By Bill Fancher and Jody Brown
The American Academy of Pediatrics has adopted policies and positions that have concerned many pediatricians who are members of that professional organization. In response to such liberal actions as endorsing homosexual adoption and abortion, a new organization was formed: the American College of Pediatrics.
Earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a statement declaring its support for homosexual parenting. Dr. Joseph Zanga, who chairs the AAP's Bioethics Committee, says that report was released to the public despite the objections of one-third of the committee which drafted it. Such tactics and stances on social issues have angered many of the group's members — and more and more pediatricians are now affiliating themselves with the American College of Pediatrics (ACP).
Zanga, the ACP's founder, describes his organization as one with Judeo-Christian, traditional values that is open to pediatric medical professionals of all religions who hold true to the group's core beliefs: that life begins at conception; and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children.
Zanga says his pro-life group believes in caring for every child, including the unborn. He says that is why the ACP has taken the stance that no abortion is justified.
“We believe that it is our responsibility to protect the lives and health of children from the time of their conception,” Zanga says. “We cannot conceive of a circumstance in which abortion — the killing of an infant in utero — is appropriate. We do not believe it is appropriate — and we certainly don't believe it is appropriate for the infant.”
Zanga, who along with 100 dissenting members of the AAP formed the American College of Pediatrics, says pediatricians need to return to the goal of “caring for the child from conception until adulthood.” He recently lamented the decline in life rights for the unborn.
“We think that society has taken many pediatricians away from that prime concern, and in the direction of social eugenics,” he says. “And we believe there needs to be another voice for pediatricians to speak on some of these important, and oftentimes social, issues of the day.”
In an interview with the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, Zanga said he and his fellow ACP members “do not want the media, the government, or the public to think that all pediatricians agree with the AAP's policies on controversial issues.”
(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
