“ALL human life is sacred in the eyes of God … Unless we defend human life from conception to death we will end up participants, even if indeliberately, in a culture of violence that sadly is already pervasive” (Archbishop Bathersby, Personally Speaking, CL 12/6/06).
An estimated 90,000 abortions per year are performed in Australia (figures tabled in federal parliament) and a further 30,000 pharmaceutical abortions are caused by the birth control pill.
That’s 120,000 Australians per year killed, or over 2000 deaths per week. But wait there’s more!
The Australian Senate has now endorsed draft legislation to enable laboratories to initiate the conception of more human embryos purely for research with the explicit intent of killing them.
And yet Catholic social justice headlines ignore this atrocity that all voting Australians are party to.
I acknowledge the need to work for reconciliation and for refugee dignity and commend those who lobby for these causes.
However, imagine if we as Catholics included under every headline “and 2000 Australian babies will die this week at the hands of their parents with current initiatives aimed to increase this number in the near future”.
Doesn’t this give every one of us a reason to write to our federal MP and insist that this legislation be rejected in the Lower House?
Several senators presented evidence in the Senate debate on this topic highlighting that embryonic stem cell research is not only grossly unethical but that it is also poor science.
For Catholics, even if by some remote possibility some cures are developed using embryonic stem cell research, it would be immoral for us to use them due to the unethical research procedures used.
Please, act now to ensure we don’t pass this moral dilemma on to our children.
What sincerity can current reconciliation statements etc have if we are killing more Australians now than we ever did before?
Write to your federal MP and appeal to him or her to reject any legislation that enables or enhances legalisation of the killing of human embryos.
Also, please write letters of thanks to senators who attempted to get this legislation rejected in the Senate.
Some good presentations were tabled by Senators Boswell, Santoro and Joyce.
It was only at the 11th hour that the efforts of men such as these managed to get the human-animal hybrid option removed from the bill.
PAUL WEBB
Toowoomba, Qld
