Life Links 11/10/11

Lynda Williams, another former Gosnell employee has pled guilty to third-degree murder.

Her victims were Karnamaya Mongar, 41, an abortion patient who died during a November 2009 drug overdose prescribed by Gosnell, and one of the seven babies whose spinal cords were cut after having been born alive and viable, prosecutors allege.

Gosnell hired Williams to work for him full time in 2008 to clean instruments, but she was soon "anesthetizing abortion patients, performing ultrasounds . . . and dealing with babies born alive while he was not at the clinic," according to a January grand jury report.

Apparently, another former Gosnell employee named Tina Baldwin will plead guilty on Monday.


Michael New reflects on the defeat of Mississippi's person amendment.

There are some lessons to be learned from this. First, many polls consistently show that most Americans are uncomfortable with abortion, but think it should be a legal option in hard-case circumstances such as rape, incest, and life of the mother. Now I, along with many other pro-life activists, think that the unborn deserve legal protection in all situations, regardless of the circumstances surrounding their conception. However, this is not a view shared by most Americans — frustrating though it might be for pro-lifers.

Another lesson is that historically, the initiative process has not been kind to pro-lifers. Pro-life initiatives often do less well than expected, because abortion opponents are typically able to raise and spend more money than pro-lifers.

The Washington Post has an article on research which indicates many patients are misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. The story includes a quote from Bobby Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo.

"Regrettably, Terri was never afforded these types of exams," Schindler wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post. "Such testing could not have hurt Terri but could have helped her."

Schindler and others called for a reconsideration of such diagnoses.

"These findings only reinforce our family's contention that the PVS diagnosis needs to be eliminated — particularly given the fact that it not only dehumanizes the cognitively disabled, but it is being used in some instances to decide whether or not a person should live or die, as it was used in Terri's case. None of us deserves to be deprived of food and water," he said.

Mark Leach writes in First Things about the new Down Syndrome test:

MaterniT21 can be performed any time from ten weeks forward in a pregnancy. In the research study, half of the samples were from the second trimester, but the test is offered earlier in the pregnancy specifically because it allows for earlier termination. Matthew Rabinowitz is CEO of Gene Security Network, a company developing its own noninvasive prenatal test for Down syndrome. Commenting on Sequenom's new test, he clinically and candidly stated, "If a couple finds an abnormality, and chooses to terminate the pregnancy, it's better to do it earlier." Considering that the majority of women currently receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome do opt to terminate, Sequenom's new test is definitively not safer for the fetus.