The CEDAW Bill on Women's Rights is increasingly, and fittingly, being referred to as "the abortion bill". Even though abortion is clearly the killing of a human being in the earliest stages of her life, the fact remains that the radical feminists promoting this bill are hell-bent on its legalisation. Until recent times when abortion advocates began to manipulate language and redefine scientific terms, there was no doubt that we were conceived at our conception.
Now, however, it has come to a point where it is necessary to demonstrate the humanity of the preborn child in order to show that abortion is indeed the killing of a human being. This article points out that the child within the womb is no less human, having no less the right to life, than the child without. It follows that abortion is murder. The falsehoods propagated by abortionists in order to fashion public mentality into supporting their cause of expanding and institutionalising abortion are also exposed. Further, since CEDAW requires the changing of the national Constitution, the incorporation of CEDAW into national law through the bill on Women's Rights constitutes a loss of national sovereignty.
Those who promote abortion "rights" or "reproductive health rights" deny the reality that abortion is the destruction of an innocent voiceless vulnerable human being. It is conjectured that the child in utero is dispensable because she is something other or lesser than what the rest of us are. When Africans were enslaved, the justification was that black people were subhuman. The Red Indians were deemed subhuman and killed by American colonists because they were "unwanted" and a problem to be eliminated in order to pursue imperialistic goals. Likewise, Jews and Gypsies were ex-"terminated" by the Nazis. The Nazis were pro-choice. They chose to kill unwanted Jews.
During those times too, pseudo-scientific information was propagated to soften the barbaric reality of slavery and of the massacre of weaker groups in society. In the Midweek Review of the 23rd February 2005, Manel Abeysekera, albeit in good faith, introduces a latin term "persona", and then excludes the preborn child from this undefined category, and does so without justification. Yet less than a century ago, the law in Britain held that "the statutory word 'person' does not include women" (cf. the British Voting Rights case, 1909). In our day, the preborn child is unjustly marginalised into a status of subhumanity and it is imperative that this myth propagated by abortion advocates is dispelled.
That our life begins at our conception is not a cultural, social, religious or personal opinion. It is an unrelenting, objective, scientific fact. The "father of modern genetics" Professor Jerome Lejeune told US lawmakers in 1981 that "to accept that after fertilisation has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. It is plain experimental evidence". The meteoric progress in science since then has only confirmed this fact and serves to better expose the lies propagated by abortion advocates who attempt to sway public opinion to their cause by dehumanising the preborn child. An understanding of the procreation and prenatal development of the child is important because against a sound scientific background the arguments for the promotion of abortion and of abortifacients such as Postinor 2 can be more clearly seen to be false.
The ovum (or egg) and the sperm are produced via a special type of cell nuclear division called meiosis. Meiosis reduces the chromosome number by half such that ovum and sperm each possess only 23 chromosomes, whereas the number of chromosomes characteristic of the human species is 46. During the process of fertilisation the ovum and sperm meet, and maternal and paternal chromosomes intermingle and fuse to produce a full human genome. This is a radical event because at this moment of conception, the sperm and the ovum cease to exist as such, and a new human being is procreated. That is, one of us comes into being. If we are killed at any time after our conception, we die. The 46 chromosome genetic code not only defines the new life as human, but also the sex, eye and hair colour and a myriad of other individual characteristics such as body type and facial features. This newly existing, genetically unique, whole, living human being is biologically an individual member of the human species, and is called zygote at this initial stage of her life.
Professor Ronan O'Rahilly, who contributed to the development of the Carnegie stages of human embryological development, and also sits on the international board of Nomina Embryologica which determines the correct terminology to be used in human embryology textbooks internationally tells us that "the zygote is characteristic of the last phase of fertilisation and is identified by the first cleavage spindle. It is a unicellular embryo." The work embryo is derived from Greek and means "teeming with life" even though learned feminists have personally communicated to the author the falsehood that the embryo is not alive.
So now that we have been conceived, what do we do next? The zygote immediately produces specifically human proteins and enzymes and genetically directs her own growth and development, which has been proven not to be directed by her mother. The mother begins a beautiful relationship with her new child by producing an immuno-suppressant known as the early pregnancy factor (EPF), which protects her child from being attacked and rejected by her immune system as a foreign body. An immuno-suppressant is necessary precisely because the zygote is not part of her mother, making it clear that the feminist claim of having the right to kill a preborn child on the presumption that the child is part of her body - and she can do what she wants with her body - is entirely unfounded.
The Carnegie system classifies our first 8 weeks, the embryological period, into 23 distinct stages. Three to four days after conception, the developing embryo leaves the oviduct (fallopian tube) and enters the uterine cavity. Implantation onto the mother's uterine wall begins five to six days after conception, and occurs over the following week. It is during this period of our life that abortifacients such as Postinor 2 can take effect by preventing implantation and thereby causing death. According to the FDA, emergency "contraception" pills "act by delaying or inhibiting ovulation, and/or altering tubal transport of sperm and/or ova thereby inhibiting fertilisation, and/or altering the endometrium thereby inhibiting implantation" (FDA, Federal Register Notice, Vol. 62, 1997).
The Canadian Therapeutic Products Directorate defines this post-coital pill similarly and its manufacturer Schering AG also admits that it can function by preventing our implantation. This potent drug is administered up to several days after sexual intercourse and takes a further day to take effect. It is unreasonable to expect it to prevent conception - that is, be contraceptive - since fertilisation may begin within 15 minutes after intercourse if an ovum is present in the oviduct, or over the following days if ovulation takes place before this pill can take effect. A simple arithmetic model predicts that when emergency "contraception" pills do have an effect, they are 57 % abortifacient if taken within three days, and 71 % abortifacient when taken on the third day after sexual intercourse (cf. http://www.all.org/stopp/numbers.htm). In fact, "post-coital drugs act principally to terminate a viable pregnancy by interfering with the endometrium", and in practice they cause abortion 75 - 80 % of the time (cf. Grou and Rodriges, Am. J. Obstet. Gynecol., 171).
Yet Sri Lankan women are told that levonorgestrel-containing Postinor 2 is exclusively a contraceptive. Also, what Sri Lankan women are not told by its promoters, is that among other side effects, it increases the risk of ectopic pregnancy, which is potentially fatal for the mother as well. According to the Women's Charter the state is expected to provide women with these abortifacient drugs as well as other dangerous and abortifacient merchandise such as Depo-provera, Norplant and intra-uterine devices - coils - which are primarily disposed on unsuspecting women in the developing world.
Our blood and blood vessels begin to form by our 13th day, and our blood is of a different type to that of our mother. Most mothers would not even have begun to suspect that they are pregnant, let alone thought of killing the child by surgical abortion when their child's heart begins to beat on the 18th day after conception (21/2 weeks). By the end of the 4th week, all four limbs have appeared and they can make spontaneous movements. The brain which has been growing since day 13, has by this time differentiated into the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain, and electroencephalogram (EEG) brain waves can be detected during the 6th week. At the end of the 7th week the bodily form - all organs and external structures, even toes, nipples, eyelids and the genitals in the form of ovaries or testes - are completely formed. Abortion proponents dismiss the humanity of this pre-natal child for being a collection of cells. The fact is that the post-natal child is also a collection of cells, as is an adult. Then, by analogy, should one demolish a house because it is a collection of bricks?
The Women's Charter that is based on CEDAW and which constitutes the schedule to the bill on Women's Rights demands (in article 13) the right of women to "control their reproductivity". During a workshop to discuss the content of the bill, its promoters were vociferously unanimous that abortion of a child constituted this "control" and power over the life and death of the smallest and weakest members of the human family. Furthermore, the chairman of the session, Professor Savithri Gunasekera, indicated that the interpretation of this bill will be determined by the interpretation of similar euphemisms used in international conventions. In this light it is particularly remarkable that the text of the bill on Women's Rights makes clear that the bill is a means of incorporating CEDAW into national law and that the expression "women's rights" is to be understood as including the rights recognised by CEDAW, the UN's fundamentally flawed Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women. The international committee that monitors the implementation of CEDAW globally, forcefully promote the in toto "right" to abortion of a child as a "women's right".
In the most recent report submitted by Sri Lanka to the CEDAW committee the authors were apologetic that they had thus far failed to legalise abortion for extreme cases such as the killing of children conceived in rape or incest, and of those children who are handicapped (cf. Combined Third and Fourth Periodic Report, 1999). Yet, such extreme cases are merely the tip of the CEDAW iceberg (cf. CEDAW Ideology and the Strategy of Deceit), and complying with CEDAW and enacting this bill will only lead Sri Lanka to the fate of the Titanic. There is evidence to suggest that it was indeed the local feminists who suggested to the CEDAW Committee to recommended the decriminalisation of abortion "in the first instance" for the hard cases of rape, incest and disability.
CEDAW requires countries to "abolish existing laws", and "repeal national penal provisions" which are contrary to its agenda and to "embody" its radical feminist principles in national Constitutions (cf. article 2 of CEDAW). Global abortion promoter Radhika Coomaraswamy in Reinventing International Law, 1997, stated that "the right to self-determination [of nations] is pitted against the CEDAW articles that obliges the state to correct any inconsistency between international laws and religious and customary laws operating within its territory". Religion and culture are considered obstacles to the implementation of CEDAW. If CEDAW ideology is fully implemented in Sri Lanka, abortion will be available on demand for any reason at any gestational time. Further, girls as young as 10 will have the "right" to abortion, with the associated "right" that their parents will be prevented from being informed of it, let alone consent to it. Yet abortion not only kills the child but also stops that child's beating heart.
Foetus is the name given to the preborn child after 8 weeks until the postnatal period when the term infant may be used. "Foetus" is a latin word meaning "the young one" even though some find it convenient to describe abortion as the "termination of a foetus" rather than the killing of a child. The sense of touch has developed by now and she reacts with movements all over her body when her lips are touched. During the ninth week, her hands, which already have fingerprints, will grip when touched. Research at the Queen's University in Belfast has revealed that the dominant hand, that is the left- or right-handedness of the child, is determined by the time she is 10 weeks old.
By the twelfth week, the development of bodily functions is complete. She can raise her eyebrows and curl her toes and she has a recognisable sleep pattern. She is sensitive to feelings and experiences of her mother, she reacts to music and is able to learn. Advanced 4-dimensional ultrasonography reveals 12 week old preborn babies stretching, kicking and leaping around the womb even though the mother cannot feel these movements. From 18 weeks, she can open her eyes although it was thought that eyelids were fused until 26 weeks by which time she can exhibit a whole range of typical baby behaviour and moods, including scratching, smiling, crying, hiccoughing, and sucking. Neonatal technology enables a child born at 22 weeks to survive outside the womb. Even though the doctor/butcher tears the child apart in abortion methods such as dilation and extraction (D&E), the baby is not dismembered in chemically induced abortions. Such babies are sometimes born alive and left to die, sometimes over three days.
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) campaigns against the provision of care to babies born alive after "unsuccessful" chemically induced abortions. Further, abortuaries or abortion "clinics" run by the IPPF also function as distribution centres for the foetal body parts industry (cf. for example, The Ryan Report, May 2000). The IPPF fiercely support partial-birth abortions where the baby's body is pulled out of the womb, and the brains sucked out while the head is still within the womb. Corpses of such babies provide undamaged baby parts. The IPPF is the parent organisation of the Sri Lankan Family Planning Association (FPASL). The IPPF operates world wide via local FPAs.
During the second month, the neurological structures necessary for pain sensation are formed, and the preborn may experience pain as early as nine weeks, but certainly by 13 weeks (cf. Dr. Vincent Collins in Principles of Anesthesiology; Reinis and Goldman in The Development of the Brain). Research at University College London (UCL) revealed that babies in the womb feel pain three to five times more intensely than adults and for a longer duration. Even though the legitimate purpose of anaesthesia is to lessen the patient's suffering as when foetal surgery is performed, and not to facilitate a violent death, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, in 1997, recommended the use of anaesthetics for babies being aborted late in their prenatal life. The Unborn Child Pain Awareness bill was introduced to the US congress in May 2004, which would require doctors to inform the mother that her child can experience the pain of abortion. What is clear is that abortion not only kills babies, it also tortures babies. The agony that the child suffers is not dependant on whether she was conceived after passionate love-making between spouses or after a violent rape.
The founder of the IPPF Margaret Sanger wrote in Woman, Morality and Birth Control that "birth control must ultimately lead to a cleaner race", and that "dysgenic groups (people with bad genes) [should be given] their choice of segregation or sterilisation". In this spirit, Sri Lankan radical feminists are demanding abortion of handicapped babies in faithful assent to the instructions received from the CEDAW committee (cf. their 545th and 546th sessions, 2002). The message to postnatal handicapped people is that they should not have been born - Your life is not worth living and it would have been better if you were killed in the womb. Doctors contribute to this search and destroy process with the abuse of prenatal diagnosis technology. We are also told that it would be an act of mercy to kill a child that would suffer or be poor the rest of her life. By this reasoning, we should then kill all poor or suffering people. Championing such "humane" solutions are also done by euthanasia advocates who lobby for the killing of old and sick persons.
Birth is a dramatic event resulting in a change of environment. Development does not stop at birth, nor does humanity or personhood miraculously descend on the child at birth. In addition to growth, important changes such as puberty, occur after birth. The brain triples in weight between birth and 16 years. During this time the infant would grow, develop and successively be called toddler, youngster and teenager while remaining a human being of infinite value at each of these stages of her life. Abortionists argue that the preborn child is abortable because she is small, less developed, looks different and is dependant on her mother. According to this logic, it is possible to say that a girl is less human than a woman since the girl is smaller and less developed than a woman, and that an infant is independent of her mother. It would follow that those who are dependant on kidney machines, heart pace-makers, or insulin would be declared non-persons.
Sri Lankans are made to believe that the Penal Code which criminalises abortion, is invalid for the reason that it is an old law. Following this logic, the first precept of Buddhism and the fifth commandment given to Moses are entirely obsolete since they predate the Penal Code by millennia. The possibility, that the Penal Code outlaws abortion because it pre-supposes the humanity and the right to life of the preborn child, is never mentioned. Sri Lankans are also told that this law is not enforced, and for this reason the law should be changed. Unless there is an ulterior motive for legalising abortion, it would be imagined that the advocacy would be for enforcing the existing law - and not its abolition - but rather for the improvement of support networks for women in crisis pregnancies, and for the facilitation of the option of giving up the child for adoption. If those promoting abortion genuinely cared for the women they pretend to represent, they would fight for the protection of women and their children from abortion. Inspite of the law, Marie Stopes, an international abortion NGO has flourishing business in Sri Lanka and offers abortion under the names "menstrual regulation" and "womb washing", in additional to the sale of abortifacient drugs and devices.
As for the desirability of the child, it is questionable whether we should kill every one that we don't "want"? When abortionists say that only "wanted" children should be allowed to live, they mean that every "unwanted" child should be killed. Further, obscuring abortion as "choice" does not alter its barbaric reality. The right to life is universal and a civilised society should restrict the individual's freedom to choose whenever that choice will harm an innocent person. It is also strange that solutions to sociological and behavioural issues associated with abortion are not given any regard. In addition to the demands of the UN's CEDAW committee, it is the mandate of the FPA to "campaign for policy and legislative change to remove restrictions against abortion", as given in their 1992 Strategic Plan, which was approved by the Sri Lankan FPA.
There is also a contention that abortion becomes safe when it becomes legal. The words of Stanislaw Lec is pertinent here when he asks "Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?". Even though it is evidently not safe for the child, we are not told that the safest course of action for a pregnant woman is to take her child to term and give birth. That legal and "safe" abortions continue to kill and maim women over the world is a fact that the abortion industry attempts to cover up. Further, the number of women affected by the post-traumatic stress disorder called the post-abortion syndrome (PAS) is growing alarmingly (cf. www.afterabortion.org, the website of the Elliot Institute). It is indisputable that women are hurt psychologically and not only physically by abortion, which has at least two victims - the mother and her child.
Since we were conceived, we have grown and developed continuously, and there is no point in our life other than our conception when our life could have begun. Abortion is the murder of a human being in utero. If you were aborted, you would have died. Abortion undermines the very concept of human rights and corrodes our attitude towards life as manifested in the hardening of heart which comes when a culture tolerates killing, particularly of the most vulnerable. Legitimising the direct killing of innocent human beings completely contradicts the inviolable right to life proper to every individual regardless of the circumstances of their conception, and denies the quality of everyone before the law. The deceptive bill on Women's Rights is a response to international pressure to legalise abortion in Sri Lanka, together with other manifestations of the caustic ideology of radical feminism, and it cries out to be prevented from being passed into law.