|
|
|
|
- Newsletters -
Dear Friends, We wish you a fruitful 2006. May we win back many souls from the pit of destruction which is the culture of death. There is so much activity that we can be involved in, but the first and most crucial activity is prayer. We can achieve nothing without Him. For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the principalities and the ruling forces who are masters of the darkness in this world, the spirits of evil in the heavens. [Eph 6:12] This is why we arm ourselves with spiritual weapons – prayer, fasting and sacrifice. It is wonderful to be part of a group that pray together. We now have groups that pray for the Gospel of Life to flourish in the Lismore diocese in: Lismore, Tweed Heads, Murwillumbah, Kempsey, Laurieton. Slowly we build up a network of prayer support for those who are actively involved so that the work that they do will always be pleasing to our God. If you don’t have a group in your parish who pray together once a month for the pro-life apostolate, PLEASE consider starting one. You CAN do it. I’d love to hear from you.
When his parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the Law required, Simeon took him into his arms and blessed God; and he said: Now, Master, you are letting your servant go in peace as you promised; for my eyes have seen the salvation which you have made ready in the sight of the nations; a light of revelation for the gentiles and glory for your people Israel. [Luke 2: 27-32] Let us pray that every child is allowed to be born, baptised and consecrated to the Lord. 25th March we celebrate on the Feast of the Annunciation - the Conception of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Now it the time to start planning what’s to be done to mark this great day and to keep before all our fellow Christians that Life starts at the very moment of conception, and that ultimately we will answer to God for not doing our utmost to protect his little ones. This year it’s a Saturday so more people should be able to be involved, who are not usually available. What are you doing that day? God bless all your efforts for His little ones, Angela ##########################
K. Maina of Lismore writes: The debate about RU486 is keeping me up at night. I'm writing this when I'm normally in a deep sleep dreaming peacefully. Not tonight. This has gnawed away at me until I've been forced, by my own unceasing thoughts to write this down, to get it out of my head, to make sure that I don't forget it by morning. I was disheartened to say the least, when, after voting No in the ninemsn poll, the numbers flashed up, revealing that over 2/3 had voted Yes to RU486. (The editor questions whether the vote was rigged!) I was in disbelief at first and wondered: Who voted? What percentage were women? What percentage of those women had had abortions? What materials had they read on RU-486? The questions keep coming to me as I sit here. I'm wondering: of those who support RU486, how many have actually tried to envision the actual process of the 'at-home' abortion? Have they sat down, closed their eyes and imagined how it would feel to take a pill, go home and wait for yourself to bleed, passing something like a large blood clot, but identifiable as a baby, and looking down to see what was their child. And no, there is no conditional tense to that sentence, no 'what could have been'. That was their baby and they know they took drugs to kill it. Human beings are not like flowers, whereby the sepal - the green protective cover of the flower - opens and dies to reveal the petals that bloom; but rather the 'cells' that pro-abortion people talk about don't die to reveal the 'real baby' later on. Those cells are the baby. At 6 weeks of gestation, those 'cells' have an audible heartbeat. An audible heartbeat! Can anyone tell me that those heartbeats heard at 6 weeks are not made by the same heart as the newborn baby? Let us also face the reality that women, of all ages, will fudge the dates to their doctors to be considered for these drugs. Some women will not be informed, and will take these drugs thinking "What will it hurt? I'm only a week or two over?" It will happen. Will the government pay for the counselling of these women? I don't just mean the three days before the abortion but the ongoing counselling that some women will need. This should not be an 'at-home' course of drugs. What is to stop women, not knowing how much bleeding is acceptable, from haemorrhaging dangerously? After my first child I bled for 9 weeks, not knowing that was an unacceptably long time. Young women lacking knowledge and life experience are particularly vulnerable. As girls we are not encouraged to ask questions or dispute a doctor's opinion. This brings me to the attitudes of the doctors themselves! With my own first two pregnancies, doctors have asked me straight up, first question, "So you're terminating?" When someone vulnerable is confronted with this question, more like an expectation from an authority figure, she would feel under some pressure to submit to Doctors' wishes. It would be much better for the woman if the doctor first said “Congratulations”, or at least remained neutral. There are families in Australia who feel that abortion is their only answer. They feel that the financial burden is too much for them. Now our Treasurer is asking families to have babies, yet families are aborting babies because they feel they don't have support. Wouldn't our politicians like to feel good about the job they do by supporting our families instead of supporting the decline in population? Now this is where I start to sound Catholic. Believe me when I say this has always been my view, even before I became Catholic. I believe that babies are conceived to some people who need to 'get it'. These people need to understand that life is bigger than themselves. They need to understand what it's like to care for others, to be compassionate and unselfish. They need to get their lives on track, to be the person they were created to be. This wasn't easy for me to write, although it has flowed from my fingers as they glide over these keys. I'm suddenly feeling tired. I must have released everything that was bottled up inside me. I don't expect everyone to like what I've written. What I would like is some understanding of the other side, and from the other side. I want to understand: where the supporters of RU486 are coming from? how they form their opinions? and why they stick to their arguments? I wanted to put my opinion out there, not specifically to change minds but so that others can see and appreciate my point of view. Thank you for reading.
Holly Patterson died Sept. 17, 2003 aged 18.
Write to your MP, the PM, the Minister for Health, and to as many senators and MHRs as possible, as soon as possible. ###################### FAMILY PLANNING ZEALOTS WON’T REST UNTIL THE 3RD CHILD IS ELIMINATED
Too Many Filipinos? Soon There Won't Be Enough Joseph D'Agostino, Vice Pres for Communications, Population Research Institute. PRI Weekly Briefing, 13 January 2006, Vol. 8 / No. 2 Mon, Jan 16, Philippines House of the Congress will vote on a coercive population control measure pushed by international agencies and their indigenous allies. The Responsible Parenthood and Population Management Act (HB 3773) would discriminate against families with more than 2 children and force Catholic doctors and nurses to provide sterilizations and contraceptives, probably including the abortifacient morning-after pill. "We know that over 100 congressmen [out of 238] are in favor of the bill but we can depend on only less than 30 to object--those we have lobbied and truly believe in our pro-life stand," says Sr. Mary Pilar Verzosa, who heads Pro-Life Philippines. International population controllers have targeted the Philippines, one of the last majority Christian nations in the world where people still have enough children to guarantee their country's future. Perhaps because of this, HB 3773 aims to impose a 2-child quota on Filipino families, redirecting government resources from programs that help poor Filipinos to programs that will help eliminate them. Even from a pro-population control perspective, this bill is entirely unnecessary. The Filipino birthrate has been dropping rapidly and, according to the U.N. Population Division, will drop below the replacement rate of 2.1 in the foreseeable future. Filipinas have gone from having 6 children, on average, in 1970 to 5 in 1980, 4 in 1990, and 2.8 today. The UN says that in 20 years, Filipinos will be having fewer children than are necessary to sustain the population. Instead of trying to force Filipinos to have fewer children, Filipino politicians should be trying to figure out how to avoid the coming demographic implosion while there is still time. But big international money comes with anti-people policies, not pro-life ones, and the usual suspects including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) are involved (and AusAid ed.) "Pro-population control agencies such as USAID and UNFPA fund the campaign for the bill to be passed into law," says Sr. Pilar. "They have attractive-looking ladies on their staff, going from one congressman's office to another distributing glossy magazines and materials on the importance of the bill, they go on road shows all over the country, and they have set up reproductive health clinics in the provinces. They also call press conferences and conduct 2- and 3-day seminars in big hotels for media people to promote the bill." This bill "is an affront to the Culture of Life in the U.S. not just in the Philippines," says Eileen Macapanas Cosby, an American of Filipino descent who has helped organize opposition to HB 3773 through the Filipino Family Fund. www.filipinofamilyfund.org "If we let the most Catholic country in the world--87% of nearly 85 million people are Catholic--fall prey to these fringe groups, this will be a huge blow to the pro-family and pro-life movement." HB 3773 grants preference in college scholarships to children from families with only 1 or 2 children, discriminating against those from families with 3 or more. Population officers would be mandated in each local district as in Communist China, and surely would have an incentive to use vigorous methods to meet birth limitation quotas. The Filipino Catholic bishops' conference has already documented instances of forced sterilization in the Philippines, where the contraceptive mentality and overpopulation myth have made steady progress in recent decades. The bill "violates the freedom of religious belief since it mandates health service providers to implement procedures contrary to their religious beliefs and penalizes them if they refuse," says Sr. Pilar. "It will corrupt the youth through mandatory sex education that emphasizes contraception and population control." Catholic schools are not exempt from the sex education requirement of the bill, and Catholic doctors and nurses could go to jail for 6 months for refusing to sterilize or distribute contraceptives. Opponents of the bill hope President Gloria Arroyo will veto the bill if it passes both houses of the Congress, but her veto could be overridden by a 2/3 vote in both the House and the Senate. If the Philippines' birthrate continues to drop, that country will face the same graying population and lack of tax-paying workers that is beginning to crush Western Europe and Japan, (and Australia, ed). Unlike these, the Philippines can't begin to afford such a situation. It remains to be seen if the Filipino Congress will side with both freedom and prudence, or help to pass a death sentence on its own people. Letters to the Editor Dear Nadir and Angela Martello, Regarding "reproductive health", yes we received reports that your government is funding house bill 3773, now in 2nd reading in our congress. There is a very strong lobby to pass this. And we hope that you can at least stop it in your end. However, regarding evidence of funding, the problem is, like any bills with disreputable background, there are layers of front NGOs that were set-up or tapped in to hide the real funders of these bills. The information is basically we got from the Australian Embassy website and the information being passed by the Family Life International-Australia headed by Gail Instance. Thanks for the concern. Please pray for us. Sincerely, Jimmy Leornas Executive Director, Pro-Life Philippines Inc. life@prolife.org.ph ACTION: Jimmy asks, “we hope that you can at least stop it in your end”. Please write to the PM, your local Fed’l Rep, and Bruce Billson and ask them why your hard earned money is being spent on eliminating Philippinos. Address your letters to Parliament House, Canberra, ACT 2600 ###################### Dear Angela, Keep the Faith. You're doing good work in fighting RU486. No doubt you heard that our "Supreme Court" (what's "supreme" about it???) has given the State of Oregon permission to continue to euthanaze "patients", which will be approved in even more states in the future, I'm sure. It truly is the Culture of Death and Hedonism and Paganism all over again. Dominus Vobiscum, Nancy Evers, Tucson, Arizona ######################### KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING IN LIFE... YOU MAY ALREADY BE THERE A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them. "Not very long," answered the Mexican. "But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American. The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family. The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat." And after that?" asked the Mexican. “With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise." "How long would that take?" asked the Mexican. "Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," "And after that?" "Afterwards? Well my Friend, That's when it gets really interesting.When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!" answered the American, laughing. "Millions? Really? And after that?" asked the Mexican.
"You'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends." And the moral is: KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING IN LIFE... YOU MAY ALREADY BE THERE. |
|
amartello@apostlesforlifesite.org
|
Apostles
for Life News February 2006
February
2nd: The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple 
At 7 weeks: Your facial features are now visible, including the eyes, ears,
nose, lips and tongue. The eyes have a retina and lens, and buds of milk teeth
have appeared. The major muscle system is developed, and you are beginning to
move spontaneously. You now have your own blood type, distinct from your
mother’s. More than 100,000 new nerve cells are created every minute. Brain
waves can now be recorded by an EEG.
At the graveside of Rebecca Tell Berg who died on June 3, 2003 aged 16 years 
"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with
my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few
drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs . . I have a full life." 
