Dec 05

In The Mailbag... I've been expounding on this very thing to anyone who will listen! Come on, where is the Clergy in America? It is time for you to step up to the plate and defend the sanctity of un-born life, offering healing and closure to those in YOUR congregations, women, men and children, who have suffered or are suffering the tragedy of abortion. The protection of life at all levels is a God- given responsibility that can no longer be denied.

The following came to me and I offer it to you, my hands trembling as I write. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, then I pray you HEED THIS NOW, or not, at your peril: This is the failure for which you will be judged: by not speaking out against abortion, your silence from the pulpit condons the mass killing of the innocent, and the shepherding of millions of men and women to lives full of years of senseless anguish!

It is time to upset the congregational "comfort-cart," my brothers, by standing up, speaking out, and leading. This is your duty. It is your mandate, as assigned by God. The truth will set you free. It will set us all free. -- Joe

Pro-Life Group: Churches Should Show How Abortion Affects Christians

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 29, 2005

Colorado Springs, CO (LifeNews.com) -- A leading pro-life organization is challenging churches during the month of January to present the latest statistics about abortions to their congregation as the nation mourns the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Focus on the Family has challenged clergy members to consider recent statistics on abortion in the church when addressing their congregations. The group points to a survey conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a Planned Parenthood research outfit, showing 20 percent of women who have abortions say they are evangelical Christians.

Kim Conroy, Sanctity of Human Life Director for Focus on the Family believes that it's time for churches to be proactive on this issue.

"Every post-abortive woman sitting in our churches needs to know that there is help and forgiveness available -- and it's our hope during this Sanctity Week that pastors and other clergy will extend that to her," Conroy said.

Conroy added that while abortion is always a tough topic to discuss, especially when considering the emotions of someone who has experienced it firsthand, it is vital that churches prioritize talking about this growing problem.

"Justice, mercy and compassion must be at the forefront of the conversation if we truly desire to extend healing to the women in our churches affected by abortion -- both those who've already experienced it and those who are right now contemplating it," Conroy explained.

In its surveys of women who have abortions, AGI also reports 33% of women who have abortions and disclose their religious affiliation describe themselves as Catholic.

posted 12/ 30/ 05 by ps - reply

In The Mailbag... Bravo to British Pro-Life for standing up. The whole world needs to admit abortion hurts woman and men. If there are roughly 4,000 abortions per day here in America, the figures below would indicate that 1,600 men and women are placed at risk for post abortion stress later in life... everyday! -- Joe

British Pro-Life Groups: Govt Should Admit Abortion Hurts Woman
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 26, 2005

London, England (LifeNews.Com) -- British pro-life groups say they could provide better help for women who suffer from severe depression after an abortion if it would acknowledge the results of a study showing women still suffer mental anguish from an abortion five years later.
Research published earlier this month by the University of Oslo shows that women who have abortions face greater depression than those who have a miscarriage. According to the study, 20 percent of women who had abortions experienced significant depression five years later.

Anthony Ozimic of the Society for Protection of Unborn Children says the British government needs to change its guidelines claiming only a small number of women experience post-abortion emotional troubles.

"This provides further evidence of the reality of post-abortion trauma, which is distinct in nature from trauma following a miscarriage," Ozimic said.

"The Government has for decades made post-abortion trauma worse for women by denying them the ‘permission’ to grieve," he explained.

“We will be challenging the Government to withdraw its pro-abortion propaganda," Ozimic added. “If the law was changed to create in effect a right to abortion on demand in early pregnancy, it would actually place women under psychological pressure to have abortions."

The new study confirms what many advocates who work with women after abortions have seen firsthand every day.

Laura Middleton, National Director of Caring at LIFE, which runs pregnancy and post-abortion hotlines, says, "Forty-five percent of calls to our help line are from women seeking support several years after having an abortion."

I would like to extend my warmest wishes for a wonderful holiday, and even more,

I wish I’d been stronger. I wish I’d had more presence of thought. I wish I’d been less in lust. I wish I’d had more fight in me. I wish I’d found my voice. I wish she had changed her mind. I wish I had my baby back. I wish we’d never met. I wish I’d had another chance. I wish we’d worked it out. I wish I had my life back. I wish…

North vs. south, truth vs. lies, blue vs. red, republican vs. democrat, black vs. white, believer vs. atheist, east side vs. west side, cowboys vs. Indians, pro-life vs. pro-choice, right vs. wrong… on and on, and so on and so on.

So many divisions, are there not? Far too many divisions to track, so ingrained are our cultures with drawing a line in the sand and then choosing sides. All throughout our history, ever divided, even to life and death. And who are we today? We are a people truly divided and near conquer.

One must ask: where has the strength and character of the idea behind "E Pluribus Unum" gone, America? it means "out of many, one." One people, one voice. Different metaphor. Same meaning.

So how do we excise this all powerful abortion industry that has taken our society to even greater levels of disparity? Simple: success in the fight to end abortion condenses down to one factor: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. Our failure will be a lack thereof. Where are you, America? --Joe

In The Mailbag... Don't kid yourself this is not just a woman-thing: The mental anguish detailed here affects men too. --Joe

Oslo, Norway (LifeNews.com) -- Another study has confirmed the fact that women who have abortions suffer from mental anxiety, guilt, shame, and distress years later. Those negative emotional feelings can last as long as five years after the abortion or even longer, the Norwegian study found.

The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, in Norway compared 40 women who suffered a miscarriage and 80 women who had abortions. Researchers questioned them 10 days, 6 months, two years and give years after what happened.

The survey found that women who had miscarriages felt more negative emotions shortly after the event compared to women who had abortions. But long-term, women who had abortions experienced significantly more distress and anguish.

Women who had abortions were 10 times more likely to have negative long-term feelings about it compared with women who had miscarriages.

The Oslo University researchers said women who have abortions should be given information telling them of the adverse emotional reaction they will likely have to it down the road.

The study follows on the heels of a comprehensive study in Finland showing that those who have had abortions have higher rates of suicide than women who carry their pregnancies to term.

The comprehensive three-year study of the entire population of women in Finland found that, compared to women who have not been pregnant in the prior year, deaths from suicide, accidents and homicide are 248% higher in the year following an abortion.

The suicide rate among women who had abortions was six times higher than that of women who had given birth in the prior year and double that of women who had miscarriages.

The epidemiological study, published in the European Journal of Public Health, was conducted by Finland's National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health.

Pro-life group said the new Norwegian study confirmed what they have been saying for many years -- namely that women will eventually severely regret their abortion decisions.

Richard Warren, from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, reacting to the new study, agreed that abortion "may bring with it long-standing feelings of anxiety and guilt."

On The Wire... Read it, Heed it, and BELIEVE it! The walls are tumbling down. --Joe

Studies denying abortion-cancer link debunked: Professor's review of latest research upholds causal relationship
Posted: December 1, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern By Ron Strom © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

In his essay, Brind (Dr. Joel Brind, director of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute. --Joe) addresses 10 separate studies conducted between 1996 and 2005, studies used by those who deny a link between induced abortion and cancer, pointing out problems with the each study's methodology. He asserts those problems skew the results toward the denial of a causal connection between abortion and breast cancer, also known as the ABC link, making them thoroughly unreliable.

Brind criticizes a large study in Denmark done in 1997 that concluded: "Induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer." But the way the study was conducted is suspect, the professor contends. The study tracked abortions that occurred only since 1973 even though the procedure was legalized in Denmark in 1939 and thousands of older women whose records were part of the research had abortions before 1973. Also, Brind points out, the study's authors did find a trend of increased risk for breast cancer in those having abortions after 18 weeks of gestation but did not include that fact in the study's conclusions.

Brind also takes aim at a Seattle study that included just 138 women, all of whom were diagnosed with breast cancer in 1994.
"Strangely, no reason is given by the authors as to why only one year of diagnoses was chosen, why the year chosen was 1994 and not any other year, and no mention is made of the fact that the study is unusually small and the results should therefore be interpreted cautiously, to say the least," writes Brind. "The authors were nevertheless unjustifiably unequivocal in their conclusion that their 'results do not support a relation between induced abortion and breast cancer incidence.'"

Another study Brind looks at was conducted in 2000 in Oxford, UK. Though the study was large, Brind says, "more than 90 percent of women in the study who had had an abortion were misclassified as abortion-negative. Even the authors admitted that their 'data on abortion are substantially incomplete.'"
A 2003 study in Sweden is similarly criticized in Brind's analysis. A study this year of Scottish women, Brind points out, purposely left out women who had abortions before 1981. This in a country where abortion is used primarily as a means to delay childbearing.
Writes Brind of the Scottish study: "The most suitable prospective database yet to become available for the study of induced abortion and breast cancer was deliberately distorted beyond recognition. Hence, the authors' conclusion that induced abortion is not a 'substantive risk factor' for breast cancer merits no
credibility."

Mentioning research that does show a causal ABC link, Brind states, " It is therefore only reasonable to conclude, from all extant evidence, that induced abortion is indeed a risk factor for breast cancer, despite the strong and pervasive bias in the recent
literature in the direction of viewing abortion as safe for women."

The basic biology underlying the ABC link boils down to the fact that breast cancer is linked to reproductive hormones, particularly estrogen. At conception, a woman's estrogen levels increase hundreds of times above normal 2,000 percent by the end of the first trimester. That hormone surge leads to the growth of "undifferentiated" cells in the breast as the body prepares to produce milk for the coming baby.
Undifferentiated cells are vulnerable to the effects of carcinogens, which can give rise to cancerous tumors later in life. In the final weeks of a full-term pregnancy, those cells are "terminally differentiated" through a still largely unknown process and are ready to produce milk. Differentiated cells are not as vulnerable to carcinogens.

However, should a pregnancy be terminated prior to cell differentiation, the woman is left with abnormally high numbers of undifferentiated cells, therefore increasing her risk of developing breast cancer.
Spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, are not generally associated with increased risk, since they generally occur due to insufficient estrogen hormones to begin with.

Although this basic biological explanation remains undisputed, establishment cancer organizations and the medical community at large continue to deny or downplay the ABC link, using studies such as those criticized by Brind.
Abortion provider Planned Parenthood claims on its website that there is no ABC link, stating, "Attempts to prove [the cell differentiation] theory have failed."

Brind's 1996 meta-analysis reviewed all the studies done in the previous decade and found a 30 percent increased risk of breast cancer for women choosing an abortion after a first full-term pregnancy and a 50 percent risk increase for women choosing an abortion before a first full-term pregnancy.
Brind is the second professional in recent months to accuse scientists of bias and sloppiness in studying the ABC link. Last December, Ed Furton, Ph.D., editor of Ethics and Medics, opined in an editorial that scientists had done "shoddy research" on the issue.
The fear of lawsuits motivates those who deny the ABC link, according to Andrew Schlafly, general counsel for the Association of American Physicians and
Surgeons.
"The abortion industry and medical establishment withholds this information (of an abortion-cancer link) in an attempt to prevent massive lawsuits from being filed," Schlafly commented.

In an article in the medical group's journal earlier this year, Schlafy argued the abortion-cancer link is driving the medical malpractice insurance crisis in the United State. Failure to diagnose breast cancer is the most common malpractice lawsuit in the U.S. today.
Commented Karen Malec of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer: "The [ABC link] evidence is a half-century old, and the suppression of it is an atrocity."

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Ron Strom is a news editor for WorldNetDaily.com.