Dear Colleage,

PRI is in the forefront of the fight in Latin America to protect Life.
Carlos Polo reports that, if the people have anything to say about it,
abortion will remain illegal south of the border.

Steven W. Mosher
President    


PRI Weekly Briefing
5 April 2007
Vol. 9, No. 13


Stopping the Abortion Juggernaut
by Carlos Polo


After the partial legalization of abortion in Colombia, the international
pro-death movement expected a domino effect throughout Latin America.
Monica Roa, the Colombian front man for the Center for Reproductive
Rights, hurriedly visited Argentina, Peru, and several other nations to
propose legislation similar to that which passed in Columbia.  Giddy from
their success in Columbia, the international abortion groups had every
expectation of subverting the legal protection of the unborn in country
after country.

As usual, they underestimated the Central Americans, Nicaragua in
particular.   Nicaragua last year abolished the sole exception of
"therapeutic abortion," and continues to move away from legalized
abortion.  Not only that, but its strong defense of Life is serving as the
catalyst for renewed opposition throughout Latin America to abortion.  The
result is that the momentum has shifted, and the supposed domino effect is
now occurring in the opposite direction.  Just last month the Chilean
Congress rejected a "therapeutic abortion" bill in record time.

The abortion lobby seems to expect long-established legal systems to
simply collapse before their misinformation campaign.  But this isn't
happening.  Instead, they are increasing being defeated by a popular
outcry.

Unlike Spain, where pro-choice health officials lied about women's health
issues, the prompt action of the Chilean Congress destroyed any
opportunity for a pro-death PR campaign.  Compare this with Columbia,
where a slick PR campaign fooled the public into accepting cleverly worded
pro-choice tenets long enough for pro-death legislation to be passed.  But
you can't fool all the Latinos all of the time. The fact is, more and more
citizens of Latin American countries are aware that they are being lied
and manipulated on these issues, and are refusing to compromise.  That's
why there is a reverse domino effect.

This reverse domino effect may also be affecting Latin American
presidential elections, where two anti-American candidates, Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, opposed to abortion and population
control have been elected.  The election of these Leftist populists has
alarmed neighboring countries.  There is no other explanation for the
abysmal failure of candidates Lopez Obrador in Mexico and Ollanta Humala
in Peru. In Peru, the open support Chavez was catastrophic for Humala's
cause.

The European Union and other donors are threatening to cut aid to the poor
country of Nicaragua if abortion isn't legalized. This shouldn't surprise
us, since it is the practice of the Left everywhere to abrogate democracy
when it suits them.  When that fails, they seek to overturn decisions made
by elected legislators through unelected judges by filing a flurry of
lawsuits.

The focal point of the current struggle is the Supreme Court of Nicaragua.
Radical feminist organizations, in conjunction with IPAS (the principal
entity behind the infamous hand-held suction abortion machine), have
argued that the law abolishing "therapeutic abortions" is not
constitutional. On March 8, pro-abortionists barraged the Nicaraguan
judges with a mass media campaign. They held public meetings in the
streets and published in two paid ads in La Prensa, the most important
newspaper in Managua, the capital city. These meetings and ads featured
the tired lie:  Abortion must be legalized or women will die.  One ad was
paid for by the Inter-American Development Bank, a division of the World
Bank, by the foreign aid ministries of the UK, Liechtenstein and
Switzerland, and by the embassies of Germany, Austria, Denmark, Spain,
Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, China and Sweden.  All this
pressure on little Nicaragua because the people there value life.

But if their support of abortion was more insistent this time, it was also
much more subtle. Their ad focused less on failed rhetoric about
"reproductive rights" than on  emphasizing the purported goal of "stopping
violence against women." Nicaragua's total ban on abortion, La Prensa
declared in another ad, was the real violence being committed against
women. The "international" storm troopers also mentioned the CEDAW
committee and their support for its recommendations to the state of
Nicaragua on violence against women.

Pro-life forces massed at the Supreme Court on March 21. The judges in
Nicaragua accepted, as is customary, testimony from the Catholic Church.
Dr. Roberto Sanchez, a respected jurist who may himself soon join the
Supreme Court, testified that the law that abolished "therapeutic
abortion" did not violate any constitutional principle. Rather, he said,
it corrected a contradiction between the Constitution and the Civil Code
of Nicaragua, the latter of which asserts that unborn babies are persons
and enjoy several explicit rights.

In other testimony, Dr. Rafael Cabrera completely debunked the argument of
the pro-abortion feminists, that therapeutic abortion was necessary to
save the life of the mother.  Dr. Cabrera, gynecologist, presented a chart
listing all the emergency medical situations that are used to claim that
abortions are needed "to save women's lives." He explained each one in
turn, clearly and convincingly demonstrating that a doctor with current
technology is always able to offer his patients-born and unborn ones-the
choice of life.

Dr. Erwin Rodriguez, a famous gynecologist whose students constitute the
majority of practicing gynecologists in Nicaragua today, also presented
testimony.  At the end one of the judges, a well known pro-abortion
feminist and unreconstructed Sandinista, asked Dr. Rodriguez about the
"hard case" of terminal cancer. "Wasn't an abortion necessary then" she
asked him.  Dr. Rodriguez showed that it was impossible for a woman to
conceive in those circumstances.

All the while, the ordinary people of Nicaragua worry about the threat of
international agencies and donor nations to cut off aid unless they
sacrifice their little ones.  How much does it cost to have sovereignty
for a small Latin American country?