Life Links 8/27/14

Time has a piece by Laura Stampler attempting to promote abortion advocates and their lame Taco or Beer challenge.  The piece is entitled “New Viral Fundraiser” despite only having 127 posts (at this moment) on Tumblr. 


A newborn baby boy in Utah is in critical condition after his mother abandoned him in a trash can and was found by neighbors who thought they were hearing a kitten. 

Police say the 24-year-old mother later returned to the scene and told officers that she'd left the baby there about an hour before he was found.

A woman in Indiana has been charged with feticide after allegedly attempting to use RU-486 to abort her late-term pregnancy.  The child was apparently born alive and then left in a dumpster. 

A pathologist ruled the infant was born alive and took a breath, but Patel's lawyer, Jeff Sanford, told the judge the pathologist's tests don't prove that.  Sanford told WSBT he has big questions about tests the pathologist did and did not do to determine whether the infant was born alive. 

Dawn Laguens’ piece attempting to defend Planned Parenthood’s transition away from “pro-choice” terminology included this absurd assertion:

As evidence, he quotes Hillary Clinton saying abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," a message that peaked in the 1990s, when President Clinton first said it, and was probably last used around 2006. Nobody says that anymore.

2006?  Here’s a CNN article from 2010 where President Obama uses the “safe, legal and rare” message.

Life Links 8/20/14

Newsweek has a long article on Lila Rose’s and Katie Stack’s respective undercover trips into abortion clinics and pregnancy centers. 

What’s really interesting to me is how Katie Stack (who appeared on MTV’s No Easy Decision) now describes her abortion.

Stack describes her choice to terminate a pregnancy, which she did in college, as “empowering” and says it aided her in “adapting a feminist framework” that led to her investigations. “It was the first time I felt like I had any control over anything, having that abortion,” she says. “I’m happy with my abortion. People get uncomfortable when I say my abortion was a good experience, but it was.”

During the No Easy Decision program in 2010, Stack cried on at least two occasions and mentioned how she had difficulty being around her newborn nephew after the abortion.  At that time, she also said she viewed abortion as a "parenting decision" because she acknowledged her child as “a baby.”   

That’s doesn’t sound empowering to me.  Only in pro-abort La-La Land is staying in a hotel room because you can’t imagine seeing your newborn nephew equal "empowering." 

After the airing of the No Easy Decision program, Stack then tried to start a pro-abortion version of Live Action called The Crisis Project which hasn’t had quite as much success.


Martin Haskell’s abortion clinic in Sharonville is dropping their appeal.  They’ll stop performing surgical abortions on Friday.  They apparently plan on trying to stay in business by offering RU-486 abortions. 


“Intellectual” Richard Dawkins told someone that bringing a child with Down Syndrome to birth is immoral. 


An abortion clinic in Alabama which couldn’t meet safety standards at its current location has been given the permission to relocate.

Life Links 8/19/14

A judge in Iowa has upheld the ban on telemed/Skype abortions. 

The judge wrote that the medical board has significant authority to regulate such issues. "There is no question that the board has the power to establish standards of practice for the medical profession. Those standards include the authority to adopt and enforce standards regarding the minimal standards of acceptable and prevailing practice," he wrote.

The system has remained in use while the two sides wrangled in court. The judge's ruling is set to take effect in 30 days. A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman said her agency would file a legal appeal.

Gillian Ropespierre, director of Obvious Child, wants people to stop calling her film an “abortion comedy.”

But, because the plot revolves around an abortion, it’s not being called, simply, a ‘comedy’. Instead, it’s being referred to as - whisper it - ‘that abortion comedy.’

Director Gillian Robespierre isn’t particularly pleased that her work of art has been given this label.

"'Abortion comedy' gives a sense, in the semantics of that sentence, that we’re making light of abortion. And we’re not doing that,” she tells me. “I was a little angry because it makes our movie sound glib and sarcastic.”

At the Washington Post, liberal political strategist Carter Eskew joins the trend of abortion advocates who are criticizing “choice” language. 

The pro-choice side cannot win the debate as it is currently framed; it can achieve only small victories when the other side overreaches. An example: Requiring an ultrasound is okay, not just an invasive one. The reason pro-choice advocates can’t and won’t win is because they don’t have an affirmative argument, only a defensive one......

The problem is “choice” will never trump “life.” Choice is valuable, but life is precious. As long as there is no competing affirmative value for abortion, then life will always win.

Life Links 8/5/14

Ad Week asked 6 ad women to rebrand “pro-choice.”  The results are....well....ummm....see for yourself.  If this is the best 6 ad women can come up with then maybe abortion advocates should stick with pro-choice.

Simply evolving the language and sentiment from pro-choice to something like pro-me would acknowledge that reproductive rights are a personal decision, one of many, that young women actively participate in every day.

                    
Toledo’s last abortion clinic, whose licensed is scheduled to be revoked in a week, is claiming they’ll become a “woman’s clinic” which doesn’t perform abortions if their surgery license is taken away. 

Capital Care’s owner Terrie Hubbard said her attorney will file a petition with the court next week asking that the clinic be allowed to continue offering abortion services while appealing the state order.

Even if the stay is not granted, however, Ms. Hubbard said she plans to keep Capital Care open as a women’s clinic. The clinic would offer gynecological services as well as abortion counseling, Ms. Hubbard said.

In Florida a woman has been arrested months after leaving her newborn child under a sink.  She claims she hid her pregnancy because she was forced to have an abortion previously. 

A police document shows Breanna LaSean Ross was 18 years old when she gave birth in January. She told police she hid her pregnancy because previously, her mother and the mother of her baby's father forced her into having an abortion. She thought they would make her do the same with this pregnancy.

Life Links 8/1/2014

Another Texas abortion clinic closes its doors.

A women's clinic in North Austin closed its doors Thursday because it can not comply with the House Bill 2 standard of an ambulatory surgical center, Whole Woman's Health said........

The Austin Whole Woman's Health Clinic had 10 employees and two doctors. Its license officially expired at the end of last month.

The company's CEO told KVUE's partners at the Austin American-Statesman that renovations to create larger operating rooms, a sterile ventilation system and other changes could cost up to $2 million, and they didn't have the money to make the changes.

In Illinois a pregnant teenager and her boyfriend have been charged in the death of her mother.  The boyfriend claimed he killed the mother because she wanted his girlfriend to have an abortion.  


An Australian couple have abandoned a child they paid a surrogate to carry because the child has Down Syndrome.  When they learned about the child diagnosis (he also has a congenital heart defect), they asked the surrogate mother to have an abortion.

Mrs Pattharamon, who is married, said she became pregnant via IVF and four months later learnt that one of her children had Down's syndrome. Doctors told the Australian parents of the baby's condition, and they then said they wanted her to have an abortion.

Life Links 5/21/14

The nation of Armenia may move to restrict sex selection abortions. 

The head of RA National Assembly Standing Committee on Healthcare, Maternity and Childhood Affairs Ara Babloyan held a workshop on the topic “Sex selective abortion occurrences and causes in Armenia” where he mentions that the problem must be treated on a legislative level.

Upon the discussed project, it is suggested not to inform the parents about the child’s sex before the fetus is thirty weeks old. The project is not yet put to circulation, however after the discussions it will be sent to the government.

A mother of two daughters and one son, 35-year-old Marine Sargsyan from Echmiadzin says that before giving birth to her son she did a sex selective abortion three times, because every time the fetus was a girl.

A Dutch man was jailed for disturbing a euthanasia.  

The man created the disturbance at a nursing home in Waalwijk, upsetting the dying patient and family in the last moments of life, news agency ANP reports. The man also refused to leave when asked to do so.

The judge in the case said he was also concerned about the man's opposition to abortion. He considers all doctors who help out at abortions should be killed, ANP says.

Margo Davidson, the cousin of Gosnell victim Semika Shaw, won her primary race in Pennsylvania.  Abortion advocates pushed for Davidson's removal after she voted in favor of abortion clinic regulations which would have protected her cousin.

Life Links 5/15/15

The Missouri House has passed a bill to extend their abortion waiting period to 72 hours.  It passed 111-39.  Pro-aborts are lamely doing a cermonial filibuster outside the Capitol.   

The House voted 111-39 in favor of the measure Wednesday, sending it to Nixon, who has previously allowed other abortion restrictions to become law without his signature. That included a measure last year that requires doctors to be in the room for the initial dose of a drug used in medical abortions.

Nixon said Tuesday that he would review the extended waiting period and act in a manner consistent with his other actions on abortion legislation.

Louisiana appears it will be the next state which passes a bill to regulate abortion clinics and require admitting privileges.  A bill passed their Senate by a 34-3 vote.

Abortion-rights groups say the restrictions would close three of Louisiana's five abortion clinics, but in the strongly-conservative state, those objections don't sway many lawmakers. The protests and sharply-divided debates of Texas haven't taken place during the Louisiana Legislature's discussion of the proposal, which has received bipartisan support.

Amid protests, Planned Parenthood is opening a new abortion clinic in  Kissimmee, Florida.  Currently in the midst of a nasty divorce, Congressman Alan Grayson attended the ribbon cutting.  Also, attending was Peggy Howland who doesn’t seem to realize her talking points from the 60's and 70's have been disproved.

The Rev. Peggy Howland, 80, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church since 1958, worked with fellow clergy in the 1960s to make abortion legal. She was on hand to give the invocation at the center — and make her case for abortion rights.

Before Roe v. Wade, she said, "there were a million illegal abortions in the U.S. every year, and these were done in places that were unsafe, and many women died.

Emily Letts Q and A with Philadelphia Magazine on abortion decision

After Cosmopolitian magazine publish abortion counselor Emily Letts’ explanation of filming her abortion, she’s received a fair amount of media coverage, including a Q and A with Philadelphia Magazine.  

The Cosmo article shows how the Cherry Hill clinic has pretty low standards for who can be an abortion counselor.

I reached out to Cherry Hill right after I finished my training. I asked to volunteer, but instead they asked me to come in for a job interview. I was hired on the spot to be one of the clinic’s abortion counselors.

In her interview Letts shares how she has a special relationship with the image of her aborted child.  

But you do understand that there's a huge segment of the population that looks at you as a murderer, that you have destroyed life that God created? You can't deny that this was at least potential life, and that you ended it.

Yes, I do realize it was potential life. I have a special relationship with my ultrasound. People say it sounds weird, it’s my process. I realize it was potential life, and I love it in my own special way. I’m not glib and cavalier. I’m comfortable with my decisions.

After claiming not to be glib and cavalier, Letts then comes off as glib and cavalier regarding her decision not to use birth control.

Yes, and that here you are, counseling women about their reproductive choices, when many see you as irresponsible in your own decisions.

It's been an unexpected departure from what I thought I was going to talk about. I'm not quite sure what people want me to say.

I wasn't on hormonal birth control, and I wasn't consistently sexually active. I wasn't super interested in putting hormones in my body. I tried to get an IUD five years ago, but it was like $600.

So, yes, I am a sex educator, and I didn't use a condom. Yeah. Absolutely. How many times did you do something that you knew had consequences but you did it anyway? How many times did you not wear your bike helmet? How many times did you get in a car with someone who had been drinking?

It was a mistake to not use a condom. Life is full of mistakes. It happens.

Letts also reveals that not all of her clinics patients are filled with relief after an abortion.

Trust me. I counsel women on grief and loss all the time. You feel very much like you're saying goodbye, a feeling of emptiness, a feeling of giving up an idea.

Life Links 5/1/14

Boxer Floyd Mayweather apparently broke up with his finance because she aborted his twin children. 

According to documents obtained by FightHype.com, Ms. Jackson had an abortion not long after learning she was pregnant with twins by Mayweather.

According to one source, Jackson originally claimed to have had a miscarriage, but it didn't take long for Mayweather to discover the truth of the abortion. Mayweather was said to be affected "emotionally and mentally" as abortions go against his belief of killing babies. Furthermore, we're informed that Mayweather began to question if the babies she was carrying were really his, causing him to call an abrupt end to the relationship.       

Michael Stokes Paulsen on men and abortion and how "her rights" quickly becomes "her responsibility."

It’s not hard to grasp the Court’s intuition: If abortion is the “privacy” right of the woman— a function of her autonomy, her body, and her life, needed to further her social and economic equality—it makes little sense to give fathers a veto, or even a vote, in the abortion choice. But the unintended consequence of vesting the abortion right entirely in the woman is to absolve the man of all responsibility. If it is exclusively her right, it is exclusively her responsibility. He is free! It’s not his choice at all! He can go on his merry way, leaving the pregnant woman the choice to abort her child.

An 18-year-old in Arizona has been arrested after he allegedly sexually assaulted a number of teenage girls.  One girl apparently became pregnant and had an abortion.

An another case, a victim became pregnant after she was allegedly raped, PCSO said.

"One of the 13 victims actually became pregnant because of the sexual assault, and she subsequently had an abortion," Babeu said. "These are horrible crimes that cannot be tolerated in our community."

Life Links 3/19/14

A Lutheran charity has purchased the former Delaware abortion clinic where Kermit Gosnell worked part-time.


In Arizona, all health clinic are inspected without warning.  That is except for abortion clinics, which get 10 day warning.

Inspectors work through observations, interviews and reviews of documents, like patient files and policies. They’re checking, for instance, to see if a clinic has a disaster plan or if employee experience matches up with job duties. If it passes, the facility gets a stamp of approval for up to 24 months.

“All of the surveys are unannounced,” Belden said.

But there’s one big exception. Abortion providers get a 10-day heads up.

"Pregnancies they can carry" is the latest jargon Jessica Valenti is using to attempt to ignore the unborn child.  

Anti-choicers cannot escape the truth of their movement: despite rhetorical efforts to the contrary, the foundation of fighting against abortion accessibility is the idea that women are less important than the pregnancies they can carry.

This is why the pro-choice side is losing.  They can't accurately describe the prolife position.  Therefore, they can't make solid arguments against it.  They're stuck trying to come up with lamer and lamer ways of dehumanizing the unborn.  

When your senior legal analyst has no clue what she's talking about, you might want to find a new senior legal analyst

     
In a recent piece for RH Reality Check, their Senior Legal Analyst Jessica Mason Pieklo argues that prolife business owners are trying to undermine settled science by claiming they have moral qualms with covering emergency contraceptive.  

The question, framed by Reuters as “deceptively simple” of whether certain forms of birth control prevent conception or destroy a fertilized egg, is not actually a controversy or debate within the mainstream scientific and medical community. In fact, the mainstream scientific and medical community all agree that the vast majority of emergency contraceptives don’t prevent fertilization, and that pregnancy begins at implantation.

The last sentence is confusing because I’m wondering if Pieklo thinks fertilization and implantation are synonymous or if she made a typo.  Pieklo links to a Guttmacher paper which undermines her claim since it says, “Rather, both Plan B and ella work primarily by preventing ovulation” which, if true, would mean they do prevent fertilization since there would be no ovulation, ergo no fertilization. 

She also doesn’t seem to understand that defining pregnancy as beginning at implantation doesn’t change whether a human embryo (or “fertilized egg” in RH Reality Check jargon) is destroyed or not.  Nor would it alleviate prolife concerns.  Maybe this is a case of pro-choicers constantly trying to use language to deceive others that they struggle to understand the meaning of the terms they're using. 

The more you read of Pielko, the more you realize she doesn’t appear to have any clue what she is talking about.   

In 2003, Congress passed the “Partial-Birth Abortion Act,” a law that banned a specific type of abortion procedure known as an intact D&E (dilation and evacuation) without any exception for the life of the pregnant person.

Wrong.  Here’s the text of the law in PDF. On the bottom of page 6, the text clearly has a life of the mother exception.

This subsection does not apply to a partial-birth abortion that is necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.

Pielko continues talking about the law:

The law was eventually challenged, and in 2006 the Roberts Court sided with Congress, holding that so long as a matter of science is up for debate, lawmakers are free to pick a side in that debate in passing legislation if their doing so is reasonable.

Nope.  The case was decided on April 18, 2007.

If Pielko’s the senior legal analyst at RH Reality Check, I can’t imagine how bad the regular legal analyst’s are. 

Life Links 3/6/14

A woman seeking to replace racist Alabama State Rep. Alvin Holmes responded to his comments in which he said white would encourage abortion if their daughters were impregnated by a black man. 

"He said that being pro life was for white people, that's not true. Pro life is loving babies whether they're inside the womb or outside of the womb. Whether you're black or white - it doesn't have a color," said Tijuanna Adetunji.

An accidental break room fire at Martin Haskell’s Indianapolis abortion clinic caused $30,000 worth of damage.  While all patients had left, five clinics staffers were there at the time. 


The University of Georgia paper, the Red and the Black, has a number of pictures showing pro-choice students attempting to cover up a recent prolife display which includes images of abortion victims.  One pro-choice student’s sign indicates she thinks legal abortion ended women dying from unsafe abortions. 


Whole Woman’s Health is closing 2 clinics in Texas. 

Whole Woman’s Health in Beaumont and McAllen will close after providing abortions in the areas for a decade. Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Woman’s Health, which operated five abortion clinics before the law went into effect, said the provision requiring physicians to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic was proving the most problematic.

Miller said hospitals near her McAllen clinic refused to grant her physicians’ applications for privileges. Some hospitals in the area require their privileged physicians to live nearby. Others require a current physician to co-sign applications for privileges, which many are unwilling to do for fear of being targeted or stigmatized.

In Beaumont, one 75-year-old physician secured privileges, but a second one could not, Miller said.

Life Links 3/5/14

A pro-choice legislator in Alabama is claiming prolife legislators wouldn’t be prolife if their daughters were impregnated by a black man.              

But during the debate, Rep. Alvin Holmes, D-Montgomery, said that his Republican colleagues would support abortion if their daughters were impregnated by black men.

"Ninety-nine percent of the all of the white people in here are going to raise their hand that they are against abortion," he said. "On the other hand, 99 percent of the whites who are sitting in here now, if their daughter got pregnant by a black man, they are going to make their daughter have an abortion."

As horrible as these comments are, I’m guessing the national media will look the other way.  Listen to the audio which makes Alvin Holmes sound even more awlful as assumes nearly every white person would be ashamed to have a bi-racial grandchild. 


At the Huffington Post, a University of Michigan student (who is a former Planned Parenthood intern) has a rambling, poorly edited piece regarding access to abortion which has a number of gems.

In fact, I did not know anyone who was pro-life growing up except for the one house in my town that posted pro-life lawn signs....

Other laws were put in place to incite guilt and trickery like prohibiting doctors who work for a state-funded women's health service from referring patients elsewhere for an abortion.....

All of these circular mechanisms entrap women with financial and emotional burdens that actualize into limited freedom....

Planned Parenthood of Arizona is suing to prevent a state law regarding abortion drugs from taking effect.

The 2012 law now being implemented says any medication used to induce an abortion must be administered "in compliance with the protocol authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,'' as outlined in the final labeling instructions for that drug.

In the case of RU-486, that means only through the seventh week of pregnancy. But Planned Parenthood advertises that it uses it into the ninth week.

More emphatically prolife with every pro-choice rhetorical ploy

Feministe has a truly remarkable post by Molly Westerman in which she argues her pro-choice position was solidified by her pregnancies with her born children.  It’s remarkable not for it’s argument but for the lengths Westerman takes her rhetoric. 

I have been so lucky to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to have unambiguously healthy planned ones. I have felt two beloved fetuses moving inside my body.

Who would describe their own children growing inside them as fetuses?  Apparently they're so beloved they can’t be called “babies” or “children” until they’ve emerged from the womb? 

My only thought is someone who is either very creepy or someone has seen prolife people point out the absurdity of how the rhetoric of abortion advocates changes when discussing wanted pregnancies and is trying to avoid using terms she likely used while she was pregnant. 

I had no idea, before experiencing it myself, how whole-body and huge and permanently-changing pregnancy and birth are. I also had a less-direct understanding of the process of fetal development and what all that means as a physical and emotional reality for the person whose body creates and sustains that other/same body.

So were your unborn children part of your body or another body?  She’s trying to make a point about how a pregnant woman body sustains the unborn’s body and the toll that can take but then realizes that in order to make her point, she would have to honestly describe how the unborn have separate bodies and then for some reason calls attention to her troubles by writing “other/same.”

It’s just that I can’t wrap my heart around forcing anyone to stay pregnant, and I can’t wrap my head around the idea that a potential future person’s right to join the human community trumps an existing person’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.

Not content with one word to indicate the unborn aren’t really persons, Westerman feels compelled to use both potential and future to describe the personhood of the unborn. 

Life Links 2/27/14

Prolifers are suing  over Madison’s abortion clinic buffer zone law. 

The City Council approved the ordinance Tuesday. It creates a protective zone within 160 feet of health care facilities to allow patients and others to enter and exit without obstruction.

Under the ordinance, people on public way or sidewalks within that 160-foot radius may not approach, without consent, another person within 8 feet for the purpose of oral protest, education, counseling, passing leaflets or handbills, or displaying signs. Violations of the ordinance are punishable by fines ranging from $300 to $750.

         
A Kansas man has been charged with first degree murder after he allegedly crushed up an abortion pill and put it in a woman’s pancake, causing the death of an unborn child.

Scott R. Bollig, 30, is accused of intentionally killing the 8- to 10-week-old fetus by putting a crushed form of the medication on a pancake eaten by the woman, according to a criminal complaint filed in Trego County District Court and posted on the attorney general’s website.

The Daily Beast has a puff piece on Medical Students for Choice which bemoans the limited number of abortion training programs and how hard it is for medical students who want to learn how to kill unborn to get learning experiences.

Are prolife laws the problem?

In a RHRealityCheck article Tara Murtha attempts to use the case of a Pennsylvania mother who endangered her teenage daughter’s life by giving her abortion pills which were purchased online to argue that prolife laws are the problem. 

While the Gosnell grand jury report indicated that the rogue provider was able to operate undetected as a result of lawmakers treating abortion as a political issue rather than a public health one, the response of the state legislature was to further politicize abortion.

What?  No.  Murtha intentionally equivocates between how pro-choice individuals in the administrations (Departments of Health and State) of pro-choice governors Tom Ridge and Ed Rendell didn’t enforce rules and how prolife legislators passed laws to further regulate abortion clinics to make sure something like Gosnell doesn’t happen again.  For Murtha to act like the Grand Jury report would somehow be against these new regulations (the Grand Jury report specifically calls for abortion clinics to be treated like ambulatory surgical facilities) is intentionally deceptive. 

The Whalen case reveals we’re at a tipping point in Pennsylvania: The politicization of abortion ultimately means the criminalization of pregnancy.

Unable to defend a mother who endangered her daughter’s life by buying abortion pills online, Murtha claims pregnancy (!) is going to somehow be criminalized as opposed to illegally giving abortion pills to your daughter.  Yes, prolife laws which regulate abortion clinics are going to be used to round up all pregnant women.  That's makes sense in bizzaro land.   

Study after study shows that restricting access to safe, legal abortions by outlawing the procedure or, as is the preferred method in the United States, implementing geographic, logistical and financial barriers, doesn’t result in fewer unplanned pregnancies or abortions.

Murtha’s “study after study” actual links to one Huffington Post article and one Guttmacher Institute web page where "the studies" in question are really pro-choice researchers guessing how many abortions are performed in countries where abortion is illegal. 

Unfortunately for Murtha, that has nothing to do with how prolife laws in the U.S. which restrict abortion affect unplanned pregnancies and abortions in the U.S.  I wonder why Murtha didn't provide a study showing that prolife laws in the U.S. don’t result in fewer abortions since that’s the issue she’s talking about? 

Neither strategy reduces the need for safe abortion. They both result in women seeking abortion through other, unregulated and often unsafe means. That is one of the main reasons pre-Roe pro-choice advocates argued for regulations.

I wonder why she doesn’t provide any evidence for these assertions either.  In Michigan, abortions are down by more than 50% in the last 25 years in part because of prolife legislation yet Murtha would have us believe that somehow these ten of thousands of women in Michigan are seeking illegal abortions and yet the hospitals aren’t filled with women suffering from complications for these illegal procedures.  Please.  

Abortion advocates like Murtha can't have it both ways.  If prolife laws don't do anything to reduce abortion and only lead women into taking dangerous means to end pregnancies then why aren't our hospitals filled with women who've been injured by these dangerous methods?  Either prolife laws reduce abortion and illegal abortions are quite rare or prolife laws lead to lots of illegal abortions which are quite safe. 

Absurd story of the day: Prolife woman gets ticketed for parking car with prolife magnets in the buffer zone

This is absurd: 

Molly Jesse of Essex Junction, who opposes abortion, was ticketed by a Burlington police officer in June for parking near the clinic — within the 35-foot buffer zone where city law states that no one may “knowingly congregate, patrol, picket or demonstrate” — while she prayed nearby, outside of the buffer zone.


Jesse’s car had three magnetic signs, including one ribbon on the tailgate that said “choose life” and a larger sign on the door that said “your baby is forever, love you.” She contested the ticket.



In a six-page judgment issued Feb. 13, Vermont Judicial Bureau Hearing Officer Howard Kalfus wrote that the signs on Molly Jesse’s car amounted to a demonstration.

Buffer zones and the rights of women considering abortion not to be "harassed" are so sacrosanct that women considering abortion can't even be confronted with small car magnets which ask them to "choose life" if they happened to look at the back of Molly Jesse's car.  

Life Links 2/20/14

Bishop Richard Malone of the Archdiocese of Buffalo has spoken out strongly against the “evolved” position on abortion of State Senator Timothy Kennedy. 

“For anyone to say that he or she is a faithful Catholic and to be pro-abortion/pro-choice rights is totally inconsistent with Catholic teaching, which is clearly articulated in the catechism of the Catholic Church,” Malone said......

The bishop’s blast at Kennedy follows a Buffalo News report Sunday in which the senator explained that his views on abortion have “evolved” in the last few years, despite earlier views that fell into the pro-life category and even in the past earned support from the Conservative Party, which opposes the procedure.   

In the Wisconsin State Journal, Chris Rickert notices how some protestors are more equal than others. 

Speeding its way through the city’s legislative process is an ordinance that would create “buffer zones” around patients as a way to keep anti-abortion protesters from trying to accost women going into Madison’s lone abortion clinic.

Under the ordinance, you risk a $300 ticket if you get within 8 feet of a patient with a leaflet or a plea to reconsider. And it doesn’t matter if you’re on a sidewalk or other public property if the property is within 160 feet of the clinic.

By contrast, there are no buffer zones or really any other meaningful government restrictions on free speech in the Capitol rotunda.

Pro-abortion groups are continuing their push against the Michael Boggs nomination. This is why the abortion positions of prolife Democrats often “evolve.”  If you want to move up, you’ll be opposed tooth and nail by pro-abortion groups.  


Someone upset with a Iowa church’s prolife sign has vandalized it twice.

But sometime Saturday night, a pro-life sign outside the church was spray-painted. The word “abortion” was crossed out and the “s” in kills covered, leaving “Kill God’s Children.”

Life Links 2/18/14

The Planned Parenthood in Flagstaff, Arizona has resumed providing RU-486 abortions.  They found a physician would prescribe the pills but is apparently only available one day a week which might eventually force them to stop again. 

Howard said it has taken this long to find a physician who could provide the service at the Flagstaff location. The physician will be available once a week on Tuesdays, and unlike before, an appointment is now necessary.

The law now requires that women seeking a medical abortion first undergo a face-to-face meeting with the physician. After a 24-hour waiting period, the woman may then be given the abortion pills. But, in Flagstaff, because the physician comes only one day a week, the next possible visit for a woman would be a week later.

And, in April, when a new law is scheduled to take effect, it is possible that a physician also will be required to dispense the second round of the abortion medication, which is taken 24 hours after the first round. Currently, a patient can self-administer the second pill or a nurse practitioner can dispense it.

If that happens, it is possible the Flagstaff center will again have to end abortions, Howard said, unless a physician can provide that follow-up day of service as well.

The government of North Korea is apparently worse than I’d imagined. 

North Korea forces women to undergo abortions and young mothers to drown their newborn babies, and has starved and executed hundreds of thousands of detainees at secret prison camps — atrocities that the chairman of a U.N. panel that documented the abuses compares to those of Nazi Germany.

“The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” the U.N. Commission on Inquiry said in a 372-page report released Monday on North Korea’s atrocities. These crimes are ongoing because “the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.”

The Students for Life group at the University of Alabama received an apology after their display was taken down. 

Guttmacher Institute can't stop making stuff up about IUD use

The Guttmacher Institute is really pushing this idea that health insurance needs to provide free contraceptives so poor women will get IUDs.  Here's Eyal Press in the New Yorker:

Thanks to publicly funded family-planning services provided to poor women under Title X—a federal program that House Republicans have repeatedly tried to eliminate—there is evidence that more low-income women have been using I.U.D.s in the past decade. But the total number of users is still small, and the cost, which can exceed a thousand dollars before insertion, remains prohibitive for many low-income women who don’t qualify for Medicaid and cannot afford private insurance. “We know that cost is a major factor in a woman’s ability to choose and access a method of contraception that works best for her, and behind the cost is access to health-insurance coverage,” Kinsey Hasstedt, a public-policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, told me.

I wonder why they don’t provide any evidence.  Is it because the percentage of women who used IUDs in 2006-2008 (table 11) hardly varied between income levels?  Also, noteworthy is that the increase in IUD use from 2002 to 2006-2008 is much higher in the 300+% of poverty level group than in the lower income groups.  IUD use went up from 1.5% in 2002 to 5.9% in 2006-2008 among women making 300+% of the poverty level while only went from 4.1% to 4.8% for women in the 0-99% of poverty level. 

Or why don't they mention that poor women are much more likely to use female sterilization (which is typically more expensive than an IUD) as their contraceptive method than their richer peers? 

It would be nice if reporters actually examined studies on contraceptive use as opposed to just parroting the Guttmacher Institute’s talking points.