Life Links 6/10/11

The New Times has a long article on the burgeoning prolife movement in Russia.

At the conference, Mrs. Yakunina said Sanctity of Motherhood was conducting a pilot program in Krasnoyarsk, an industrial city in Siberia, working with doctors and journalists to shift public opinion and women’s choice away from abortion. The abortion rate in Krasnoyarsk among women who had gone through the program dropped by 16 percent, she said, which if applied to Russia as a whole would mean 200,000 more babies a year, based on the official figure of 1.3 million annual abortions.

Dominic Holt-Reid, the man who attempted to force his girlfriend to have an abortion at gunpoint was sentenced to 13 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted murder of his then unborn child.


Gregory Nelson will possibly face the death penalty for killing his pregnant girlfriend and their unborn child.

Nelson was arrested in Kissimmee, Fla., four days after Cisneros’ bloody body was discovered by her family several yards from the restaurant in the early morning hours of March 9. Family members said she had gone to meet Nelson at the restaurant when they lost cell phone contact with the 24-year-old immigrant from Mexico.

Laws were passed in Virgjnia in 2004 that created offenses of capital murder and fetal homicide when someone attacks and kills a pregnant woman intentionally and also with the intent of taking the life of the fetus.

Cisneros, according to family members, expected to deliver Nelson’s child within a few weeks, but it is not clear what agreements, if any, existed between the two for the child’s care.

Ross Douthat responds to Ezra Klein's critique of his position on assisted suicide.

It’s more like supplementary evidence for exactly the point I was trying to make — which is, once again, that rather than just providing an escape from unbearable pain in the last hours of life, both moral logic and practical experience (from Ezekiel’s study to Kevorkian’s depredations) suggest that recognizing a right to die will gradually encourage the use of assisted suicide as a kind of “treatment” for depression, chronic illness, and other, not-immediately-terminal conditions.