News,

Pro-life campaigners picketed the Welsh Assembly yesterday to protest against the legislature's financial and verbal support for the provision of abortifacient morning-after pills to girls as young as nine without the knowledge of parents [see news digest for 15 February ]. A contingent of about 100 members of the South Wales Region of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children gathered outside the assembly in the Cardiff Bay area and spoke to various assembly members. Gordon Kane, a spokesman for SPUC in Wales, said: "Morning-after pills are not simply 'emergency contraceptives'; they frequently work by making the lining of the womb hostile to newly conceived human life. In other words, a chemical abortion takes place should the girl have conceived." [SPUC South Wales, 21 February] The leader of Roman Catholics in the Dominican Republic has pledged himself to the defence of the unborn. Cardinal Nicholas de Jesús López Rodríguez, archbishop of Santo Domingo, called on the country's executive to promulgate a law passed recently by the national congress establishing 25 March as the Day of the Unborn. The cardinal said: "Those of us who believe in morality understand that the child who is in the mother's womb has rights." [Zenit news agency , 20 February] President George W Bush has appointed a United Nations US ambassador with an unknown stance on life issues. Pro-life observers had hoped that the president would appoint a well-known pro-lifer to the key position, but John D Negroponte's record is unknown and LifeSite reports that some of his "past associations are seen as cause for concern". Mr Negroponte has previously served as US ambassador to Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines. [LifeSite, 20 February ] Pro-lifers in Nigeria have presented a petition to the Abia House of Assembly protesting against national proposals to legalise abortion. A letter from the Owerri provincial council of the Catholic Women Organisation was read out on the floor of the chamber by the deputy speaker. The letter stressed that the rights of the unborn child should be protected and that abortion "kills and dehumanises womanhood". [Africa News Service, 20 February; via Northern Light ] A court in Arizona has convicted an abortion doctor of manslaughter and an abortion clinic administrator of negligent homicide. LouAnne Herron died three hours after an abortion in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1998. Her uterus had been ruptured during the procedure. The court heard that Carol Stuart-Schadoff, the administrator, had disregarded a sonogram indicating that the unborn child to be aborted was more than 24 weeks old, and that Dr John Biskind, the abortionist, had walked out of the clinic as Ms Herron lay dying. [AP, from Pro-Life Infonet, and Nando Times, 20 February ]