Life Links 5/11/10

Back in 1997, current Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan urged President Clinton to support a loop-hole-ridden amendment by then-Senator Tom Daschle to ban post-viability abortion as a way of stopping his veto of the ban on partial-birth abortions from possibly being overridden.

In a May 13, 1997, memo from the White House domestic policy office, Kagan and her boss, Bruce Reed, told Clinton that abortion rights groups opposed Daschle's compromise. But they urged the president to support it, saying he otherwise risked seeing a Republican-led Congress override his veto on the stricter bill.....

''We recommend that you endorse the Daschle amendment in order to sustain your credibility on HR 1122 and prevent Congress from overriding your veto,'' they wrote.

Here's some more information on that amendment from National Right to Life including a Washington Post article entitled, "Daschle Bill May Not Ban Anything" which notes how the bill would allow abortionists to decide if they broke the law or not.

In effect, the draft measure would give a doctor, or nonphysician allowed to do abortions, the last word on the likelihood a fetus would survive outside the uterus, as well as calculating risks of "grievous injury" to the mother if she continues the pregnancy.

The article also notes that Kagan urged Clinton to support a ban on human cloning.


In China, a farmer has killed a family planning official (and beaten her children) for reporting his wife's pregnancy to authorities, who then forced her to have an abortion.


The Vancouver Sun has an article on how two hospitals are now charging $50 to tell pregnant patients if their child is a boy or a girl. The policy includes a clause which attempts to prevent sex-selection abortion.

A draft document of the new policy obtained by The Vancouver Sun indicates that while fetal gender determination is not normally included in the ultrasound, "at the patient's request, it will be included in the radiologist's report ... [and] a charge of $50 will be levied for this additional service.

"The ultrasound staff will not disclose this information to the patient. Rather, [the pregnant patient] will obtain it from the referring physician after 20 weeks gestation [when abortion is no longer an available option]."

The time period after which such information is disclosed is important to prevent women from aborting if they are disappointed by the news of the gender of their fetus.

The Louisiana House has unanimously passed a measure to give the Department of Health and Hospitals more authority to shut down abortion clinics that pose an imminent danger to women.

The bill would give the secretary of the department the power to deny, refuse to renew or revoke an existing license of an abortion clinic if an investigation determines that it is in violation of state or federal law.

In the Daily Mail, Kishwar Desai writes about how British Indian families will travel to India to abort female unborn children.

Having carried out extensive research into the subject for my new novel, I'm convinced that scenarios like this are played out regularly in most of Britain's major cities. Indeed, research from Oxford University has estimated that girl babies are 'disappearing' from British Indian families at a rate approaching 100 a year. As with all official estimates, the reality could well be more.

By 'disappearing', I mean British Indian communities in this country are failing to produce the number of girl babies that science tells us to expect, which, broadly speaking, is 950 girls for every 1,000 boys.