News,

The president of the pontifical council for the family has accused certain countries' representatives at this week's United Nations summit on children of: "a selective, superficial or distorted recognition and understanding of human dignity". Addressing religious leaders at the UN, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo pointed out how some delegations purported to defend victims of oppression and discrimination, yet failed to recognise the humanity of unborn children. The cardinal hosted a meeting for pro-life and pro-family groups at the Holy See's permanent mission in New York and urged everyone of good will to help build a culture of life. [SPUC representative in New York] The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is sending fewer and fewer expectant women to adoption agencies so that, in 2000, PPFA performed 80 abortions for each adoption referral. Between 1997 and 2000 the number of abortions by PPFA rose by 19% while annual adoption referrals declined from over 9,000 to under 2,500. CNS News has discovered that a PPFA abortion costs more than $300 and the federation performed nearly 200,000 such procedures in 2000. [CNS News, 8 May ] In an attempt to stop sex-selective fertility treatment, India's national government plans to prevent in vitro fertilisation clinics from determining the gender of embryos. It is already illegal to use ultrasonic scanning to find out an unborn child's sex. Studies suggest that almost all abortions in India kill female children. [CWNews on EWTN, 7 May ] The Canadian government is expected soon to publish a bill which would allow stem cell research on human embryos. It is expected that opposition to the measure will come from members of several parties on both left and right. [Canoe, 6 May ] A proponent of embryo research has told President Bush's bioethics council that a product of human cloning can rightly be called an embryo. Dr John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, who helped discover embyronic stem cells, said that an unnecessary change of vocabulary would not alter the ethical issues. [LifeSite, 7 May ] Shareholders in a major American investment company are being urged to stop their chairman from making multi-million dollar corporate donations to Planned Parenthood, the pro-abortion Catholics for a Free Choice and providers of the RU-486 abortion drug. A motion proposed by Mr Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, would constrain Mr Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire-Hathaway Inc of Nebraska. Mr Mosher is urging pro-abortion shareholders to support his initiative if only to stop boycotts of the firm's products by pro-life consumers. [LifeSite, 7 May ] Plastic surgeons have grown bone, cartilage, skeletal muscle and nerve cells from fat removed from patients by liposuction. Dr Peter Fodor of Century City Hospital, Los Angeles, who presented the research, has pointed out how fat is richer in stem cells than bone marrow and suggests that patients have their extracted fat stored. [LifeSite, 7 May ]