LIFE DIGEST: Pro-choice GOP nominee would help, NARAL says
- Oct 16, 2007 - comment
A pro-choice Republican presidential nominee “would be good” for the movement, says a spokeswoman for a leading abortion rights organization.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is the only GOP candidate who would fit that description in the 2008 election campaign. Giuliani’s abortion stance already has resulted in some pro-life Republicans saying they would not even vote for him if he were running against Democrat Hillary Clinton for the White House. Clinton is an abortion rights advocate.
The opposite side of the battle over abortion certainly has a different viewpoint.
“The Republican Party used to be about the conservative principles of limited government intervention in private life. It seems to me if they went back to that and stood out from the rigid mainstream, anti-choice agenda, I think yeah, it would be good for the movement,” said Elizabeth Shipp, political director of NARAL Pro-choice America.
Would NARAL back a Giuliani candidacy?
“I don’t know yet,” Shipp told the Huffington Post, a liberal website. “He has said some very concerning things since getting into this race. If you have to grade him compared to everyone else you have to give him an incomplete.”
Giuliani is the only GOP candidate whom NARAL would possibly support, Shipp said.
Meanwhile, Giuliani’s pro-choice position has placed him at the center of debate in the Roman Catholic Church. He is a Catholic who supports abortion rights against the church’s teaching – like Democratic presidential candidates Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson.
St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke is expected to urge U.S. Catholic bishops in a meeting next month to endorse his position that any person administering communion should deny it to political candidates who support abortion, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Oct. 3.
When asked if he would refuse to serve communion to Giuliani, Burke told the newspaper, “If the question is about a Catholic who is publicly espousing positions contrary to the moral law and I know that person knows it, yes I would.”
In 2004, Burke said he would deny Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry the sacrament for his pro-choice views.
Global abortion study flawed, pro-lifers say
A new worldwide study of abortion that has been described as the most comprehensive to date is biased and based on uncertain statistics, pro-life leaders say.
The survey, a joint effort of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, reported abortion rates are comparable whether or not the procedure is illegal, implying banning abortion does little to keep a woman from having one.
“What we see is that the law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion,” said WHO spokesman Paul Van Look, according to an Oct. 12 report in the International Herald Tribune. “If there’s an unplanned pregnancy it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.”
Pro-lifers did not buy the survey.
Abortion often is illegal in developing countries, and recording accurate abortion data in those countries is impossible, said Stephen Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI).
“Neither Guttmacher nor anyone else knows how many abortions have been performed worldwide in this year or any other year,” Mosher said in a written statement. “In Columbia, Guttmacher reports hundreds of thousands of abortions. Yet PRI was recently informed by the Columbian Vice Minister for Health that the ministry has performed only about 50 abortions since the legalization of abortion last May. This is several orders of magnitude smaller than Guttmacher claims.”
Randall O’Bannon of the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund told the newspaper, “These numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data.”
The problem in developing countries is the poor state of health care, not the governmental policy on abortion, some pro-lifers said.
The WHO and Guttmacher “have equated the word ‘safe’ with ‘legal’ and ‘unsafe’ with ‘illegal,’ which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal,” O’Bannon said.
The study was published in the Oct. 13 issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal.
Massachusetts reverses rule on stem cells
A Massachusetts regulatory council has reversed a restriction on embryonic stem cell research instituted only last year when Republican Mitt Romney was governor.
The Public Health Council voted unanimously Oct. 10 to revise one sentence and repeal the regulation backed by Romney, now a leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination. All 15 members of the council were appointed by new Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, according to the Boston Globe.
The previous language, approved in August 2006, said embryos could not be created “with the sole intent of using the embryo for research,” the Globe reported. Under that rule, scientists feared the use of stem cells from embryos created outside the state for research purposes could place them in legal jeopardy.
Pro-life leader Kris Minneau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, had said before the council’s action a rule change would open a “Pandora’s box of creating human embryos in laboratory conditions on a wide-scale production.” According to the Associated Press, Minneau said, “We need safeguards against the rampant exploitation of human life.”
Stem cells are the body’s master cells that can develop into tissues and other cells, providing hope for the treatment of numerous afflictions. Extracting stem cells from embryos results in the destruction of the tiny human beings. Embryonic research has yet to treat any diseases in human beings and has been plagued by the development of tumors in lab animals.
Unlike research using embryos, extracting stem cells from non-embryonic sources—such as umbilical cord blood, placentas, fat and bone marrow—has nearly universal support. Such research has produced treatments for at least 73 ailments, according to Do No Harm, a coalition promoting ethics in research. These include spinal cord injuries, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis and sickle cell anemia.
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