Church leaders to discuss abortion before House debate on Wednesday

Ahead of presentations to be made to Parliament on the abortion debate on Wednesday, more than 100 representatives from various denominations will meet at the Jamaica Conference Centre to reinforce the Church’s position on the issue. Submissions will be made in Parliament by Professor Brendan Bain, retired professor of community health, The University of the West Indies; Dr Charlie Royes, retired consultant surgeon; and Christina Milford, head of the Pregnancy Resource Centre of Jamaica, Montego Bay. The abortion symposium is to be hosted by Jamaica CAUSE, which has been advocating for the Government to keep the buggery law.

Immediately following the symposium, a convoy of participants will travel to Parliament to give support to the presenters, who will make their submissions in the afternoon.

The church group to be at Parliament will include one of the world advocates of anti-abortion, Harvard-educated Rev Eugene Rivers III, who is famous for his work in the reduction of crime in Boston and AIDS in Africa. He will present at the symposium on the challenge of the Church in the abortion issue. Other topics to be covered at the symposium will be: ‘Alternatives to Abortion in the Crisis Pregnancy’; and ‘Care of Post-Abortive Women’ and ‘Blood Money, Feminism: the Business of Abortion’. Some questions that are slated to be explored include: why hasn’t anyone provided the media with the films The Eclipse of Reason and the Silent Scream so that the public can be better informed about the entire process of abortion and be made aware of the human remains ­produced by the procedure? And, are ­parliamentarians and their constituents aware of all the information available concerning the truth about the life, humanity and ­personhood of the unborn, as well as the horrendous effects of these procedures on the child, mother, and the abortionist?

In a prepared submission to be presented to Parliament soon by the Gatekeepers, a member of Jamaica CAUSE, in response to Private Member’s Motion No. 61/2018, the group will seek to challenge the Government to tell the nation whether it intends to go the route of most First-World countries that argue that a child is a human being on conception but is not a person until it is born. “The Bible views the unborn child as a human life to be protected and so, do many doctors, neurobiologists, and bioethicists,” said the group.

According to the Gatekeepers, the pro-life principle encompasses all living human beings at every stage of biological development. The group says this stands in stark contrast to competing, more ­exclusionary approaches to defining ‘personhood’, which assign (rather than recognise) moral worth for a subset of the human population according to predetermined ­criteria established by others.

“Literally millions of lives hang in the balance. Regarding the unborn child, the only path that comports with our best moral traditions and our nation’s founding principles is to provide equal justice for all even when it would seem more useful or convenient to do otherwise,” is a view of the Gatekeepers.

The group warned the local decision-makers to examine the emerging and worrying trend of sympathetically facilitating one seemingly harmless “immoral” act, opening the door for a steady progression to other more dangerous acts, such as abortion, leading to eugenics and euthanasia.

The Gatekeepers reference a case in Denmark where, in a move to mobilise Danes to united action, the Danish government established 10 goals for 2020. Looking towards the goal of being one of the countries where people live longest, the Danes instituted eugenics through prenatal screening, particularly seeking to abort unborn babies who showed any signs of undesirable traits, in particular Down’s syndrome. According to the Gatekeepers, women who resisted the pressure of “seeming to be socially irresponsible” and kept their babies, have shown that the tests, although being indicative, are frequently not accurate.

“In those instances, humans are considered mere chattel, which can be culled like cattle without conscience. Such pre-selection of which babies ought to be born is eugenics,” noted the group.

Rev Dr Alvin Bailey, chairman of Jamaica CAUSE, said the ­symposium is timely as the abortion issue has again come up for discussion in Parliament. Therefore, the wider Church needs to be well informed of the varying viewpoints, locally, and internationally, and the ­biblical context.