JivinJehoshaphat

Life Links 1/30/12

2012-01-30T10:44:00.000-08:00

Jill Filipovic is promoting the meme that won't die.

The United States has one of the highest abortion rates in the developed world — that is in large part because of lack of birth control access

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There are various reasons the United States' abortion rate is higher than some other nations in the developed world. "Lack of access to birth control" is not one of them.

Noticeably absent from Filipovic's pronouncement is any evidence for it. Typical.

The New York Times publishes an article from the Texas Tribune on the state's new ultrasound law. Here's a boo-hoo part about the poor abortionists and the logistics nightmare it creates for traveling abortionists:

For the clinics, however, it has been a bureaucratic nightmare. Now the physician performing the abortion — not an ultrasound technician, for example, or a secondary doctor — must conduct the sonogram on a separate day, a scheduling struggle when doctors providing elective abortions are in short supply and rotate between clinics.

“They’ve had to set aside a whole other day doing ultrasounds, visits that in most parts of medicine would be dedicated to people with less training than a physician,” Ms. Hagstrom Miller said. “The effect on their travel schedule, on their reimbursement, on patients’ access to them has been tremendous.”

Lawyer Gloria Allred is apparently contacting television stations which are planning on airing Randall Terry's Super Bowl ads and asking them for time to appear on the stations and react to the ad and "express the pro-choice right to safe and legal abortion position." I don't know if the stations should allow someone who can't spell the name of her country properly ("United Sates") the time of day.

Newt Gingrich has announced he would ban all embryonic stem cell research and create a commission to study the ethics of in-vitro fertilization if elected president.

Life Links 1/27/12

2012-01-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

The Michigan Daily has an insightful piece by Cassie Balfour, a pro-choice student, who recently took the time to attend a meeting of the university's prolife student group.

It's pretty easy to be pro-choice at the University. I may have been raised in the religious west side of the state, but I grew up in East Quad, where being pro-choice is as ubiquitous as the Bob Marley posters pasted on dorm room walls.

It's easy to get trapped in an echo chamber when you think the Truth belongs to your side. But even if we can't agree, we can occasionally step across the protest line, stop the chanting, and listen.

A district judge has denied a Justice Department attempt to stop Colorado-based sidewalk counselor Kenneth Scott from talking to drivers as they enter Denver's Planned Parenthood.

Katrina Fernandez writes about beauty in the prolife movement.

I will never forget the one woman I met on Monday. She was there wearing an "I had an abortion" t-shirt. She said her abortion was 26 years ago and it was the best thing she'd ever done. Can you image living as long as she has and the only grand achievement she can claim for herself was having an abortion two and half decades ago?

Overheard: Student for Life of America's Kristan Hawkins in an interview at National Review Online.

You know, I saw two bumper stickers on a car the other day, and it still frustrates me when I think of it: One side of the car had a "You Can't Be Catholic and Pro-Choice" bumper sticker, and the other side had an "Obama 2012" bumper sticker. Can you say disconnect?

Life Links 1/26/12

2012-01-26T08:54:00.000-08:00

The Peoria Journal Star has an article on National Health Care Services abortion clinic in Peoria, Illinois, which was found in violation of "dozens" of state rules (22 pages worth of deficiencies) after being inspected for the first time in over a decade.

Since the inspection, National Health Services has instituted a number of changes, including rewriting charts to indicate physicians reviewed patient medical histories and physical exams; renewing and updating files on physicians' credentials and hospital privileges; and training or re-training staff on pre- and post-operative emergency procedures. Additionally, licensed practical nurses will no longer administer intravenous medications and no LPNs or registered nurses will perform duties beyond their scope of practice. A maintenance log has been established to document regular equipment sterilization and all medications and narcotics will be locked away at all times.

The clinic spent about $10,000 to meet requirements of a separate architectural inspection. Almost $4,000 of the amount went to replacing wooden doors of two storage rooms with fireproof doors, Van Duyn said.

Abortions will resume at a Planned Parenthood in Columbia, Missouri after the clinic found a new abortionist.

An abortion clinic in Australia will stop performing abortions past 24 weeks. The clinic previously performed post 24-week abortions on women with "psychosocial reasons" including women who were "suffering mental health problems, have had a catastrophic change in their circumstances or have experienced difficulty accessing abortion services earlier."

Peter Heck points out how many pro-choicers insert emotion into the abortion debate in place of logic and notes how pro-choice political candidates rarely have to face emotional questions based on personal scenarios.

Or compare apples to apples and envision Obama being quizzed by Piers Morgan: "So if you believe that partial-birth abortion is a legitimate medical procedure that violates no moral law, would you be willing to inject the saline into your own daughter's womb to burn your grandchild alive?" Such outrageously aggressive and offensively personal questioning would have Morgan looking for work within a week.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has asked for a rehearing of Texas' ultrasound law in front of the entire 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The New York Daily News has the story of a woman who was misdiagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy, given one of the drugs used in chemical abortions, discovered her child was actually in her uterus and decided to give birth despite the possibility of birth defects. Despite being born with some rather serious birth defects, her daughter is "surprisingly healthy."

A lack of access to contraceptives is not a major reason why teens get pregnant

2012-01-24T08:52:00.000-08:00

A new government study pokes another large hole in the "we need more access to birth control to dramatically reduce unplanned pregnancies" meme. Here's an MSNBC article on the study:

A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could get pregnant......

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex......

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to.

Table 1 of the study clearly shows that a number of different reasons led teenagers not to use birth control and not having access isn't in the top 3. Interestingly, the 13% of teens not using contraceptives who say they had trouble getting them mirrors the 12% number found in the Guttmacher Institute's 2001 research of all reproductive-aged women who didn't use contraceptives.

Will these findings finally lead Planned Parenthood, AGI, etc. to stop blathering on endlessly about the desperate need for more access to contraceptives?

I wouldn't bet on it.

Life Links 1/24/12

2012-01-24T08:31:00.000-08:00

Here's the Washington Post's coverage of the March for Life 2012.

The Salt Lake Tribune has a long two-part profile article on embattled abortionist Nicola Riley, who has been charged with murder for her role in late-term abortions in Maryland. The story shows how Riley's financial troubles led her to inquire about aborting children on the east coast and led to her association with infamous abortionist Steven Brigham. The second part details the botched abortion which led to charges against Riley and Brigham and how Riley's numerous lies about her past prison term caught up with her.

At the LTI blog, Jay Watts dismantles Debra Haffner's assertion-filled, argument-free piece attempting to make a religious case for legalized abortion.

What always gets me about pieces like Haffner's is when they equate "respecting women's moral agency" with believing that every decision a woman makes is morally right.

A utility worker in Fort Wayne found the remains of an unborn child while cleaning a pump station screen. The age of the child has yet to be determined. The article states between 10 and 25 weeks.

Embryonic stem cell success? Well, we're not really sure.....

2012-01-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

The scientists at ACT have gotten the Lancet to publish a paper noting that after 4 months, two patients with eye conditions who received injections of cells derived from human embryonic stem cells have not had an adverse effects and have shown limited improvement. However, the paper notes that the scientists don't know what led to the improvement.

Similarly, we are uncertain at this point whether any of the visual gains we have recorded were due to the transplanted cells, the use of immunosuppressive drugs, or a placebo effect.

Amazingly, the New York Times has a (dare I say it?) somewhat evenhanded piece in their business section (maybe that's why) regarding the study. The article notes ACT's history of using overstatements in press releases to raise funds, the unusualness of publishing results on so few patients so quickly, the lack of a control group and the reality that the implanted cells might not have actually done anything.

More on Illinois' abortion clinic inspections

2012-01-23T08:30:00.000-08:00

The Daily Herald has more from the Associated Press' research into Illinois' attempt to start inspecting abortion clinics again after years of neglect. Most notable is the results of their inspection of the Women's Aid Clinic in Lincolnwood, its closure and the insane reaction of Larissa Rowansky, the abortion clinic's co-owner.

One of those facilities — the Women's Aid Clinic in Lincolnwood — closed when the owner decided to surrender its license rather than pay a $36,000 fine or endure an expensive legal fight with the state. The fine was for violations including the clinic's failure to perform CPR on a patient who died after a procedure. Its owner told the AP her clinic was safe and she felt victimized by the surprise inspection after 15 years....

Larissa Rowansky, a co-owner of the Women's Aid Clinic in Lincolnwood, said her clinic helped women and provided the best care that a professional clinic could provide.

But Illinois inspection reports detail citations for practices such as frozen TV dinners stored in a biohazard lab refrigerator that also held placental or fetal tissue. The clinic's dusty equipment, lack of a supervising registered nurse and failure to perform CPR on a patient who later died also drew citations.

Rowansky said that patient didn't need CPR because she was speaking to emergency workers when she was taken to a hospital after her abortion. The patient "lied about her condition," Rowansky added, saying the woman had bronchial pneumonia and was too ill to have an abortion.

The other violations uncovered by the state inspectors were technicalities, Rowansky said.

"It was unfair," she said of the state's inspection last year, the first in 15 years.

A separate inspection of the building resulted in more citations for fire hazards. Fixing the problems and paying the fine would have cost more than a year's revenue, Rowansky said.

"I tried to help women to get legal abortions," she said. "If someone wants to work against that, there's nothing I can do."

Life Links 1/23/12

2012-01-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

The smallest surviving child born in California is going home. Melinda Guido weigh a little more than ½ a pound at birth.

She was born four months premature on Aug. 30 and weighed just more than 9 ounces, making her the second smallest in the United States and one of the world's smallest surviving babies.

Melinda was so tiny she could fit into the palm of her doctor's hand.

Doctors say the baby now weighs 4.5 pounds and has progressed enough to be discharged.

Overhead - Mark Judge on Washington Post writer Dana Milbank's observations about the March for Life:

What makes this so awful is not that Milbank is a liberal. It's the rote belching up of cliches in place of thought, research, or contemplation. It's the making of an idiotic assertion about financial motivation, followed the inability to follow a more interesting assertion he stumbles over to an interesting place. It's the childish impulse, not to mention the moral sclerosis, of the sarcastic quotes around "conscience clause."

Scott Klusendorf and Jay Watts defend incremental prolife legislation.

Casey Martinson, the Director of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes (PPSFL), writes that the sky is falling on Roe v. Wade.

I'm sorry to say that the sky is falling on Roe v Wade. It's been falling incrementally for the past four decades, and it fell further, faster, in 2011 than in any year before. According to the Guttmacher Institute, state legislatures passed 94 new laws restricting abortion in 2012. Not only is that a new record, but it shatters the previous record of 34 new laws passed in 2005 by a lot.

Interestingly, the director of public affairs doesn't know how old Roe v. Wade is.

So the alarm that defenders of reproductive rights have been sounding at a higher and higher volume is serious business. As we approach the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we have an opportune moment to bring these concerns into focus against the never-ending blur of our modern news cycle. Anti-choice extremists – a fair word for people who equate not just abortion but birth control pills with murder – are gearing up to make their own hay on this issue, and after 38 years of losing ground, pro-choice advocates need maximum effort to turn things around.

Unsurprisingly, avid pro-choicers who spurn debate have no problem interrupting a prolife event at the March for Life to mindlessly spout chants. Jennie Stone has the video and summary.

ProLifeCon live streaming

2012-01-23T05:42:00.000-08:00

Don't miss the live stream of ProLifeCon at the Family Research Council's website.

Illinois inspecting abortion clinics again

2012-01-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

Two separate Associated Press articles on local Illinois television stations inform readers that in 2011 the state of Illinois started to inspect abortion clinics after years of neglect.

An analysis of state documents by The Associated Press finds the state is catching up with a backlog of neglected inspections, but a few clinics still haven't been checked in more than a decade.

The renewed oversight last year led to the permanent closure of a clinic in Rockford earlier this month, following the closing of a second clinic in suburban Chicago last October.

State officials say gruesome revelations about a Philadelphia facility spurred the renewed inspections.

Another article lists the number of years since various clinics had been investigated.

Even the unborn are Tebowing

2012-01-19T11:37:00.000-08:00

You know a trend is popular if unborn children are taking part in it.

Life Links 1/19/12

2012-01-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

Russell Moore writes about sharing the gospel in an abortion culture.

In your congregation this Sunday, and in the neighborhoods around you right now, there are women vulnerable to abortionist propaganda, not because they reject the church but because they're afraid they ‘ll lose the church. Pregnant young women are scared they will scandalize church people when they start to show, so they keep it secret. Parents are fearful their pregnant daughter, or their son's pregnant girlfriend, will prompt the rest of the congregation to see them as bad families.

As they keep all of this secret from the Body of Christ, many of them fall prey to the false gospel of the abortion clinic. "We can take care of this for you," these people say. "And it will all go away."

Scott Klusendorf recently had a piece entitled, "The 2012 Elections: Five Questions for Pro-Life Advocates" published in the Christian Research Journal.

It's hard to keep straight face reading this from Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards:

In fact, the Tebow story exemplifies the health care environment that Planned Parenthood promotes....

The Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization have apparently put together another one of those worldwide abortion ~~studies~~ guesstimates based on guesstimates which the Lancet decided to publish. Unsurprisingly, they claim abortions are more frequent in countries where abortion is illegal and to push for more funding of contraceptives.

Life Links 1/18/12

2012-01-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

Massachusetts' state appeals court has struck down a probate judge's ruling ordering a woman with schizophrenia have an abortion and be sterilized.

Earlier this month, a Norfolk probate judge declared a pregnant woman with schizophrenia incompetent and ordered her to undergo an abortion, stating she could be "coaxed, bribed, or even enticed'' into the hospital for the procedure.

Unbidden, the judge further directed that the 32-year-old woman be sterilized "to avoid this painful situation from recurring in the future.''

Yesterday, the state's appeals court struck down the decision in unusually harsh terms, saying the woman had clearly expressed her opposition to abortion as a Catholic.

"The personal decision whether to bear or beget a child is a right so fundamental that it must be extended to all persons, including those who are incompetent,'' the opinion stated, citing a 1982 ruling by the state's Supreme Judicial Court......

The woman, identified in court records by the pseudonym Mary Moe, described herself to court officials as "very Catholic,'' and said she would never have an abortion. When asked about an abortion at a December hearing, she replied that she "wouldn't do that.......''

The woman, who also has bipolar disorder, has been pregnant twice before. In the first pregnancy, she had an abortion. In the second she gave birth to the boy.

At some point between her abortion and the birth of her son, she had a "psychotic break'' and has since been hospitalized numerous times for mental illness, court records say.

Dr. Rajendra Kale, interim editor-in-chief at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, defends his call for withholding information on fetal sex until the 30th week to prevent sex-selection abortions in Canada.

Kale said the overall numbers might be small, but if the phenomenon is showing up in census data, it's not as small as people here want to believe.

"Anyone saying it doesn't happen in Canada or happens in ridiculously low numbers is just wrong," Kale said. "I'm convinced we need to do something."

A South African court is hearing from an abortionist about the death of a 35-year-old woman who died during a botched 18-week abortion at a Marie Stopes abortion clinic.

e said soon after the procedure started, 'something went wrong' and Mathebula's condition deteriorated. She died after losing more than two litres of blood. 'I did not force the forceps . . . to cause the tear, I simply grabbed the foetus. I do not know what caused the tear which eventually led to the rupture,' he is reported to have said.

Overheard - Dana Milbank on abortion provider Merle Hoffman's claims of an abortion expulsion since the recession:

Abortion rates have exploded since the economic collapse, she warned, as nearly three-quarters of women ending their pregnancies say they simply can't afford to have a baby. Hoffman expanded on that trend to forecast a "dim future" for women if a Republican wins the White House: a world of abortion "slave states" and "underground railroads" and "pre-Roe reality."

There was just one problem with this hysteria: The data in the study she presented were from 2008 — before the impact of the recession was felt. The sweeping conclusions came, rather, from "journalistic reports," as well as "seminal studies" (no pun intended, apparently) at Hoffman's own clinic in New York — where, as she eventually admitted, abortion rates were "relatively stable" the last two years.

Life Links 1/16/12

2012-01-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

The Northern Illinois Women's Center abortion clinic in Rockford will be closed permanently. This is after the clinic had done a variety of tasks required to meet health regulations including plans to hire an abortionist with surgical privileges at an in-state hospital.

According to an email sent to the Rockford Register Star, the clinic's owners have decided to voluntarily shut their doors for good.

Clinic officials state their decision is based on lack of support from the community, the political climate surrounding the abortion issue and the challenge the clinic would face in rebuilding staff.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the immediate enforcement of Texas' ultrasound law.

Then on Thursday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott asked the appeals court to make its decision effective immediately, shortening the 22-day waiting period typically required under the court's rules. The appeals court granted the request in a one-sentence order less than a day later......

The Texas Department of State Health Services expected to implement its enforcement plan in the coming weeks, spokeswoman Carrie Williams said. The department was finalizing its notification letters that it will send to abortion facilities and inspectors, Williams said.

Overheard: George Berkin in NJ Voices on the Texas ultrasound law and it's detractors.

First, Planned Parenthood's response shows just how empty the "pro-choice" rhetoric really is. In our everyday experience, more information makes for greater freedom of choice. Should I attend Rutgers or Montclair State? As I consider my options, I want as much information as possible about academic offerings, costs, social life, etc.

Deciding what to do when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, unlike choosing which school to attend, is fraught with moral consequences as I consider each option. But that moral dimension should make it more important to be fully informed about each possible choice, not less important.

Amanda Marcotte is really off her rocker. She think that if Griswold v. Connecticut is overturned, she could see "conservative states passing laws requiring you to be married (to get contraceptives) or some such nonsense." No states are mentioned nor any legislators in such a state who would support such a law. She really is the mayor of Crazytown, U.S.A.

Later, she shows why she continuously struggles to form anything resembling a reasonable argument.

Santorum is trying to argue basically the contraception somehow causes out-of-wedlock births---man, I hate that term---because it lets people think they can have sex and then they get pregnant. Luckily for us, we actually have data to disprove this argument, and not just common sense. The record high for teen pregnancy was not 1966, the year after Griswold was decided. Nor was it after condoms became ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s. It was actually in 1958, when it was twice as high as it is now. True, there were a lot of shotgun marriages back then, but so what? The difference is not in contraception use, but in mores regarding marriage and pregnancy.

First, she's comparing apples and oranges. Teen pregnancy doesn't equal out-of-wedlock births, especially in 1958. My mother was the first woman in her immediate family not to be married and have a kid before she was 20. This is why teen pregnancy numbers were high in the late-fifties. It wasn't because a bunch of unmarried teens were having unplanned pregnancies nor was it because of "shotgun marriages." It was because a bunch of married women who were teenagers were having planned pregnancies.

People got married and started having children at a much earlier age in the 1950's. In 1950 and 1960, the median age of first marriage for women was 20.3 years. That means a little less than half of the women getting married were doing so in their teens. Unsurprisingly, a higher number of women being teens when married leads to a higher number of teen pregnancies. Interestingly, Marcotte never seem to think that easier access to contraceptives may have played a role in changing society's mores on sex, marriage and pregnancy.

Life Links 1/12/12

2012-01-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

A Maryland woman is facing 5 years in jail after buying abortion pills online and giving them to a teenager who was 20 weeks pregnant. Sandra Craine pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment after the teen she gave the pills to wound up in a hospital delivering a child hours after taking the pills.

"The pills arrive in the mail and (Craine) gives the packet to (the victim). She takes her first pill on the morning of June 30 and two hours later, the pregnant (victim) is in Union Hospital with pain. Her baby was born alive a short time later, but died shortly thereafter," Urick said.

Doctors who treated the victim contacted police and Det. Angel Valle of the Cecil County Sheriff's Office, in turn, conducted the investigation that led to the indictment.

Rai Rojas, the Director of Hispanic Outreach for the National Right to Life Committee, discusses prolife people who claim they wouldn't vote for their non-favored Republican against President Obama.

I promise you, I am going to scream the next time I hear a conservative pundit or "family issues" blogger state that they wouldn't vote for this guy or that guy if this guy or that guy wins the GOP nomination. And if one more holier-than-thou pro-lifer quips that so-and-so would be just as bad as Obama – I'm also going to scream, but not before I whack them straight up the side of their numb-skull head.

This president is the single most pro-abortion one we have ever had, worse, this is a president who has said that banning infanticide would impede a "woman's right to chose." Seriously. Are you still going to insist that Gingrich, Romney, Paul et al are just as bad? If so, you've lost all grip on reality.

UK abortionists are getting ready for an increased number of abortion procedures after the holiday season.

Mr Bradshaw, 57, said: "There is a significant increase in post-coital contraception in the week after the festive season. There are also more requests for terminations within the next few months.

Life Links 1/11/12

2012-01-11T07:18:00.000-08:00

A panel of three judges on the Fifth District Court of Appeals has overturned a restraining order which prevented Texas' sonogram law from fully taking effect. The law required an abortionist to show women considering an abortion their ultrasound and describe it. U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks had originally ruled that parts of the law infringed on the free speech of abortionists.

Chief Judge Edith H. Jones used her opinion to systematically dismantle the argument that the Texas law infringes on the free speech rights of doctors and patients, the key argument against the law.

"The required disclosures of a sonogram, the fetal heartbeat, and their medical descriptions are the epitome of truthful, non-misleading information," Jones wrote. "The appellees failed to demonstrate constitutional flaws" with the law.

Sparks had ruled in August that several provisions of the state law violated the free-speech rights of doctors who perform abortions by requiring that they show and describe the sonogram images and describe the fetal heartbeat, all of which doctors have said is not necessary for good treatment.

In response to this opinion, Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights hilariously goes all libertarian. Just don't let them know you favor tax funds being directly inserted into that private decision!

"This law, and this decision, inserts government directly into a private decision that must be protected from the intrusion of political ideologues," Northrup said. "Anyone concerned with the erosion of the constitutional protection of our individual rights as Americans should be profoundly concerned and disappointed by today's events."

A Michigan judge has ruled Planned Parenthood can open a clinic at a property with a disputed deed restriction. Planned Parenthood deceived the property owners of a nearby hotel which held the deed restriction and have repeatedly lied about their intentions for the clinic. Prolifers have promised to appeal.

At the hearing, Circuit Judge James Alexander said lawyers representing those opposed to Planned Parenthood failed to show how the clinic, set for a business-zoned area of Opdyke Road, would violate restrictions set forth when the land was split for sale more than a decade ago.

He scolded lawyers representing the opponents for arguing on the assumption that the clinic would provide abortion services, when local Planned Parenthood officials have said repeatedly that they may not.

"Let me stop this right now," said Alexander, as attorney James Carey referred to the clinic as "an abortion clinic" in the beginning of his arguments. "This is not an abortion case. This is a property case."

It shows you something about how abortion clinics don't really care about "choice" when there is supposedly only one abortion clinic in the entire country that is also an adoption agency. No statistics are given comparing the number of adoptions with the number of abortions. The story of this clinic in Ohio also disputes one popular pro-choice assertion.

One of the myths surrounding abortion is that a woman walks into an abortion clinic, says get rid of it, climbs on the table and walks out baby-free. But abortion providers know that the greatest problems with abortions can come in the aftermath, if a woman goes into a deep depression over her decision.....

Nature profiles Robert Lanza and ACT, the only company currently running a clinical trial using cells created from human embryonic stem cells, and there various troubles.

Now, the company's future hinges on the outcome of the trials. Final results won't be out until 2013, and they will show mainly whether the cell transplants are safe. The patients enrolled in the trial are in the late stages of vision loss, so the chances of dramatic improvement are remote, experts say.....

But even if the trial results are positive, ACT will face enormous challenges in commercializing the technology. The company will have to show the FDA that its RPE cells can slow vision loss in bigger and more expensive clinical trials.

And even if the treatment works, storing and distributing the cells, which often have short shelf-lives, is expensive and logistically difficult, says Chris Mason, head of the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Bioprocess Group at University College London.

This is why it's tough to take feminist pro-choice bloggers seriously

2012-01-09T10:43:00.000-08:00

Jill Filipovic at Feministe provides a perfect example of why thoughtful people have trouble taking feminist pro-choice bloggers seriously. She links to a piece in the Washington Post which takes down the silly idea that Rick Santorum wants to outlaw birth control.

Jill claims she isn't scared Santorum himself would move to ban birth control but Jill is worried about "efforts on the state level to outlaw birth control."

Do I think that if Santorum is elected president he'll try to outlaw birth control? No. Of course not. That's not going to happen, and that's not what anyone is actually worried about. What we are worried about are the efforts on the state level to outlaw birth control, and the kinds of federal judges that President Santorum — a phrase that makes me feel slightly ill — would appoint, to the Supreme Court and other federal courts.

This is crazy. Which states are going to try to outlaw birth control?

Can Jill name any state which has 10, heck 5 legislators in favor of outlawing birth control? If not, then why would she be worried about it?

Jill continues,

We are, however, concerned that he will stack the courts with anti-choice judges, and will back state efforts to limit or outlaw birth control.

Why would Santorum back efforts to outlaw birth control? In the Washington Post article Jill links notes Santorum is opposed to state efforts to outlaw birth control,

To be clear, he does think that laws banning birth control would be dumb "for a number of reasons. Birth control should be legal in the United States. The states should not ban it, and I would oppose any effort to ban it.''

So Santorum opposes state efforts to outlaw birth control, thinks laws to ban birth control would be "dumb," thinks birth control should be legal but Jill still thinks in some way he's going to support non-existent state efforts to ban birth control. Somebody took a crazy pill recently.

Amanda Marcotte is also drunk on delusional fears.

Life Links 1/6/12

2012-01-06T08:28:00.000-08:00

Bobby Joe Rodgers, a homeless man with an extensive arrest record, has been arrested for and has admitted to setting fire to Steven Brigham's abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Rodgers told investigators he had an aversion to abortion.

The lawyers for abortionist/accused murder Nicola Riley want police and prosecutors in her case to be charged with contempt.

In the petition for contempt, Riley's attorneys argue that details about the charges against her have appeared in more than 700 news articles, prejudicing her presumption of innocence and likely tainting the jury pool......

In the motion to unseal the indictment and set bail, Riley's attorneys argue that the evidence against her is weak and that Maryland's viable fetus law does not apply to her.

"Because Dr. Riley is a medical professional and because she provided lawful medical care to a patient, in this case, she is exempt from prosecution," the motion says. "The facts of this case ... and the express language of the statute run counter to the state's bald assertion that this case is unique."

The Northern Illinois Women's Center abortion clinic in Rockford, Illinois plans to reopen after being closed since September. Here's a PDF of the final order which includes the complaint, NIWC's plan of correction, etc. The final order shows NIWC had to hire a "new" (he's probably around 75 years old) abortionist as an "Independent Contractor" who has privileges at the Methodist Hospital of Chicago and will work one day a week at NIWC. The other abortionists who work at NIWC don't have surgical privileges at an Illinois hospital.

Life Links 1/5/12

2012-01-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

The Rockford abortion clinic which failed two inspections in a row can reopen if they pay a fine of $9,750. If they pay the fine and reopen, they can be shut down if 2012 inspections find any of the deficiencies found in 2011 inspections.

Or they can pay a $1,000 fine and close.

RH Reality Check's Robin Marty thinks violations like not having a nurse in the operating room and abortionists not having privileges with licensed hospitals have "very little to do with the actual services that it provides."

For some reason Jill at Feministe seems to think the fact that cells from the unborn child cross over the placenta and stay in the child's mother for years is somehow helpful to proving that the unborn aren't distinct, unique human beings. She presents no argument so I'm struggling to see why she would think cells from Human Being A existing in Human Being B proves that Human Being A isn't a distinct, unique human being. Transferred organs with the DNA of distinct, unique human beings live in other human beings for years. Does that prove organ donors aren't distinct, unique human beings?

The web page she links to also hurts the ole' "fetus is a parasite" argument as it notes the cells from the unborn child inside the mother help the mother.

Pincott adds that some fetal cells can also "migrate to injury sites" and speed up healing, as well as minimize scars after pregnancy and normalize skin structure — meaning that baby is helping to restore mommy!

Planned Parenthood has opened a new office in Johnson City, Tennessee and is relocating an abortion clinic in Waco, Texas.

Life Links 1/4/12

2012-01-04T07:19:00.000-08:00

Lawyers for the state of Illinois and a Rockford abortion clinic will meet before a judge today told to talk about the suspension of the clinic's license. The Northern Illinois Women's Center has been closed since the end of September after failing a health and safety inspection.

The cause of the fire at the abortion clinic in Pensacola has yet to be determined. Abortionist Steve Brigham, who was recently charged with multiple counts of murder, is the owner of the clinic. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer timeline detailing Brigham's various run-ins with authorities, Brigham purchased the facility in March of 2011.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation. Local, state and federal agencies are helping with the investigation.

"We have not determined that it's arson," said Deborah Cox, a spokeswoman for the state fire marshal's office. "The investigation is continuing in that regard."

Planned Parenthood's monster affiliate, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, keeps getting bigger.

Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma has joined Planned Parenthood of the Heartland to create an affiliate that spans four states and includes three centers in Tulsa and one in Broken Arrow.

No decision has been made regarding whether the merger will make abortion services available at the Tulsa and Broken Arrow centers, and there is no timeline to make such a decision, a spokeswoman said.....

The merger, announced in June, brings together 34 centers in Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.

Rich Lowry discusses how the Santorum family lost a child and the recent "controversy" caused by the idiotic comments of Alan Colmes.

How is a family supposed to deal with the death of a child? Among some on the left, there's an instinctive reaction against how the Santorums handled their loss because the logic of abortion rights denies that there is any loss worth troubling over. The Santorums accepted their grief, and when life presented them with another wrenching challenge, accepted it in turn.

Life Links 1/3/12

2012-01-03T11:53:00.000-08:00

In case you missed it, abortionists Steven Brigham and Nicola Riley have been charged with multiple counts of murder, presumably for killing viable unborn children. Both have been arrested and Maryland authorities are working on their extraditions.

Maryland criminal law states that people can be charged with murder if they "intend to cause the death of the viable fetus." The law does not define "personhood" and states it is not intended to infringe on a woman's right to have an abortion.

But state law also defines a fetus as "viable" if "there is a reasonable likelihood of the fetus' sustained survival outside the womb."

Brigham provided abortions to five patients ranging from 18 to 33 weeks pregnant, according to a report by the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners.

The determination of whether those fetuses were "viable" could occur in court.

On New Year's Day, an abortion clinic in Pensacola was burned.

The Florida Fire Marshal's Office is heading the investigation, but the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have joined in because of the location of the blaze, said Deborah Cox, spokeswoman for the marshal's office.

"Because of the structure that was involved, because it was an abortion clinic," she said.

A preliminary investigation found that the fire began outside the clinic, Cox said.

The address of another one of arrested abortionist Steven Brigham' clinics is listed as the clinic's mailing address.

American Family Planning lists its physical address at 6770 N. Ninth Ave. and its mailing address as 1 Alpha Ave. in Voorhees, N.J., according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration.

The New Jersey address used by Brigham is the location of American Women's Services, which offers abortion and gynecological services.

The Washington Times has a New Year's piece featuring abortion proponents complaining about President Obama's supposed failures on the abortion front.

MSNBC has the story of a woman who was reunited with her biological daughter 77 years after the child was adopted.

New York prosecutors have dropped self-abortion charges against a woman who used abortion drugs to self-abort and then dumped the child in a dumpster.

Selective reduction abortion statistics from the UK

2011-12-29T11:16:00.000-08:00

The propensity to kill one of your unborn twin children is not just an American tragedy though I would guess the numbers in the U.S. would be much higher.

Department of Health statistics found that more than 100 babies were terminated by women expecting twins, triplets or quintuplets, the Daily Telegraph said.

The statistics, released under the freedom of information law, revealed that in 2010, 85 women aborted at least one foetus while going on to give birth to another baby. This compares to 59 women in 2006.

Of the 85 women undergoing selective reductions last year, 51 were reducing a pregnancy from twins to a single baby, up from 30 four years before.

The data showed that there were 20 abortions to reduce triplets to twins and nine procedures to take a pregnancy from triplets to a single child.

GOP attacks women by trying to save girls from sex-selection abortions?

2011-12-29T08:38:00.000-08:00

Oh Alternet. You rarely disappoint. Here's Tanya Somanader piece entitled "The GOP's 10 Most Extreme Attacks on Women." One of those extreme attacks on women is legislation which hopes to outlaw sex selection abortions in the U.S.

Race/Sex Abortions: Taking their queue from Arizona, House Republicans introduced the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) — a so-called "civil rights" bill that bans physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus's race or sex. The problem of selective abortion is virtually non-existent, as not one state official or independent research offered any evidence of race-based abortions. Only 5 percent of abortions occur after the point when a fetus's sex can be determined. Arizona's measure, now law, sends doctors and clinicians to jail for three years if they knowingly provide such abortions. The federal bill PRENDA allows for civil suits against the physicians.

Tanya never explains how this legislation, which would deal with a supposedly "virtually non-existent" problem, is extreme or an attack on women.

I guess I supposed to take it as a given that for Alternet readers any legislation which restricts abortion (even abortions performed solely because the child is a girl) is an extreme attack on women.

Life Links 12/28/11

2011-12-28T10:49:00.000-08:00

Rick Perry dropped his rape/incest exception to abortion after attending the abortion forum in Iowa, watching Gift of Life and discussing abortion exceptions with a woman who was conceived in rape. The Hill has the video of him discussing his change of heart.

The Detroit Free Press has an AP story on China's one-child policy and those who defy it.

It's impossible to know how many children have been born in violation of the one-child policy, but Zhai Zhenwu, director of Renmin University's School of Sociology and Population in Beijing, estimates that less than 1% of the 16 million babies born each year are "out of plan."

Robocalls are bad enough but now we've got robotexts.

During Tuesday's edition of "Andrea Mitchell Reports," correspondent Peter Alexander said that some Iowans received text messages Tuesday morning urging them to call an in-state phone number.

When they did so, they heard "a recording of Mitt Romney's comments from 1994, where his convictions on the pro-life, the abortion, debate have really been in question."

In California, Willie Hines Jr. has pleaded not guilty to murdering Tatjana Cruz and her unborn child.

A Texas man has been arrested for a stem cell scheme in which he made $1.5 million for injecting stem cells into patients with diseases like cancer and multiple sclerosis. His scam was featured on 60 Minutes in 2010.

According to a 19-page indictment filed in Houston's federal courthouse in November, Morales oversaw the purchase umbilical cords and placentas from a maternity clinic in Del Rio, Texas.

Morales allegedly had the genetic materials shipped to a lab in Arizona where they were forwarded into the hands of a South Carolina pathologist who harvested the stem cells.

According to the 15-count indictment, Morales would use the stem cells in Mexico as medical treatments for cancer, multiple sclerosis and procedures that are not approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

New research is showing that performing an autopsy on the remains of stillborn children can provide information about a possible or probable cause.

In fact, the study of 512 stillborns -- a fetal death in the second half of pregnancy -- found the most common causes were obstetric complications, including preterm labor and premature rupturing of the amniotic sac, accounting for 29 percent of the deaths.

Life Links 12/22/11

2011-12-22T07:07:00.000-08:00

One of the Planned Parenthood clinics which is closing in Washington provided RU-486 chemical abortions. Herald writer Sharon Salyer gets how RU-486 abortions work completely wrong.

The Oak Harbor clinic, which operated three days a week, served a little more than 1,000 patients, said Kristen Glundberg-Prossor, a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman.

While surgical abortions were not performed at the site, women could prevent a pregnancy by getting from the clinic RU 486, the so-called abortion pill.

State Representative Margo Davidson, one of the Pennsylvania legislators who voted in favor of the new abortion clinic regulations, was related to Semika Shaw, one of abortionist Kermit Gosnell's victims.

"I honor her memory by voting for this bill," Davidson told her colleagues Wednesday after the controversial measure was approved. "So women will no longer walk into a licensed health-care facility and be butchered as she was."
......
Shaw's death, which led to a $900,000 insurance settlement, was central to the grand jury's conclusion that state officials had failed to inspect the clinic for two decades and repeatedly ignored complaints of possible criminal activity there.

Davidson, 49, who grew up in same Mantua neighborhood where Shaw lived and the Gosnell clinic was located, said her young cousin probably sought an abortion because she had two young children and realized that as a single woman, she could not support a third. The grand jury report said Shaw had four previous abortions.

Little wonder the clinic wasn't inspected in those days, Davidson reasoned. "The regulations regarding inspection were only policy," the legislator said. "It was not mandated by the law."

In Australia, a 42-year-old woman died after undergoing an abortion at the same abortion clinic where abortion clinic anesthesiologist James Peters infected dozens of women with hepatitis C. The clinic is run by Marie Stopes International.

A woman in the UK spent the last 3 months of her pregnancy in a tilted hospital bed to reduce the risk of miscarriage.

Donna Kelly, 29, was told five months into her pregnancy that her baby was just an inch from the top of her cervix and at risk of "falling out".

So doctors made her lie in a hospital bed tilted at 45 degrees to reduce the pressure.

Georgia abortionist charged with Medicaid fraud, billed abortions as new patient visits

2011-12-20T06:54:00.000-08:00

Georgia-based abortionist Tyrone Malloy has been indicted on Medicaid fraud. He and his former office manager allegedly billed the federal government over $100,000 for abortions over a nearly 3 year period. They also allegedly billed the government for ultrasounds they didn't perform. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The alleged fraud occurred at Malloy's Old National Gynecology, a medical practice in the 6200 block of Old National Highway in College Park, whose website says it specializes in first-trimester abortions.

According to the indictment, between Dec. 9, 2007 and Aug. 9, 2010, the defendants billed the Georgia Medicaid program approximately $131,615 for new patient visits when, in reality, the visits were for elective abortions.

The Georgia Medicaid program is funded jointly by the state and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Under federal law known as the Hyde Amendment, federal funds cannot be used for elective abortion services; nor are abortions covered by Georgia Medicaid, the indictment states.

Malloy and Warner also are charged in the indictment with billing Georgia Medicaid about $255,024 for detailed ultrasounds that actually were never performed during the same period from 2007 through 2010.

Life Links 12/19/11

2011-12-19T09:28:00.000-08:00

In the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen discusses Newt Gingrich's various statements on when life begins and embryonic stem cell research.

The Guttmacher Institute has published new research which looks at the demographics of women who have abortions after 12 weeks. The studies findings include that black women and teens were more likely to have later term abortions than other segments of the population and that later term abortions were more likely to be paid for with health insurance.

Here's abortion advocate/journalist Sarah Kliff's write-up.

A California woman, whose name has not been released, has died after being beaten by her unborn child's father. She was 20 weeks pregnant and her child died immediately after the attack and she died a couple of days later. Police are now looking for Willie Davis Hines Jr.

San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies received a report of a domestic disturbance at 4:44 p.m. They discovered the victim, a 24-year-old woman, was knocked unconscious by Hines during a fight. The unnamed victim was flown to a hospital for treatment of critical head and upper body injuries. Doctors discovered the woman's 20-week-old fetus had died.

St. Louis Today has the story of Melinda Star Guido, a child who was born at 24 weeks, weighing nine ounces. She now weighs over 4 pounds.

Melinda was just 270 grams at birth — roughly the size of a soda can. When a baby is that small, doctors say it is anybody's guess what will happen. There is little research about long-term survival. Doctors across the nation often let babies weighing less than 400 grams die, Ramanathan said.

Planned Parenthood resumes abortions at two Arizona facilities

2011-12-15T12:26:00.001-08:00

Planned Parenthood of Arizona has announced that they will resume providing abortion at two clinic as they either found another abortionist to provide them (they were using nurse practitioners until Arizona law squashed that) or their current abortionists have become more willing to travel.

The organization halted abortion services at all but three clinics statewide in late August after several state laws went into effect requiring that only physicians dispense medication abortion pills or perform first-trimester surgical abortions. Before, a nurse practitioner or physicians assistant could perform those duties. Planned Parenthood at the time was unable to find enough doctors to continue providing abortions at all of its locations, particularly those in the more rural areas of Flagstaff, Yuma and Prescott Valley.

The only three clinics that continued to provide abortions were in Tucson, Tempe and Glendale.

Planned Parenthood of Arizona CEO Bryan Howard said they now have enough doctors to serve five locations in the Tucson and Phoenix metro areas. He said they are still trying to find doctors in the rural areas so they can re-open those clinics.

Bryan Howard again restates that 20% of Planned Parenthood of Arizona's patients are looking for abortions.

According to Howard, about 50,000 Arizona women seek care from Planned Parenthood's 13 clinics each year, about 10,000 of them for abortions. The rest are for a variety of health-care needs, including birth control, vaccinations, cancer screenings and annual gynecological exams.

Howard also notes that the abortion restrictions have likely lowered the number of abortions performed on women from rural communities (which undermines the pro-choice talking point that abortion restrictions don't prevent abortions).

Life Links 12/15/11

2011-12-15T07:23:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on Katie Sharify, the last patient in Geron's now-canceled study, who was recently injected with cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. It's tragic the false hope this young woman has been given. While doctors tell her that the cells aren't likely to help her, she seems to not know about adult stem cell research into paralysis and her expectations of what embryonic stem cells are going to do in the future is completely unrealistic. At first she wasn't convinced, then a surgeon talked her into it, likely citing a first-of-its-kind-must-be-super-important kind of reasoning and downplaying possible risks.

Sharify said she wasn't immediately sure she wanted to participate in the study. She didn't know a lot about embryonic stem cells other than that they were controversial. She knew she'd be getting a treatment that was considered fairly safe, but was also experimental. Her parents were even less enthusiastic.

The entire family debated the treatment up until the night before the surgery. In the end, it was the surgeon from Stanford who would be injecting the actual stem cells who convinced her.

"After talking to him, I knew this was a really big deal," Sharify said. "I'd been trying to find the reason all of this happened to me."

National Right to Life PAC and Nebraska Right to Life PAC will be working against Senator Ben Nelson in 2012 if he seeks re-election because of his vote on health care legislation.

"Ben Nelson cannot win in Nebraska without pro-life support and he won't have it. No pro-lifer should even consider supporting Ben Nelson for re-election," David O'Steen, the national group's director, said in a statement.

Whether or not Nelson will seek reelection is one the biggest open questions in the race for control of the Senate. Democratic leaders have kept mum about their conversations with Nelson, who told The Hill on Tuesday that he could make a decision as early as next week.

Abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been indicted for his illegal prescription business, which was the only reason his house of horrors abortion clinic got raided in the first place.

Authorities said the doctor wrote hundreds of prescriptions a month, topping out at 2,300 prescriptions in January 2010, the month before federal drug and FBI agents raided the clinic.....

According to prosecutors, patients paid $115 to $150 for the prescriptions and received cursory, if any, examinations. They were allowed to purchase multiple prescriptions under different names, authorities said.

Gosnell and his staff dispensed some of the medicine over the 20 months covered by the indictment, including more than 900,000 pills and 19,000 ounces of cough syrup with codeine, authorities said.

USA Today, CNN and MSNBC covered last night's abortion forum in Iowa.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, trailing in Iowa polls, won the biggest applause from the crowd tonight – and aimed his remarks at his competitors.

"I have some problems with some of the folks who running for office these days when they say, ‘I believe life begins at conception.' That's like, I say, ‘I believe the sun rises.'" Santorum said, to laughs.

"Why would you say you believe something that's a fact?" Santorum added.

Abortionist's wife pleads guilty

2011-12-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

Pearl Gosnell, the wife of infamous Philadelphia abortion Kermit Gosnell, has pled guilty to a variety of charges related to her helping him abort children at the Women's Medical Society abortion clinic. She won't testify against her husband at trial.

Pearl Gosnell, 50, of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty to performing an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy, two counts of conspiracy and participating in a corrupt organization, according to court documents.....

Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner set Pearl Gosnell's sentencing for Feb. 15. He warned Gosnell that she faces up to 54 years in prison, but that her actual sentence would not be "nearly that long," according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The lawyers in the case are under a gag order. However, defense attorney F. Michael Medway confirmed to the Inquirer that Pearl Gosnell would not testify against her husband at trial, which is her legal privilege.

Life Links 12/13/11

2011-12-13T10:34:00.000-08:00

The federal government denied a request from the state of Texas which would have prevented Medicaid patients from using family planning money at abortion clinic.

As for the state's request to ban clinics that perform abortions from getting money through the Women's Health Program under a separate Medicaid waiver, Mann said it violated federal law.

"Medicaid does not pay for abortions and will not pay for abortions," Mann said. "The issue here is not whether Medicaid funding is involved, but whether a state can restrict access to a qualified health provider simply because they provide other services that Medicaid doesn't pay for. The law does not permit this."

"We are disappointed in the decision, which is inconsistent with federal law that gives states the authority to establish qualifications for Medicaid providers," said Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for Texas Health and Human Services.

The Wall Street Journal's William McGurn writes about Kathleen Sebelius' plan to impose a contraceptive coverage mandate on employers, including Catholic employers.

Whether you approve or disapprove of contraception or sterilization is beside the point. Today nine out of 10 employer plans offer what Mrs. Sebelius wants them to. The point is whether it is right or necessary for Mrs. Sebelius to use the federal government to bring the other 10% to heel.

There was a day when liberals and libertarians appreciated the importance of upholding the freedoms of people and groups with unpopular views. No longer. As government expands, religious liberty is reduced to a special "exemption" and concerns about government coercion are dismissed, in the memorable words of Nancy Pelosi, as "this conscience thing."

Another study with iPS cells out of Stanford shows how their potential to be used to model genetic diseases far outreaches embryonic stem cells due to the ease of obtaining them from patients with genetic disease as opposed to attempting to find embryos with genetic diseases, then kill them and obtain their embryonic stem cells.

Stanford University School of Medicine investigators have shown that iPS cells, viewed as a possible alternative to human embryonic stem cells, can mirror the defining defects of a genetic condition — in this instance, Marfan syndrome — as well as embryonic stem cells can. An immediate implication is that iPS cells could be used to examine the molecular aspects of Marfan on a personalized basis. Embryonic stem cells, on the other hand, can't do this because their genetic contents are those of the donated embryo, not the patient's.

This proof-of-principle regarding the utility of induced pluripotent stem cells also has more universal significance, as it advances the credibility of an exciting approach that's been wildly acclaimed by some and viewed through gimlet eyes by others: the prospect of using iPS cells in modeling a broad range of human diseases. These cells, unlike ESCs, are easily obtained from virtually anyone and harbor a genetic background identical to the patient from which they were derived. Moreover, they carry none of the ethical controversy associated with the necessity of destroying embryos.

Life Links 12/12/11

2011-12-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

Newsweek's The Daily Beast has a long story on Jennie McCormick, the woman in Idaho who aborted a later-term pregnancy using RU-486 and then put her dead child in a box on the back porch.

McCormack, who thought she was about 12 weeks along, took the pills (the protocol involves two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol) the afternoon they arrived. The drugs are FDA-approved only for ending early-stage pregnancies; McCormack had no complications, but the pregnancy turned out to be more advanced than she thought—perhaps between 18 and 21 weeks, experts later speculated—and the size of the fetus scared her. She didn't know what to do—"I was paralyzed," she says—so she put it in a box on her porch, and, terrified, called a friend. That friend then called his sister, who reported McCormack to the police.

The author, Nancy Hess, includes this absurd claim about fetal pain with no source given.

(Virtually all research on the subject shows that fetuses cannot distinguish pain until as late as the 30th week of gestation.)

ABC News has a report from Elizabeth Vargas on sex-selection abortion and infanticide in India.

Hilarious Amanda Marcotte quote of the week (my emphasis):

But don't take my word for it. David Dayen at Firedoglake quoted respected and non-ideological pollster Celinda Lake on the issue:

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said she could "not even remotely" understand the political calculus of the decision, saying it "alienates the base, causes conflict with women in the base, [is] bad for key groups of women like younger women and unmarried women, and doesn't win the swing independent women."

It's one thing to ignorantly claim Celinda Lake is non-ideological. It's another to say she's non-ideological and then post a quote which the author identifies Lake as being a Democratic pollster.

Pro-choice advocates: Back-alley abortions? Who cares?

2011-12-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

Among the numerous foolish claims in this RH Reality Check piece questioning why self-inducing a post-24 week abortion should be illegal, Steph Herold and Susan Yanow claim:

In spite of ever-increasing restrictions, abortion is legal through the second-trimester throughout the United States, although it is inaccessible to many women.

Yet the arrested woman self-aborted her child in New York City, the abortion capital of America where tax dollars pay for the abortions of poor women and 41% of pregnancies end in abortion.

How is abortion inaccessible in New York City?

It's not as Herold and Yanow admit later noting the woman had virtually unfettered access to abortion.

Women in New York City have much better access to abortion care than Ms. McCormack did. New York State allows state Medicaid funds to cover abortion services, and there are a number of clinics in New York City that provide abortion care through 24 weeks. New York also does not have the restrictions, such as waiting periods and parental consent, that are insurmountable barriers for women in many other states. So why would a woman in New York City decide to end her pregnancy by herself?

What's interesting here is that if the woman in question had self-aborted in a state with abortion restrictions, pro-abort individuals and organizations would be screaming from the mountaintops about how draconian prolife laws forced this woman into a dangerous situation where she felt she had to self-abort. But since the incident took place in America's abortion capital, we're informed how safe self-abortion supposedly is (at 24+ weeks - are you kidding me!) and told it shouldn't be a crime.

We do not have enough information to guess whether or not this woman fell through the gaps in the social support and health net, or made a conscious choice to end her pregnancy in a way that she felt most comfortable. But why is self-treating an unwanted pregnancy a crime?

We certainly should do everything possible to provide excellent information to women about services and fight to keep abortion care widely available and accessible. But if a woman decides that the best thing for her to do is to self-induce an abortion, she should have access to the best information available on how to do this safely (ie with medicines, NOT herbs) and know where to go in case of a complication.

Reason pro-choice Canadian won't debate: "We already won" yet we still have lots to do

2011-12-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

Try to make sense of these two posts from Abortion Monologues writer Jane.

First, she claims the reason pro-choicers in Canada are unwilling to debate prolifers is because they've "already won." While it's true that abortion is legal in Canada that hardly means pro-choicers have won the debate over abortion.

In her next post, Jane claims her time is better spent advocating for abortion (but wait - I thought you already won?) as opposed to trying to provide a defense of abortion that doesn't get completely destroyed in a minute of cross-examination.

I would wager $100 that for any other cause where the law isn't on Jane's side, she wouldn't be claiming that the other side has already won and debating was pointless.

Life Links 12/8/11

2011-12-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, authorities arrested a man enlisted in the Navy named Joseph Devia for allegedly killing Omoyeme Erazua, a pregnant woman he had apparently impregnated, after see refused to have an abortion.

Erazua's body was discovered on a Houston street. An autopsy showed she had been stabbed in the neck about 20 times.

A purse found with the body contained a cellphone that showed calls and text messages between Erazua and Devia indicating Devia believed he was the child's father. The messages also indicated Devia wanted Erazua to have an abortion and that she had refused, according to a complaint filed by the Harris County district attorney's office cited in the Houston Chronicle.

At least 4 presidential candidates (Gingrich, Bachmann, Santorum and Perry) have signed up to attend an abortion forum in Iowa.

Former Planned Parenthood manager Abby Johnson has been hired as Senior Policy Advisor by Americans United for Life.

Michael New reviews a recent study on abortion legislation in Europe which, as he notes, "shows nothing."

Methodological shortcomings aside, the findings themselves should cause pro-lifers little concern. The only restrictions the study analyzes are country-wide requirements that a woman must demonstrate 1) a physical-health reason, 2) a mental-health reason, or 3) a socio-economic reason before having an abortion. The study finds that five EU countries that require that women demonstrate a reason for obtaining an abortion (Spain, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Finland, and the U.K.) have similar abortion rates to EU countries where abortion is available on demand. However, the findings support what pro-lifers have been saying for years, that health exceptions (and other exceptions) are too broad and fail to provide any real protection to the unborn.

Life Links 12/6/11

2011-12-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich's communication director Joe DeSantis has clarified to prolife bloggers that Gingrich believes life begins at fertilization.

I still haven't seen any defense or reasoning for Gingrich's comments to ABC's Jake Tapper in which he specifically said he thought life began at implantation and provided his reasoning for that belief. It seems rather far fetched to believe he got implantation and fertilization confused. I'm not buying this at all.

British abortion provider BPAS is encouraging women to stock up on emergency contraception during the Christmas season and promoting a new service which allows women to get the pill for free with a phone call.

The trial of the Australian abortion clinic ananaesthetist who infected more than 50 women with Hepatitis C is under way.

The Daily Caller has a piece on embryonic stem cell research by Neil Munro which discusses the intentional hyping of embryonic stem cell research by scientists and Democrats. It has these interesting quotes by bioethicist Art Caplan who recently did a 180 on embryonic stem cell research.

"By hyping stem cells, the Democratic guys could accuse [conservatives] of being anti-science," said Caplan. "Those deals were wink-wink deals, but they were going on," he said.....

The mass media aligned with the Democrats "because the science community and the patients' community was on the pro-[embryo stem-cell] side," said Caplan. "They tended to listen to those voices more than the political [conservatives] and religious [advocates] and few scientists" pushing the rival technologies, he said.

Caplan was one of those guys accusing conservatives, especially President Bush, of being anti-science. He was one of the key voices on the pro-embryonic stem cell side the mass media turned to for an opinion which invariably promoted embryonic stem cell research while downplaying alternatives.

I welcome converts to the "embryonic stem cell research was completely hyped" tent but converts like Caplan should admit they were among the hypers and apologize for their attacks on prolifers who were right about the science.

Life Links 12/5/11

2011-12-05T10:51:00.000-08:00

After his odd and competing statements on when life begins and embryonic stem cell research, Newt Gingrich's campaign has gone into damage control and published a statement on their web site which says Gingrich believes that "life begins at conception." It never notes what Gingrich means by conception. Unfortunately, the definition of conception (which should by synonymous with fertilization) has been manipulated to where some people think it means the same thing as implantation. Clarification needed.

The New York Times features on article on the prolife factions in Ohio and the heartbeat bill.

A former abortionist at Marie Stopes abortion clinics in the UK has been disqualified from practicing medicine. One of the patients whose care Phanuel Dartey botched was a woman seeking an abortion.

One of the five cases involved an unidentified Irishwoman whose uterus was perforated. The patient was also left with parts of her fetus inside her during the 2006 procedure.

The woman had to be rushed to hospital on her return to Ireland and was in a critical condition for two months before eventually recovering.

Defending prolife legislation can be expensive. In Kansas, for example:

After about six months, the state has tallied $392,520 in legal bills stemming from attempts to restrict abortion that were pushed during the legislative session earlier this year.

The state spent $237,834 on private lawyers defending efforts to strip Planned Parenthood of federal family planning funds. It has laid out $94,380 defending new rules for abortion clinics.

New York NOW is upset a New York woman has been arrested and charged for self-abortion.

Gingrich's position on implantation/embryonic stem cell research is nonsensical

2011-12-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich talked with ABC's Jake Tapper about abortion, when life begins and embryonic stem cell research. While Gingrich is supposedly the intellectual candidate in the field, his answers are far from thoughtful.

I think that if you take a position when a woman has fertilized egg and that’s been successfully implanted that now you’re dealing with life. because otherwise you’re going to open up an extraordinary range of very difficult questions.

So instead of basing when he thinks life begins on something like....I don't know... science, Gingrich appears to base it on his desire to avoid difficult questions.

Tapper seeks clarification:

TAPPER: So implantation is the moment for you.

GINGRICH: Implantation and successful implantation. In addition I would say that I’ve never been for embryonic stem cell research per se. I have been for, there are a lot of different ways to get embryonic stem cells. I think if you can get embryonic stem cells for example from placental blood if you can get it in ways that do not involve the loss of a life that’s a perfectly legitimate avenue of approach.

What I reject is the idea that we’re going to take one life for the purpose of doing research for other purposes and I think that crosses a threshold of de-humanizing us that’s very very dangerous.

If life begins at implantation (as Gingrich asserts) then why would he think that the killing human embryos who haven't implanted would "involve the loss of a life" and would cross "a threshold of de-humanizing us"?

His views make absolutely no sense. He completely contradicts himself in the span of a few sentences.

New York woman charged with self-abortion

2011-12-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I linked to a story about the body of an approximately 24-week-old unborn child being found in a Manhattan dumpster. Now authorities have charged 20-year-old Yaribely Almonte with performing an abortion on herself.

Yaribely Almonte was charged with self abortion in the first degree, a misdemeanor which carries a punishment of up to a year in jail.

It was initially unclear how police connected the fetus to Almonte, but a law enforcement official said that she admitted to police that she had purposefully induced an abortion. It was not immediately clear how Almonte is alleged to have done this.

Under the state law, it's illegal for a woman who has been pregnant for 24 week or more to commit or submit to "an abortional act upon herself which causes her miscarriage." The exception to the law is if a licensed doctor performs the abortion after determining that the mother's life would otherwise be in danger.

Life Links 12/1/11

2011-12-01T07:40:00.000-08:00

Slate's William Saletan (a pro-choicer who favors some abortion restrictions) describes his debate with Ann Furedi regarding limits on late-term abortion and while his conclusion (cognition, interaction and viability make humans valuable) is wrong, he still points to some major flaws in her beliefs:

If, as Furedi says, viability makes no particular difference, then why stop at birth? In our debate, I pointed out that the neural development trajectory outlined in "The Emergence of Human Consciousness: From Fetal to Neonatal Life" doesn't end at birth. It runs through the first three years of life. If a child's ability to survive on its own makes no difference, and if neural development adds no binding significance to the fetus's original dispensability, then who are you to impose your values on Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, or Marilyn Lemak? If a woman feels that eight, 18, or 28 weeks after birth isn't too late for her, shouldn't we trust her judgment?

Interestingly, Salean is unable to see that his own arbitrary criteria for limiting abortion could also lead to the killing of some born human beings.

On Tuesday, Circuit Judge William Gowan entered the default judgment in favor of Daschica Thomas who sued longtime Mississippi abortionist Joseph Booker in 2005 after a botched abortion in 2003 put her in a coma for a week. Booker didn't show for the hearing and his former lawyer doesn't know where to find him. He no longer works at Mississippi's lone abortion clinic.

The lawsuit claims that Booker wasn't the doctor originally scheduled to perform the abortion, but the other doctor was out that day. When Booker was performing the abortion, he allegedly stopped abruptly, said he couldn't finish it and told Thomas to come back so it could be completed by the other doctor.

The lawsuit claims a "reasonably prudent" physician would have treated Thomas with antibiotics because of her diabetes, but Booker didn't. Thomas allegedly came down with a blood infection, went into a coma and needed blood transfusions. The lawsuit also claims, among other things, that Thomas couldn't have children after the abortion and that her husband lost his job for missing work while caring for her.

Booker performed abortions in Mississippi for years and found himself in controversial situations before.

Here's an interview Booker did after the death of George Tiller.

The Illinois Supreme Court will take up Illinois' parental notification law which has been in limbo since 1995.

At the NY Times Opinionator Gary Gutting discusses personhood, abortion and logic.

The basic problem is that, once we give up the claim that a fertilized egg is a human person (has full moral standing), there is no plausible basis for claiming that all further stages of development are human persons. The DNA criterion seems to be the only criterion of being human that applies at every stage from conception to birth. If we agree that it does not apply at the earliest stages of gestation, there is no basis for claiming that every abortion is the killing of an innocent human person.

Trent Franks has introduced a bill to ban sex-selection abortions on the federal level. The usual suspects are opposed to the bill as they favor ensuring access to "culturally competent medical care."

n a letter to Congress co-signed by over 30 pro-choice groups — including Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Center for Reproductive Rights — laid out their case, explaining that Franks' bill was "simply more of the same from the anti-choice extremists choice extremists in the House" and urged Congress to oppose the initiative.

"[T]he bill will effectively exacerbate already existing disparities by limiting some women's access to comprehensive reproductive health care and penalizing health care providers," they wrote. "Instead of addressing health disparities and ensuring accessible and culturally competent medical care for all women, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act will further isolate and stigmatize some women — particularly those in the Asian American and Pacific Islander and African American communities — from exercising their fundamental human right to make and implement decisions about their reproductive lives."

Life Links 11/30/11

2011-11-30T12:30:00.000-08:00

Kathleen Parker writes about Mitt Romney's prolife conversion.

he result of that conversation and others was a pro-life Romney, who kept his campaign promise to honor the state's democratically asserted preference for abortion choice but also began a personal path that happened to serve him well, at least theoretically, among social conservatives. Was his conversion sincere? No one can know another's heart, but Hurlbut is convinced that it was.

"Several things about our conversation still stand out strongly in my mind," Hurlbut told me. "First, he clearly recognized the significance of the issue, not just as a current controversy but as a matter that would define the character of our culture way into the future.

"Second, it was obvious that he had put in a real effort to understand both the scientific prospects and the broader social implications. Finally, I was impressed by both his clarity of mind and sincerity of heart. . . . He recognized that this was not a matter of purely abstract theory or merely pragmatic governance, but a crucial moment in how we are to regard nascent human life and the broader meaning of medicine in the service of life."

Washington Post's Breaking News Blog covers the Maryland Board of Physicians decision to close its investigation into abortionist LeRoy Carhart's failure to disclose how he would be performing late-term abortions in Maryland.

The National Catholic Reporter has a piece on Democrats for Life. Of note is DFL's continued support for Senator Bob Casey despite his rather lackluster voting record.

A human child at 24 weeks gestation was found in a trash can in Manhattan.

"The way I found it was perfectly placed, covered with garbage," said Gregory Santana, 20, who is the son of the building's super.

"It was inside a small bucket, inside a couple of extra bags," he said. "I ripped it open, immediately saw the baby [and\] closed it back up."

Life Links 11/29/11

2011-11-29T11:54:00.000-08:00

The Northern Illinois Women's Center abortion clinic in Rockford will stay closed until at least January 4, 2012, when attorney for both the abortion clinic and the state health department will have another hearing.

Lea Singh writes about the upcoming Gosnell murder case and the acceptance of late term abortion amongst some.

And yet, late-term abortions, effectively right up to the moment of natural birth, are not illegal in Canada or in many parts of the United States. If Gosnell had chosen to act in medically acceptable ways by dismembering or killing the fetus within the womb just before removing it, he would likely be a hero in the eyes of many for providing an essential service that empowers women. Who knows, he could have gotten the highest civilian award -- a mere three years ago we bestowed the Order of Canada upon Henry Morgentaler, a man who claims to have personally performed over 100,000 abortions.

Is it just me, or is there something sickly schizophrenic about a society that huffs and puffs in outrage at the killing of a baby in the light of day, but quietly supports it when it happens in the darkness of the womb? We are talking about the very same baby here, at the exact same moment of gestation, the only difference being the location of the demise. If we can kill a baby within the womb, why not outside of the womb? Viable babies are being put to death in late-term abortion clinics all over the United States, perhaps some in Canada. We call it "abortion" but in the light of day, these actions clearly are "murder".

Apparently, some pro-choicers at Harvard aren't big fans of tolerance. From Aurora Griffin's op-ed in the Harvard Crimson:

In response to the growing hostility toward discussion of the abortion issue on campus and dissolution into name-calling, as seen in the impressively consistent vandalism of Harvard Right to Life's poster campaigns, I'd like to present a philosophical argument for the pro-life position. HRL's innocuous "Smile, your mom chose life." posters have been ripped down within hours of posting almost without exception. At a school where free speech and diversity are valued so highly, this is a travesty.

Why the pro-choice movement is losing?

2011-11-28T11:08:00.000-08:00

I think one reason is they typically just aren't very good at persuasion. Here's Ann Furedi attempting to argue there should be no limits on abortion.

What we have to ask ourselves is whether there needs to be any policy intervention or social intervention to change or regulate what is going on at the moment. And I don't think there does. There is no evidence to suggest that we need to restrict later abortions in any way, by enforcing legal time limits. And I certainly don't see any reason to think that doctors are abusing the current situation, or indeed that women are abusing the current situation......

Does late abortion have a detrimental effect on society? No, I really don't think it does. There is no evidence that the number of women requesting late abortions is increasing. The figures remain very much the same. However, does the idea that we can override who makes these decisions about late abortion have a detrimental effect on society? Yes, I really believe it does. Because what we're really saying when we argue that an earlier time limit needs to be imposed is that we don't trust women's decisions, and we don't trust doctor's decisions.

Notice the complete lack of evidence and thoughtfulness. Furedi's reasons for why something should be or shouldn't are as follows: "I don't think there does", "I certainly don't see any reason to think", "I really don't think it does" and "I really believe it does."

It's like the end all and be all of evidence for Ann Furedi is what she believes.

This is how elementary school children argue. Yet she's one of (if not the) leading voice for abortion in the UK.

Life Links 11/28/11

2011-11-28T08:28:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post is covering the case of the New Jersey hospital attempting to force nurses to assist in abortions.

One of the nurses, Fe Esperanza R. Vinoya, said a manager told her: "‘You just have to catch the baby's head. Don't worry, it's already dead.' "

The ACLU says who cares about conscience, nurses should be forced to catch dead baby heads.

"These are health-care professionals who work at a publicly funded hospital saying that they do not want to do the job they were hired to do, including caring for a woman before or after surgery," said Jennifer Dalven of the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project. "People have a right to their beliefs, but that shouldn't give them the right to discriminate against patients who need medical care."

A prolife group in New Zealand used a location of statue featuring a large hand holding a tiny baby child to launch balloons and spread the prolife message. The group which commissioned the statue and the clueless artist are upset.

Meanwhile, a surprised Mr Vincent said the anti-abortion group's message was not the intent of his sculpture.

"Voices Against Violence was the organisation that commissioned it, and it's about nurturing and protecting the most vulnerable in our community, which is children."

The Californian has a long story on a couple whose child's spina bifida was repaired in the womb.

"The ultrasound tech was nervous; you could tell something was wrong," Marriah said earlier this year in the couple's Winchester home. "She told us, 'The fetus would have been a girl.' People abort babies with spina bifida. That's what you do. I said I didn't want anything to do with abortion."
......
A team of 27 medical professionals performed the procedure. Marriah's uterus was removed and placed on her stomach. Doctors entered the uterus and the still-forming fetal spine and attached fetal skin to the hole in the fetus's lower back. The uterus then was replaced inside Marriah and she was sewn back up. After the surgery, she was bedridden for three months while her baby continued to grow....

Kaleah Erin Peltzer was born Oct. 18, 2010, by Cesarean section. Although premature, she was a healthy baby girl.

"She was our miracle baby," Marriah said.

A Nashville woman has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit, alleging the treatment she received while in jail caused her to miscarry and then jail staff improperly disposed of the child's baby.

Allison said prison staff denied her requests to take another test and other medical requests until Nov. 13, 2010, her birthday, when she began to experience "sudden and excruciating abdominal pain" during a Bible study.

Allison said she went across the hall to a bathroom, was bleeding profusely and miscarried into a toilet. She was later taken to Nashville General Hospital.

Prison employees were under instructions from paramedics and a doctor to preserve the fetus, according to the lawsuit, but their attempts to unclog the toilet destroyed it.

Life Links 11/22/11

2011-11-22T12:17:00.000-08:00

CNN has an article on a clinical trial using fetal stem cells from an aborted child in an attempt to treat ALS.

In an operation than lasted about four hours, Grosjean received five injections into the cervical, or neck, area of his spinal cord, each delivering 100,000 cells. The cells came from Maryland-based biotech company Neuralstem, which is funding this clinical trial and devised a procedure to grow millions and millions of motor neuron cells from the donated spinal cord tissue of an 8-week-old aborted fetus.

In the UK, updated figures from the Department of Health show that Britain is spending much more than they originally thought on abortion.

Campaigners say the new calculations provide more reason to stop the organisations that offer counselling to pregnant women also performing terminations, which are now estimated to cost £680 each, on the grounds that it represents a conflict of interest.

They are calling for spending watchdogs to investigate why Parliament was "misled" over the scale of the "abortion industry".......

Under the updated figures, taxpayers spent £118m on abortions in 2010, of which £75m went to private clinics and just £44m to NHS bodies.

The total number of terminations carried out in England rises from 136,000 to 173,000 and the cost of each one from £660 to £680 under the revised figures.

Herman Cain has signed Susan B. Anthony List's Pro-Life Presidential Leadership Pledge.

Michigan Attorney General shuts down two abortion clinics for good

2011-11-22T06:37:00.000-08:00

From the AG Bill Schuette's press release:

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette today announced the permanent dissolution of Health Care Clinic, of Delta Township, and the affiliated Women's Choice Clinic, of Saginaw, in response to a lawsuit filed by his office alleging the clinics were operating without the proper physician ownership required by State law. According to an agreement submitted by Schuette and the clinics' owner and approved by Eaton County Circuit Court Judge Calvin E. Osterhaven, the clinics will permanently dissolve. The clinics' owner, Richard Remund, as well as his wife and corporate officer, Margaret Remund, are banned from ever organizing another abortion clinic.

"Profit should never come before patient safety, and that's why state law requires medical facilities to be run by licensed medical professionals," said Schuette. "Facilities that fail to follow this important safeguard should not be in business."

According to paperwork filed with the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA), the clinics, which have been closed under temporary restraining order since Schuette filed suit on November 7, 2011, have now officially been dissolved. A consent order approved in Eaton County Circuit Court today makes that dissolution permanent.

Life Links 11/21/11

2011-11-21T12:06:00.000-08:00

Ramesh Ponnuru notes presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's history (which includes various quotes noting his favoring of funding research using "cells in a fertility clinic") with human embryonic stem cell research.

In the meantime, Michelle Bachmann is going after Gingrich on abortion and claiming that he has "Failed to Meet a Consistently Pro-Life Standard."

Wesley Smith links to an article in the LA Times discussing the collapse of Geron's human embryonic stem cell research program. The article seems much more like an editorial. Reporter Eryn Brown makes this false assertion

"Many biotech start-ups benefit from hefty grants from the National Institutes of Health, but until 2009 the agency largely remained on the sidelines of embryonic stem cell research."

The NIH spent around $250 million on human embryonic stem cells from 2002-2008 and around $700 million on animal embryonic stem cell research for the same time period. I know spending in Washington is out of control but spending around $1 billion in 7 years on experimental research is hardly sitting on the sidelines.

Overheard - Pro-Choice Feminists rip Planned Parenthood, NARAL

2011-11-21T11:16:00.000-08:00

Ninersgal at the Abortion Gang blog:

Here's the scoop: if PPFA didn't spend so much money on fancy pink posters and snazzy T-shirts, they might not need to shake the money tree so often.

Kalli Joy Gray at the Daily Kos:

I'm not saying Keenan and her organization don't mean well. Or that the big feminist advocacy organizations of this country serve no purpose at all. But this post reflects the kind of ineffectiveness and tone deafness that is so prevalent among those who monopolize so much of the conversation about women in this country. Far too little, far too late. With zero recognition of the work that a new generation of feminists is doing to fight for women

Pro-choicer Marie Diamond might want to try learning how to do some basic research before attempting to discredit prolifers

2011-11-18T09:34:00.000-08:00

It amazing how little research some pro-choicers will do before attacking prolifers. Marie Diamond's piece in Think Progress is a perfect example.

She claims,

RH Reality Check explains that here was never any proof to support an anti-abortion activist's claim of finding fetal remains in an abortion clinic's dumpster, but the anti-abortion lobby has nevertheless used the story as an excuse to propose an unprecedented bill about the disposal of fetuses.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The RH Reality Check piece by Robin Marty which Diamond links to claims, "In the end, it turns out that there was no proof of mishandled remains." Notice how Marty says, "mishandled remains" as opposed to just saying remains. This sloppy language could confuse someone who can't do any research besides looking on pro-choice blogs (like Diamond) to believe there were no remains.

And as evidence for this claim, Marty links to another one of her posts which notes that "At the time, the AG said there was no documents found that violated HIPAA regulations."

Isn't that amazing how quickly that an assertion about documents found alongside the remains of aborted children and how dousing the remains with formaldehyde made it legal to dump them in the trash quickly turned into evidence that no remains of abortion children were found?

All it takes is a couple of sensationally lazy pro-choicers like Marty and Diamond who are much more focused on attacking prolifers than learning/telling the truth. Instead of accurately describing why no charges were filed and linking to an article sharing that information, Marty uses language which makes it seem like prolifers didn't find what they found.

Of course, Diamond's assertion that there was no proof of prolifers finding fetal remains in an abortion clinic dumpster is patently absurd considering prolifers took pictures of the remains, created a slide show of them and then publicly buried them in front of a crowd of approximately 1,000 people including a TV news crew.

Life Links 11/18/11

2011-11-18T08:35:00.000-08:00

The New Jersey Star-Ledger has an editorial scolding the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for attempting to force nurses to assist on abortions.

In other words, UMDNJ believes it should be able to compel nurses and other health care professionals, against their moral beliefs, to perform duties leading all the way up to the actual abortion, then force those health care professionals to attend to patients immediately afterward — or lose their jobs.

Narrowing the law to specify that nurses have the right to opt out of only the actual abortion procedure strains common sense.

For decades, the law has been interpreted to allow nurses and others, if they object, to opt out of any care given to an abortion patient. The nurses involved in the lawsuit say that simply helping to admit an abortion patient facilitates the procedure, making the nurses an active participant.

And they object to that.

A Pennsylvania judge has refused to separate the trials of two of abortionist Kermit Gosnell's employees from his trial.

While former Gosnell employees are pleading guilty left and right, abortion clinics are still fighting against legislation to strengthen abortion clinic regulations. One Newsworks article has a few quote from abortion clinic director Jennifer Boulanger.

"What people don't understand is how abortions are done and how simple they are," Boulanger said. "I'm going to speak very frankly; an abortion is a five-minute procedure."

Well, that's an incredibly broad generalization designed to mislead people. The length of an abortion procedure varies a great deal based on the length of gestation and procedure being used. Boulanger also laughably claims her clinic welcomes inspections.

Albert Mohler reflects on the loss of Mississippi's personhood amendment.

The bitter lesson of Mississippi's defeat of the human personhood amendment is this: When it comes to moral reasoning concerning the unborn child, far too many just adopt Harry Blackmun's moral framework and want to tweak it. Many in the pro-life movement want to shift his lines of moral judgment, but not to repudiate his deadly logic.

We may think we are pro-life, but if we do not affirm the personhood of every human being at every point of development, from fertilization onward, we are not really so pro-life as we think. Or, in other words, we're all Harry Blackmun now.

Overheard: Abortion doula admits graphic images of unborn children are real

2011-11-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

From an article in the New York Observer focused on abortion doulas.

To some extent, Ms. Mitchell sees her point. In an interview with The Observer, she joked that she sometimes wants to automatically reject the abortion doula applications of pro-choice activists, because it's so hard to go from pro-choice rhetoric to supporting real people who don't necessarily find their abortions empowering."Those pictures pro-life activists flash are real," Ms. Mahoney said. "That is what a fetus looks like when its head is crushed. When you see the procedure, you must decide, as a pro-choice person, whether you are in or out." She's thought about it a lot. "I have never been more in," she said.

University of Ottawa abortion debate

2011-11-17T07:53:00.000-08:00

At Vimeo, someone has posted the abortion debate between Stephanie Gray from the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform and Jovan Morales from Atheist Community of University of Ottawa. The event was sponsored by University of Ottawa Students for Life and University of Ottawa Medical Students for Life.

I like how the debate allowed the participants to question each other. That happens at about the 40 minute mark. In about a minute, Gray totally dismantles Morales' definition of person and the entire basis for his argument. When Morales' time to question Gray arrives, it becomes more awkward than some of Rick Perry's debate moments. After a couple of questions, he has no clue what to ask her. In fairness, he did step up for the debate about a week before the debate after numerous pro-choice Canadians declined the opportunity to debate Gray. The vocal pro-choice students in the audience (who frequently interrupted Gray and called her names) try to help him out and are clearly frustrated by their side's inability to put up a solid defense of the pro-choice position.

Something I found very interesting was Morales' continued attempts to argue that the unborn aren't children but at various times he would slip, call the unborn "children" and then correct himself.

Morales' knowledge of fetal development was also severely lacking. Some of his assertions about how developed the unborn are at certain stages during the question and answer time were absurd.

Every time I watch one of these types of debate, it seems like the pro-choice debater hasn't really thought through their position. One of the last questioners asks Morales how on one hand he can assert morality shouldn't be imposed but on the other hand he thinks the government should fund abortions. Morales answer is incoherent. He points out how he is anti-war and thinks he shouldn't have to fund the war (so he's opposed to that imposition of morality) but unfortunately you have go along with what the majority of the country favors ergo tax-funded abortions (a imposition of morality he favors). "Don't impose your morality" seems to be much more of a catchphrase than something he's actually thought about. It's like he sees any law against something he favors as a horrible imposition of morality but when he wants someone to accept his morals, then it's not really an imposition of morality.

"The issue here isn't about abortion." Or is it?

2011-11-16T10:53:00.000-08:00

Sam Wight, spokesman for a pro-choice group on Canada's Prince Edward Island really wants people to think a debate about abortions being performed on P.E.I. isn't really about abortion. My additions to his quote below are in bold.

"The issue here isn't about abortion," said Sam Wight, spokesperson for P.E.I. Reproductive Rights Organization, which has about 150 supporters and is planning a rally at the legislature on Saturday. "It's about having the same accessibility in our province (to abortion) as in the rest of Canada and we like to keep trying to drive that message home that we're all Canadians and we should all have this right (to abortion)."

What is it with Canadian pro-choicers not wanting to have a debate about abortion?

Unintentionally hilarious quote of the week

2011-11-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

This one comes from Kellie Quinn in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian:

"Embryos and fetuses are humanized by this sort of political movement, and it does not help that movies and television often reinforce this stance. "

She's referring to the "humanization" of embryos and fetuses which are in fact human.

Is this what pro-choice arguments have come to? When prolifers point out how pro-choicers often attempt to de-humanize the unborn, they respond by saying prolifers humanize them.

Well, duh, they're human.

Which is a reality even Quinn seems to recognize later in her piece:

Why are we seeking to remove rights from fully developed humans for the purpose of granting additional rights to humans that do not have much, if any, brain processing yet?

Life Links 11/15/11

2011-11-15T09:08:00.000-08:00

The decision regarding the fate of the Northern Illinois Women's Center abortion clinic in Rockford, Il. will wait another two weeks.

Attorneys for the Northern Illinois Women's Center and Illinois Department of Public Health were back before Administrative Law Judge Cynthia Ramirez this morning. They were expected to announce the terms of an agreed settlement stemming from a series of state law and administrative code violations that the clinic was cited for earlier this year. Instead, they asked for more time.....

Resolution in this case could range from revocation of the clinic's license to allowing the clinic to reopen.

Another former employee of abortionist Kermit Gosnell has pleaded guilty to charges against her.

Tina Baldwin, 46, pleaded guilty to participating in a corrupt organization, conspiracy, and corruption of a minor involving her work at Gosnell's Women's Medical Society clinic from 2001 until the clinic closed in 2010.....

The charge of corruption of a minor involves Baldwin's daughter Ashley, whom she got a job at the clinic at age 15 and who soon was working with her mother in providing sedatives and other drugs to women undergoing abortions.

I wonder what Bart Stupak's feelings are now on his health care deal after this Elena Kagan/Larry Tribe e-mail exchange was released.

"I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing," Kagan wrote, in an email obtained by Judicial Watch, on the day Obamacare passed through Congress. Larry Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court attorney who served as "senior counselor for access to justice" in the Department of Justice (DOJ), replied to Kagan that the bill's passage was "remarkable."

"And with the Stupak group accepting the magic of what amounts to a signing statement on steroids!" Tribe added in delight, and in derision for the pro-life Democrats.

Geron shuts down embryonic stem cell research program

2011-11-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

After promoting the promise of human embryonic stem cells for more than a decade, the Washington Post and the New York Times both place the story of Geron in their respective business sections. The New York Times story even tries really hard to make it seem like this isn't a huge blow to the embryonic stem cell research field.

From the Times:

The company conducting the world’s first clinical trial of a therapy using human embryonic stem cells said on Monday that it was halting that trial and leaving the stem cell business entirely.

The company, Geron, said that its move did not reflect a lack of promise for the controversial field. Rather, it said, with money scarce, it had decided to focus on its experimental cancer therapies, which are further along in development......

So far four patients have been treated. Dr. Scarlett of Geron said that there were "no signs" that the treatment was helping the patients. But that was not expected in the initial trial, which was mainly looking at safety. And so far, he said, there had been no sign of safety problems......

By dropping the stem cell program — the company is cutting its work force by 66 people, or 38 percent — Geron will be able to last without needing to raise new money until it receives results of clinical trials of its cancer drugs over the next 18 months. By contrast, Dr. Scarlett said, given all the precautions in the stem cell field, he did not think there would be results from the stem cell trial until 2014.

Dr. Scarlett said that Geron hoped to sell or license the stem cell program to another company that would continue it.

So far, though, many big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have been wary about trying to develop therapies using embryonic stem cells because of the political controversies and scientific and economic uncertainties.

Related: WaPo's story on the first patient treated with human embryonic stem cells.

Life Links 11/14/11

2011-11-14T12:14:00.000-08:00

Phill Kline on Sebelius/Six Shreddergate controversy in Kansas:

"If it is routine to destroy evidence that implicates a key political ally of the governor in criminal activity, then that simply means there is routine corruption."

A new study shows unborn children can sense how their mothers are feeling.

Researchers at the University of California-Irvine recruited pregnant women and checked them for depression before and after the mothers delivered their babies. They also tested the babies after delivery to see how their development was progressing.

What appeared to matter most, according to their finding, was a consistent environment. The babies who fared best were those born to mothers who were either not depressed both before and after birth, or those who were depressed both before and afterwards. When mothers' moods shifted from to depression to healthy or from healthy to depression, the change appeared to slow development of their babies......

"We believe the human fetus is an active participant in its own development and is collecting information for life after birth," said Curt A. Sandman, one of the authors and an emeritus professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC-Irvine. "It's preparing for life based on messages the mom is providing."

Feministe blogger Jill Filipovic (who is sadly becoming almost an Amanda Marcotte clone in her writing style) is living in her own reality. As evidence, she writes:

But women's rights have been bad for anyone who thinks that the only option for women should be to stay home and raise as many children as God gives her. That, obviously, is not the majority of the American public, as evidenced by what the American public actually does. But it is the majority of the American pro-life leadership (which, of course, is distinct from individual voters who identify as pro-life).

The evidence for this wild assertion? ....... Crickets chirping. It's so strange how someone like Jill can act so nice in a co-interview with Feminists for Life President Serrin Foster but then write such venom. Is that what the Guardian requires of columnists? Thoughtless, argument-free pro-choice babble?

Hilariously, this comes less than 2 weeks after the Washington Post wrote a story on the feminine face of the prolife movement. Yep - Marjorie Dannenfelser, Charmaine Yoest, Penny Nance, Shannon Royce and Kristan Hawkins (not to mention the numerous female state-level prolife leaders) are just staying home and having 12 kids each. Do pro-choicers actually believe this garbage?

Life Links 11/10/11

2011-11-10T10:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Life Links 11/8/11

2011-11-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Pittsburgh area abortion protester and sidewalk counselor Meredith Parente. Parente is accused of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Act for allegedly shoving two abortion clinic escorts. Looking over the FACE Act, I'm struggling to see how shoving volunteer clinic escorts (if it actually happened) would violate the FACE Act. How does shoving clinic escorts impede someone looking for an abortion from entering the clinic?

The Justice Department press release notes: "The FACE Act prohibits the use of force against any person providing or obtaining reproductive health services, or those seeking to do so, with the intent to injure, intimidate or interfere with that person."

Volunteer clinic escorts aren't providing (unless "providing" is used in an incredibly broad sense) reproductive health services nor are they seeking them.

Overheard on Russian abortions:

Women of all ages used to fill gynecologist Lyubov Yerofeyeva's Soviet state clinic, lined up by the dozen for back-to-back abortions. "It was more common to take sick days for an abortion than for a cold in those days," she said.

Dennis Byrne compares the use and acceptance of graphic images used to dissuade smoking and abortion.

For years, pro-life groups have been condemned for trying to publish (mostly unsuccessfully in the mainstream media) gruesome images of aborted fetuses. The opposition to their publication comes down to something like this: It coarsens public discourse or, more generally, it will offend. Mysteriously, though, that argument didn't seem to occur to liberals that oppose publication of the "products of pregnancy termination" while at the same time favoring the forced display of the "products of smoking."

We're in a gray free-speech area, but it occurs to me that there is one significant difference: Pro-life advocates have not used the force of law to require that gruesome images of aborted fetuses be prominently displayed on the exterior of abortion clinics for all to see.

Indian officials have raided another suspected illegal abortion clinic and arrested the husband-wife team.

The two-room clinic was allegedly run by a couple without having mandatory certificates and permission of the Punjab health department. During raids, the health department team has seized blood soaked clothes, placenta of delivery, medicines and other instruments.

"Ashok Kumar and his wife Devinder Kumari were working as doctors, conducting deliveries and selling medicines without having any certificate," said Surinderpal, district family planning officer of Patiala, who was the member of the raiding team.

Lawsuit filed to close two Michigan abortion clinics

2011-11-07T11:32:00.000-08:00

Michigan's Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed a lawsuit to shut down two abortion clinics owned by Richard Remund.

The AG office says along with the lawsuit they are also asking for further investigation to determine if there were any violations of agencies within the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.

The state requires these facilities to be operated by a licensed medical professional. Schuette says Remund was not a licensed medical professional.

Life Links 11/7/11

2011-11-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Prolifers in Loganville, Georgia used Halloween as a time to educate the children in their community about fetal development. Some parents weren't happy about this.

"It was a great event with one exception: There was a pro-life group of some kind handing out 12-week-old fetus toys to the children. A man handed one of the so-called toys to my 3-year-old grandson. He asked what it was. The man that handed it to him told him, ‘This is a 12-week-old fetus. This is what you looked like in your mommy's belly,'" Loganville resident John Ramsey said. "There is a time and place for everything. This event for handing out candy to small children was not the time or the place to be handing out toys about pro-life......

"This ability to see how complex, fragile and precious life is, even at 12 weeks, is an amazing experience for children," Edmonds said. "We were told by two people this year that they enjoyed the displays but did not want to have other discussions about early life development with their children for another few years, and one person did voice concern to a city council member who was at the event. Other than that, we had a wonderful response from all of the attendees.

A Vermont man has been sentenced to 5 years in jail for attacking his son's girlfriend and threatening to kill her and her unborn child.

The Caledonian Record said Comeau was arrested in 2009 after terrorizing his 31-year-old son and his son's 23-year-old girlfriend. The girlfriend told police Comeau was drunk when he pushed her down, kicked her and grabbed her by the throat telling her he was going to kill her and her baby.

A Massachusetts man plans on pleading insanity after being charged with killing his girlfriend and an unborn child his girlfriend said wasn't his.

Peter Ronchi, 48, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the May 2009 slaying of Yuliya Galperina, who was due to give birth within days.

The Los Angeles Times has an article on scientists attempting to figure how to use embryonic stem cells to treat diabetes. Since embryonic stem cells isn't a political issues anymore, we get to hear that cures aren't anywhere near being around the corner.

But fine-tuning the cells to make them safe and effective for human use will take time. For example, beta cells do more than just produce insulin; they also respond to body cues to produce just the right amount of insulin when it's needed and thus regulate glucose levels with great precision. If you make beta cells that produce too much insulin, the level of glucose can drop dangerously low — and people can pass out, lapse into a coma or even die.....

Another major problem facing a cure in humans is the issue of autoimmunity — the problem that causes Type 1 diabetes in the first place. "Even if we are able to generate beta cells from stem cells, if you put them into a patient with Type 1 diabetes, they'll be eliminated quickly, because the immune system is primed to destroy those cells," Hebrok says.

Life Links 11/4/11

2011-11-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

A New York City man was convicted yesterday of killing his pregnant girlfriend. Derrick Redd faces 25 years to life in prison for stabbing Niasha Delain.

Cops previously said Derrick Redd, 38, of Jamaica admitted that he 'hadn't believed the child was his and urged Niasha Delain, 25, to have an abortion.

Delain, a bank teller, was stabbed 20 to 30 times in her stomach and torso on Oct. 25, 2008, in her South Ozone Park apartment, according to the Queens district attorney's office.

The fetus was stabbed five times .

New York doesn't recognize the unborn child as a victim but according to the NY Daily News, Delain's mother has started a campaign to change the law.

Christopher White of the World Youth Alliance demolishes Nicolas Kristof's column which claims birth control is the solution to "many of the global problems that confront us."

The New Jersey hospital which forced nurses to participate in abortions "says it will temporarily stop requiring nurses to assist in performing abortions if they object on religious grounds" after the nurses filed suit with the Alliance Defense Fund.

A woman in South Korea staged a one-woman protest against a university professor and grandmother of her child whom she alleges tried to force her into an abortion. The professor denies the allegations.

Carrying her new-born baby in her arms, the 28-year-old stood holding a sign, reading "I became pregnant following my engagement. But my fiance's mother broke us up when I was six months into the pregnancy. She then tried to force me to have an abortion right up until my eighth month."

On the placard, she listed her complaints, using the real name of the professor and her department.

Life Links 11/3/11

2011-11-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

At the Prospect, E.J. Graff displays a typical rant from a pro-choicer completely uninformed about fetal development This is embarrassing.

Rachael, I disagree. I see an embryo, the size of a pinkie, that couldn't survive even in the most intensive NICU. It doesn't have a working brain, internal organs, or lungs that could function under any circumstances. It's a mush of rapidly dividing cells with enormous potential to be a human, if nothing intervenes, like a miscarriage or a D&C. But to me, that uninhabited scrunch of cells is no more human than an acorn is an oak tree. And so I don't agree that "it's barbaric to kill 1 million babies a year," since I do not see a baby in that one ounce of tissue. I don't think women who choose abortion have committed murder, or anything even close. I think they scraped out some extra tissue that could have become babies but were not yet.

This is what an unborn child looks like when he or she weighs about an ounce and is slightly longer than my pinkie. Not quite a "mush" or "uninhabited scrunch" of cells without a working brain or internal organs.

Steven Massof, another former employee of Kermit Gosnell will plead guilty today for his role in the deaths of children who survived abortions.

A person with knowledge of the plea agreement says medical school graduate Steven Massof will plead guilty to two counts of third-degree murder and other charges.

Two murder counts typically bring a mandatory life term in Pennsylvania. But a judge could give the suburban Pittsburgh man a reduced sentence for his plea or potential cooperation.

Massof is charged in the deaths of two babies prosecutors say were born alive.

A group in Kansas raising money to start an abortion clinic in Wichita claims they have half the money they need to open up a clinic. They claim they're on track to open sometime in 2012. The article also notes that wannabe abortionist Mila Means efforts to start a clinic haven't gone anywhere.

Survivor winner Ethan Zohn's Hodgkin's lymphoma has returned. He'll undergo chemotherapy and hopes to receive a stem cell transplant from his brother.

Memo to Fact Check: You might want to actually check facts

2011-11-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

As opposed to just contacting pro-choice organizations and asking them if Herman Cain's claims are true. Here's the last two paragraphs of the story in which Planned Parenthood attempts to debunk the claim that the majority of abortion clinics are located in black neighborhoods.

Cain's claim also isn't true today. Tait Sye, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood, told us in an email that "73% of Planned Parenthood health centers are located in rural or medically underserved areas." Not all of those would be predominately black communities.

Also, the Guttmacher Institute reported this year that 9 percent of abortion clinics in the U.S. are in neighborhoods in which 50 percent or more of the residents are black. That's according to the group's "census of all known abortion providers."

If you've been reading, you already know the Guttmacher Institute report is a joke as it equates "neighborhoods" with zip codes. Why not go a step further and equate "neighborhoods" with counties or states?

I wonder why Tait Sye doesn't provide information on where Planned Parenthood's abortion clinics are located. Sure, they have a lot of small rural clinics which typically don't provide abortions but what percentage of its clinics which provide abortions are located in rural areas? Not many.

Fate of closed Rockford abortion clinic being settled

2011-11-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

The Northern Illinois Women's Center, a notorious abortion clinic in Rockford, Illinois which was shut down in late September/early October after failing a follow-up inspection. Now an agreement between lawyers for the abortion clinic and the Illinois Department of Health is reportedly close at hand. This could mean the clinic will close for good or could re-open.

Attorneys did not discuss any details of the potential settlement during a telephone conference this morning. Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the state, and Hirshman, reached individually after the proceeding, declined to comment on the terms of the pending agreement.

Resolution in this case could fall on either side of the spectrum — from revocation of the clinic's license to allowing the clinic to reopen. The state suspended the clinic's license Sept. 29 and ordered the facility closed pending a hearing.

According to the attorneys today, a hearing is not necessary, and they plan to present Ramirez with an agreement at a second telephone conference set for 10:30 a.m. Nov. 14.

Does a zip code = a neighborhood?

2011-10-31T12:42:00.000-07:00

The Guttmacher Institute apparently thinks so. I came across this "Evidence Check" sheet (entitled "Claim that Most Abortion Clinics Are Located in Black Neighborhoods Is False") from them after reading a Time/Swampland blog post by Steven Gray.

In his post, Gray claims Herman Cain's assertion about Planned Parenthood attempting to put abortion clinics in black neighborhoods is false because a Guttmacher Institute says, "Sixty-three percent of abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where more than half the residents are white."

Ignoring Gray's obviously faulty equation between all abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, let's take a closer look at what the Guttmacher Institute (which Gray deceptively labels as "non-partisan") thinks neighborhoods are.

Neighborhood characteristics are based on information for each U.S. zip code from the 2000 decennial population census.

Maybe it's just me but I tend to think that there can be multiple neighborhoods in a zip code and that equating zip codes and neighborhoods is fallacious.

For example, one of the zip codes in the Grand Rapids area is 49506 (here's a web site which provides zip code maps). According to Zipskinny, this zip code is 73.3% white.

So by Guttmacher standards, there could be no "black neighborhoods" in this zip code, when there is a portion of this area (on the west side near Eastern and Franklin) where a majority of the residents are African-Americans.

Another example in the Grand Rapids area would be 49508. Again Zipskinny says the zip code is 74.7 white. There is an abortion clinic in this zip code, located at the corner of 32nd and Eastern. This abortion clinic is in a neighborhood which is likely predominately African-American (or at least close to it) but because the 49508 zip code includes more area which is mostly white, the zip code is also mostly white.

Instead of zip codes, maybe the Guttmacher Institute could have used county or state population information to decide whether any abortion clinics were in neighborhoods that were predominately African-American.

Discrimination for some but not others?

2011-10-31T11:18:00.001-07:00

At the Abortion Gang blog, KushielsMoon is maddened by the story of a couple in the UK who aborted their child with Down Syndrome after a nurse and a consultant continuously pushed abortion on them. KushielsMoon's solution:

"The way to fix this is clear: stop discriminating against people with special needs. Instead, value those with special needs within our society."

But, wait. Don't the unborn happen to be human beings with special needs? And doesn't allowing their intentional destruction discriminate against them?

Overheard: Fred Barnes on the pro-choice movement

2011-10-31T09:04:00.000-07:00

From his cover article in the Weekly Standard:

Look across the alley from the fifth floor office of the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA) in downtown Washington and you’ll see two placards. They’ve been posted on the window of the office of a labor union in the adjacent building—for the SBA crowd to see. One says “Stop the War on Women,” the other, “Don’t Take Away My Cancer Screenings.”

These are the response of Planned Parenthood and its allies to attacks on what PP and the abortion industry actually do. Abortion? Forget it. (PP says it mostly does medical tests, and abortions are a sideline.) The “A” word is almost never uttered now by anyone connected to the abortion industry, which claims merely to support “a woman’s right to choose.” Choose what? They don’t say. Their opponents aren’t “pro-lifers,” but anyone who is “anti-choice.”

The language gymnastics and euphemisms reflect the forlorn condition of the pro-choice flock. They’re worn out. Many are in despair. Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told Newsweek of her anguish as she watched last year’s March on Washington. “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young,” she said. “There are so many of them, and they are so young.” Today, zeal and confidence and perseverance in the abortion battle are all on the antiabortion side. “There are more pro-lifers now, and they’re more determined,” says Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life.

Overheard - Pro-choice blogger: Women really can't accomplish much without abortion

2011-10-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

"I think it's awfully hard for women to really accomplish much if they don't have full control over their reproductive capacities. That includes access to birth control, preventative services, and it also includes abortion."

-Jill Filipovic, blogger at Feministe, speaking on Today with Pat Kenny on October 25, 2011

UPDATE: Also of interest are the kind words Jill has for Feminists for Life when in the past she has written various times about how she doesn't think they are a real "feminist" organization.

Did meeting and getting to know Feminists for Life President Serrin Foster change her mind?

Life Links 10/28/11

2011-10-28T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Daily O'Collegian, Oklahoma State's paper, has a piece by Temitope Akande who was planning on challenging the "ignorance and insensitivity" of a group displaying graphic images of abortion. His discussion with a prolife volunteer didn't make him prolife but it helped him think more clearly about the issue.

But after listening to John, I realized that dismissing a fetus as just a part of the woman's body is a very simplistic view; yes it is part of the woman, but it is also an independent life, an existence that is exactly where it is supposed to be. He also made a good point when he said the fact that people will do something anyway is not a good basis for public policy......

Finally, is it silly and a little hypocritical that a lot us are mad at the gruesome graphic photographs of aborted fetus being displayed on campus, but we are not equally appalled by the act that led to those photos?

Two of Kermit Gosnell's employees pled guilty yesterday to third-degree murder.

Andrea Moton, 34, admitted her involvement in the stabbing death of one late-term baby that she pulled from a toilet where it had been delivered.

Sherry West, 52, pleaded guilty in the February 2009 death of Karnamaya Mongar, a Bhutanese immigrant who was 19 weeks pregnant. Neither worker was trained or licensed for the work they did at the clinic run by Dr. Kermit Gosnell, authorities said......

Moton faces up to 120 years in prison. She was one of three employees who were so startled by the size of a nearly 30-week fetus allegedly born alive and killed that they each took pictures of the infant. Moton gave her cellphone photo to the FBI, the grand jury report said.

Kansas abortionists have filed suit against revised health department regulations. At first, the law had requirements for room size, which were much maligned by the pro-abort camp. Those requirements have been removed but the abortionists still don't want the revised regulations which prevent non-physicians from giving prescriptions, require abortion clinics to allow the health department to review their records and require an hour wait in recovery.

Dana Singiser, a key White House aide, has been hired as the Vice President for Public Policy and Government Relations for Planned Parenthood.

Life Links 10/27/11

2011-10-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

Two of abortionist Kermit Gosnell's employees will plead guilty today for their roles in the botched abortion death of Karnamaya Mongar.

Adrienne Moton, 34, and Sherry West, 52, are scheduled to plead guilty for contributing to deaths that occurred in the filthy, unlicensed West Philadelphia abortion clinic run by Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 70.....

Moton, of Upper Darby, was to be tried for murder, conspiracy, racketeering and corruption related to the death of a viable baby born alive at the clinic. She was an unlicensed worker who routinely and illegally administered anesthesia to patients, the District Attorney's Office said at the time of her arrest.

West, of Newark, Del., was to be tried for third-degree murder in Mongar's death and related counts.

Part of North Carolina's informed consent law will take effect but their ultrasound requirement is being held up by a U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Eagles

She said the North Carolina abortion law "goes well beyond" requirements that patients give informed consent to medical procedures. The ultrasound provision could compel "an unwilling speaker to deliver visual and spoken messages to a listener who is not listening or looking," the judge wrote.

Eagles said the provision is "likely to harm the psychological health of the very group the state purports to protect."

Ohio prolife groups are feuding.

Ohio Right to Life has been at odds with Faith2Action since its founder — activist Janet Folger Porter — returned to Ohio in January. She has been pushing the Heartbeat Bill, which would ban Abortions once a fetal heartbeat could be detected, sometimes as early as six weeks into pregnancy. If passed, it would be the most stringent Abortion restriction in the country.

Ohio Right to Life has remained neutral on the bill out of concern it reaches too far and can't sustain a court challenge. The group is spearheading a coordinated effort among anti-Abortion and pro-family groups that's also linked to the fetal heartbeat. It's advocating informed consent bills in all 50 states requiring women to see and hear the fetal heartbeat before agreeing to an Abortion.

Life Links 10/25/11

2011-10-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

Reuters provides a classic example of poor journalism in this piece by Katy Migiro. Is this an article or an editorial on the legality of abortion in Kenya? Where do those statistics on abortion deaths come from? Migiro doesn't tell us but a quick google search indicates the source is this report from the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights. The report's methodology is extremely shaky. Basically, they think the reported statistics are too low, so they interview a bunch of abortion proponents and make a guess.

It's almost as if Migiro went to pro-abortion groups and asked, "What would you like me to write for you?"

Presidential candidate Herman Cain further clarifies his position on abortion during an interview with CBN's David Brody.

Brody: Are you for some sort of pro-life amendment to the Constitution that in essence would trump Roe v. Wade?

Cain: Yes. Yes I feel that strongly about it. If we can get the necessary support and it comes to my desk I'll sign it. That's all I can do. I will sign it.

An abortion protester is planning on running in the primary for Rep. Keith Ellison's seat in Minnesota and using his campaign to display graphic images of abortion on television.

Gary Boisclair announced Monday morning he is running against Ellison in the DFL Primary -- and he made his campaign platform very clear.

"The platform is life, liberty and justice under God," said Boisclair. "Very simply, I am fighting to bring an end to legalized child killing. I will fight in this campaign to bring that to the forefront."
.......
Local television stations, including FOX 9, would have no choice but to run the ads. FCC rules dictate that if the ad comes from a legally qualified and certified candidate for federal office, the TV station must run it uncensored.

Here's how a local ABC News station describes a child found dead on a porch.

The Philadelphia Coroner's Office said on Monday that it was a fetus, not a fully-formed baby, that was found on a porch this weekend.

The fetus weighed less than two pounds, the coroner said, and would not have been from a viable birth.

Complete lack of efficiency at the Michigan Department of Transportation

2011-10-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

Oh MDOT. Promises. Promises.

The Burton Street bridge over US-131 will be closed. Bridge work on Burton Street over the Grand Elk Railroad, a City of Grand Rapids project, will be performed concurrently with the closure of Burton Street over US-131.....

One lane will be open in each direction on Burton Street by early September.

It's late October and there are no lanes open. Maybe that's a typo which should say "early November."

Life Links 10/24/11

2011-10-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

HBO is apparently developing a medical drama entitled "Wichita" which will be based somewhat on abortionist George Tiller.

The Kansas Department of Health shredded abortion records which could be used to prove that Planned Parenthood broke the law.

The records in question deal with reports that Planned Parenthood must file under state law for each abortion it performs. One copy is kept by Planned Parenthood in the patient files, and another is sent to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Prosecutors wanted to prove the records obtained by Kline were the same as those filed with the state and different from alleged copies provided later by Planned Parenthood.

In its latest filing, made public Friday, the prosecution asked for additional time to find witnesses to establish the authenticity of records obtained by Kline as attorney general.

Reached Friday, Kline said KDHE knew in 2005 that the destroyed records were a key part of a criminal investigation.

"It is greatly disturbing and potentially obstruction for them to have destroyed them," said Kline, adding that he thinks the case can still be made.

Another stone to mountain of evidence showing Amanda Marcotte's inability to do basic research. At RH Reality Check she makes the following absurd claim:

For instance, in Tennessee, they're just straight taking contraception funding and giving it to anti-contraception propaganda centers called "crisis pregnancy centers".

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Shelby County Commission voted to have Christ Community Health Services provide the county's family planning program over Planned Parenthood. CCHS is obviously not a CPC unless CPCs started providing primary and dental care and no one let me know. CCHS is also obviously not "anti-contraception" since they scored higher than Planned Parenthood on their ability to provide family planning services. Maybe Amanda thinks they're anti-contraception because they will refer out emergency contraception requests instead of providing them.

Here's Herman Cain's response to the controversy over his comments over abortion.

At Public Discourse, Michael Paulsen discusses laws banning sex-selection abortions.

Four states—Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and most recently Arizona—have enacted laws prohibiting sex-selection abortion. Those laws have yet to be tested in the courts. At least seven other states have considered bills that would ban the practice......

Are such bans constitutional, under the Supreme Court's decisions creating a right to abortion? The question such laws present is a dramatic one, challenging the underpinnings of Roe v. Wade in the most fundamental and direct of ways: Does the U.S. Constitution create a right to abortion, even when the woman's reason for abortion is that she does not like the sex of her unborn child?

Sadly, the answer, under the Supreme Court's absurd, through-the-looking-glass constitutional law of abortion, is yes......

Even after viability, a woman may abort for any "health" reason, an exception that ends up swallowing the rule: The Court's abortion decisions define "health" justifications for abortion to include any "emotional," "psychological," or "familial" reason for wanting an abortion.

A pregnant woman's (or a couple's) preference for a boy rather than a girl would seem to fit comfortably within the gaping loophole for "emotional" or "familial" reasons for abortion.....

The fact that laws banning sex-selection may fly in the face of the Roe and Casey decisions is no reason not to enact them. On the contrary, it is a powerful reason to enact them: The justices, and abortion supporters generally, ought to be forced to confront the uncomfortable reality of the Court's abortion jurisprudence.

Life Links 10/21/11

2011-10-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

A piece in the New England Journal of Medicine discusses the effectiveness of two different types of prolife legislation. Demand-side policies (like informed consent) attempt to impact how many women want abortions while supply-side policies (regulations on abortion providers). The study finds that a supply-side policy in Texas was much more effective than a demand-side policy.

If Texas's demand-side policies had an impact, there would have been a decrease in abortions at all gestational stages. If only the supply-side policy restricted access, the decrease would be limited to abortions performed at or after 16 weeks. I found that the supply-side policy had dramatic effects, whereas the demand-side policy had none. The number of abortions performed in Texas at or after 16 weeks of gestation dropped by 88%, from 3642 in 2003 to 446 in 2004, while the number of residents who left the state for a late abortion almost quadrupled, from 187 in 2003 to 736 in 2004. Despite this large outflow, there were 2460 fewer abortions at 16 weeks or later in Texas residents 1 year after the law took effect, a 68% decline. By 2006, Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio had ambulatory surgical centers in which abortions were performed at or after 16 weeks of gestation, but the number of such abortions remained well below the 2003 level.4 Over the same period there was no meaningful change in the number of abortions before 16 weeks of gestation (see graphNumber of Abortions Performed in Residents of Texas, before and after 16 Weeks of Gestation, in and outside Texas, 2001–2006.). The demand-side policies had no measurable impact.....

If policies rendering free-standing abortion clinics economically unviable are allowed to stand, a map of U.S. abortion services will probably resemble the blue-state–red-state configuration after the 2004 presidential election. Services will be readily available in coastal blue states, whereas women in the country's vast middle will have to travel large distances for access......

The pre-Roe data illustrate that the farther women must travel for an abortion, the lower the abortion rate will be, and that travel distance is a greater obstacle for less-advantaged women.

The Washington Post has presidential candidate Herman Cain's most recent statement on abortion.

I will appoint judges who understand the original intent of the Constitution. Judges who are committed to the rule of law, know that the Constitution contains no right to take the life of unborn children.

I will oppose government funding of abortion. I will veto any legislation that contains funds for Planned Parenthood. I will do everything that a President can do, consistent with his constitutional role, to advance the culture of life."

Didn't Rudy Giuliani promise to do basically the same thing while still self-describing himself as "pro-choice?" Just being opposed to tax-funded abortions and promising to appoint judges committed to the rule of law doesn't make a presidential candidate "prolife."

We still need answers to specific questions like what's Cain's stance on the Mexico City policy, the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, signing prolife legislation which restricts access to abortion like prohibiting the transportation of minors across state lines to avoid state parental consent law. Also, what does Cain think is consistent with the constitutional role of the president? Maybe he thinks it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to restrict abortion.

Broad statements will not do. Answers to specific questions are needed.

Prolife legislation passed in Russia's parliament.

The law passed on Friday limits abortions to 12 weeks of pregnancy — except for women who say they can't afford a child, who may have an abortion up to 22 weeks.

The law also stipulates a mandatory waiting period of two to seven days before the procedure, described as time for a woman to reconsider her decision.

The law does not include restrictions proposed by the Russian Orthodox Church, such as a requirement for a husband's or parents' consent for married women or teenage girls or for a doctor's right to refuse an abortion.

UK's The Guardian is covering the news of a Chinese woman's death after a forced abortion. The story was broken by Women Right's Without Borders.

Cain tweets he's "prolife," provides no explanation

2011-10-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry but a brief tweet explanation on this issue is incredibly lame after Cain's various conflicting statements.

What does "I'm 100% Pro-Life. End of Story." mean? "Pro-Life" could mean one thing to Herman Cain and quite another thing to prolife voters who want to know if the republican presidential candidate supports and is willing to sign prolife laws.

This is not "End of Story" until candidate Cain further explains what he would do regarding prolife legislation if he were elected president.

Life Links 10/20/11

2011-10-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

Planned Parenthood of Indiana is refusing to separate it's abortion services from it's other services in order to retain government funding.

State attorneys suggested in a brief filed in August that Planned Parenthood should just separate its services to ensure no public money goes toward abortion. While officials with the state group say they're open to that, the outcomes of similar battles in Missouri and Texas give them pause.

Texas set up a Medicaid waiver program in 2005 to provide family planning services for low-income women but banned abortion providers from receiving any of the funds. In response, that state's Planned Parenthood formed a separate abortion affiliate.....

Indiana state Sen. Scott Schneider, author of the proposal to defund Planned Parenthood, called the organization's split in Texas a "superficial" one. He said the group simply "moved the abortions to the second floor."

In Colorado, abortion protester Jo Ann Scott has agreed to pay two women $750 each for blocking their way into a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.

The agreement signed Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Philip A. Brimmer states Scott, 59, will not to use "force, threat of force or physically obstructing any person because that person is or has been obtaining or providing reproductive health services."

Her husband, Kenneth Scott, is accused of having "physically obstructed patients and staff," on 10 occasions; a federal lawsuit against him is pending, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Here's the Justice Department complaint against the Scotts which originally sought $5,000 from Jo Ann Scott for each individual and a $15,000 civil penalty for allegedly touching one woman on the shoulder and poking another person (not the abortion client) in the back and pushing them in the chest.

Here's another poor pro-abortion editorial in the New York Times. This one is on the Protect Life Act. As usual, the take their talking points directly from NARAL and Planned Parenthood and provide not the slightest bit of evidence that the legislation would allow hospital to refuse to perform emergency abortions on women whose lives were in danger. The note that the sponsor Rep. Pitts disagrees with this assessment of his legislation but then simply assert they are right and he is wrong.

Evidence? Who needs that when you can just throw out wild accusations?

Is Herman Cain really prolife? Or is he just "personally prolife?"

2011-10-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering if presidential candidate Herman Cain is just "personally prolife?" In a variety of interviews (here's a John Stossel interview) when he is pressed to say more than "I'm pro-life," Cain seems to indicate that he doesn't favor government making decisions about abortion. Politico has the latest regarding what Cain said during an interview with Piers Morgan:

His views on abortion, he said, should be seen this way: "I can have an issue on a opinion without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn't be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make."

Cain certainly needs to be pressed by prolifers to clarify if he would sign prolife legislation if elected president. Recall that Cain refused to sign the Susan B. Anthony List's prolife pledge because it asks the candidate to "advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" because Cain felt only Congress could advance legislation.

Life Links 10/19/11

2011-10-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Williamette Week has an interview with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.

There was one question which wasn't a toss-up.

In the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, a lot was made of your salary—close to $400,000 per year. Planned Parenthood declined to comment on it. Why?

It's public record. It always has been. I work hard for my salary, and I think that's a red herring. Planned Parenthood is the most cost-effective provider of family planning services in this country. The far right has done everything they can to undermine us and to create non-issues, which I think that is.

Kelcie McCrae , the editor-in-chief at North Carolina A & T's paper is opposed to North Carolina's ultrasound viewing law.

Having an abortion was one of the hardest things one of my closest friends has ever done, and to imagine looking at the ultrasound moments before the procedure, according to her, would have been unbearable.

Why would it have been unbearable? If a fetus isn't a human being and killing one should be legal then why would it be so hard to view an image of one?

The Connecticut Catholic Public Affairs Conference is attempting to get their state health department to look into the discrepancy in abortion reporting. The state received 14,442 abortion reports in 2008 while a survey by the Guttmacher Institute has 17,030 abortions reported in 2008 after surveying abortion providers.

A maid in the United Arab Emirates has been charged with premeditated murder after an abortion and then waiting 10 hours for the child to die.

The prosecution accused the 30-year-old maid of premeditated murder by failing to save her own baby who was still alive hours after abortion.

A Chinese man attempted to sue his wife for "violating his reproductive rights" after she had an abortion without his consent.

Liu Gang, 34, divorced his wife and demanded 30,000 yuan in psychological compensation after his partner Li Fenfen, 31, terminated her pregnancy in favor of a job promotion.....

After several rounds of futile mediation, the couple was granted a divorce. But Liu's demand for psychological compensation was thrown out by the judge as China's marriage law stipulates that wives own the right to terminate a pregnancy.

A woman from the UK is claiming she overheard her husband on the phone telling a friend that he had drugged her with an abortion pill. The drugging apparently led her to miscarry and have an emergency trip to the hospital.

Overheard: Pro-choice movement knows motivations matter in how public views abortion

2011-10-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

From a Slate article on mothers who abort:

Of course, when it comes to public opinion, it’s one thing for a mother to choose an abortion out of desperation, and another to do it out of preference. Feldt says the motivations behind a mother’s choice to terminate place her on a sliding scale of public opinion. Recalling her days polling voters at PPFA, she describes the American view of who gets to have an abortion like this: “The less in control of a woman’s life she is, the more the public supports her right to make that choice [to have an abortion]. The more she is in control of her life, saying this is the life I choose, the less people support it.” So if a mother who is destitute chooses to abort, we might accept her decision. But someone like me, who could support another child if only I moved to a less expensive ZIP code and got a job with a steadier paycheck? I’d be a moral pariah.

This is why the pro-choice movement has slowly been abandoning the "choice" rhetoric and they often use "need" language when referring to the reasons why women have abortions. It's not because women actually "need" abortions, its because the public is much more accepting of women "needing" abortions as opposed to "choosing" abortions.

No patents for embryonic stem cell researchers in Europe

2011-10-18T07:20:00.001-07:00

Poor embryonic stem cell researchers. The European Court of Justice has ruled that researchers can't patent the process of killing human embryos. Now let's listen to poor researchers complain about how they won't be able to make tons of money from patenting the killing of other human beings.

"It will unfortunately make it less likely that companies in Europe will invest in the research to develop treatments to use embryonic stem cells for treatment of human diseases," said Ian Wilmut, the British scientist who led the team that produced Dolly the cloned sheep.

Pete Coffey of University College London said it was the ECJ ruling was a "devastating decision" and Austin Smith, another stem cell expert at the University of Cambridge, said it left scientists "in a ridiculous position".

"We are funded to do research for the public good, yet prevented from taking our discoveries to the market place where they could be developed into new medicines," he said.

Note that this ruling doesn't prevent researchers from killing human embryos for research and doing embryonic stem cell research, it just prevents them from patenting their work and making boatloads of money on it. The winning plaintiff in this case was Greenpeace.

Life Links 10/18/11

2011-10-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

A local Oklahoma news station has the story of Stacy Crimm, a woman who refused chemotherapy for an aggressive brain cancer because she was pregnant, and her daughter Dottie.

With Crimm's death imminent, Beo worked with nurse Jetsy Jacob to step up their questioning of the family, healthcare professionals and disease experts about Crimm's condition, including her staph infection. They talked to Neoflight, the medical center's neonatal transport team, about using a capsule-like ICU to safely move Dottie.

When his sister regained consciousness later that day, Phillips asked what she thought about possibly seeing Dottie. Crimm's eyes popped open and she raised her hands as if to ask where was her child.

Nurses wheeled Dottie down the hallway to her mother moments later. Phillips said doctors, nurses and others clad in protective gear gathered as nurses carefully lifted the baby from the incubator under her mother's watchful eye.

They placed the baby on her mother's chest. Mother and child gazed into each other's eyes for several minutes. She smiled at the baby who at last lay in her arms.

No one said a word. No one had a dry eye.

Stacie Crimm died three days later.

In Tennessee, Shelby County commissioners voted 9-4 to give Christ Community Health Services their county's contract for family planning. Planned Parenthood was the previous recipient of this contract.

Yesterday, 20 cities began offering a new test which can detect Down Syndrome in unborn children earlier and easier than amniocentisis or chorionic villus sampling. The test analyzes fetal DNA in the mother's blood.

The results of a study published online Monday by the journal Genetics in Medicine showed that Sequenom's new test picked up 98.6 percent of Down syndrome cases.

The false-positive rate — when the test incorrectly said that a baby would have Down syndrome — was 0.2 percent.....

The test can be used as early as 10 weeks into a pregnancy, though half of the samples tested in the study were from the second trimester, meaning 15 weeks or more.

The Yale Daily News has an interesting article on how the placenta tricks the mother's immune system to get more nutrients and how this doesn't happen in women with preeclampsia.

In order for the invasive cells to circumvent the mother's white blood cells, the placenta secretes the protein PP13 into the mother's blood as a diversion, Kliman said. White blood cells are the foot soldiers of the human immune system and although they would normally defend the arteries in the uterus, the white blood cells instead attack the decoy PP13, leaving the arteries unprotected. The entire area around the PP13 secretion becomes inflamed and filled with the mother's dead white blood cells, while the placental cells destroy the arteries, increasing blood flow and nutrient supply to the baby, Kliman said.

"The finding was completely unexpected," Kliman said. "For such death and destruction to be a normal part of pregnancy is shocking."

In the absence of PP13, the attacking cells are destroyed and the intact arteries prevent enough blood from reaching the baby. In response, the placenta releases signals that increase the mother's blood pressure in an attempt to increase blood flow, causing the mother to develop preeclampsia.

Kliman said uncovering this mechanism may lay the basis for providing diagnosis and treatment options to pregnant women who develop preeclampsia. Doctors may now be able to detect women who are at risk for preeclampsia long before symptoms emerge, he said.

According to Women's Rights Without Frontiers, a woman in China who was 6 months pregnant died during a forced abortion.

"More than ten persons from the Family Planning Bureau came, took off the oxygen mask from her and forced her to induce labor. From the time she was put into operating room at 4:00 p.m., there was no news about her . . . At night around 10:00 p.m., someone came, opened the door of the delivery room and slipped away. We ran into the delivery room and saw that the doctors and nurses all disappeared while poor Jihong Ma's body had already been totally freezing cold, with purple lips and bleeding nose, lying on the operating table without any movement....."

Life Links 10/17/11

2011-10-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

China is a buzz after a toddler was hit by a van and then at least 18 people passed by the bleeding toddler without doing anything to help the wounded child. The incident was caught on video camera. The Daily Telegraph has the video and various comments regarding the how China is becoming a land without morals. The girl, named Yueyue, is in critical condition.

One of the state of Washington's largest hospital systems will stop performing abortions when it merges with a Catholic-run health organization. However, Swedish Medical Center it will help pay for a new Planned Parenthood abortion clinic opening in 2012.

A secular institution with five hospitals and 11,000 employees, Swedish announced last week that is it seeking an affiliation with Providence Health & Services, a Catholic group. Based in Renton, Providence has 27 hospitals across five states and nearly 53,000 employees. Each organization also has many clinics.....

On late Friday, Swedish announced that it will transition services for elective abortions to a new Planned Parenthood center in First Hill. The company said it will help underwrite the costs of establishing the center.

Another article notes that Swedish will refer women to Planned Parenthood for abortion.

"I'm extremely pleased that this has the potential to work for everybody," said Chris Charbonneau, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest. "Our plan is to make sure that not a single woman can't get the services they need."

Planned Parenthood's local CEO even claims abortions at Planned Parenthood are safer than abortions at hospitals because hospitals unneccesarily "medicalize" them.

Both Tizon and Charbonneau said abortions are more often — and more appropriately — performed in a clinic than in a hospital.

"Swedish should never have been doing those things in a hospital, anyway," Charbonneau said. "We have really perfected the office procedure. When you take people into a hospital, you add a level of complications and danger," unnecessarily medicalizing the procedure and typically making it more expensive, she said.

New Jersey's cuts to family planning funding have lowered the number of clients visiting Planned Parenthood.

From June 2010 to June 2011, Planned Parenthood and similar providers statewide saw 16,340 fewer visits to their centers, Planned Parenthood of New Jersey's statewide coordinator Michele Jaker said. She said there were 81,978 visits to centers statewide from June 2009 to June 2010. That number was down 20 percent just one year later, to 65,638.

A doctor in Uganda has been arrested after allegedly performing an abortion on a minor whom who allegedly impregnated. The abortion seems to have been against her will.

Overheard: Wesley Smith on Nancy Pelosi's Demagoguery

2011-10-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

Regarding Pelosi untruthful description of the Protect Life Act, Smith writes:

What a demagogue, devoid of intellectual integrity, lying about a bill that would certainly not prevent dying women from being treated medically in an abortion situation.....

This is a prime example of why Pelosi is no longer Speaker of the House. What a disgusting and nasty display of political demagoguery.

Life Links 10/13/11

2011-10-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

What happens when Plan B becomes Plan A?

At XOJane, Cat Marnell writes about (warning: Cat discusses her sex life) how she is using Plan B as her primary form of birth control. Cat believes other women in New York are "abusing" Plan B as well because supposedly pharmacies all over New York City are out of it.

Cat also believes that abortion is murder, has had multiple abortions and thinks she has the right to murder her unborn children as long as they are in her body.

In the comments she writes, "in most ways I am GLAD, so much, that we can all get abortions like we can get oral surgery, and that no one pressures us to dwell upon and consider the hurt inherent in it all. only recently have i thought about them and my own experiences in a way that let them or the trauma of them matter, or register as awful physical/emotional/psychological experiences to have gone through. traumas.. if that makes sense. I definitely have let my pro-choiceness numb out my feelings."

In response to Katie Stack's editorial attack on crisis pregnancy centers, the New York Times publishes a letter to the editor from abortionist Nancy Stanwood which claims CPCs in her area lied to patients.

The New York Times: All the evidence-free attacks on pregnancy centers that are fit to print.

Politico has an article on the Protect Life Act and it's upcoming vote in Congress.

The bill would ban federal funding of abortions. It would also ensure that providers have protections if they believe abortions violate their consciences and prohibit the tax subsidies in the health reform law from going toward a health plan that includes coverage of abortions except in cases of rape or incest or for the safety of the mother.

Planned Parenthood warns that the bill could allow hospitals to refuse to treat a patient whose life depends on having an abortion. The group argues that a hospital would be able to use the bill's conscience clause to escape the federal law — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act — that requires hospitals to treat all patients.

It's a theory that the bill's backers call "preposterous" — arguing that health care providers would never refuse to do what's needed to save a patient's life. Andrew Wimer, a Pitts spokesman, says Catholic hospitals let their doctors perform emergency procedures even if they could cause the death of an unborn child.

One would think that honest pro-choicers would eventually catch on to these kind of outlandish scare tactics.

Abortions are down in Arizona after legislation restricts nurse practitioners from providing abortion. Let's listen as Planned Parenthood Arizona President Bryan Howard bemoans that abortionists have to actually consult with their patients face-to-face.

He said there are just not enough doctors in Arizona who are both trained to do the work and willing to do it, what with protestors outside the clinics and, in at least the case of one nurse-practitioner in Flagstaff, outside her home.....

"It's 100 percent due to the shortage of providers,'' Howard said. Now he said doctors must perform both surgical and medical abortions as well as be available for those face-to-face consultations.

Planned Parenthood also performed 89.6% of Arizona's abortion's last month.

Planned Parenthood is the state's largest abortion provider. Howard said 653 of the 729 abortions in September were performed by Planned Parenthood.

Howard also ridiculously appeals to the 400 "real children" this month who didn't get killed at his clinics and how their families may not be able to afford child care.

In the San Francisco-area, a rich, old lady named Harriett Hills Stinson told NARAL's Power for Choice luncheon she had an abortion and encouraged other women to talk about their abortions. Another article from the San Mateo Times notes that her ob/gyn husband performed the illegal abortion and has this scary detail.

The lack of sleep from raising three young children was causing her such stress that she had the urge to act out violently toward them whenever her sleep was disrupted.

Life Links 10/12/11

2011-10-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

Governor Rick Snyder signed Michigan's partial-birth abortion ban yesterday.

Remember when liberals were all up in arms about "violent" rhetoric in politics after Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six people were murdered? I specifically remember a couple of pieces at the RH Reality Check web site on this issue. I guess that time has passed on as RH Reality Check blogger Robin Marty seems to have no problems with Kathleen Sebelius describing the fight over Obamacare and the funding of Planned Parenthood as a "war."

President Obama has apparently threatened to veto the Protect Life Act, which would place Stupak-Pitts-like regulations on Obamacare's subsidizing of abortion coverage.

Life Links 10/10/11

2011-10-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

Secular Pro-life and Gerald Nadal both write on the death of prolife advocate Kourtney Blythe Gordon and her unborn child.

Last night, Students for Life of America field coordinator Kortney Blythe Gordon was killed in a two-car accident in Georgia. Also killed were her unborn daughter, Sophy, and a person from the other car who has not been identified. Several other individuals were injured. There are not many details at this time.

A woman in Milwaukee has been arrested after she allegedly removed a child from another woman's womb. This resulted in both the death of the mother and child. The suspect called the police and claimed she had recently given birth and her child wasn't breathing.

Milwaukee police said the 33-year-old suspect removed the full-term baby from Maritza Ramirez-Cruz' uterus "by force," but did not elaborate.

The suspect called 911 on Thursday saying she had given birth at home and that the baby wasn't breathing, police said. An autopsy and investigation led police back to the suspect's home Friday where they found the 23-year-old mother's body in the basement. The woman was arrested but has not been charged in the case.

Isaac Barchus, a nine-year-old boy with a rare disease called CANDLE syndrome will receive a stem cell transplant, the first of its kind for someone with his condition.

The condition is CANDLE syndrome, an autoinflammatory disease named only last year. So far, his case is one of only nine described in the medical literature, said Dr. Adam Reinhardt, a pediatric rheumatologist at Children's Hospital & Medical Center......

The goal of the stem cell transplant, which will use stem cells derived from a donor's blood, is to stabilize Isaac's condition until specific drugs become available to treat it, said Reinhardt, who has cared for Isaac for the past three years.

Abortion advocate Katie Stack and her friends agree crisis pregnancy centers don't help women, thousands of women helped by CPCs disagree

2011-10-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has published an editorial attacking crisis pregnancy centers by Katie Stack. Stack is an abortion proponent who was one of the two post-abortive women who appeared with Markai Durham in a post-interview segment of MTV's No Easy Decision special. Stack was the woman who began crying after explaining how she went to a hotel after her abortion so she wouldn't have to go home and see her sister's baby. During the special, she also said she acknowledged her child as "a baby" and saw her decision to abort as a "parenting choice."

The editorial has the kind of reasoning I used in junior high (me and my friends all think it's true, therefore it must be true).

Since then I've talked with dozens of women, including my best friend and my younger sister, about their own experiences with these centers. Regardless of our views on abortion, our conclusion about crisis pregnancy centers is the same — they don't help women.

Yes, no women have ever been helped by the approximately 3,000 CPCs across America because an abortion advocate and her friends agree. No woman has ever received diapers, baby food, prenatal care referrals, etc. Come on.

I guess Katie at least knows her audience. Only someone whose sole knowledge of CPCs comes from the New York Times and Planned Parenthood mailings would believe that.

I also seriously doubt the veracity of this claim.

My sister fully intended to raise her own son, who is now 2, but when she was pregnant and went to a center for advice, all she got was a lecture about the joys of adoption and a pamphlet on eternal salvation. She had to turn to Planned Parenthood to receive any actual prenatal health care or referrals.

Life Links 10/6/11

2011-10-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Taylor and Wesley Smith discusses the human cloning/stem cell breakthrough that wasn't. Taylor writes,

These researchers went beyond just cloning human embryos and destroying them. They intentionally created human embryos with triploidy, a genetic condition where a person has 3 copies of each of the 23 chromosomes instead of two. While triploidy is often fatal, some children with triploidy do survive to birth and beyond. I cannot emphasize this enough. These scientists intentionally created human lives that they knew would have a devastating genetic condition and then destroyed them for cells that they knew could never be used to treat anyone. This is beyond morally offensive, it is downright evil.

Smith notes how the researchers had to pay women for eggs.

Clearly, this is another case of scientists who could care less about curing disease or treating patients. They just want to be the first ones to do something and could have cared less about the morality of what they were doing or the usefulness of their experiment's results.

Justice for All is displaying graphic images of abortions at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The ignorance of pro-choice students who were interviewed or who've commented on the article is saddening.

"I feel like this is incredibly disrespectful," she said of the display.

(Elena) Schmeising said the gruesome images were a flawed argument because partial-birth abortion is already illegal.

She also said the group was deploying scare tactics and said she worried that it could be upsetting to young women who were considering abortions or have had the procedure.

Apparently, Elena is so ignorant of abortion techniques she thinks all of the photos used by Justice for All are of children aborted by partial-birth abortion. She also accuses prolifers of scare tactics for showing images of something which is happening on a daily basis while the group of counter demonstrators she joined held "posters that included warnings that outlawing abortion would lead to dangerous, back-alley procedures."

Here's some horrid humor from the Abortioneers blog as Desembarazarme discusses how she joked about the possibility of aborting her friend's planned pregnancy.

Her pregnancy was incredibly planned, and I knew it was in the works. When she disclosed her expectant status, I screamed and hugged her, and she told me, "I'm scared. I'm not sure I'm 100% happy." And I hugged her again and made a bad joke about how she has until the third trimester to change her mind (she smiled), and I told her I understand, because I do.

I guess if your job is helping to kill unborn human beings, you'd find it funny to joke about the possibility of aborting your friend's child.

Life Links 10/5/11

2011-10-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

Florida abortionist Michael Benjamin had his medical license suspended indefinitely over the weekend because he failed to report a 12-year-old's pregnancy. The girl was 6 months pregnant in 2009 when her mother and her mother's boyfriend brought the girl to Benjamin for an abortion. The mother's boyfriend is now spending 15 years in jail.

According to LifeNews, Benjamin worked at the National Abortion Federation affiliated Presidential Women's Center.

Various Illinois media outlets are reporting the Northern Illinois Women's Center abortion clinic in Rockford will be closed at least "several weeks" but no one is reporting Operation Rescue's belief that the clinic will be closed for good.

A message on the clinic's web site says they are "temporarily unable to take appointments...."

An Indiana man will serve extra time in jail because when he killed his wife, he also killed his unborn child.

Second was the doctor who performed Amy's autopsy, Dr. Scott Wagner. While performing the autopsy he said he found a male fetus. It was at approximately 12 weeks gestation. Dr. Wagner believes the baby died due to Amy's internal bleeding from when Tyler shot her twice. He handed out pictures of the fetus inside and outside of the womb to the jury. NewsChannel 15 has also learned Amy died because she went into shock.

It took the jury no longer than 15 minutes to deliberate. They said Tyler's actions caused the death of Amy's fetus.

This will add 6-20 years onto his sentence.

In the UK, local health commissioners are being attacked for their decision to stop performing abortions at a hospital in South Tyneside.

Rockford abortion clinic closed for good??

2011-10-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

According to Operation Rescue, the receptionist at Northern Illinois Women’s Center in Rockford, Illinois is closing for good.

A woman answering the clinic’s phone this morning told the caller that the clinic had permanently stopped providing all services, including abortions. She offered referrals for pregnancy tests to the Health Department.

Apparently, this abortion clinic is unable or unwilling to bring itself into compliance with Illinois health laws.

UPDATE: Illinois media outlets are reporting the clinic will be closed at least several weeks.

Life Links 10/4/11

2011-10-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the slow economy has also struck The Atlantic's fact-checking department. In her Planned Parenthood promoting piece, Lindsay Miller apparently doesn't understand there are differences between resources/budget and "services."

Every time a new attack of this nature makes the news, I can't help but wonder: Do these people have any idea what Planned Parenthood does? Yes, they provide abortions or referrals to medical practices that offer abortions, but that accounts for about three percent of their resources, and none of their federal funds; abortions are paid for by the patient, or by donations from people like me, who believe that a woman who doesn't even have the disposable income to terminate a pregnancy should absolutely not be forced to carry one to term. The other 97 percent of Planned Parenthood's budget goes toward a variety of services having to do with reproductive health. They provide birth control, STD testing, Pap smears, breast exams, cancer screenings (for men as well as women), and much more. So why have they become such a boogeyman to the anti-abortion right?

Ummm....maybe because they're America's leading abortion provider (25% of America's abortions) and people who are anti-abortion are.....against abortion. But the better question is: So why should prolifers listen to someone who doesn't take the time to do basic research about an organization she's promoting?

In the Washington Post, Sarah Kliff writes about the Hyde Amendment and health care reform and how abortion proponents seem to be fighting an uphill battle.

"Unfortunately, this idea that there shouldn't be public insurance coverage for abortion got cemented in the public's mind," says Jessica Arons, director of the women's health and rights program at the Center for American Progress. "Politicians have gotten used to saying that."
......
"The persistence of the Hyde Amendment also created a series of disastrous roadblocks to inclusive reproductive health coverage in other legislation," Fried, a professor at Hampshire College who both studies and supports the abortion rights movement, wrote. "Compounding this specific policy loss was the profound ideological loss of normalizing the exclusion of abortion from health insurance."

Kansas' state medical board likely won't make a decision regarding former abortionist Ann Kristin Neuhaus status until next year. Nehaus rubber-stamped second opinions for George Tiller's late-term abortions.

Share your abortion story but don't say anything about the actual abortion

2011-10-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

That's the theme of 1 in 3 campaign share your story "My Story" videos. One woman mentions the doctor and says he was nice but there's no description of what happens in the clinic or during the procedure.

Isn't odd that a campaign designed to get women to talk about their abortions, starts with a bunch of videos of women not really talking about their abortions but rather talking about the circumstances in their life when they had abortions?

There's also continuous use of "choice" rhetoric despite some of testimonies including claims that abortion was the "only thing" the woman could do.

In the pre-Roe stories, however, we hear how abortions were performed, including details.

If post-Roe abortions are so much better than pre-Roe abortions, then why avoid describing what happens in a post-Roe abortion?

Life Links 9/30/11

2011-09-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

A Kansas law restricting the coverage of elective abortion in insurance coverage will stand while a court challenge takes place.

Ruling in Wichita, U.S. Senior District Judge Wesley Brown found that the ACLU failed to prove that the Legislature's primary motive was to create obstacles for women seeking an abortion.

The law bans private insurers from providing elective abortion coverage in Kansas unless the procedure is necessary to save the mother's life. The bill allows coverage for abortion, but women have to buy a separate rider at additional cost.

"On its face, the act does nothing to directly prohibit or restrict a woman from obtaining an abortion," Brown wrote in his 19-page opinion.

Scott Klusendorf shares his thoughts on Ray Comfort's "180" film.

A Planned Parenthood in Flagstaff is warning of future back alley abortions since women from Flagstaff area seeking abortions are now referred to a Planned Parenthood in Phoenix because Arizona's law no longer lets nurse practitioners do abortions. The reality that Planned Parenthood can't find an abortionist with a medical license willing to go to Flagstaff is somehow everyone else's fault.

Otterstein, the nurse practitioner in Planned Parenthood's Flagstaff clinic, said her 30 years of experience suggests that women won't stop having abortions but may opt for unsafe procedures, including late-term abortions caused by saving for travel expenses.

"I'm very sure we're going to see illegal abortions crop up, which can be very serious because they can lead to deaths," she said.

Yes, because we've never heard this scare tactic before. Oh wait.....parental consent, waiting periods, etc.

We know not much work is happening at the women's studies department at Purdue. Here's how one employee responded to the Genocide Awareness Project being on campus.

Laurie Graham, assistant director of women's studies, said someone emailed her and told her about the protest. When she saw it herself on the way home for lunch, she was horrified.

She returned with a sign supporting the right to choose. She and a colleague spent the afternoon receiving high-fives from passing students and gathering signatures of support.

"It's not genocide; it's not the Holocaust; it's not racial lynching," Graham said, referring to the graphic images. "I'm so offended by the whole thing. I thought I've just got to do something."

Life Links 9/29/11

2011-09-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

Mexico's Supreme Court upheld Baja California's abortion law.

After three days of debate, the justices opposing the measure fell one vote short of the eight needed to declare the legislation unconstitutional.

The state law establishes an obligation to protect life from the moment of conception and treats unborn children as persons.

One of the Thai morgue workers who hid the remains of aborted children has been sentenced to 3 years in jail.

An online Vancouver news source reports on Canadian abortion advocate Joyce Arthur's opposition to laws prohibiting prostitution.

"I saw a lot of parallels between the abortion issue and the sex-work issue," Arthur explained, quickly adding that it's not a "perfect" comparison.

First off, she said, sex work and abortion involve women having control over their bodies, rather than letting the state interfere with their choices. Both issues are linked in their own way to sexual expression. In addition, she noted that nobody likes to have an abortion. And many people also don't like the existence of the sex trade.

Bills to ban partial-birth abortion in Michigan will soon be signed by Governor Snyder. The most noteworthy part of this article is that the reporter actually describes partial-birth abortion. How often does that happen?

Life Links 9/28/11

2011-09-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

At First Things, Joe Carter discusses reproductive technologies.

However, there are some methods and approaches that are indisputably unethical and temptations to act immorally abound.

A prime example is the routine practice of creating "excess embryos", a practice that is common, though not essential, to IVF. The procedure is inherently expensive, often costing between $10,000 and $30,000 per treatment and the likelihood of success is dismally low. Even the best of techniques offers less than a 50 percent chance that a live birth will occur. Because of these obstacles, couples are often tempted to set aside ethical concerns in order to increase the chances of fulfilling their desire for a child.

RH Reality Check's Jodi Jacobson has a hilarious post about Congressman Cliff Stearns' letter to and investigation of Planned Parenthood. She attacks him because the legislation isn't about jobs.

You know how jobs, the deficit, lack of health care, and the country's economic crisis are top priorities?

Florida Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns apparently does not......

Note to Congressman Stearns: Your own state has 10.7 percent unemployment. Think there might be better things to do?.....

While we wait for accountability of corporations, banks, and other entities responsible for the current economic crisis, while people struggle with unemployment, job uncertainty and lack of health insurance, the far right finds new and more invasive ways to crawl up women's legs.

Hmmmm..... Where was Jacobson's focus on jobs, jobs, jobs, when she was promoting legislation to regulate pregnancy centers or supporting a bill to permanently ban the Mexico City policy?

This is great news. A study has found chemotherapy doesn't harm unborn children.

Chemotherapy is safe for children born to mothers undergoing treatment for cancer, according to a study that may result in fewer abortions and premature deliveries.

Babies born at full-term to women who received cell- killing drugs while pregnant had normal health and intelligence at 18 months, the study found. Children induced prematurely in order to hasten treatment for the mother, representing two- thirds of the babies studied, were more likely to have lower intelligence scores. The results were presented at a cancer conference in Stockholm today.

"Frequently, because of the fear of chemotherapy, clinicians induce delivery and start to treat the mother," Amant said at a briefing with reporters in Stockholm. "Our message is actually that we prefer to give chemotherapy until the fetus is mature."

Life Links 9/27/11

2011-09-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

A Colorado abortion clinic has withdrawn its application for a local grant for its teen clinic (which doesn't provide abortions) after community members spoke out against the grant.

The agency, which has operated a teen clinic in Longmont for five years and received city funding for eight, had asked for a $14,000 grant. City staff recommended it receive $11,000, but several residents objected to Boulder Valley Women's Health Clinic's being funded at all.

There appear to be at least a couple of San Francisco supervisors who aren't raving pro-aborts. Proponents of legislating the advertising activities of pregnancy centers didn't get everyone on their side.

Supervisors, after being briefed by the city attorney, said that in order to mount a strong defense against a likely legal challenge, the city would have to produce a record of false and misleading advertising.

But both Supervisors John Avalos and Sean Elsbernd, who serve on the committee, said such a record wasn't demonstrated. The best legislative backers could come up with were reviews on Yelp and a search on Google when people plugged in the phrase "abortions in San Francisco" and Plunkett's First Resort organization popped up as the second link.

"This legislative record here, to me, is empty," Elsbernd said.

And don't miss this quote from Supervisor Malia Cohen, the main proponent of the legislation,

"This legislation has been carefully crafted to ensure a balance between protecting the most vulnerable members of our communities and protecting the constitutional rights of everyone."

Talent contract for an unborn baby?

"Toddlers and Tiaras" stage moms, take note. Lorenzo Lamas' pregnant daughter, "The Bachelor" winner Shayne Lamas, is contemplating signing her fetus with a talent agency.

TMZ reports that the reality star's unborn child may have an agent with talent management company Z Group, who have presented a contract. Lamas, 25, and husband Nik Richie won't welcome the baby for another two months.

Forbes reporter Seema Singh shows bias and ignorance on stem cells

2011-09-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

Media bias? What media bias? Here's Forbes reporter Seema Singh completely editorializing (and doing so poorly) in the first sentence of a story about stem cells.

A decade after George Bush set the clock back for stem cell research, the science is showing signs of regeneration.

Nowhere in the story is President Bush's stem cell policy described or is any evidence put forward that Bush's decision to limit U.S. federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research to already created lines "set the clock back."

Is there no editor at Forbes India?

That's okay because that kind of writing gets you a job teaching journalism.

Overheard: The prolife cause is by definition uncivil?

2011-09-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

Amanda Marcotte's provide her thoughts about what civility is. Being mean and calling names is okay as long as you're using facts (or at least what Marcotte believes are facts).

I think the lesson in all this is that there are limits to the concept of civil discourse. I appreciate Goodman's desire for people to turn down the volume on the hostility and anger---her lecture was to be titled "A Civil Tongue: Welcome to the era of polarized politics, food fight cable shows, and ballistic blogging. How civility was shattered, who is winning, who is losing, and how do we call a truce to the mud wrestling"---but there's really no way for anti-choicers to conduct themselves civilly when promoting their cause. After all, the cause itself is uncivil. Civil people don't nose around in other people's private lives, try to impose their weird religious dogma on the unwilling, or try to destroy other people's pleasure just for the sake of doing it. But that is functionally what the anti-choice movement is about......

My conception of an ideal civil political discourse has less to do with turning down the snark and the name-calling than it does turning up the reliance on facts and reason. If our political system became more civil, it would do serious damage therefore to the anti-choice cause.

Life Links 9/23/11

2011-09-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

At Public Discourse, Christopher Kaczor responds to Dennis O'Brien's "Can We Talk about Abortion" piece.

O'Brien does not deny the harm of abortion, but he does seek to contextualize it in the intimacy of gestation. The reality of pregnancy—the unique, intimate relationship of the human being in utero and the pregnant woman—changes the ethics of feticide: "The pregnant woman's womb is not just a geographic location for an independent entity that would be the same if it were located someplace else." To deny this reality is to reduce the pregnant woman to a "container."

The intimacy argument, as articulated by O'Brien, begs an important question: Why should independent moral status require independent physical status? We don't think that one conjoined twin may licitly or legally authorize a third party to kill her conjoined sister in order to terminate their intimate relationship. Indeed, the intimate relationship that always exists in pregnancy is a powerful argument against abortion. Every human fetus is a mammal, and every mammal has a mother. Sound ethical reasoning and just laws hold that human mothers and fathers have serious duties to care for and, above all, not harm their own dependent progeny. So, the intimate relationship that exists in every pregnancy gives rise to the duty of the mother not to harm her own child prior to or after birth, including by prematurely ending the child's life. Precisely because an expectant woman is a mother rather than a mere container, she has duties to her dependent unborn child.

Canada will start funding International Planned Parenthood again. This time only in countries where abortion is illegal.

Planned Parenthood, which provides an array of sexual and reproductive health services, including abortions, abortion counselling and training for providers, is getting the federal funding after Oda let the agency's previous request sit on her desk for a year without a response, and after a Conservative MP told an anti-abortion group that the government wouldn't be giving the organization any money.

Oda's decision to approve Planned Parenthood's proposal comes more than a year after Canada was embroiled in controversy over whether to fund abortions as part of a G8 commitment to improve maternal health in developing countries.....

The funding is worth $6 million over three years for Planned Parenthood to work in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Mali, Sudan and Tanzania, where abortions are illegal except in cases where the mother's life is at risk.

Pro-Life News of the Day reviews a recent story on Jezebel about a woman who allegedly went to a CPC in New York, thinking it was an abortion clinic.

Some things are just too much for the human heart to handle, and the knowledge that you're responsible for the death of a real live human being is one of them. She initially felt that the pregnancy center volunteers were honest and kind. But she can no longer feel that way, not after making the decision she made. And so, she demonizes the pregnancy center movement in an effort to avoid her grief. It isn't working, though: she says that "It's taken me the two years since [the abortion] not to break down every time I think about it."