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Contents © 1996
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

July/August 1996

"Time and effort has also been spent by International Planned Parenthood to loosen up the anti-abortion laws in such countries as Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkino Faso. Question for the Black Caucus: What do those countries have in common? Are we beginning to get the picture yet?

"'As far as the Black Caucus is concerned, they're all pro-abortion,' Chris Smith told me. 'There isn't a single exception among the women and men who make up the caucus...'

"Until about 1980, the black leadership seemed to understand that the man had a plan. Jesse Jackson gave many anti-abortion speeches in the 1970's. After he and Dick Gregory spoke at the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition in New York, in 1974, the pro-abortion activist and clinic owner Bill Baird accused them of 'exploiting black women's bodies to act as breeding machines to give more political power to male black leadership.' Well, Baird won that debate. It turned out to be no contest. Jesse Jackson teamed up with the abortionists and the Rockefeller Republicans.

"Coalition politics is what happened. In return for receiving their goodies from the white liberals -- minority set-asides, quotas, legal privileges and entitlements, racially gerrymandered districts -- the black leadership knew what they had to give in return: Full support for the feminist position on abortion... Eldridge Cleaver said recently that we now have 'the worst leadership in the black community since slavery.'"


HOW DOES AMY DO IT? reads the title in the Pentecost 1996 Catholic Home Educator. "Most homeschoolers in our area know, or at least have heard of Amy Hambleton -- the one 'with all those boys' -- seven of them, in fact, all in a row, with three little girls at the end." Some of Amy's hints: "Amy has only two sizes of boys' clothing like socks, underwear, t-shirts...and only one type of sock...To keep her food costs low, she does not buy breakfast cereals, desserts, or other prepared foods...Amy manages to homeschool all of her kids by relying heavily on workbooks and texts which the kids can do themselves...She generally weans her kids off the daytime nap habit around two years of age so that everyone under 10 or so goes to bed around 7 or 7:30, giving her time to unwind...She rarely interferes in boys' fights and arguments, preferring to ignore them for the sake of her sanity, unless they are 'really hurting each other.'"


"MY EIGHTH GRANDCHILD, a little girl who was to be christened Anna, had Down's Syndrome," writes Margaret White from London in the Spring 1996 Human Life Review. "Before legalised abortion became common in Europe there were seven research doctors working to find a way to treat children with Down's Syndrome; afterwards there was only one -- Professor Jerome Lejeune. Soon after Anna was born I wrote to him and asked if we could bring her to Paris...Professor Lejeune was the scientist who discovered the extra chromosome on the 21st pair (Trisomy 21) that is present in Down's Syndrome. In spite of his eminence and the considerable success his work had already achieved, all his research funds were cut off by the late President François Mitterand....

"Anna grew and thrived....One evening in the spring she became feverish; she died before dawn the next day (not from anything connected with Down's Syndrome)..." White explains how she set up the Anna Fund, in part to help fund Lejeune's research, in part to help English parents take their children to Lejeune in Paris. "I asked Professor Lejeune if we could have his treatment regime and research results so that we could set up a clinic in London and he readily agreed. Shortly afterwards we heard that he was dying of cancer. A few days before he died we asked if we could call the clinic the Lejeune Clinic and carry on his work; he replied 'Yes, that is the best thing that could happen.' He knew that the professor who was taking his place at the University of Paris and the hospital for sick children was not all pro-life; he did not know if his work had any future in Paris."


'PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION: IT'S THE ONLY CORRECT TERM' was the title of a story which appeared in the May 20 National Right to Life News. "You may have read in the paper that President Clinton vetoed a bill 'outlawing late-term abortions' or 'banning a procedure called intact dilation and evacuation.' But actually Congress never passed such a bill. Rather, Congress passed -- and President Clinton vetoed -- a bill to ban partial-birth abortion (unless necessary to save the mother's life). The bill (HR 1833) defines partial-birth abortion, for purposes of the U.S. criminal code, as 'an abortion in which the person performing the abortion partially vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the fetus and completing the delivery.'

"The bill does not contain any reference to the gestational age of the fetus/baby....The bill makes no reference whatever to 'intact dilation and evacuation' abortions....[late abortionist] Dr. McMahon used the term 'intact dilation and evacuation' to cover any procedure that resulted in an intact cadaver....This also included procedures to remove the bodies of babies who had died natural deaths in utero and procedures to remove the bodies of babies who had been deliberately killed in utero, neither of which is a partial-birth abortion as defined by the bill."


WHAT I SAW AT THE ABORTION, also from the Spring Human Life Review: "The doctor selects a three-and-one-half-inch needle bearing a central stylet. He places the point at the site of the previous injection. He aims it straight up and down, perpendicular. Next he takes hold of her abdomen with his left hand, palming the womb, steadying it. He thrusts with his right hand. The needle sinks into the abdominal wall.

Oh, says the woman quietly.

But I guess it is not pain that she feels. It is more a recognition that the deed is being done.

Another thrust and he has speared the uterus.

We are in, he says.

He has felt the muscular wall of the organ gripping the shaft of his needle. A further slight pressure on the needle advances it a bit more. He takes his left hand from the woman's abdomen. He retracts the filament of the stylet from the barrel of the needle. A small geyser of pale yellow fluid erupts.

We are in the right place, says the doctor. Are you feeling any pain? he asks.

She smiles, shakes her head. She gazes at the ceiling.

In the room we are six: two physicians, two nurses, the patient, and me.

I see something! It is unexpected, utterly unexpected, like a disturbance in the earth, a tumultuous jarring. I see a movement -- a small one. But I have seen it.

And then I see it again. And now I see that it is the hub of the needle in the woman's belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.

Again! And I know!

It is the fetus that worries thus. It is the fetus struggling against the needle. Struggling? How can that be? I think: that cannot be. I think: the fetus feels no pain, cannot feel fear, has no motivation. It is merely reflex.

I point to the needle.

It is a reflex, says the doctor.


THE HAND OF GOD, the book by former abortionist Bernard Nathanson about his road to the Church, was reviewed in the June issue of Crisis. After witnessing Operation Rescue pro-lifers in Manhattan, Nathanson "plunged into Malcolm Muggeridge, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, Karl Stern, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, Richard Gilman, Blaise Pascal, and Cardinal Newman, all of whom had taken the path he was considering.

"By then he had already gotten to know John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest based in Princeton with a doctorate in theology and a reputation for helping intellectual seekers.

"'He'd heard I was prowling around the edges of Catholicism,' the doctor says. 'He contacted me and we began to have weekly talks. He'd come to my house and give me reading materials....'

"Other than McCloskey, the biggest influence on Nathanson's decision was Karl Stern, a world-renowned psychoanalyst who was one of his professors in the 1940s at McGill University Medical College in Montreal. Stern had converted from Orthodox Judaism to Catholicism in 1943 and later chronicled his spiritual journey in Pillar of Fire."


THE CARTOON on the cover of the June 8-15 America magazine makes fun of p.c. language, but the lead article is an ad hominem defense: "Those who oppose inclusive language for liturgical texts and translations of Scripture do not seem comfortable confessing that they do this on grounds of purely personal preference." The author, Joseph Jensen, O.S.B., attacks reports in Catholic World Report, Inside the Vatican, and Our Sunday Visitor; Jensen's main complaint is that "'conservative lobbyists...having been outvoted in the the democratic process of the NCCB, use their influence in Rome to attain their goals in other ways." The page-three editorial and a story by dissident Richard McCormick, S.J. of Notre Dame gnash teeth over the bishops' censure of Richard McBrien. And Father Mike Sinor, on the San Diego seminary staff until last year, writes in a letter to the editor from Calexico that "America is an oasis in the desert where I live. Keep up the good work!"


JESUIT PRIEST and former Democratic congressman Robert Drinan wrote against the partial-birth abortion ban; his opinions first appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, then on June 4 in the New York Times, on June 6 in the Sacramento Bee: "Congress should sustain the veto. The bill does not provide an exception for women whose health is at risk, and it would be virtually unenforceable.

"I write this as a Jesuit priest who agrees with Vatican II, which said abortion is virtually infanticide, and as a lawyer who wants the Clinton administration to do more to carry out its pledge to make abortions rare in this country." [Editor: Drinan voted consistently in Congress to promote abortion.]

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