ENDEAVOUR FORUM NEWSLETTER No. 109, FEBRUARY 2003

 

 

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NATIONAL & OVERSEAS NEWS

Babette Francis

Press Release from Karen Malec, President, Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer

"Ellen Rice, an associate professor of business at Indiana University in South Bend, recently authored an article entitled, "Is Abortion Related to Breast Cancer? Too Political to Address". The article discusses the California case, Bernardo et al. vs. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, et al., in which three plaintiffs are suing the abortion provider for falsely advertising the safety of abortion.

"A statement provided under oath by New Jersey breast cancer surgeon, Angela Lanfranchi, M.D., F.A.C.S. reveals that many medical experts in the nation’s premier medical institutions privately admit that abortion is one of the causes of breast cancer, but refuse to say so publicly. Medical experts are fearful of the political implications, which would inevitably follow such an acknowledgment. It’s no wonder. The fact that this ongoing research has been concealed from women for nearly five decades is going to be a political bombshell for cancer organizations and other medical organizations in the years to come.

"Ellen Rice concludes her article with a call for congressional hearings. She explains that, as a result of heavy lobbying by activists from groups like the National Breast Cancer Coalition, Congress allotted funds for breast cancer research to the Department of Defense (DOD) in 1993. She notes that the DOD’s Breast Cancer Research Program cost taxpayers $1.145 billion for the years 1993-2001 (or one-fifth of the federal funding for breast cancer research). Prof. Rice argues that Congress should "look into abortion and breast cancer, and its defense funding history."

"We think there are some hard questions for members of Congress to ask. For instance, the DOD partially funded the notoriously flawed study, Melbye et al. 1997, which has been widely used to discredit research reporting a positive association between abortion and breast cancer. Chris Kahlenborn, M.D. asked an excellent question in his book, "Breast Cancer: Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill." He wondered: "…why a Danish medical study which was performed by Danish researchers was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Defense? The reader will note that Dr. Melbye’s research article ends with the disclaimer that: ‘The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the U.S. government.’ Why a U.S. government agency is funding a Danish study and then feels compelled to publish a disclaimer at the end of the study strikes this author as exceptionally odd. Perhaps the U.S. Department of Defense could offer an explanation to the public as to why U.S. tax dollars that are earmarked for maintaining our defensive forces, have gone to a Scandinavian country to fund a study on breast cancer."!

UGANDA SUCCESS STORY

Members of Parliament from AIDS-ravaged South Africa visited Uganda in November 2002 to learn about Uganda's seemingly miraculous success in combating AIDS. A recent Harvard study found that from the late 1980s to 2001, the number of pregnant women infected with HIV in Uganda dropped from 21.2 percent to 6.2 percent due to promotion of abstinence before marriage and fidelity in marriage. However, the South African MPs seem so bent on sexual decadence they could not help but attempt to proselytize their hosts into permitting abortion. South Africa's MP Joyce Ndimandi and five of her colleagues are meeting with Ugandan MPs from the Parliamentary Committees on Social Services and on HIV/AIDS. The meetings were spawned by statistical reports which noted that had South Africa followed Uganda's lead in fighting the deadly virus through promotion of healthy sexuality rather than the libertine approach of condoms, South Africa "would have turned the corner in the year 2000 and started going down." The quote comes from former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization (WHO) epidemiologist Rand Stoneburner who presented a study on Uganda's success story to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) this February.

Despite the obstinacy of some, Uganda's phenomenal success with abstinence and chastity has convinced some libertines of the abstinence approach. One of the principal researchers on the Harvard study, anthropologist Edward C. Green explained, "I'm a flaming liberal, don't go to church, never voted for a Republican in my life. But if you say the things I've said ... the religious people love you and the people in public health get suspicious."

 

Miss America and Abstinence

 

Erika Harold

 

When my husband Charles and I were in Chicago in April 2002, we had the pleasure of meeting Miss Illinois, Erika Harold, who was competing for the Miss America title. We met Erika in the office of Project Reality, one of the major promoters of abstinence programs in the USA. "Abstinence" was Erika’s theme for the competition - we found her to be a beautiful and articulate person, who planned to study law. She got offers from several law schools and eventually decided on Harvard. Erika has exotic parentage -- Welsh, German, Native American and African American. Erika went on to win the Miss America title, and immediately came under pressure from the organisers to drop her abstinence platform and pick a more politically correct issue. She has also come under attack from the homosexual lobby who accuse her of causing death because she promotes abstinence, not condoms. However, she fought courageously to keep an abstinence theme in her platform. Erika stresses that her decision to abstain from premarital sex and the use of alcohol and other drugs is one of the main reasons she was able to overcome the bullying she experienced, and eventually win the Miss America title.

Another of the competitors for the Miss America title was Miss Oregon, whose them was "Abortion and Breast Cancer". The ambience of such pageants is certainly changing -- for the better.

EQUALITY DOES NOT SUIT MILITARY NEEDS

Ted Lapkin, a former Israeli army officer and senior staffer in the US Congress who now lives in Ballarat, wrote a critical article in the Herald Sun, 29 October 2002, warning of the folly of putting women into combat roles in the defence forces. Western democracies who have adopted such a policy have not had to wage a serious military conflict in decades.

Feminists have long argued that the military must be held to the same standards of gender equity that apply in the civilian workplace but Lapkin says that to operate effectively, the armed forces must impose standards on their personnel that set them utterly apart from the norms of civilian society. "In essence, armies are tools of violence that spend peacetime in preparation for the day their political masters declare war. Soldiers are rewarded with medals and promotions for doing things that would earn them long prison sentences in civilian life: wreaking death and destruction with great efficiency. Unlike any other function in human society, the military's unique mandate for violence makes conventional standards of equal opportunity inapplicable".

Lapkin points out, as Phyllis Schlafly has often done, that feminist activists contend that vulnerable servicewomen are in dire need of protection from a military culture of machismo-laden aggression that makes sexual harassment inevitable. Yet these same ideologues simultaneously insist that female soldiers should be allowed to serve in frontline battlefield roles, where they will routinely encounter a close-quarters brutality of the worst sort imaginable. If women are unable to cope with the crude sexual horseplay that is part of peacetime barracks life, how can they be expected to endure the unbridled savagery of infantry combat?

There will be no equal opportunity commission on the battlefield, Lapkin reminds us. "Appeals to the principles of fairness and gender equity would fall on the deaf ears of an enemy infantryman intent on impaling a female soldier on the end of his bayonet. Moreover, in their haste to attack the military's culture of belligerence, feminists ignore that the key to an army's battlefield success lies in the deliberate cultivation of controlled violence within its ranks. It is pure testosterone-driven aggression that motivates young men to assault enemy machine gun positions at the very moment when the rational instinct for self-preservation urges them to run in the opposite direction. The military nurtures and controls this aggression through training and through a process of male bonding that promotes unit cohesion.

"Ever since 300 Spartans faced a Persian horde at Thermopylae some 2500 years ago, soldiers have been motivated to face death on the battlefield by a powerful emotional tie that is unique to men who share adversity and danger. This spirit of fraternal love between warriors was brilliantly captured by Shakespeare in Henry V's paen to his outnumbered English army at Agincourt: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, for he who sheds his blood with me today, shall be my brother’."

Lapkin warns that the posting of women to combat units would disrupt the small-group dynamic that coalesces rifle companies into effective weapons of war. In 1948, the Israelis quickly dropped their brief experiment with women fighters when it turned out that male soldiers spent their time in combat protecting their female counterparts, rather than achieving their mission objectives. Israel should know- - it is a country that has lived in a constant state of siege since its founding.

Furthermore, when young men and women are thrown together in crude and primitive field conditions for long periods, romantic liaisons are inevitable. Such relationships, with their tendency towards jealousy, protectiveness and favouritism, would wreak havoc on the unit cohesion that makes soldiers willing to risk their lives for each other.

Britain has abandoned the idea of women in combat roles and so should Australia. Defence forces are not an arena for social engineering, and academic feminists should keep in mind that the young women they want to send to the front line are likely to come home in coffins -- not because they are not competent but because they are not as strong as the male enemy soldiers they are likely to encounter.

 

 

 

Member Organisation, World Council for Life and Family

NGO in Special Consultative Status with ECOSOC of the UN