by Fred Jackson
(AgapePress) – Pro-family groups are celebrating Wednesday’s victory on Capitol Hill. The House voted 218-210 to reinstate the “Mexico City Policy” which forbids federal funding of foreign organizations which promote or perform abortions.
The Mexico City Policy has been the focal point of a bitter battle between pro- and anti-abortion forces for years. President Reagan brought it in back in the 1980s. Bill Clinton, on his first day in office in 1993, immediately overturned it.
When President George W. Bush arrived in the Oval Office in January of this year, one of his first official acts was to move to reinstate it. But since then, pro-abortion legislators — with the help of groups such as Planned Parenthood — have been working to defeat the Bush move. Just a few weeks ago, they succeeded in doing that at the committee level when they voted to amend the State Department budget bill.
In recent days, pro-family forces have been busy lobbying legislators to insure the Mexico City Policy was revived when it came to the full House yesterday. Well-known pro-life legislator Henry Hyde was one of those who led the charge.
“Abortion is not family planning,” Hyde said. “Family planning is helping you get pregnant or keeping you from getting pregnant, it is not killing an unborn child after you become pregnant — that’s abortion.”
At the end of the day, 32 pro-life Democrats joined 185 Republicans and one Independent to gain the victory.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
Adoption Program Recognizes Personhood of Frozen Embryos
by Jim Brown
(AgapePress) – A unique adoption program is offering a pleasant alternative to the disposal of an estimated 100,000 “leftover” frozen human embryos from in vitro fertilizations.
Instead of giving up the embryos for research, throwing them away, or blindly donating them to another couple, via the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, couples are able to choose adoption for pre-born children and still receive many of the same legal and emotional safeguards offered in traditional adoptions.
Unlike the choices offered by the typical IVF facility, adoption offers genetic parents control over who can adopt their embryos and raise their children. The genetic family will know that the family they have chosen to parent their child has been screened for a criminal history and child abuse record as well as educated about how to parent an adoptee. They also get to specify traits such as age, religion, and years of marriage of the adoptive parents. Some have specified they want heterosexual couples only.
Couples who participate in the Snowflakes program are usually those whose infertility does not allow them to create their own genetic families, and specifically, couples considering egg or sperm donation. According to CNSNews, since the program’s inception four years ago, Snowflakes has matched 30 genetic families with 22 adopting families, resulting in seven babies born into the world.
JoAnn L. Davidson, director of the Snowflakes program, tells CNSNews, “When the legislators step in to say we need to decide what’s going to happen with embryos, now it’s like, here it is! We’ve got 30 cases right here of how it’s been handled.”
Snowflakes is a project of the California-based Nightlight Christian Adoption Agency and considers each embryo to be “fragile, unique, and the most beautiful of God’s creations.”
