Life Links 4/16/09

A woman in Tennessee has been sentenced to 8 years in prison for trying to steal a baby. She claims she attempted to kidnap a newborn child after having an abortion and trying to cover it up and trick her abusive boyfriend.

In testimony Wednesday, Johnson told the court the New Year's Eve incident happened because she was trying to cover up an abortion and fool an abusive boyfriend. A relative told her what would happen if she didn't.

"He said, 'She better produce some kind of baby, or I'm going to kill her,' and he had a gun," said Johnson.

According to this story, prosecutors don’t trust her account of the reasons behind the kidnapping.


A British biotech firm called MedCell Bioscience is planning on starting a clinical trial in the next year using an adult stem cell technique which has successful treated race horses with tendon damage.

Patients will receive injections containing millions of their own stem cells, which have been extracted and multiplied up in a laboratory, and can regenerate new tissue to repair damaged regions.

More than 1,500 race horses have been treated using the same process and follow-up data suggests a 50 percent reduction in re-injury over a three year period, compared with conventional treatment.

Cate Nelson has a piece on Eco Child’s Play about how she went from a prolife feminist to being pro-choice during her pregnancy with her first child after she left her cheating fiancee.

But I also knew that most women do not have the support network that I had at hand. Most women overall, not just pregnant women in bad situations. If another woman were in my situation, pregnant, how could I ask her to carry the child? That was my choice, yes. But would my choice be different if I had no one?

I felt Little L move very early for a first pregnancy (12 weeks). I am thankful for him every day. I was thankful for him every day that I was a single mom, too. No matter how I struggled at times. But Little L and I had incredible people in our lives. People who babysat for free so I could work. People who bought us loads of clothes or sent us Whole Foods gift cards. People who thought about what we needed and gave and gave and gave, without us ever asking.

Most women—most poor families—do not have that.

She provides no argument for why the fact that some poor families who don’t have the support network she had means it should be legal to kill unborn children.


At the Weekly Standard blog, Kevin Vance notes that Hillary Clinton is standing by her praise of eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Mrs. Sanger, of course, wasn't the benevolent advocate for human rights that Clinton's remarks make her out to be. In fact, Sanger's "vision" for birth control seems to be united to a eugenic vision. In the October 1921 issue of The Birth Control Review, Sanger wrote that "the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aim of Eugenics."