Thursday November 4, 2010
Dutch Bishop Calls Parliamentarians to Defund Abortion
By Patrick B. Craine
Roermond, Netherlands, November 4, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Dutch bishop has made waves in the country after he called on politicians to defund abortion in the face of impending budget restrictions, reports French journalist Jeanne Smits.
Several members of the Dutch House of Representatives have complained after Bishop Everard de Jong, auxiliary for the Roermond diocese, sent a letter earlier this fall to each representative along with a plastic 10-week fetal model.
In the letter, the bishop suggested that the government could save money “on the backs of bloody abortion clinics.” The bishop also suggested that given the Netherland’s aging population, the country will need a younger generation to take care of the elderly; however, he said, there is no younger generation because “we have already ‘cleansed’ them” through abortion.
Dutch representative Linda Voortman, of the Green party, said the letter was “contrary to good taste and unbecoming.” “Imagine if one is infertile or just suffered a miscarriage,” she said. According to Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert of the VVD (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), who has had several miscarriages, the letter was “nauseating.”
“Allowing an unwanted child to be born is a very bad beginning to life,” said Pia Dijkstra of the Democrats. “The choice then seems to me to belong to the individual and nobody else.”
The bishop said further, “As you can see by looking at the enclosed model of an unborn baby at 10 weeks, it does not consist of a blob of tissue, but of a very discernable little person, whose heart beats and whose face has very precise features.”
“In the Netherlands, it is possible that up to the 24th week of life, such a precious little person can be assassinated,” he added.
The controversy over the letter, which broke in September, surfaced again at the end of October when the editor of a Catholic newspaper came to the bishop’s defense. Mariska Orban said that as the VVD member had had miscarriages, she should be able to understand the horror of abortion. “Is it not nauseating that our society allows 30,000 babies to be aborted every year?” she said. Orban later apologized after pressuring from politicians and media.