of advancing human dignity means progress in all the other areas as well.
But to make a truly equivalent parallel between the plight of the poor and that of the unborn, one would have to imagine a policy whereby a) the poor were officially declared to be devoid of "personhood" under the [American] Constitution, and b) over 4,000 of the poor were put to death daily against their will [as is the case for the unborn in America]...It is one thing to assert that a particular policy does or does not advance the rights of the poor; it is quite another thing to assert that the poor have no right to exist."
Without the right to life, all other rights mean nothing. Any rights to food, clothing and shelter can only be enjoyed by the living; if a baby is killed by abortion, then she cannot enjoy these other goods.
The Catholic bishops said the following in 1998: "Opposition to abortion and euthanasia does not excuse indifference to those who suffer from poverty, violence, and injustice...Therefore, Catholics should eagerly involve themselves as advocates for the weak and marginalized in all these areas...But being 'right' in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life...If we understand the human person as the 'temple of the Holy Spirit'-the living house of God-then these latter issues fall logically into place as the crossbeams and walls of that house. All direct attacks on innocent human life, such as abortion and euthanasia, strike at the house's foundation."
May Swaziland never adopt the abortion mentality, a mentality which denies the first and most important right-the right to life. May the nation respect the lives of all its citizens, from conception through all of life to natural death. No to abortion, and yes to life.
Rudy Poglitshrpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Abortion and Holocaust II
Thank you, Mr. Editor, for a second opportunity to discuss the parallel between abortion and the Nazi holocaust. The goal of my first letter was to show the similarities between language used by Nazis to dehumanize their victims and the language used by abortion advocates to dehumanize the targets of abortion-namely, unborn children. Dehumanization of human beings using language makes it easier to kill them. I believe that the scale of death makes this a legitimate comparison. Worldwide, there are up to 40 million abortions per year. What other historical events can compare with death on this scale? Nazism killed approximately 6 million European Jews using dehumanizing language for cover; those 6 million represented about 60% of all Jews in Nazi-controlled territory in World War II. The Nazi death program started with dehumanizing language and authorizing others to make the decision to kill these "subhumans".
Women will rarely kill their living children. But a woman in a crisis situation can be very vulnerable to deception when the medical people and her society use inaccurate and dehumanizing terms like "products of conception", "blobs of tissue", and "blood clots" to refer to unborn children. Abortion clinics in the USA routinely refuse to allow a pregnant woman to see an ultrasound scan of the baby and fail to provide accurate information about the baby's developmental stage.
You said it was unfair to compare "Nazi Germany of the 30s to the later democratic ideals of the USA". Unfortunately, abortion laws in the United States were not a result of the democratic process. In 1973 the United States Supreme Court overturned all democratically-enacted laws protecting the unborn in all 50 states.
The point of drawing these parallels was to help Swazis identify and reject dehumanizing language when it is directed at the unborn. In recognizing the humanity of her unborn and then acting to protect them from abortion, the citizens of Swaziland preserve the future of their nation.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Abortion and Holocaust
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines "holocaust" as "destruction or slaughter on a mass scale". According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (a pro-abortion agency), 115,000 abortions occur every day worldwide. The deliberate killing of over 100,000 innocent children everyday certainly sounds like "slaughter on a mass scale."
The language of abortion and that of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany bear uncomfortable similarities. Consider these examples:
"Only persons of 'German or related blood' can be citizens; this does not include Jews."-Reich Citizenship Law, 1935
"The word 'person', as used in the fourteenth Amendment (of the USA Constitution), does not include the unborn."-USA Supreme Court, 1973 ruling which legalized abortion nationwide
"The authority of physicians is enlarged to include the responsibility for according a 'mercy death [to] incurables.'"-Hitler's Euthanasia order, 1939
"The abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently and primarily a medical decision and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician."-USA Supreme Court, 1973 ruling
"The Jewish-Bolshevik Commisars personify a repulsive yet characteristic subhumanity."-Dr. August Hirt, Nazi chancellor of Reich University in Stasbourg during World War II. In 1943 Hirt ordered the execution of 115 prisoners and planned to use their bodies in an anthropological display.
"For the first four and one-half months the fetus is subhuman and relatively close to a piece of tissue." Amitai Etzioni, 1976
The world has had enough holocausts. May Swaziland refuse to slaughter its own innocents, and instead give mothers and children the support they need to prosper. No to abortion; yes to life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Sex Ed in Form 1?
On August 10 the Times told us that "The Family Life Association of Swaziland has made sure girls from St. Anne's High School know where to get their reproductive health services and HIV/AIDS information". Later we were told the students were educated on "teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and HIV prevention". We also learned that these students were in Forms 1 and 2.
Girls just beginning their secondary school experience should not need reproductive health services. Form 1 and 2 students need a society that gives them the clear and consistent message to save sex for marriage and keep sex in marriage only. That simple behaviour would end almost all new HIV infections (over 90% of new HIV cases are contracted through heterosexual encounters), eliminate unwed pregnancies, and put young men and women on the road to strong character and lifelong marital happiness. If mothers and fathers, other adults, schools, and the media frequently and consistently encouraged young people to save sex for marriage and keep it in marriage only, and if these adults provided a good example of that behaviour, this would build strong individuals, strong marriages, strong families, and a strong nation.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Girls just beginning their secondary school experience should not need reproductive health services. Form 1 and 2 students need a society that gives them the clear and consistent message to save sex for marriage and keep sex in marriage only. That simple behaviour would end almost all new HIV infections (over 90% of new HIV cases are contracted through heterosexual encounters), eliminate unwed pregnancies, and put young men and women on the road to strong character and lifelong marital happiness. If mothers and fathers, other adults, schools, and the media frequently and consistently encouraged young people to save sex for marriage and keep it in marriage only, and if these adults provided a good example of that behaviour, this would build strong individuals, strong marriages, strong families, and a strong nation.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Maternal Health and Abortion
People of good will desire mothers to have safe pregnancies and deliveries; no decent person wishes for a woman's pregnancy to cause her death. Unfortunately, abortion proponents regularly use the desire for safe pregnancies to advance legalizing abortion. They do this by stating that huge numbers of women die from illegal abortions or "complications of pregnancy and childbirth", then assert that legalized abortion would save these womens' lives.
The statistics of mothers dying of illegal abortions, however, are grossly exaggerated by pro-abortion organizations. A few examples:
*A 1989 CNN documentary said 6 million abortions take place in Brazil each year, and 400,000 women die from them. But the United Nations Demographic Yearbook for 1988 showed that 40,000 women between the ages of 15-44 died of all causes in that year.
*In Italy in 1983, abortion proponents claimed 20,000 women died of illegal abortions per year. The number of women aged 15-45 dying from all causes was in fact 11,500.
*At the United Nations' Habitat conference in Turkey in 1996, UNICEF claimed that 585,000 women died of pregnancy and childbirth-related causes each year. The United Nations Demographic Year Book for 1990 listed maternal deaths worldwide at about 6,000 per year.
Complicating this issue is the fact that in much of the developing world, the cause of people's death and even the sex of the deceased is not recorded. The United Nations Population Division issued a report "The World's Women 2005: Progress in Statistics" that said "more than a third of the 204 countries or areas examined did not report deaths by cause, sex and age even once." The report also said that “even where the deaths are derived from a civil registration with complete coverage, maternal deaths may be missed or not correctly identified, thus compromising the reliability of such statistics.”
We have cause do doubt, then, when the UNFPA tells us (as they did in the Times on 7 July) that 1,000 women die daily of "complications of pregnancy and childbirth" and that protecting "reproductive health and rights is fundamental to our collective future and sustainable development." 1,000 women a day is 365,000 women a year; that number falls into the same very high and hard-to-verify category described above. Remember also that in United Nations language, "reproductive health and rights" almost always includes abortion.
2007's "Women Deliver" conference in London claimed that 500,000 women a year die of pregnancy-related causes. A delegate to that conference said "With all this evidence that the number of maternal deaths and deaths from abortion is impossible to know, it is egregious that WHO, UNFPA, UNICEF and others build policy prescriptions – especially the highly controversial promotion of abortion rights – on virtually no data. Attention should be placed upon building good health care systems that not only provide decent care but provide registries of births and deaths so that sound policy to address maternal mortality can be made.”
Let us take this delegate's recommendation seriously. Let us love and care for both mother and child. No to abortion; yes to life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Saturday, July 23, 2011
To Save a Nation
Every day we read about Swaziland's financial woes and her efforts to get money to stay afloat. There are other ways, however, that a nation can sink: one of them is the disintegration of marriage and family. A Swazi friend recently told me stories of relationship chaos in the country. Story one: a man and a woman have a child together, then the father marries some other woman and the wife doesn't want the child around. The mother doesn't want the child, and so this daughter is left rudderless. Is it any wonder that this girl starts getting into trouble? She has never known the love and direction of her father or mother. She tells my friend, in as many words, that no one cares for her-so why should she care what she does? Story two: unmarried mom starts dating a man and introduces him to her daughter. Thing is, boyfriend and daughter are better "introduced" than mom knows, as they have a relationship that mom doesn't know about. Story three: A man stays in town with his live-in lover. Additionally, he marries a girl back in his home area. The "girl back home" knows about the woman in town, and when the man dies, the home girl comes to collect all the late man's possessions. "But we had a joint bank account, and children together!" protests the woman in town. "Irrelevant", replies the home girl's family. "You and he were never married. Give us all the stuff".
If you try to build a house with crumbling bricks, the house will fall. The family is the basic unit of society; if too many families disintegrate or never truly form in the first place, poverty, juvenile crime, teenage pregnancies, and the pain and heartbreak that accompany these ill-effects will multiply. As my friends' stories illustrate, these negative outcomes are already upon us.
Unlike Swaziland's current financial predicament, the resources to repair the marriage and family crisis are within reach. Saving sex for marriage, and keeping sex in marriage between one husband and one wife, is the way to increase love and security for generations. May men and women save sex for their one and only spouse. Doing so will multiply happiness and strengthen the nation.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
If you try to build a house with crumbling bricks, the house will fall. The family is the basic unit of society; if too many families disintegrate or never truly form in the first place, poverty, juvenile crime, teenage pregnancies, and the pain and heartbreak that accompany these ill-effects will multiply. As my friends' stories illustrate, these negative outcomes are already upon us.
Unlike Swaziland's current financial predicament, the resources to repair the marriage and family crisis are within reach. Saving sex for marriage, and keeping sex in marriage between one husband and one wife, is the way to increase love and security for generations. May men and women save sex for their one and only spouse. Doing so will multiply happiness and strengthen the nation.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
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