Life Links 2/29/08

Martin Haskell's abortion clinic in Dayton has recently lost its license due to a lack of admitting priveleges at local hospitals but a judge ruled the clinic can temporarily stay open because of abortions which have already been started. The clinic has stayed open for two weeks despite orders to shut its doors from the Ohio Department of Health. Martin Haskell is one of the abortionists who invented the partial-birth abortion technique.


Props to Jessica at Feministing for highlighting Planned Parenthood of Idaho's (or at least their vice president of development's) willingness to take a donation from an actor displaying racist motivations for his donation. One article from Idaho has Planned Parenthood sounding very unapologetic and claiming the call was misrepresented while the article Jessica links to has an apology along with attacks on the prolife group which made the calls.


According to the Daily Mail and the Mirror, a man in England has been charged and faces life in prison after mixing abortion pills with his girlfriend's food twice. The child somehow survived after being born 3 months premature.


A biotech company called PrimeGen has claimed to have created induced pluripotent stem cells without using genes which could cause cancer. The research has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal at this time.

"looked like some potentially non-sterile 1980's exam room"

That's how a woman who recently underwent a 21-week elective abortion at Benjamin Surgical Services International describes the operating room where her abortion took place.

Life Links 2/28/08

Planned Parenthood must really dislike those prolife students at UCLA.


Michelle Malkin has a Haleigh Poutre update.


Andrea Mrozek critiques Joyce Arthur's opposition to the Unborn Victims of Violence legislation in Canada. I wonder when Arthur says, "I recognize and respect Ms. Talbot's grief over her loss" if she respects Talbot's grief over the loss of her unborn grandson or just respect Talbot's grief over the loss of her daughter.


This editorial by Laura Merritt in the Columbia Missourian on the efforts to outlaw human cloning for research in Missouri really shows how little some proponents of embryonic stem cell research know. I think Laura has been told so many lies and been fed so much hype about embryonic stem cell research that she actually might believe what she's written here. The judge forgot the election results because she recognized the language provided by Robin Carnahan is obviously biased? The total number of people embryonic stem cells will now help is up to 125 million? Do nearly half of Americans really have some condition stem cells could help?


A pastor in Ghana named Kwaku Anokye is on the run after using a herbal concoction to induce an abortion on one of his church members who was impregnated by another pastor. The pastor who induced the abortion at 4 months also apparently demanded sex from the woman in exchange for the inducing the abortion.


The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has upheld one of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundations patents on embryonic stem cell research.

Life Links 2/27/08

The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a review of adult stem cell treatments. In the review, Dr. Richard Burt of Northwestern and his collegues examined hundreds of adult stem cell studies which took place in the last ten years. Here's an article in U.S. News and World Report which summarizes the review.


A television station in Washington state has a story on a man whose multiple sclerosis was successfully treated with chemotherapy and adult stem cells.


A man in Sweden has been sentenced to 18 months in prison by an appeals court (the original sentence was a year) after mixing abortion pills into his girlfriend's yogurt in an attempt to induce an abortion. The woman suffered severe stomach pain and vaginal bleeding. She had an abortion after the incident because she feared the pills could have permanently damaged the child.


Cristina Page just can't stop writing blog posts which are intentionally misleading. For example, she claims "McCain won't - or can't - say whether he even supports the right to use contraception" based on questions McCain took from a reporter on his campaign bus. The questions have nothing to do with whether McCain thinks it should be legal to use contraceptives or not but rather if the United States should use tax dollars to provide contraceptives to African countries.

Is Page unable to comprehend that there is a difference between thinking whether contraceptives should be legal or not and thinking whether the U.S. should provide contraceptive funding overseas or not?

Life Links 2/26/08

Amy Sullivan, a senior editor at Time and a self-described evangelical liberal who is pro-choice (though with "serious moral concerns"), discusses her book, abortion and evangelical voters in an interview with Salon.


William Saletan on sex-selection abortion in America:

Now these tests are being bought, used, and reported just like any other prenatal test. The couples who use them are described just as sympathetically. The problem isn't that they're screening their offspring for sex. The problem is that in doing so they're being thwarted by flawed technology and exaggerated marketing.

If you blame the Times for this loss of dismay, you're missing the larger trend. The article exists because the underlying stigma has already decayed. Scores of women are suing over erroneous sex tests. The Jains are unashamed to tell their story and put their names on it. So are the other women quoted in the article. As technology makes it possible to break the sex-selection taboo privately and inexpensively, the practice spreads, and we get used to it. The question of whether to restrict it becomes, as with other prenatal tests, a mere question of consumer protection.

It appears Senator Clinton is feeding her audience lies about stem cell research on the campaign trail.

Clinton also addressed her support for the development of stem cell research.

“I want Congress to send me the bill that [President George W.] Bush has vetoed twice to permit [the U.S. government] to do stem cell research,” she said.

Quotables

Ramesh Ponnuru defends the Catholic bishops' statement on abortion:

And there is another problem with this argument, which is that a reduction in the number of abortions is not the only goal that pro-lifers should have. Also important is that the law stop treating unborn children as subhuman creatures who may legitimately be denied the protections of the law against unjust killing. Obama himself may be perfectly sincere in willing that fewer women exercise the (supposed) right to abortion even while he supports keeping that option legal and making it subsidized. I have no reason to doubt that he is. But he also wills that unborn children be denied the basic legal protection from homicide that you and I enjoy. The Catholic Church wants voters to take that injustice seriously; more seriously than Feuerherd seems inclined to take it.

Serge on emergency contraception news:

Since there was extensive news coverage of the effort to get Plan B to OTC status, why the silence in the wake of information that Plan B will not effect pregnancy or abortion rates? Imagine the outcry if a heart medication was thought to reduce heart attacks by 95% - and was made over-the-counter in order to increase its availability to reduce heart disease. A year later evidence comes out that no study had ever found that it had any effect on heart attack rates, and that the only thing that could be said about it is that it is "probably better than nothing". There would be a great outcry, congressional hearings, and accusations that the evil pharmaceutical companies were gouging unsuspecting patients. However, so far there has not been a peep among those concerned about "women's health" that they could be promoting an expensive medication that may not be effective.

Life Links 2/25/08

A woman in England named Emma Beck hanged herself in February of 2007 "because she was overcome with grief after aborting her twins" according to the Daily Mail. Her suicide notes read,

"Living is hell for me. I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum. I told everyone I didn't want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies - they need me, no one else does."

The article also notes Beck attempted suicide in January of 2007 after viewing a television program which "featured foetuses."


The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada has a list of talking points against a proposed Canadian version of the Unborn Victims of Violence legislation. One talking point falsely claims Texas banned abortions after 16 weeks.


Meanwhile, Mary Talbot (whose daughter and unborn grandson were killed) writes about the legislation in the Ottawa Citizen and calls out Joyce Arthur.


The Boston Globe notes abortionist Rapin Osathanondh's resignation of his medical license.

"i lost ten lbs since my abortion two weeks ago."

Idreamwideyed is the blog of a young woman who chronicles her eating disorder, drug use and her recent abortion at 23 weeks. It appears she didn't know how far along she was until recently.

Any comments left on her site should be respectful and should be made out of love.

Life Links 2/21/08

Joe Carter on Why Pro-Life Presidents Matter.


A court in Missouri has shot down Secretary of State Robin Carnahan's attempt to hurt an anti-cloning petition drive. Carnahan's summary of the ballot initiative was ruled to be "insufficient and unfair" HT: Wesley Smith


Jill at Feministe claims Bill Clinton is "right that anti-choicers have done nothing to decrease the abortion rate." I think we can have an argument about how a variety of factors (prolife legislation, contraceptives, education, greater openness to out-of-wedlock births, etc.) have each played a role in lowering the abortion rate but to claim "anti-choicers have done nothing" is just silly. In Michigan alone, the number of abortions decreased by more than 10,000 in 1989 after tax-funded abortions were banned at the end of 1988. I can't imagine Jill is stupid enough to actually believe that prolife legislation has "done nothing" to lower the abortion rate. Can you honestly think the abortion rate would be the same if the Hyde Amendment didn't exist?


According to Jill Stanek, abortionist Rapin Osathanondh has permanently resigned his medical license after the Boston Medical Board of Registration revoked his license after causing the death of Lauren Smith.

Life Links 2/19/08

Erin O'Brien should be careful about who she's calling illogical.

We could say it is illogical by pointing out that an 18th-century slave is different from a 21st-century fetus because affording slaves the full rights they deserved as human beings did not undermine the choices, rights or bodily autonomy of another human being.

Um... The slave owner might disagree with that. Slave owners felt that granting slaves full rights infringed on what they considered their property rights. Their choice to own another human being is undermined if the human being they want to own has full rights. That brings us back to the question of whether the unborn should have the right to life, a topic O'Brien seems to prefer to avoid.

The simple truth is that when it comes to the issue of abortion, the lack of logic of these shaky claims is not what we should be talking about. We should be talking about the people actually involved in this situation – their rights, their needs and their choices. We should be talking about the woman.

O'Brien thinks we should avoid the central questions in the abortion debate: what the unborn are and what their status should be. She would prefer to avoid the question of whether the unborn are "the people actually involved in this situation" and just assume they aren't. Talk about illogical.


Sherry Colb wonders if someone can be both prolife and pro-choice after watching the film 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days.


The University of Michigan has received a "significant gift" to create a fund which will support both adult and embryonic stem cell research. Shhh....Don't tell the Detroit media, they think embryonic stem cell research is banned in Michigan.

Leon Kass on Cloning

In the Weekly Standard, Leon Kass has an article entitled Defending Life and Dignity: How, finally, to ban human cloning in which he lays out his ideas on how our nation can ban human cloning. He thinks his solution will somehow work both for individuals who want to ban human cloning (regardless of whether it is for reproductive or research purposes) and for individuals who want to keep human cloning for research purposes legal. Difficult, no? How can you satisfy two groups who want two profoundly different things?

Kass writes,

Second, we should call for a legislative ban on all attempts to conceive a child save by the union of egg and sperm (both taken from adults). This would ban human cloning to produce children, but also other egregious forms of baby making that would deny children a link to two biological parents, one male and one female, both adults. This approach differs from both the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch and the Brownback-Landrieu bills, yet it could--and should--gain support from people previously on both sides. It pointedly neither endorses nor restricts creating cloned embryos for research: Cloning embryos for research is no longer of such interest to scientists; therefore, it is also no longer, as a practical matter, so important to the pro-life cause. Moreover, the prohibited deed, operationally, should be the very act of creating the conceptus (with intent to transfer it to a woman for pregnancy), not, as the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch bill would have it, the transfer of the proscribed conceptus to the woman, a ban that would have made it a federal offense not to destroy the newly created cloned human embryos. The ban proposed here thus deserves the support of all, regardless of their position on embryo research.

Is anyone else scratching their head? Maybe Kass is going over my head here but his language seems to confuse what he's actually proposing.

On one hand, "a legislative ban on all attempts to conceive a child save by the union of egg and sperm" sounds to me like something which would ban the creation of human clones since they are conceived in a different way than the union of egg and sperm. But then Kass writes, "It pointedly neither endorses nor restricts creating cloned embryos for research." Huh? Wouldn't a legislative ban on conceiving a child by an alternative means (other than egg and sperm) including conceiving a child by cloning (using egg, a somatic cell, chemicals, and an electric charge)?

Is Kass using the term conceive to mean "implant?" But wouldn't that have the same effect as the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch legislation which he's against?

Maybe this sentence gets to the heart of what Kass is advocating:

Moreover, the prohibited deed, operationally, should be the very act of creating the conceptus (with intent to transfer it to a woman for pregnancy), not, as the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch bill would have it, the transfer of the proscribed conceptus to the woman, a ban that would have made it a federal offense not to destroy the newly created cloned human embryos.

So it seems that Kass is saying we should ban the creation of human embryos via cloning if the intent of the researchers is to transfer the clone into a woman's womb but keep the creation of human embryos via cloning legal if the intent of the researchers is to kill the embryos for research. To me, this only differs semantically (and not operationally) from the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch legislation.

But then Kass goes on to call for a separate bill which would create a 4-5 year moratorium on the creation of any kind of embryo solely for research (including creating cloned human embryos).

We should call for a (four- or five-year) moratorium on all de novo creation--by whatever means--of human embryos for use in research. This would block the creation of embryos for research not only by cloning (or SCNT), the goal of the Brownback-Landrieu anti-cloning bill, but also by IVF.

Thoughts?

Review of Stephen Wagner's Common Ground Without Compromise: 25 Questions to Create Dialogue on Abortion

In the last five years, there are probably very few people who have spoken about abortion more often with individuals who disagree with him than Stephen Wagner. He often travels with Justice for All exhibits to universities and spends hours listening to and talking with college pro-choice college students about abortion. In Common Ground, Wagner provides 25 questions he believes many prolifers and pro-choicers can find agreement on. His hope is that common ground will allow individuals from opposing sides of the abortion debate to have a more honest and civil discussion with each other.

Wagner begins his book by explaining what he means by common ground and why he thinks finding common ground is important. He writes,

Building common ground is good diplomacy and good manners, especially when we are hoping to persuade someone of something. It shows we are truly interested in seeing how someone else's point of view squares with our own. Changing hearts and minds, after all, begins with understanding hearts and minds.

Wagner then goes into his 25 questions which he has separated in various groupings/chapters like "The Top Six," "Is Abortion Different from Any Other Surgery?," and "What Is the Best Solution to the Problem of Unwanted Children?" Each chapter begins with an introduction and ends with tips to creating a conversation. Each question segment begins with "take your pulse" table where you can compare your feelings on the question to what you think most people believe and has reflection questions. Throughout, Wagner shares stories of his successes and failures at finding common ground. He also provides questions for prolifers to thoughtfully consider.

Wagner concludes that the mess we're in with abortion is that we aren't really talking about it. While we may see television pundits arguing about it all the time, abortion is seldom a conversation topic among friends, families and acquaintances. The answer to this mess is starting civilized, well-informed dialogues by asking questions in a non-abrasive way and listening to the responses.

While reading his book, I was often brought back to an abortion discussion between myself and some of my friends a few years back. Instead of having a thoughtful discussion, the conversation quickly devolved into one of those arguments where one of my female friends claimed I couldn't say anything about abortion because I was a man. Instead of trying to find common ground and move on from there, I was probably much too focused on pointing out the logical flaws in her argument instead of finding points of agreement and building our conversation from mutual agreement.

I think Wagner's book is exceptional resource for, and I would certainly suggest it to, individuals who are interesting in changing hearts and minds on abortion through conversation. We can't all be professional debaters but each of us can use the advice and questions Wagner provides to create thoughtful conversations. Unfortunately, many of these kinds of conversations never occur because we often spend all our time on our differences and no time finding places where we agree. This constant disagreement, especially on issues like abortion, can tend to drive people away from conversations with individuals with differing viewpoints.

Small complaint: I personally found the placement of reflection questions to be somewhat bothersome. They appeared on the side and often they weren't near the end of the segment. I'm guessing this was done for aesthetic and design reasons but I found myself reading the reflection questions mid-paragraph and losing the main text's train of thought when I did. I would have preferred the questions to be at the end of each segment.

Life Links 2/18/08

Jill Stanek has the video and a transcript of Bill Clinton discussing abortion at a rally which prolifer were protesting at. The Hotline and FOXNews both have articles on the exchange.


Here's another advance in changing adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. Wesley Smith provides an explanation for us non-scientists.


Albert Harris, a professor at the University of North Carolina, told his class he believes the moral thing for older mothers to do is get amniocentesis testing and abort their child if he or she has Down Syndrom. His lecture notes say,

"In my opinion, the moral thing for older mothers to do is to have amniocentesis, as soon during pregnancy as is safe for the fetus, test whether placental cells have a third chromosome #21, and abort the fetus if it does.

Thomas Hibbs reviews 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.

Filmmakers have been willing to depict abortion as something ugly, even as a necessary evil in the face of tragic circumstances. Despite an increasingly explicit film culture, in which it is permissible — indeed, in certain genres, mandatory — to show every manner of torture and physical brutality, the direct portrayal of an aborted fetus is rare. The way in which this film depicts the consequences of the abortion packs a chilling, emotional wallop. At four months, three weeks, and two days, a fetus is unmistakably human — small, but human. Recognizing this fact, Gabita begs Otilia to "bury" rather than simply discard the dead baby.

Life Links 2/15/08

What kind of narcotics and what quantity of them lead someone to believe the New York Times has a bias against abortion? Ross Douhat has more. How can any rationale person find Debbie Nathan's article persuasive?


Jill from Feministe really needs to take a beginner's level class in logic. This post is embarassing and its borrowed title is simply ridiculous. A principal at a public school is against featuring a the story of a hardworking teenage student mother in the yearbook. Some individuals think this is because the school teaches abstinence-only education. From this, Jill assumes the administration is "likely 'pro-life.'" And leads her to write,

"And therein lies the entire crux of the anti-choice movement: They are willing to actively deny reality in order to promote their ideals."

What on earth does the "anti-choice movement" and "their ideals" have to do with one public school principal's (whose position on abortion is completely unknown) decision to prevent the printing of the story of teenage mother in the school yearbook? Grasping at straws, anyone?

Jill's typical ignorance of prolife movement is also quite apparent. I can't count the times I've seen stories in prolife publications about unmarried women choosing life for their children. Hey, but if one public school principal (whose position on abortion is unknown) is against printing the story then the whole of the prolife movement wants women who choose life to "piss off."


One American woman is set to pay a lot of money for a cloned dog.

Another sad story of rape and coerced abortion

Arnesx Honore, a fugitive wanted for raping a 14-year-old girl and coercing her to abort some of her pregnancies was allowed to continue teaching at a disciplinary school. The charges were originally dropped because the girl didn't testify but were filed again a month later. The school was unaware the charges were refiled and they were for assaulting a minor.

According to records filed at the courthouse, the birth of the teenager's daughter was the first of four pregnancies during the three years the girl was allegedly beaten, threatened and abused. Authorities said the girl had been living with Honore because of problems at home.

According to an affidavit of probable cause, Honore is accused of forcing her to terminate at least two pregnancies and, during the second, when she was 15, telling her that if she did not have an abortion he would "kick her ass and do it for her."

At the time she reported the crimes, authorities noted she was four months pregnant with another of Honore's children, but court records did not specify whether that child was carried to term.

Pennsylvania has a parental consent law. How did this girl, who was living with Honore because of problems at home receive her parents' consent for at least two abortions? Is this another case of an abortion clinic looking the other way when a statutory rapist brings in a minor to get rid of the evidence?

Life Links 2/14/08

Authorities in Italy took an aborted child from a hospital after a woman had a late-term abortion and a caller claimed the woman was having the abortion outside of legal limits.


A public school teacher in California has been placed on leave after showing his students the film The Silent Scream.


William Saletan replies to Robert George's and Christopher Tollefsen's reply to his review of their book. He pushes basically the same points he did in his original review. I'm also having trouble figuring out what his position is. Is he arguing early embryos aren't human organisms or is he arguing they aren't human persons? And if so, what is his definition of person and why should we accept it?


The Chicago Sun-Times provides a review of an article they published 30 years ago on abortion clinics in Chicago.

The Sun-Times/BGA team had people work undercover in six Michigan Avenue clinics. The team uncovered incompetent and unqualified doctors who performed abortions without giving their patients anesthetics. Sometimes, it made no difference if a woman was actually pregnant -- she'd still be sold an abortion.

In one truly horrifying case, a couple was sent to a disreputable Detroit abortionist whose dog accompanied the nurse into the operating room -- then lapped up blood from the floor.

Happy Valentine's Day

From Baby Jivin to you.














And here's one with something that appears to be a smile.

Life Links 2/12/08

A woman in England has discovered her unborn child is still living a month after being told the child died in the womb.


Dawn Eden links to a blog by a pro-choice feminist who recently had a difficult abortion experience with RU-486. The woman also experienced some emotional pain after the abortion and said that she "lost a baby" but is "more pro-choice than ever."

Dawn writes, "However much she may say she made the "right choice" for herself, I can't help thinking that women, let alone their unborn children, really do deserve better than abortion." Dawn's post is somehow evidence to Jill at Feministe that "professional prolifers" only care about women if they can use them as "political ping-pong balls." Jill's blog posts seem to be becoming more like Amanda Marcotte's every day.


Speaking of which, Jay provides a diagram of Marcotte's typical post.


Geron and Thomas Okarma are still claiming they start an embryonic stem cell clinical trial on human patients if they get FDA approval.

Life Links 2/11/08

William Saletan reviewed Robert George's and Christopher Tollefsen's book Embryo in the New York Times. George and Tollefsen respond in the National Review Online.


In another example of pro-choice intolerance, a group of around 50 pro-choicers in Australia interrupted a prolife rally by storming the stage. The pro-choicers only left the stage after cops asked them to leave.


An Australian scientist has found what he believes to be stem cells in breast milk.

His team cultured cells from human breast milk and found a population that tested positive for the stem cell marker, nestin. Further analysis showed that a side population of the stem cells were of multiple lineages with the potential to differentiate into multiple cell types. This means the cells could potentially be "reprogrammed" to form many types of human tissue.

Here's an article in the Boston Globe about California's Institute of Regenerative Medicine and how the process of getting Cures! Cures! Cures! isn't that simple even if large amounts of money are thrown scientists' way.


Researchers at UCLA have jumped on the induced pluripotent stem cell train.


Last week's Friday Night Lights featured an unplanned pregnancy storyline. Here's how one reviewer explains the storyline.

The waitress that Jason Street had a one-night stand with shows up to tell him she"s pregnant. Jason can"t believe it, because everyone told him it wasn"t physically possible for him to have children. The nineteen-year-old waitress (rightly) is pretty set on an abortion until Jason lays it on super-thick about the tiny toes and fingers and how this is his one chance to have a child.

You can watch the episode online (if I recall correctly, the episode closes with Jason's meeting with the waitress) at NBC.com's Friday Night Lights page. I wonder what our nation's abortion rate would be if every father made the kind of speech Jason Street makes.

Life Links 2/8/08

The Los Angeles Times has a long article about all the troubles a chain of abortion clinics in the Los Angeles area have had over the years after their manager, Bertha Bugarin (a name which almost sounds like it could have been used for a villain in the Harry Potter books), was charged has been charged with practicing medicine without a license.


Paul Ranalli responds to abortionist Garson Romalis and explains why he isn't an abortion provider.


A Traverse City man points out some flaws in a pro-embryonic stem cell editorial.


Blogger Miss Britt thinks no one has the right to take the life of the unborn (which she says is "a baby") but also believes abortion shouldn't be illegal and votes according to that belief. So I guess that means she believes it should be legal to kill babies and votes according to that belief. She also has some extremely inaccurate perceptions of the prolife movement and she seems to base her idea of what the majority of the prolife movement is like on nasty comments left on a blog. Why do people like Miss Britt not take the time to actually find out who is helping women who think abortion is their only way out?

Life Links 2/7/08

Wesley Smith has news of a man in Oregon who killed his wife and will likely try to defend his killing as a mercy killing.


A leader of a Catholic homeschool group is compiling the thoughts of some of her students who attended the March for Life.


Will British scientists ever find an experiment involving embryos they don't like? Some researchers have created human embryos using the DNA from 3 people.


Some pro-choice leaders are laying out their reasons for supporting Hillary. I'm struggling to see how Obama would do anything different. I guess they don't think he's as much of pro-choice leader as Hillary is.


A pro-choice orgnaization in France is upset that a court has ruled that parents of miscarried child (regardless of fetal age) have the right to officially name their child.

Chantal Birman, deputy president of a pro-abortion and contraception group called ANCIC, said the court's determination would provide a powerful emotional argument for opponents of abortion, as it implied that a foetus or an embryo of any stage of development had the right to a name.

"A foetus is only viable after 26 weeks," said Birman, a midwife by training. "You have to take the timetable of pregnancy into account."

The decision "will help a rollback (on abortion rights) that has been taking place in Europe for the last few months," Birman told AFP, pointing to changes in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

"Our abortion was a love story."

So says Alison Piepmeier about how her experience with chemical abortion brought her and her husband closer together in an essay in Skirt magazine entitled "Choosing Us."

Sitting on rocks on the riverbank, on a sunny, cold January morning, I read my letter aloud. "Dear potential person," I said. "Thank you so much for coming along." I started to cry. I wished it well, told it I hoped it found another home, and pulled the blossom off my flower and threw it into the river....

Our abortion was a love story. I'd worried that Walter and I were rejecting a gift from the universe. What I discovered, though, was that when we stripped away the distractions of everyday life so that we could make this difficult decision together, it bound us together as surely as if our choice had been different—and as it turns out, that was the gift.

Life Links 2/6/08

I don't know what Dobson is thinking here. McCain isn't my favorite candidate either but it's not like he's Giuliani. Justin Taylor has an alternative headline.


Stand to Reason has posted a PDF of a paper by Robert George entitled "Embryo Ethics."


Hillary Clinton and NOW are still going after Barack Obama's "present" votes on prolife legislation.


A British girl with acute myeloid leukemia has been successfully treated with a transplant of frozen umbilical cord stem cells from Japan.

Not all prolifers hate women?

Ed Brayton, who describes himself as pro-choice, goes after the myth that all prolifers are misogynist.

A couple of people are insistently claiming that every single person who opposes a woman's right to have an abortion is, by definition, misogynistic. Others reject that argument, including me. Not only do I reject it, I think it's precisely the kind of lazy, shallow, overly simplistic thinking that is far too common in our political dialogue today....

Here's what I think is really going on here: assuming an evil agenda is easier than engaging someone's real position. It's what Matt Nisbet would call a convenient cognitive shortcut. It makes the world so simple when you can just dismiss the person taking the position out of hand without having to engage the position itself. But sometimes the world just isn't that simple; sometimes, frequently in fact, a clash of ideas really is a sincere dispute between people who both care about doing the right thing even if they disagree on what the right thing is.

Some of his readers still fervently disagree.

Life Links 2/4/08

Jennifer F. of Et Tu? (The Diary of a Former Atheist) describes how she became pro-life.

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed "fetuses" touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at Lifesite. Babies -- I mean, fetuses -- seen yawning at 12 weeks gestation? Involuntary spasm. As modern technology helped fetuses offer me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar of what I considered human....

It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not pro-choice.....

Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

HT: The Point


A Canadian abortionist in the text of a speech given to other abortion advocates explains why he is a abortion provider.


This is London reports that 66 British children survived abortion attempts in 2005.

Rather than dying at birth as was intended, they were able to breathe unaided. About half were alive for an hour, while one survived ten hours.

Finnish scientists have replaced a patient's upper jaw with the help of stem cells taken from his fat. Before the treatment, the patient wasn't able to eat or drink without a removable prosthetic jaw.