Life Links 10/17/07

A Virginia man named Daniel Riase has been sentenced to 5 years in jail after giving his pregnant girlfriend a drink spiked with misoprostol (one of the drug used for RU-486 abortions). The drug caused his girlfriend, who was 11 weeks pregnant at the time, to miscarry their child.


Charlotte Allen has provides probably one of the most comprehensive reports on Planned Parenthood's activities in Planned Parenthood's Unseemly Empire. She also discusses Planned Parenthood's 3% claim.

The 3 percent pie slice in the 2005-06 financial report, representing 264,943 abortion customers served, can only be described as deliberately misleading.

One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test--a separate service in Planned Parenthood's reckoning--and is almost always followed at the organization's clinics by a "going home" packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs--you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.

From the Associated Press:

The House on Monday urged health agencies to expand research into postpartum depression problems that affect up to one-fifth of new mothers and can, if untreated, lead to more serious psychoses. Democrats also accepted a GOP-backed provision that approves a National Institutes of Mental Health study into the psychological consequences of abortions.

Ryan Anderson on how an organization called Catholics United is trying to hijack the term "pro-life" in an effort to get prolifers to support the expansion of S-CHIP.

The pro-life jabs are particularly distasteful and destructive. They are nothing more than gross moral equivocation and the intentional hijacking of language. If every poverty-fighting bill under the sun becomes a "pro-life" bill, then the words lose all meaning. According to its website, Catholics United is a pro-life group dedicated to protecting the 1.3 million Americans killed every year by abortion. Yet it is leading the charge to eviscerate the clear meaning that the words "pro-life" have had in the American context for the past generation: opposition to legalized abortion coupled with support for mothers facing crisis pregnancies.

Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter has more.

Catholics United is running deceitful ads against pro-life members of Congress who opposed the vetoed S-CHIP bill, but otherwise supported health care for underprivileged kids. Why? Because Catholics United, which demurs from airing similar ads against pro-abortion members of Congress, is not a Catholic Church sanctioned organization; it is a Leftist political front group.

Also of note, the biography of Catholics United's "Director or Organizing" (sic) James Salt notes his "messaging work for Governor Sebelius." Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius is one of the most pro-abortion governors in the United States and has vetoed a bill which would have made abortion clinics comply with basic regulations for surgical facilities.