Life Links 3/16/12

Illinois continues its long overdue attempts to crackdown on abortion clinics. This time, the state is ordering an abortion clinic to stop advertising surgical abortions since it lost its license in October.

The Illinois Department of Public Health sent a strongly worded order to the Women's Aid Clinic in Lincolnwood by certified mail on March 7. But the clinic's website on Thursday still was promoting "first trimester abortion services from 6 to 14 weeks of pregnancy with two types of anesthesia."

In October, the clinic lost its abortion clinic license after it was cited for dusty equipment, lack of a supervising registered nurse and failure to perform CPR on a patient who later died.

Since then, the clinic has remained open, even as its owner told the state the clinic would cease to operate as a licensed pregnancy termination center. It's unclear whether the clinic still is providing surgical abortions, which could be a violation of state law. A woman answering the phone said the clinic provides only the abortion pill.

The clinic failed to pay a $36,000 fine assessed in October, according to the March 7 letter, which also demands that the clinic return its original license to the state or face a revocation action. The matter will be referred to the Illinois attorney general's office if the clinic doesn't pay the fine and cease its "false advertising," the letter states.

I'm surprised the Washington Post headline in this story/blog post correctly attributes the decision to defund the Texas Women Health Program to the White House.

WaPo also has an interview with a local Planned Parenthood leader about the defunding and PP's plans to cut corners.


Funny how abortion advocates act like all abortion clinic owners aren't really in it for the money but just care so much about women. Then you have an abortion clinic worker say something like this:

Sometimes our employers tend so much to the "business" part of our business, that they forget the heart of it. They forget that without passion, without advocacy, without caring for more than the bottom line (and without having employees who do, to their core, have these qualities), they will have a very cold business. They will lose those who care the most: who are motivated by making a difference in women's lives. Some of my friends are getting lied to by their bosses: being promised that they would always have a job/not get a paycut/not get laid-off/that they're too valuable to ever lose; then all of the above happens. And employees who are rude to patients, rude to other employees, who suck the heart out of a clinic stay behind.

Ready to get sick? At Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner interviews an anonymous abortionist about the role her faith plays in killing defenseless human beings.

For the doctor, her faith is "an important part of my life I think it still helps me find balance and determine what actions to take. I do feel like I have a calling for certain things, including the work I do, and that comes from my faith and my beliefs."

A calling from God to rip innocent human beings limb for limb?

Life Links 3/15/12

The Detroit Free Press has an article on Michigan State women's basketball player Lykendra Johnson, her unplanned pregnancy and her daughter.

As MSU learned it would be heading to Wichita, Kan., to play Northern Iowa in the first round of the NCAA tournament, Johnson learned something, too.

"It wasn't fatigue," she said. "That's when I first found out."

She found out she was pregnant, and had been pregnant for most of the season, including when she had 16 points and 17 rebounds against Ohio State in February and 24 points and 12 rebounds against Penn State. The pregnancy -- former MSU men's player Delvon Roe was the father -- was a shocking surprise.

A California man was given 25 to life for killing his girlfriend and her unborn child.

A man who admitted to strangling his pregnant girlfriend, killing her and her 4-month-old fetus, was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years to life in state prison.

Michael LaBrunda pleaded guilty to both first-degree murder for killing 21-year-old Alisha Chapman of Westminster on Oct. 10, 2007, and second-degree murder for killing the fetus, Los Angeles County prosecutors said.

In Reason, Steve Chapman writes about the real war on women.

If the effort to limit the contraceptive mandate were truly a frontal assault on women, a majority of them would not be endorsing the offensive. But the ideology of groups like Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women (NOW) sometimes ignores inconvenient gender realities.

Those advocates have been distracted from a different and far less figurative war on women—which, as it happens, is helped rather than hindered by one of the "reproductive rights" they champion. Legal abortion may empower women, but it has also become a powerful method for the mass elimination of females.

Bookmark this to respond to arguments that "no one likes abortion".....

I love abortion. I don't accept it. I don't view it as a necessary evil. I embrace it. I donate to abortion funds. I write about how important it is to make sure that every woman has access to safe, legal abortion services. I have bumper stickers and buttons and t-shirts proclaiming my support for reproductive freedom. I love abortion.

Life Links 3/14/12

The office of Governor Rick Perry responds to the Obama Administration announcement that the federal government will defund the Woman's Health Program because Planned Parenthood wouldn't get any of its funding.

The fact that the Obama Administration would announce its decision to deny care for more than 100,000 low income women during a press event before giving official notice to the state is a clear demonstration of the political motivation behind this decision. This tactic is an affront to the more than 100,000 women served by this program. We await official word from the Administration on this matter and in the meantime, at Gov. Perry's direction, the state continues to move forward to ensure low-income women will not lose access to this preventative care. Gov. Perry will continue to fight this egregious federal overreach and defend life, our state's laws and the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.....

• There are more than 2,500 qualified providers in the WHP that operate more than 4,600 locations across the state.
• Planned Parenthood represents less than two percent of providers in the WHP.
• Planned Parenthood's cost per client is 43 percent higher than most other providers, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

Sometimes, I wonder if abortion clinic workers at the Abortioneers blog ever notice how ridiculous they sound:

So, here is my struggle...I want factory farms to be exposed for their cruelty (not only to animals, but also workers) more than anyone. I know deep down that undercover investigations in factory farms are NOT the same as anti-woman creeps like Lila Rose (and yes I feel bad giving any of her sites web traffic, but google her if you must). The footage and audio that people like Lila Rose obtain from abortion clinics is manipulated and taken out of context and at the end of the day just a downright lie. When it comes to undercover footage from factory farms there is little manipulation going on. I have seen enough of that footage to know that animal cruelty is commonplace in factory farms and no amount of photoshopping or editing can create the horrors I have seen.

Manipulated? Taken out of context? Downright lie? Umm.... do you mean the full, uncut tapes?

Do these abortion clinic workers really believe the uncut videos are downright lies or does their overwhelming preference for pro-abortion policies and their hate for prolife organizations prevent them from doing any actual research?


Spanish doctors announced they carried out the world's first lung surgery on a preborn child in 2010.

During the 30-minute procedure performed in late 2010, doctors introduced an endoscopy through the fetus' mouth to repair the defected bronchi.

"It is an extremely delicate operation since it is carried out near the heart on tissues as thin as cigarette paper. But without this fetal therapy, the baby would not have survived," Dr. Gratacos told reporters.

The baby named Alaitz was born at eight months and is in very good health condition 16 months after birth, said the doctors who unveiled their landmark work on Tuesday.

UK abortion clinics aren't used to large protests.

The spokeswoman, who requested anonymity because she said she had received hate mail, said the protests were bigger than many other anti-abortion protests.

"We've always had sporadic outbursts down the years, but I think we are seeing something, seeing protest on a scale we haven't seen before," she said.

Local Texas Planned Parenthood president Tony Thorton arrested

What's the last thing Planned Parenthood in Texas needs right now? How about the executive director of Planned Parenthood Lubbock exposing himself at a baseball field to another man?

Tony Thornton, CEO and president of the Planned Parenthood Association of Lubbock, was arrested and charged with indecent exposure Monday afternoon.

Thornton, 56, was arrested at the baseball field on Municipal Drive in Lubbock, said Sgt. Jonathan Stewart with the Lubbock Police Department.

According to the police report, the alleged victim was a 43-year-old male.

The local FOX station picked the story up as did a local NBC station which called the national headquarters.

KCBD NewsChannel 11 contacted the national headquarters of Planned Parenthood. A person with the media relations department said they would work to issue a statement on Thornton's arrest. As of Tuesday evening we have not received a response.

At this point, there is no word on whether Thornton is still employed with Planned Parenthood, following his arrest.

Life Links 3/13/12

The Washington Times has an article on Abby Johnson's $5.7 million whistleblower lawsuit against Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast.

According to the lawsuit, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast contracted with the state to help prevent unwanted pregnancies among a population of eligible women. The clinics' main service was to offer women an annual family-planning exam and consultation; only office visits "related to contraceptive management" were reimbursable by the Medicaid program, the lawsuit said.

However, owing to financial pressures of its own, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast leaders and staff collaborated to register all kinds of ineligible services — pregnancy tests, sexual-disease tests, Pap tests — for Medicaid reimbursement, the lawsuit claims, adding that the bosses admitted to Ms. Johnson and other clinic directors that these claims were not eligible for reimbursement, but told them, "We have to keep these people as patients" and "We must turn every call and visit into a revenue-generating client."

Two New York researchers were awarded the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine for their work to treat alloimmune thrombocytopenia, "an auto-immune disease which can cause fatal brain hemorrhages in unborn fetuses and newborn children. The cause is unclear, but the illness causes the mother's immune system to attack the fetus as if it were a foreign body or disease."


Dr. Peter Goodwin, a leading advocate of Oregon's assisted suicide law killed himself using pills obtain under the state's "Death With Dignity Act."


In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson discusses the "after-birth abortion" bioethicists.

The article doesn’t go on for more than 1,500 words, but for non-ethicists it has a high surprise-per-word ratio. The information that newborn babies aren’t people is just the beginning. A reader learns that “many non-human animals … are persons” and therefore enjoy a “right to life.” (Such ruminative ruminants, unlike babies, are self-aware enough to know that getting killed will entail a “loss of value.”) The authors don’t tell us which species these “non-human persons” belong to, but it’s safe to say that you don’t want to take a medical ethicist to dinner at Outback.

Saletan on "After-Birth Abortion"

While William Saletan doesn't agree with bioethicists Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva but he recognizes that they raise some challenging questions for pro-choice advocates with their after-birth abortion position.

The challenge posed to Furedi and other pro-choice absolutists by “after-birth abortion” is this: How do they answer the argument, advanced by Giubilini and Minerva, that any maternal interest, such as the burden of raising a gravely defective newborn, trumps the value of that freshly delivered non-person? What value does the newborn have? At what point did it acquire that value? And why should the law step in to protect that value against the judgment of a woman and her doctor?

Life Links 3/8/12

The amended Virginia ultrasound bill has been signed by Governor McDonnell. Unsurprisingly, the AP article about the law has this mischaracterization:

The measure initially had sought to mandate a vaginally invasive form of an ultrasound, triggering a national uproar that resounded across political talk shows and TV comedy shows.....

Soon after the uproar, McDonnell had his party remove the requirement for an invasive exam through an amendment.

Also absent from the AP article are any facts regarding how standard ultrasounds are.

Sarah Kliff suggests the pro-choice movement blundered by focusing on transvaginal ultrasounds and not their real opposition to the bill.



A Baltimore Sun article about the dropped charges against abortionists Nicola Riley and Steven Brigham has more information on why the charges were dropped.

Rollins said his office had been consulting with an expert, whom he declined to identify. Early in the investigation, the expert told the state's attorney that the termination and removal of the fetuses must have occurred in the same place, said Rollins.

This expert, whom Rollins planned to use at trial, then changed his determination, under pressure "from [the expert's] colleagues in the late-term abortion community," he said. The witness decided the termination and removal of the fetus could have happened in different places.

"We've got an expert whose testimony is useless to us because he's said two different things now," said Rollins, who concluded that his office could no longer prove the pregnancies were terminated in Maryland and therefore dropped the charges.

It appears Brigham may continue his abortion caravans as New Jersey authorities have no plans to press charges.

Rollins has said his office is going to review all its evidence and may hire another abortion expert to re-examine the place of termination of the fetuses.

If the state's attorney determines that the terminations occurred in New Jersey, similar charges are not expected there.

"There's no indictable offense in this state that fits what he was doing here," said Jason Laughlin, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Camden County, N.J., where Brigham's primary clinic is located.

I like how the New York Times describes the situation regarding the Texas Women's Health Program.

Now, the Medicaid-financed Women's Health Program is in jeopardy. Texas signed regulations prohibiting clinics affiliated with groups that provide abortions from receiving funds, even though the clinics do not perform abortions themselves. The federal government says excluding qualified providers in this way is illegal, requiring it to withhold $35 million — about 90 percent of the program's financing — if the regulations, which take effect on Wednesday, are not rescinded.

Which part of the federal government? The Obama administration? Is it really required to withhold the money or is that them choosing to stick up for Planned Parenthood over funding a woman's health program.

Andrew Rosenthal also provides his typically ignorant thoughts on the issue claiming that "Texas is now planning" on shutting down the program. Rosenthal also seems to think that all Title X money goes to Planned Parenthood despite a comment in the NY Times article linked above (and also linked to by Rosenthal) which notes other organizations besides Planned Parenthood get Title X funds.

Life Links 3/7/12

Maryland prosecutors have dropped murder charges against abortionists Stephen Brigham and Nicola Riley. It appears Brigham is being let go because he injected the unborn children with fatal chemical while in New Jersey, killing them there (despite not having a valid medical license there), creating a jurisdictional issue.

As first reported Tuesday by the Cecil Whig newspaper, Rollins said in a news release that after consulting expert witnesses, prosecutors realized that fetal demise "created a jurisdictional issue."

Thus, Rollins said, Maryland "cannot successfully prosecute these matters at this time." However, he added, "the investigation is continuing."

Lawyers for Brigham and Riley argued that prosecutors had misinterpreted Maryland's fetal homicide law and its abortion law regarding the issue of fetal viability.

Brigham's lawyers argued that the abortion law gives the attending physician the responsibility for determining whether a fetus is capable of surviving outside the womb. "And under the law, it doesn't matter if others disagree," Brown said......

Brown said the latest crisis "has been very stressful for Dr. Brigham. He's eager to get back to his life and his practice."

So post-viability abortion caravans will continue unless New Jersey prosecutors step up and charge this guy with something.


The American Thinker has a story by a man whose wife "selectively reduced" triplets to a single child.

But that emotional scar will ache my whole life. I see my child's smile every night and anticipate a new one in some months...but I think of the two smiles I will never see. Every day, returning from work, I hear "Hi Daddy!" and know there are two voices and two giggles that I will never hear. I play with and cuddle my child, looking forward to the same with the second...but I know there are two sets of hands that will never touch mine, two sets of toes that will never be counted, two hugs that will forever be absent from my arms.

Obama is not very popular in Oklahoma. Abortion foe Randall Terry got 18% of Democratic primary vote there and may get a delegate.


The Muskegon Chronicle is running stories on unsolved crime mysteries. Today's story is about a 27-year-old woman who was found dead in the Muskegon River. She was going to testify against an abortionist who was caught aborting her child.

The obvious suspect was Earl Sales, the Flint man whom England was about to testify against. Investigators were also interested in the fact that Sales' wife was a Flint police officer.

"In a case like this you've got to look for motive," Knudsen said. "You have no other evidence that you can trace out. So obviously who could benefit by her death? And of course Earl Sales was the obvious guy."

But it wasn't enough.

Sales was polygraphed twice, the second time just before he was sent to prison to serve 18 months to four years for performing the abortion. (The 63-year-old was convicted of that even without England's testimony.)

Life Links 3/6/12

One would think the LA Times' Jenny Deam would do some cursory research before writing such a puff piece on wannabe abortionist Mila Means. The Wichita Eagle already profiled Means and their story would leave most normal people with the impression that Means is an unreliable individual whose "plans" to open an abortion clinic weren't very well planned out.


At First Things, Matthew Cantirino discusses Peter Singer's reaction to the strong reaction to a recent essay arguing in favor of infanticide.

Nevertheless, what's surprising about Singer's response is not necessarily his position on infanticide (which, at this point, is well known), but the academic insularity it exudes. He appears to be genuinely bothered that a paper arguing there should be no ethical taboo against killing a newborn baby is fomenting "virulence" among the general public. If only the grown-ups who run academic journals were left alone to "discuss it in a serious and well-reasoned manner," why, the controversy would be practically nonexistent.

Prolifers in Jacksonville won a lawsuit over the city's ordinance which prevented them from protesting near an abortion clinic because the spot lacked sidewalks.


A guess this is what counts as research nowadays. The New Times' Economix blog is linking to a Brookings Institute paper which claims that if the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on various projects (mass-media campaigns, evidence-based teen pregnancy intervention and expanding access to Medicaid family planning aka giving people who aren't poor free contraceptives) aimed at reducing unplanned pregnancies, the government would save much more money from the decrease in unplanned pregnancies. Of course, the small percentage reductions in unplanned pregnancies are based solely on estimates from the same author apparently in a different paper and the expanding access to Medicaid family planning insanely estimates that it would reduce unplanned pregnancies by 4.1%.

Yeah, that's not happening when only a small percentage of the people who get pregnant without using contraceptives failed to use contraceptives because of "access" issues. We're left to believe that large percentage of the people who supposedly can't afford contraception are going to eligible to enroll in this plan, enroll in the plan and use contraception every time perfectly or decide to use unpopular long-acting contraceptives.


Jonah Goldberg on Democrats' dishonesty over Obama's contraceptive mandate.

The Obama campaign insists that "if Mitt Romney and a few Republican senators get their way, employers could be making women's healthcare decisions for them" and require that women seek a permission slip to obtain birth control.

It's all so breathtakingly dishonest. Rather than transport us to President Franklin Pierce's America, never mind Charlemagne's Europe, the Blunt amendment would send America hurtling back to January 2012. That's when women were free to buy birth control from their local Ralphs or Wal-Mart, and religious employers could opt not to subsidize the purchase. What a terrifying time that must have been for America's women.

Life Links 3/2/12

Rick Perry responds to President Obama's plan to cut federal funding to Texas Women's Health Program because they Texas disallowed funds to go to Planned Parenthood.

However, the Obama Administration apparently is unwilling to allow the exclusion of organizations like Planned Parenthood, as Texas law requires, even though that organization represents less than 2 percent of enrolled providers. Texas has more than 2,500 qualified providers in 4,600 sites across the state, ready to deliver care.

If this debate were really about health care, the Obama Administration would allow the Texas Women's Health Program to continue.

Instead, the administration's stated intention to reject the Texas program reflects nothing more than its pro-abortion agenda, and is a blatant pander to the president's liberal base, which has made Planned Parenthood's abortion services a celebrated cause.

The Wall Street Journal on the tabling of the Blunt Amendment:

Nancy Pelosi called it "devastating legislation" and "the latest ploy in the Republican agenda of disrespecting the health of American women." Planned Parenthood claimed the "dangerous proposal" would have allowed "your boss"—yes, yours—to decide "which prescriptions you can get filled and which medical procedures you can have," including cancer screening, maternity care and AIDS medications.

It sounds medieval. But in fact, the provision that the Senate tabled yesterday would merely have restored the status quo ante of one month ago. Those were the dark ages before the Obama Administration overturned traditional conscience protections with its birth-control insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act.

At least one state legislator in California (Sen. Christine Kehoe) thinks first trimester abortions should be a decision between a woman and her nurse practitioner, physician assistant and nurse midwife.

Lawmakers opposed to abortion, however, were furious.

"My immediate response when I heard about this bill was visceral — I felt like I was kicked in the gut," Assemblyman Brian Jones (R-Santee) said in a statement. "I shouldn't be shocked at the moral failure this represents, but I fear what it says about our society that we are actually looking for more ways to abort babies."

Abortion advocate calls on others to stop comparing ultrasounds to rape

Carol Joffe, who has a lot of credibility as an abortion advocate, basically destroys the ultrasound=rape meme:

But I have considerable concerns about what calling these ultrasounds "rape" and "unnecessary" will mean for abortion patients and providers. The reality is that most abortion patients do receive an ultrasound to date their pregnancies. Since most abortions take place in the first trimester of pregnancy, many of these ultrasounds are performed with a transvaginal probe, the most effective method for viewing early-stage pregnancies. In the end, whether an ultrasound is performed, and which method is used, reflects either the practice of the abortion provider, the patient's medical history, or—for a relatively small number of women—an aversion to the transvaginal method. Most of the time, however, the transvaginal ultrasound is a useful and common tool that helps providers perform abortions safely and well.

"Objecting to infanticide is what's really wrong".....and other foolish ideas from Julian Savulescu

Julian Savulescu responds to criticism of an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (Savulescu is the editor) which argued killing newborns (or "after-birth abortion," as they labeled it) should be legal. He believes that what's wrong with the world is not that some "ethicists" think it should be legal to kill newborn babies but that some people would be deeply opposed to killing newborns and think the idea of killing newborn is evil and scary.

Coming from Savulescu this is no surprise. He's a eugenicist who is more known for writing outlandish things like it's "morally required that we employ cloning to produce embryos or fetuses for the sake of providing cells, tissues or even organs for therapy" than for producing anything that resembles a persuasive or thoughtful argument.

Unfortunately, thinking up new ways to argue in favor of killing certain humans gets you a professorship at the University of Oxford.

In the comments sections, a commenter named LiberalDemocratProgressive writes:

Savulescu is correct, our society gets overly hysterical and can't handle intellectual discussion on moral ethics. I long for a society where you could freely and calmly discuss genocide. Like, say, Germany 1933.

Abortion advocates reveal true positions/intentions on ultrasound bill

At least some abortion advocates are willing to admit the whole dust-up regarding Virginia's ultrasound bill didn't really have to do with transvaginal ultrasounds now that an amended bill is making its way through the legislature.

Elizabeth Nash, a Public Policy Associate for the Guttmacher Institute, told TPM that there’s “definitely concern” that “the huge outcry around vaginal ultrasound is masking other provisions in the bill that are just as terrible.”

So abdominal ultrasounds are just as terrible as transvaginal ultrasounds, which abortion advocates compared to rape?

Vicki Saporta, President and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion practitioners, agreed that ultimately people are “totally missing the big picture” when it comes to these ultrasound bills. “Really the abdominal versus transvaginal ultrasound issue is a distraction, one that has gotten a lot of publicity. But I think that the bill that was passed in Virginia is every bit as bad as what was being introduced there last week. I don’t think that the few changes they made make it any less burdensome for women seeking abortions.”

A distraction? Abdominal ultrasounds are "every bit as bad?" Not any less burdensome? Then why all the focus on transvaginal ultrasounds?

And Donna Crane, the Policy Director for NARAL, told TPM that they “remain as opposed to that bill as we were in from the beginning” because it mandates that a woman go through an unnecessary medical procedure. “We do not make a specific distinction as to what type of procedure is being forced on her,” she said.

So all that hullabaloo about transvaginal ultrasounds being "invasive" and "rape!" was just to get some media attention?

Again, leading abortion advocates show how deceptive and PR-savvy they are. They will use every trick in the book to try to derail prolife laws.