"Congressional Investigation" eh?

I didn't see much new information in this Emily Bazelon NYT piece. Abortion advocates are scared to challenged fetal pain legislation but they like to describe their decision as "good legal strategy," which it may well be. It doesn't change the reality that they're fearful of the consequences of losing a challenge.

What is laughable is how Bazelon describes a high school-level report by pro-abort Henry Waxman's staff as a "Congressional investigation." The whole report is basically: prolife CPCs claim one thing about how abortion affects women but we have one or two studies which say different, ergo they're providing misleading information.

There's no thought to where are CPCs are getting their information, evidence showing those studies were poor, etc.

Life Links 5/27/11

63-year-old Ralph Lang has been arrested in Madison, Wisconsin after he shot a gun in a motel room and then informed police he planned on killing an abortionist.

Lang said he planned on shooting the clinic’s doctor “right in the head,” according to the complaint. Asked if he planned to shoot just the doctor or nurses, too, Lang replied he wished he “could line them up all in a row, get a machine gun, and mow them all down,” the complaint said......

Lang had a history of targeting Planned Parenthood buildings. Court documents said he was arrested in 2007 outside a Madison branch, telling officers that everyone in the building deserved to be executed and that police were failing in their jobs by not carrying out the executions. Lang received a disorderly conduct citation, according to court records.

A law regulating the use of RU-486 which passed in Ohio in 2004 has been ruled constitutional by a federal judge.

The law bars use of the drug, RU-486, unless it is administered in compliance with Federal Drug Administration rules. The drug could not be prescribed more than seven weeks into a pregnancy. Violations are a felony.

Planned Parenthood and other abortionists frequently prescribe RU-486 in a different manner than the FDA rules for women further along in their pregnancies and in a way that doesn't require the abortionist to see the woman as often.


An Australian anesthesologist who worked at an abortion clinic has been charged with "54 counts of conduct endangering life, negligently causing serious injury and recklessly causing serious injury" after he allegedly infected abortion clinic patients with hepatisis C.


The ACLU and some Democratic Congresswomen attempted to get Congress to vote on whether health care coverage for military women should include abortions for rape victims.

Louisiana health department shuts down abortion clinic

From the story:

The State Department of Health and Hospitals has ordered the closure of the Gentilly Medical Clinic for Women for alleged violations of state licensure regulations....

The Gentilly abortion facility is currently appealing a separate license revocation action instituted by the Department in January 2010. That action was based on a determination of the facility's "substantial failure to comply with the minimum standards for licensure of abortion clinics," according to DHH.....

DHH says Wednesday's revocation action was based on a new survey of the facility conducted by DHH Health Standards on May 6, 2011.

State officials say the recent survey "found the clinic to be in violation of standards for abortion clinic licensure...Specifically, the facility failed to provide nursing services to meet the needs of its patients and adequately monitor women in recovery following a procedure."

Overheard: Steph Herold is sad she couldn't pay for woman's elective post-24 week abortion

Sometimes I think some abortion workers live in a world of their own.

Here's some more evidence for that pile from the Abortion Gang Blog.

Angela (name changed) was one such a case. She called our hotline when she was well over the legal limit for an abortion–over 24 weeks. She had been trying to have an abortion for two months, but because of various medical conditions and never having enough money, she was turned away from many local providers. She’s in a conundrum. She needs to have an abortion. The only provider that will see her is 5000 miles away, and that abortion is $9000, not to mention travel and lodging. Angela couldn’t afford to feed her children last week. Where will she come up with $9000?

There is no easy solution here. I wish I had a big bag of abortion money and could grant Angela the abortion of her dreams. Unfortunately, Angela couldn’t get that abortion. I wish I could’ve called Congress and put her on speaker phone. I wish I could call Henry Hyde and have him listen to her cry. My heart aches for her and for all women in her situation. Until politicians hear the voices and experiences of women like her, restrictions on this legal medical procedure will continue to roll out of Capitol Hill and states across the nation. Until the broader pro-choice movement embraces later abortion access as a matter of justice and equality, Angela and all women in her situation will continue to suffer, lacking the ability to get the care they need.

Does Steph really think that having a woman over 24 weeks pregnant cry to Henry Hyde would have made him think that tax dollars should pay for her late-term abortion? Are the voices of women who want post 24-week abortions really the best voices for the pro-choice movement?

Also, notice how the word "need" is used twice to describe a late-term abortion that Angela wants.

What happens when you take Christ and the cross out of the church?

That's exactly what the former Christ Community Church of Spring Lake did in June of 2010 when they changed their name to C3Exchange and removed the cross from their building. It appears the church stopped practicing orthodox Christianity years ago but in 2010 they tried to make sure they weren't mistaken for a church.

C3Exchange, 225 E. Exchange, Spring Lake, was formerly known as Christ Community Church. The Rev. Ian Lawton, the church's pastor, said the name change and removing the cross were designed to reflect the church's diverse members.

"Our community has been a really open-minded community for some years now," he said. "We've had a number of Muslim people, Jewish people, Buddhists, atheists. ... We're catching up (to) ourselves."

.....

Lawton said C3Exhange will also begin “dechurching” the building’s interior over the next year, replacing banners and rearranging the building’s layout.

Fast forward a year and they're attempting to sell their building and land because they can no longer afford it.

The C3Exchange Board of Trustees has announced that the "inclusive spiritual community" can no longer afford its building at 225 E. Exchange, Spring Lake.

The building, a landmark in the village, is to be listed with the Grand Rapids-based real estate firm NAI Wisinski for $1.9 million, C3Exchange officials said.

The board said, in a press release, that older debts were a major reason for the cash flow problem. The community had announced it was having financial problems in March and would consider all options, including leaving the building it had occupied since the 1970s.

Life Links 5/26/11

An Indiana man named Leonard Beaty has been found guilty for molesting a young girl who became pregnant and had an abortion at 11-years-old. The girl apparently continued to be molested after the pregnancy and abortion, thanks to the abortion clinic which seemingly didn't inform law enforcement about a pregnant 11-year-old.

The girl involved in the case became pregnant when she was just eleven years old, but she says that Beaty continued to molest her after the pregnancy that she aborted. She is now thirteen years old.

The House of Representatives voted yesterday to ban teaching health centers from using tax money to train abortionists.

The author of the measure, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said she wanted to make it "crystal clear that taxpayer money is not being used to train health care providers to perform abortion procedures."
......
The amendment also states that no funds available under the grant program can be used to perform abortions and that teaching health centers will not be eligible for funds if they discriminate against providers that deny abortion services.

An abortion clinic in New Jersey called Pilgrim Medical Center was cited in 2009 for various deficiencies.

A patient's chest was not hooked up to an EKG monitor, but an EKG status was written on that person's medical record anyway.
State inspectors found a series of health violations at Pilgrim Medical Center on Bloomfield Avenue, including some that posed immediate risks to patients.

State inspectors found a series of health violations at Pilgrim Medical Center on Bloomfield Avenue, including some that posed immediate risks to patients.

Before they were ready to be inserted into patients, 10 needles were removed from their packaging and placed in an unsterile plastic container.

Employees were exposing medication to possible contamination by opening vials with their bare hands after having wiped them with alcohol.

Frederick Dyer writes on how abortion became illegal in the United States.

Storer, the American Medical Association, and the state/territorial medical associations were wonderfully successful. Connecticut and Pennsylvania passed strict anti-abortion laws in 1860. By 1880, nearly every state and territory had new legislation that made it a serious crime to induce abortions unless the mother's life was in danger. Most of these stringent state laws against abortion were virtually unchanged until Roe v. Wade overturned them in 1973.

Ohhhhh poor NARAL

They really do make it too easy to punk them.

Check out their Flickr photostream, filled with photos from prolifers (including some graphic images of aborted children).

I love that a link to NARAL's flickrstream is on the front page of their web site.

Life Links 5/25/11

A man in New York has been arrested and charged with felony abortion and assault for allegedly punching his 17-year-old girlfriend in the stomach in an effort to kill their child.


I'm still waiting for the RH Reality Check's Robin Marty to provide evidence for her false assertion that "The number one factor being cited for unintended pregnancy is an inability to afford birth control."

I won't be holding my breath.


Abortions in the UK are still on the rise. As always, pro-choice groups have only one solution in mind.

But health commentators including pro-choice groups said they were surprised by the rising total number and rate of abortions, and called for greater spending on contraceptive services.

The number of repeat abortions is up.

Figures also show that more women are having repeat abortions. In 2010, 34 per cent of women ending pregnancies had had at least one previous abortion, up from 30 per cent a decade ago. In total, 85 women have ended seven or more pregnancies.

Life Links 5/24/11

Research shows that Indian couples are increasingly using sex-selection abortion to abort daughters in second pregnancies if their first child was a girl.

The study found that, from 1990 to 2005, the “sex ratio” of first-born female children in India did not change significantly nor differ from what was biologically expected. (In 1990, it was 943 girls per 1,000 boys, and in 2005 it was 966). However, in families whose first-born was a girl, the incidence of the second-born being a girl fell almost steadily over that period, from 906 per 1,000 boys in 1990 to 836 in 2005.

During the period, the trend increased among families in which the mother had 10 or more years of education but did not change in families in which the mother had no education. The sex ratio fell especially sharply in the richest 20 percent of households, Jha and his colleagues found. The findings were the same in both Hindu and Muslim households.

The most extreme decline in the probability of having a girl occurred in families in which the first two children were girls. In that case, the ratio of girls to boys in the third-born child was 768 to 1,000 in 2006. This came at a time when the average family size in India was 2.6 children — a huge reduction from earlier generations.

The Phoenix FOX News affiliate has the story of a woman whose child had been growing in her abdomen, outside of her uterus.

Nicollette Soto's son weighs just 2 pounds, 14 ounces. She had what's called a cornual pregnancy, and doctors are amazed he survived.

He was born at 9:20 a.m.

Doctors say they noticed that the baby was developing outside the uterus at 20 weeks. They offered to operate because of the complications involved, but Soto declined.

A woman in Illinois named Marisol Molina pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after taking "at least 10 abortion pills before having a baby, then tying the still living infant in a plastic bag and leaving her in a closet 'as if it were garbage.'"

Molina, who was seven to nine months pregnant, wrapped the baby in a robe and tied her in a plastic bag on Feb. 18, 2010, before hiding her in a closet in her home in the 6100 block of North Sheridan Road— where the baby was discovered dead a day later, said Kevin DeBoni, an assistant Cook County state’s attorney.

In Massachusetts, a woman was sentenced to two years in jail for killing an unborn child while beating another woman in a hair salon.

Authorities said Woodhouse kicked and punched the other woman during an argument as other people in the salon screamed at her to stop.

The fetus was delivered by emergency Cesarean section, but did not survive. The medical examiner determined that the fetus died because the placenta became detached from the uterus.

Why can't Lawrence Finer and the Guttmacher Institute tell the truth about their own research?

Another day and another Guttmacher Institute study which leads them to exact same talking points we hear over and over and over and over again. Somehow a study which shows a higher percentage of women having abortions are poor should inform us that poor women are having abortions because they have less access to contraception (even though previous Guttmacher Institute research shows other leading reasons why women have unplanned pregnancies) and abortion restrictions effect poor women's access to abortion (Wait? Didn't the research show poor women were having more abortions?)

The Guttmacher Institute's Lawrence Finer also drops this blatant lie:

"Women who are deciding to have an abortion are women who have unintended pregnancies, and limited access to contraception is one of the key drivers of unintended pregnancies," said Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute and author of the 2006 report. "Most Americans want to control how many kids they have and when they have them. We should [ease] access to contraception when possible to reduce the substantial proportion of unintended pregnancies."

Limited access is not one of the key drivers of unintended pregnancies and the reason I know this is because Guttmacher Institute research shows it isn't. Much higher numbers of unplanned pregnancies occurred because

1.) Contraceptives were used inconsistently
2.) Women thought they were unlikely to get pregnant
3.) Women had concerns about contraceptive methods
4.) They had unexpected sex

Planned Parenthood supporters in Nebraska argue for abortion while claiming not to

Karen Amen and Penny Berger, two former Planned Parenthood leaders in Nebraska, have an editorial in which they argue for abortion while claiming not want to enter into the "choice" debate.

We recognize that spokeswomen for the anti-choice movement, such as Sandy Danek in her editorial in the May 19th Journal Star and Julie Schmit-Albin in her work in the Legislature to curb or destroy a woman's right to choose, are guided by their own ethical and religious beliefs. We recognize that in matters of the heart and faith, factual information and rational debate rarely will change opinions about reproductive health, sexuality, family planning, birth control and abortion. We acknowledge and respect Danek's right to hold dear her beliefs on these issues. We have no desire to persuade her otherwise.

Now that's an underhanded way of saying, "She's irrational, we're rational." It's also quite cowardly. Instead of pointing out how Danek's arguments were incorrect, Amen and Berger just cast them aside. Here's Danek's column. Notice the number of facts and statistics and the complete lack of religious arguments.

Danek uses her column to rant against the new Planned Parenthood facility in southeast Lincoln, focusing solely on abortion and using the term "business model" in an emotionally charged way. Even though we suspect she and her organization have their own business model, as must any organization that hopes to survive for the long term. Nonetheless, Danek uses the phrase to imply that Planned Parenthood provides abortions just to make money. To reiterate what others already have pointed out, abortions are approximately 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's income and work.

WRONG. Maybe Amen and Berger have been out of the game a while and don't understand that services and income doesn't necessarily equal each other.

But we write today not to enter the likewise emotionally charged debate surrounding the "choice" issue, although each of us has close friends who have faced the difficult choice of whether to continue or end a pregnancy.

So we're not going to argue about abortion but here's a reason we're in favor of legal abortion. Oh, and here are some more arguments in favor of abortion.

These friends made different decisions; each made the decision best in her circumstances.

And that, of course, is our point. We firmly believe every woman deserves the sacred right to choose when to become a mother and when to make a full commitment to being the best parent possible to her precious child. We do not wish to impose our dearly held belief upon people who have a different opinion; we ask the same respect from them.

A bad moral argument for abortion

I don't think I will ever understand how people can think it is better to kill children than to have them grow up in difficult circumstances. That's Davidson Loehr's position in a "Moral Argument for Abortion":

We can always breed, but should only do it when we are ready, willing and able to care and provide for our children. While a few kids out of a hundred thousand may make it out of the ghetto, those are unfair odds to pile on a parent, child, or society.

There is an image from September 11, 2001 that was burned into the memory of everyone who saw it: people, sometimes holding hands, jumping to their death from the Twin Towers, with no safety nets to catch them. It should be as heart-rending to see millions of children pushed out into a world that has no adequate safety nets for them either. And to enact laws whose intent is to force the most desperate women to bring babies into a home and a world that can't care for them is, if not evil, a brutality against the most vulnerable women and children in our society -- and profoundly immoral.

So instead of trying to provide safety nets for them, we should kill them faster?

Why don't these advocates of killing unborn children (based on future hardships) ever advocate for killing other human beings whose lives they might consider "nasty, brutish and short"? Where's Loehr's "A Moral Argument for Killing the Homeless" or "A Moral Argument for Killing the Poor"?

If the unborn aren't human beings then you don't need a moral argument for abortion. But if they are then claiming they won't have a quality of life doesn't really have much consistency to it unless you're willing to allow the killing of born humans whose lives you don't consider quality either.

Life Links 5/23/11

Here are the latest results from Gallup on American attitudes towards abortion. For the first time in 2 years, the percentage saying they are "pro-choice" was greater than those saying they were "pro-life." 51% of Americans view abortion as morally wrong and 61% of Americans think abortion should be legal in either no or only in a few circumstances. Interestingly, 18-34s were the likeliest group to describe abortion as morally wrong and think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. They were also the group that most likely felt abortion should be legal in all circumstances.


LifeNews just noticed this information from a Telegraph story from April about President Barack Obama's father.

Mr Obama Sr. and Miss Dunham divorced in January 1964, by which time he had left Hawaii and was studying for a PhD in Economics at Harvard.

The file said two months later, concerns were raised over Mr Obama Sr.'s relationship with a Kenyan high-school student on an exchange scheme in nearby Boston, who abruptly travelled to England.

"The suspicion exists," the March 1964 document said, "that she may have gone to London for [redacted]". It is unclear what the next word is. At the time, abortions were illegal in the US.

The New York Times notes how the Obama Administration isn't pleased with Indiana's law defunding Planned Parenthood and are trying to decide how to proceed.

The changes in Indiana are subject to federal review and approval, and administration officials have made it clear they will not approve the changes in the form adopted by the state.

Federal officials have 90 days to act but may feel pressure to act sooner because Indiana is already enforcing its law, which took effect on May 10, and because legislators in other states are working on similar measures.

Apparently, a bunch of big-league pitchers want the same adult stem cell procedure Bartolo Colon received.

Don't let Margarette Shegog become a doctor

She thinks children born and unborn before 28 weeks of gestation aren't alive. This is coming from someone who describes herself as a "second-year medical student."

Below is part of her letter to the editor of the Dayton Daily News in which she claims having a heartbeat is arbitrary in deciding whether the unborn are alive. Instead, having complete neural pathways is supposedly a completely non-arbitrary criteria for whether human beings are alive.

For more than 30 years, brain death, not heartbeat, has been used to denote life in medicine. Thorough neurological testing for basic reflexes and reaction to stimuli is used to test this.

Neurological pathways in the embryo are still developing at birth. After 28 weeks of gestation (third trimester) the fetal brain begins to communicate with the fetal body.

This means that a fetus would not have any basic reactions to stimuli until well after the current cutoff for non-medically indicated, elective abortion. These fetuses cannot feel pain, nor are they self-aware.

We should not limit people’s choices based on a non-medical, arbitrary marker of development such as a heartbeat.

Margarette almost seems unaware that numerous children are born before 28 weeks. According to her ludicrous criteria, they're not alive because their brain supposedly hasn't begun communicating with their body.

The Onion on Planned Parenthood's "AbortionPlex"

The fake news web site The Onion has a piece on a fictional Planned Parenthood AbortionPlex. While I think the partial goal is to poke fun at how prolifers supposedly view Planned Parenthood, there's also a good deal that hits abortion clinics like the floor plan where a day care center promises that young children can play "while their unborn siblings are being terminated elsewhere in the facility" or the adoption center for dogs and cats.

The 900,000-square-foot facility has more than 2,000 rooms dedicated to the abortion procedure. The abundance of surgical space, Richards said, will ensure that women visiting the facility can be quickly fitted into stirrups without pausing to second-guess their decision or consider alternatives such as adoption. Hundreds of on-site counselors are also available to meet with clients free of charge and go over the many ways that carrying a child to term will burden them and very likely ruin their lives......

"We really want abortion to become a regular part of women's lives, especially younger women who have enough fertile years ahead of them to potentially have dozens of abortions," said Richards, adding that the Abortionplex would provide shuttle service to and from most residences, schools, and shopping malls in the region. "Our hope is for this facility to become a regular destination where a woman in her second trimester can whoop it up at karaoke and then kick back while we vacuum out the contents of her cervix."

"All women should feel like they have a home at the Abortionplex," Richards continued. "Whether she's a high school junior who doesn't want to go to prom pregnant, a go-getter professional who can't be bothered with the time commitment of raising a child, or a prostitute who knows getting an abortion is the easiest form of birth control—all are welcome."

Life Links 5/19/11

Two men, one in California, another in Virginia, have been charged with killing their unborn children along with killing their girlfriends.


A legislative committee in Wisconsin has voted in favor of a proposal to prevent abortion providers from getting family planning grants. Cue crazy quote from abortion advocate:

Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) expressed concern that funds could be cut for organizations that provide abortions for victims of rape or incest.

"We're going back centuries to a time when women were more like a child and you could not make your own choices," Taylor said.

An abortionist in Australia is claiming sans evidence that abortion clinic protesters are driving up her business.

Dr Kathy Lewis travels from Melbourne every week to run the Albury clinic and said members of the Helpers of God's Precious Infants may be sabotaging their own efforts to make women reconsider a termination.

"In my experience they're not turning people away," she said.

Dr Lewis said the clinic's bookings were up "because everybody knows we're here", though she would not provide figures.

Killing is kindness?

At the Daily Mail, a woman who is regular Daily Mail writer shares the story of how she aborted her child because he had spina bifida and doctors said he wouldn't be able to walk. Her thought process is sickening. How messed up is our society when people actually think that killing your own child because he will be paralyzed is the kindest thing to do?

I pictured him watching from the sofa, frustrated and immobile, as his sisters turned cartwheels and somersaults in the living room. I envisaged trips to the park, where he would sit on the sidelines as other children clambered over climbing frames and kicked footballs......

I tried to shake away the image I conjured in my head of a little boy, lonely and friendless, robbed of the most basic human functions. The prospect of watching a child I'd love just as much as his sisters suffer in this way made me howl. I hugged my stomach, as if I could in some way shield him from the misery that lay ahead.....

And so it was that a week after that first scan, and against my initial instincts, I realised I couldn't bring this child into the world, knowing the extent to which he would suffer.

Andrew and I talked long into the night, and finally agreed that ending the pregnancy was the kindest thing we could do for our son.

Life Links 5/18/11

Angel Dillard has filed a counterclaim against the Justice Department, claiming their lawsuit against effected her free speech and religious rights.

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division sued Dillard under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The government's lawsuit seeks a court order permanently prohibiting Dillard from contacting Means or coming within 250 feet of the doctor, her home, car or business. It also seeks damages of $5,000 for the doctor and a penalty of $15,000.

In her counterclaim, Dillard claims the government's conduct has intimidated and interfered with her First Amendment right to worship where she chooses because her church is located less than 250 feet from Means' office.

Dillard is seeking attorney fees, court costs, statutory damages of $5,000 per violation, as well as punitive damages to deter the government and its agents from further alleged violations of constitutional rights.

New Mexico Right to Life wants its name removed from a billboard posted by a man upset that his former girlfriend possibly had an abortion without telling him. In the billboard he uses the name of his former girlfriend as the name of his unofficial organization.

The billboard depicts an Alamogordo businessman, GEFNET owner Greg A. Fultz, holding what appears to be an outlined baby in his arms as he is looking down at it. Next to the picture, in large print, is the statement, "This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To Not KILL Our Child! [sic]."

A woman in California is under arrest after trying to kill her 6-week-old daughter. The article reveals that she previously killed an unborn child by using meth.

According to authorities, this isn't the first time Mailloux has harmed one of her children. In 2009, the death of her 39-week-old, 7 pound fetus was ruled a homicide by the Coroner's office.

"Homicide to us simply means that someone else caused the child's death," said Commander Dennis Smithson, Kern County Coroner's Office. "It wasn't natural cause, it wasn't an accident, someone did something to the child that caused the death."

Smithson says that "someone" was Mailloux and that "something" was drug use. "A toxicology report was done and the baby came back positive for a high level of methamphetamine."

But, under California law authorities cannot criminally prosecute the mother for this type of death.

Man cured of HIV by adult stem cell transplant interviewed

Timothy Ray Brown was recently interviewed by the San Francisco CBS affiliate about being cured of AIDS after receiving a stem cell transplant from a donor who was immune from HIV.

“I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any since,” said Brown, who has been dubbed “The Berlin Patient” by the medical community......

Both doctors stressed that Brown’s radical procedure may not be applicable to many other people with HIV, because of the difficulty in doing stem cell transplants, and finding the right donor.

“You don’t want to go out and get a bone marrow transplant because transplants themselves carry a real risk of mortality,” Volberding said.

He explained that scientists also still have many unanswered questions involving the success of Brown’s treatment.

“One element of his treatment, and we don’t know which, allowed apparently the virus to be purged from his body,” he observed. “So it’s going to be an interesting, I think productive area to study.”

NZ woman who had abortion as teen - "I wish I had told my parents"

In New Zealand, a woman who had a secret abortion at 16 with her school's help has come forward. She still seems to be pro-choice and thinks if teenagers had to tell their parents they go to the "black market."

She said at the time she had no real comprehension of what she was doing and was only asked by a GP if she was sure about her decision.

"You're naive at that age and choices are very one-dimensional."

.....

Ms Wickham said though she wouldn't change her decision, it had haunted her and she felt great guilt over the lost life.

"When it comes to the time that you become a mother, there's guilt with that."