Next Thursday

Besides Angie Jackson, another woman is sharing her RU-486 abortion experience on her blog entitled Next Thursday (which was yesterday). In one post, she writes about how she wishes her mother had had the choice to abort her. There is also this statement:

Yes, I am a mother. I have seen many ultrasounds. I have heard the heartbeats, felt kicks, and known the love a woman can have for her unborn child. I also understand the difference between a child, and a growing mass of cells with the potential to become a child.

Life Links 2/26/10

The Washington Post has an article on one of the abortionists who travels to South Dakota to perform abortions because no doctor in South Dakota will perform them. Apparently, Carol Ball doesn't understand the what prolifers believe in the slightest.

"I would rather do this without all this hoopla," she says. "I'm dismayed that it's gone on so long. Why don't they just go home?"

Why don't I trust Planned Parenthood spokespeople? Here's a great example. After being caught not reporting statutory rape, Planned Parenthood CEO of Wisconsin attempts to act like they didn't have enough information to report.

On Tuesday, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin CEO Teri Huyck responded to the charge that the organization had failed to report the incident.

"In this particular circumstance, we did not have the name of the young woman,” Huyck claimed. “She did not give it to us. She did not provide any ID. So we were unable to make any report."

On Wednesday she added that the patient would be reported if she gave her name.

"The so-called patient in this case did not provide identifying information. In fact, she refused." Huyck said. "It would've been difficult if not impossible to make any kind of report."

Live Action responded by releasing extended footage featuring a Planned Parenthood counselor named as Sonia.

Sonia coached Rose how to obtain a judicial bypass waiver for an abortion so that her parents would not find out about her supposed relationship with an older man.

"What is your name? So I can call them and tell them you're coming,” the video shows Sonia saying.

Rose gives her name as “Janelle Marion” and reports a birthday of July 27.

They really don't like those billboards educating women about the prevalence of abortions in the African-American community, do they? The pro-choice group Spark has started a campaign to try to get CBS advertising to take them down.

ABC features story on Angie Jackson live tweeting her abortion

I wonder why this ABC new story of Angie Jackson live-tweeting her RU-486 abortion by Emily Friedman didn’t include any of Angie’s more...(language warning).. um.... colorful tweets?

She takes 17 vicodin and acts like it’s “almost exactly
= monthly period.

Stand True’s Bryan Kemper also interviewed Angie and posted the interview and his thoughts.

Can abortion still block health care reform?

At Time, Amy Sullivan discusses the possibility of abortion still being the main barrier to health care reform by breaking down the Democrats in the House who voted for the Stupak Amendment but against the health care bill, for the Stupak Amendment and for the bill, and against the Stupak Amendment and against the bill.

Another 24 members who supported Stupak and the House bill are solidly pro-life. The key question for them is whether they are willing to accept an abortion prohibition that falls short of the Stupak language. No one in the House leadership has polled members on this point to get a head count, but the best guess is that many in this category would be satisfied with the Nelson language....

The final group of 16 Democrats voted against both the Stupak amendment and the House bill. While abortion did not drive their votes in November, these members could be in play if the House votes on a reconciliation bill. Half of the members of this group are freshmen Democrats who opposed the House bill because of concerns about cost or because they opposed the public option, which is not in the Senate version.

Life Links 2/25/10

According to Bart Stupak, around 15-20 House Democrats are withholding their support for Obama’s health care bill based on abortion and other issues.


Yesterday, Spain approved legislation to formally legalize abortion. The law will take effect in approximately 4-5 months.

The new law allows the procedure without restrictions up to 14 weeks and gives 16- and 17-year-olds the right to have abortions without parental consent. The senate's passage of the bill Wednesday gives it final approval....

Under the previous law, which dates back to 1985, Spanish women could in theory go to jail for getting an abortion outside certain strict limits — up to week 12 in case of rape and week 22 if the fetus is malformed.

But abortion has been in effect widely available because women can assert mental distress as sole grounds for having an abortion, regardless of how late the pregnancy is. Most of the more than 100,000 abortions carried out each year in Spain were early-term ones that fell under this category.

The NCAA has pulled a Focus on the Family web ad promoting a prolife message because of concerns over the group’s stance on gay marriage.


Gang members in Delaware are facing jail time after beating a pregnant teen.

She testified she was picked up Dec. 17, 2008, by one of the female gang members at Wilmington Hospital after she decided against getting an abortion and had called King to tell him about her decision. At the apartment, witnesses said King and Hicks questioned her about how long she had been pregnant. She said King did not believe he was the father....

Despite the savage assault, the girl testified she later successfully gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

Some history on abortionist Kermit Gosnell

More background stories have emerged on Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, whose license was recently suspend because of deplorable conditions at his clinics.

He was part of a super-coil abortion experiment in the early 70's in which 9 of 15 patients suffered serious complications.

One of the 40-plus lawsuits filed against him, claimed another woman died from a botched abortion at his hands in 2000.

Semika Shirelle Shaw called the office the day after her abortion because she was bleeding badly but wasn't told to get checked there or at a hospital, according to court documents. The lawsuit alleged that Shaw, a 22-year-old mother of two, died two days later of a perforated uterus and sepsis.

Malina Williams, a woman who Gosnell performed an abortion on nearly 20 years ago recounted her experience as a 13-year-old at Gosnell’s clinic.

She said she had thought something was amiss when the West Philadelphia doctor eagerly agreed to perform the abortion, even though he allegedly didn't have permission from her parents as required by state law.

After her procedure was over, Williams said she saw Gosnell cradling a bottle that contained the remains of her fetus. Her eyes darted away and landed on the room with the bottles.

"He left the door open," said Williams, now 32. "I could see all the little babies in bottles filled with liquid, and I started crying.

"He said he did research on them. He said, 'Don't cry, don't feel bad. Everybody does this.' "

Debating abortion

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting article on annual abortion debate at the University of California at Berkeley between Raymond Dennehy and Malcolm Potts.

"Dr. Dennehy and I are serious people who respect each other and have become friends over the years," Potts told the class as it met last fall. "We don't abuse each other. We don't try to spin data or philosophical interpretations in unreasonable ways."

Dennehy, 75, is a dapper professor of philosophy, bioethics and epistemology at the University of San Francisco.

He argues that abortion is almost certainly the killing of an innocent human being and that the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which has led to about 1.3 million legal abortions a year, "has had the effect on democracy that an atomic bomb would have on any city."

Potts, also 75, is a rumpled, British-born embryologist and gynecologist who has worked to make the procedure available to women in developing countries.

He contends that it is scientifically impossible to determine when life begins, but concedes that "I would rather destroy a five-week embryo than a 15-week embryo, and I accept there is some stage in pregnancy that you have to say no."

It's amazing how many of these students need a class in basic logic.

Have you ever been raped or been pregnant?" a young woman demanded.

You could almost see Dennehy rolling his eyes.

"Suppose I said yes," he said, unable to keep a slight snippiness out of his voice. "What's your next move?"

"I was just curious how your opinion would have changed if you were in that situation."

"What has that got to do with the validity of my argument?"

Her gambit failed; now she was on the defensive: "It's just a question."

"There are only two issues in an argument, miss," Dennehy said. "The facts, and the conclusions you draw from the facts.

"When we teach logic, that common fallacy is one of the first things we teach: shifting the attention of the argument and the evidence to the person arguing. It's absolutely irrelevant."

Life Links 2/24/10

Lila Rose and Live Action have released yet another video (their tenth) showing a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic employee willing to overlook statutory rape. From their press release:

In the video, after hearing the girl is 14 and her boyfriend is "much older," the counselor says whether or not the situation will be reported by clinic workers "depends on the person you're disclosing that information to." When the girl says that her boyfriend is 31, the counselor tells her, "You don't have to say anything" about the statutory rape and instructs her, "Just give them the information that's needed." The counselor also confirms that the 31-year-old "boyfriend" will be paying for the abortion.

In Wisconsin, sex between an adult and a minor under age 16 is a felony, and health care professionals are required to report such cases to law enforcement immediately. The law specifically includes abortion providers in this requirement.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a story about Karnamaya Mongar, a woman who died at the West Philadelphia abortion clinic, which was recently shut down because of deplorable conditions discovered by federal investigators looking for evidence of illegal prescription drug dealing.

Mongar was about 18 or 19 weeks pregnant on that November night, Ghalley said. Her husband could not accompany her because "he just got a job in a chicken factory."

Ghalley's first impression of the Philadelphia facility - a shabby, three-story brick structure with a two-story annex - was not good.

"So dirty. Dirty, bloody, a lot of people waiting," Ghalley recalled. "I was thinking at that time, maybe he [the doctor] was cheaper."

Later, as Ghalley watched his sister being put in the ambulance, a clinic employee and his niece began crying.

The story also notes that the clinic's abortionist, Kermit Gosnell, is no stranger to run-ins with the law.

The suspension is the latest trouble for Gosnell, who has been named as a defendant in 46 civil suits - 10 of them medical-malpractice cases - since 1981....

This is not the first time Pennsylvania has suspended Gosnell's license. In 1996, he temporarily lost it for allowing a physician's assistant to treat patients. He got it back after paying a $1,000 penalty....

Gosnell also skirted the state's abortion control in 2007 when he performed an abortion on a minor without her parents' consent. It became public when the parents brought a civil suit for assault. Gosnell paid $10,000 to settle the case.

ABC's World News featured a report on the prolife billboards in Atlanta attempting to raise awareness about the prevalence of abortion among African-American women. Newsbusters has the details.

The National Institutes of Health is proposing to change its definition of embryonic stem cells to include cells removed from very early embryos.

Representative Bart Stupak says President Obama's health care reform legislation is unacceptable on abortion.

"The Senate language is a significant departure from current law and is unacceptable," said Stupak. "While the President has laid out a health care proposal that brings us closer to resolving our differences, there is still work to be done before Congress can pass comprehensive health care reform."

Life Links 2/23/10

Virginia Delegate Robert Marshall has apologized after claiming the increase in children born with handicaps is because God is punishing women for aborting their first child.

Marshall said his broader point on Thursday was that he had collected a substantial amount of published medical research suggesting that abortions raise the risk of miscarriage and birth defects in subsequent pregnancies and that those findings echoed the Bible's teaching that abortion is wrong.

"The point is, there are profound consequences to the act of abortion," Marshall said.

Late Monday, his office released a formal apology. Addressing the story that his office said had "conveyed the impression that I believe disabled children are a punishment for prior abortions," Marshall explained:

The Washington Post is running an AP article on concerns Shiawassee County prosecutors have finding a fair-minded jury in trial over the murder of abortion protester Jim Pouillon.


Oklahoma legislators have quickly started the process of re-passing separate prolife bills which were in one bill which was recently struck down by a Oklahoma judge by of an Oklahoma law which requires laws cover a single subject.

Philadelphia abortionist has license suspended for "deplorable" conditions

Kermit Gosnell, an abortionist in West Philadelphia, has had his medical license suspended after his office was raided by federal agents. They were apparently looking for evidence that he was illegally distributing prescription pain killers. What they found were "deplorable and unsanitary" conditions.

It states: "There was blood on the floor, and parts of aborted fetuses were displayed in jars."

The order calls Gosnell's continued practice of medicine "an immediate and clear danger to the public health and safety....."

The suspension order also alleges that on or about Nov. 20, a patient died after being treated at the clinic by an unlicensed employee.

The woman, who was not named and was in the clinic for an abortion, was given 10 mg of Demerol and 12.5 mg of promethazine. When the patient began experiencing cramping, she asked for more pain medication, and Gosnell told the unlicensed employee to administer it, the order states.

The woman allegedly was given 75 mg of Demerol, 12.5 mg of promethazine, and 10 mg of diazepam, and later more anesthetic in preparation for the abortion.

After the abortion, the order states, the woman "started to have arrhythmia and then went into V-fib" (ventricular fibrillation). She was taken to an unnamed hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

According to the UPI, a local CBS station reported there were 30 frozen unborn children found in a follow-up search by state officials.

National Right to Life: Obama's Health Care Plan Worse on Abortion than Senate's

Here's their press release:

If all of the President's changes were made, the resulting legislation would allow direct federal funding of abortion on demand through Community Health Centers, would institute federal subsidies for private health plans that cover abortion on demand (including some federally administered plans), and would authorize federal mandates that would require even non-subsidized private plans to cover elective abortion.

Life Links 2/22/10

Here's Maame-Mensima Horne with ridiculous pro-choice quote of day:

That is one of many myths within their arguments. First of all, to say abortion is genocide is a misconception. Access to abortion actually saved lives in black communities, where illegal abortion was a leading cause of death before Roe v. Wade.

I love it when pro-choicers attempt to dispel "myths" by using myths that have been debunked for decades.


A judge in Oklahoma has ruled a prolife Oklahoma law unconstitutional because it violates a law which says law should only address one subject. Besides outlawing sex-selection abortion, "the law also would have required doctors who perform abortions to provide information about female patients, including age, race, marital status, number of previous pregnancies and the reasons given for seeking an abortion."


Legislators in Nebraska have introduced a bill which would ban abortions after 20 weeks.

Life Links 2/19/10

A judge in California has denied a request to suspend abortionist Andrew Rutland's medical license.

The state medical board was "disappointed that the judge did not agree with our petition that Dr. Rutland poses an imminent threat to public safety," said spokeswoman Candis Cohen.

Cohen said the board would pursue its effort to revoke Rutland's license "as expeditiously as possible."

Arkansas-based abortionist William Harrison wrote an e-mail to 40 Days for Life participants thanking them for protesting because he thinks it will show people where they can get an abortion.

Harrison wrote an email to the organizers of the protest, saying they're more than welcome to demonstrate because it'll show their children and newcomers where to get an abortion.

“You know, we have a lot of new people in the area. And since we don't do any advertising, a lot of people don't know the services that we offer. So I am glad they're over there,” said Harrison.

And he admits he even joked around in the e-mail, telling them to look serious and to bring priests along, or else it'll deliver the wrong message.

A man in Texas is facing the death penalty after being found guilty of killing and robbing his former next door neighbor. When he admitted guilt, he claimed he needed the money to pay for an abortion.

Jurors saw surveillance videos of Estrada making purchases with Barrios' credit cards and driving her stolen Mercedes. But in an odd twist, prosecutors stifled efforts by Estrada's attorneys to let jurors see a video of the teenager confessing to police.

In the video, Estrada sobs and tell police he needed $300 for an abortion because he got someone pregnant. He went into Barrios' house with his hunting bow and one arrow, he said.

"She said, 'Who's there?'" Estrada tells police in the video. "I just turned and I fired. I hit her."

An embryonic stem cell proponent in California's legislature has introduced legislation to bring more transparency and oversight to CIRM, California's stem cell agency, whom she says "is essentially accountable to no one."

Life Links 2/18/10

There’s more trouble for abortionist Andrew Rutland. After killing a patient, he was ordered to stop performing surgeries but that apparently didn’t stop him from scheduling to perform a surgical abortion on an undercover Medical Board investigator.

At that time, in response to a request from Rutland's lawyer seeking clarification of the no-surgery order, the judge amended it to specifically ban him from performing "first trimester abortions and endometrial curettage procedures."

Two weeks later, Medical Board investigator Carmen Aguilera-Marquez made an appointment for an abortion at A Women's Choice Family Planning Clinic in Chula Vista. She used an undercover alias and brought a urine sample from a pregnant woman.

At the clinic, she saw Rutland in a room through an open door standing by a woman lying on an examination table, according to a petition filed by the board. The patient's legs were bent, and Rutland was looking into the patient's cervical area, she said.

She spoke with a friend of the patient who told her that the woman was there for a "chemical abortion," a spontaneous miscarriage induced with pills inserted by a physician, she said in the petition.

Later, when she was asked to undergo a pregnancy test, the investigator went into a bathroom and filled the cup with urine she brought with her, she said.

Rutland determined she was seven weeks pregnant. He said his physician daughter performs surgical abortions but was not in that day, she said, and advised that she allow him to do a chemical abortion.

The investigator insisted on a surgical procedure, and an appointment was scheduled for another day, she said in the petition.

Doctors in New Zealand are fighting proposed guidelines which would require them to tell patients having doubts about their pregnancy that abortion is an option.


A physician in Jamaica named Kenneth Enyi has been charged with performing an abortion on a 13-year-old girl. The mother of the individual who impregnated the girl has also been charged.

From Knife Welder to Life Chooser

This is amazing. Remember the pregnant woman who pulled a knife on sidewalk counselors in Minnesota while she was going in for an abortion? She never had the abortion.

The surprise came when Hall was reached by phone at her Superior home Tuesday evening. She said she never had the planned abortion. Hall said she decided to keep the baby after being confronted by anti-abortion protesters Leah Winandy and her mother, Sarah, on Nov. 24. She said she was stressed out and they made her realize that she didn’t want to end the life she was carrying inside her.

Hall was asked if there was anything she’d like to say to the Winandys.

“Thank you for being there,” she said. “If they weren’t there, I probably would have gone through with it and regretted it for the rest of my life. It probably would have gone the other way. I’m sincerely sorry for doing that to her.”

Mechelle Hall pled guilty to second degree assault and received probation.

Life Links 2/17/10

This is interesting but not surprising considering how politicized everything with embryonic stem cells has become. Geron intentionally delayed the application of their now-delayed embryonic stem cell clinical trial so their application could be accepted just after President Obama expanded the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Remember this when proponents of embryonic stem cell research claim they just want to save lives. They didn't want to hurt their "Bush is a stem cell obstructionist" story line so they "engineered" when their application would be approved so Obama could get the credit.

It now turns out that the timing was more than a coincidence. When I met up with Geron's chief executive, Tom Okarma, in London this week, he revealed that the announcement was deliberately planned for the immediate aftermath of President Obama's inauguration. But it was the company, not the FDA, which set this in motion: Geron deliberately timed its application so it would be decided just after President Bush left office, so that the Obama Administration would be able to announce it.

Dr Okarma told me:

"Many people hypothesised the first time that the lifting of the hold was due to the Administration change. We have no information and no indication that that was the case. We engineered the timing, because our final submission was timed such that the 30-day window occurred after the inauguration of President Obama. That was our design, not really an Administration change. That was our timing. We did not want this to come up under the Bush Administration. We designed it."

Jared Ahlstrom has plead guilty to drugging his pregnant girlfriend with misoprostol.

The baby died nearly a year ago but it wasn’t until November when Ahlstrom told the mother of the child that the miscarriage wasn’t an accident.

In a written statement, Chief Deputy District Attorney Dan Rubinstein said, “It is unfortunate that Colorado law only makes this a class 4 felony. It is considered a ‘non-extraordinary risk’ crime, and carries no mandatory sentencing of any sort. It has a maximum of 12 years prison, but he is eligible for any type of sentence.”

The Virginia Senate has passed a measure to allow pro-choice license plates but the Senate measure doesn't include an amendment added in the House to prevent any funds from going to Planned Parenthood.


Wesley Smith notes attempts in the Netherlands to expand the legalization of assisted suicide to individuals who are over 70 and "tired of life."

I have long believed that once killing is accepted as an acceptable answer to human suffering, the culture changes to the point that life itself ceases to matter if the person in question is perceived as “suffering.” Now, Dutch citizens have rushed to put a measure before the Parliament that would allow people age 70 and older who are “tired of life,” to have access to assisted suicide–even if they aren’t sick or disabled....

Unbelievable, but entirely logical. Once you start down this road, it is never enough. And why limit it to people age 70 and over? Surely 68 year olds who are tired of life deserve “choice.” And in fact, why not just anybody sufficiently depressed to want to die for longer than two weeks? Yup, that is already happening–officially approved by the Dutch Supreme Court.

Life Links 2/16/10

In Australia, a child has been born healthy after one doctor mistakenly thought the child had died, gave the woman misoprostol, and then a senior doctor pressured the mother to abort.

The doctor recommended termination using the drug misoprostol, but the drug did not work and a follow-up scan showed the foetus was still alive.

Later scans revealed the baby had fluid on the brain - a condition likely caused by the abortion drug Ms Vanderhook had been given.

Despite six other specialist opinions that the baby would be born normal, Ms Vanderhook says a senior obstetrician at Canberra Hospital continued to press her to terminate the baby, even at 31 weeks, when termination would have involved inducing labour.

"To have a baby induced and to watch him just die and not do anything about it? I was disgusted," Ms Vanderhook told the ABC.

The Vanderhook's barrister, Bernard Collaery, believes there is a simple explanation why the hospital was urging her to terminate the pregnancy.

"Away would go the litigation that might in the event of serious deformities produce a multi-million dollar verdict," he said.

Lila Rose links to the Alabama Department of Public Health's full report on the Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Birmingham which has been placed on probation and calls for their license to be revoked. Besides the parental consent and failing to report statutory rape violations, the clinic had two expired suction pumps which weren't tagged to show they weren't available for use and temperature in the exam and treatment rooms was 90 degrees.

Hey, but never mind all that. According to Amanda Marcotte (who apparently hasn't taken the time to actually understand why the clinic was placed on probation), laws regulating abortion clinics are just more evidence of......you guessed it.....prolife misogyny and (get this) comparable to voting literacy tests.


How do you know that your billboard idea was successful? When papers from New York and Chicago cover billboards in Georgia (not to mention all the local news coverage), you've probably gotten more than you were expecting. Let's hope all this coverage makes a difference.


The southern gospel group Fresh Anointing won the Emerald Coast Southern Gospel Music Association’s Song of the Year for their prolife song "Third Voice."


Apparently, some University of Florida students need a lesson in basic human biology.

Nick Tomlinson, a senior geography major, disagreed.

"[A fetus] is just a string of cells," Tomlinson said. "It's not a human yet. That's the difference."

About-face

I love the contrast between these two Feministing posts mentioning the election of Laura Chinchilla as the first female president of Costa Rica.

Right after the election, Jessica rejoices:

Costa Rica elected its first female president by a landslide!

Then the excitement quickly drains as Samhita discovers that Chincilla doesn’t share Feministing’s view on abortion and claims Chinchilla “doesn’t really like women.”

Life Links 2/15/10

In his Washington Post column, Michael Gerson shares some information from Edwin Black’s recent book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race.

Black points out that early last century, the American Breeders Association -- supported by generous grants from Andrew Carnegie -- created a committee to study “the best practical means for cutting off the defective germ-plasm of the American population.” The panel included doctors, economists and attorneys from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Chicago.

Black continues: “During a number of subsequent conferences, they carefully debated the ‘problem of cutting off the supply of defectives,’ and systemically plotted a bold campaign of ‘purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of these anti-social classes.’ Ten groups were eventually identified as ‘socially unfit’ and targeted for ‘elimination.’” Among those groups, according to Black, were the “feebleminded,” epileptics, the “insane,” the “deformed” and the “deaf.”

The Oregonian has an article on the opening and protest of a new large Planned Parenthood abortion facility in Portland, Oregon.



One of Tiger Woods’ mistresses is claiming she conceived two of Tiger’s children. Supposedly, one of them miscarried and she aborted the other without Tiger’s knowledge.

Life Links 2/12/10

The Kansas legislature is considering a bill which would prevent insurance companies from covering elective abortions unless the abortion coverage is paid for with an additional payment.


In Florida, a man has been arrested for sexual assault after allegedly impregnating a 12-year-old. Authorities found out about the assault after the girl got a 24-week abortion.


Creative Minority Report notes that a play focusing on abortion has run into difficulty finding a stage. The playwright believes it's because the play has an outspoken prolifer.

“In my opinion, a lot of the old lefty arguments have not been brought up to date, and the right-wing ones have science on their side now,” he argues. “I’ve talked to many people from the pro-choice organizations, and they don’t have anything to say other than it’s a woman’s right to choose. But I do question that and say, ‘Oh yeah? Who says you’ve got the right to choose?’ That’s what a character in the play basically says.”

“I think for women of a particular generation, this isn’t something even to be discussed: It is a basic human right,” Simpson observes. “A consideration of what abortion is, even just on a clinical level, isn’t something that they’re interested in encountering.

Worst assignment ever:

Trying to defend the Woman's Media Center's various reactions to the Focus on the Family Super Bowl ad featuring Pam and Tim Tebow.



Shelby Knox (of The Education of Shelby Knox semi-fame) gets this horrible assignment and even lets it slip that "we're sort of laughing at ourselves" over the assertion that the ad promotes violence against women (which was also apparently "said jokingly").

Life Links 2/11/10

Pro-choice Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi thinks Focus on Family made pro-choice advocates “look silly.”

But some women’s groups foolishly took the bait offered by abortion opponents. When they learned about the ad, they tried to bully CBS into pulling it. That generated a super-sized pre-Super Bowl controversy that helped anti-abortion forces gain even more publicity. Thanks to all the buzz, Focus on the Family happily reported that its website traffic was exploding, subscribers to its magazine were up and a Facebook page for the ad attracted 230,000 fans.....

No supporter of Roe v. Wade can escape the truth. With one choice, you could end up with a strapping son; with another choice, you don’t.

Demonizing the ad featuring this mother and son doesn’t change that. It only helps their cause.

After receiving pressure from prolife groups and the ACLU of Ohio, Speaker Armond Budish will allow National Right to Life’s oratory contest winner Elisabeth Trisler to be honored on the state House floor.


An article in Scientific American notes that a study by Robert Lanza and his colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology has found some problems with induced pluripotent cells. It appears that some of the problems can be fixed by using proteins instead of viruses to produce the cells.


A local ABC stations has an article and video on a young girl with cerebral palsy who was treated with her own umbilical cord stem cells.

The stem cell infusion took only 15 minutes. Back home, the family must report to researchers any changes every 3 months. “Her speech has exploded, unbelievable. She is about what I would consider 85 percent cured from CP. She can walk flatfooted with a leg brace."

A former high school student has filed a wrongful death lawsuit after losing her unborn child after allegedly being roughed up by school security guards while being arrested.

Alabama Planned Parenthood on Probation

A Planned Parenthood located in Birmingham, Alabama has been put on probation after state health department inspectors found their were “problems with the reporting of suspected sexual abuse and how parental consent was obtained for minors.” The investigation was spurred by Live Action’s undercover tape.

Rick Harris, director of the state's Bureau of Health Provider Standards, said Wednesday the clinic did more than was required in some ways but failed to get the signature of minors on its forms verifying parental consent, a technical violation.

"To me this is the problem: You would think that an abortion clinic that intended to be law-abiding would have a lawyer or someone in the facility personally sit down and read what the statute requires and that obviously hadn't been done," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The clinic staff apparently thinks there was nothing suspicious about a 12-year-old have 3 sexual partners (4 by the time she was 13) and have two abortions in the span of four months.

There were also concerns about reporting child abuse. One of the 13-year-olds who received an abortion reported starting having sex at age 12 and having three partners in the previous year. She was back at the clinic for another abortion four months later and said she had now had four sexual partners in her life.

"A reasonable person would suspect abuse or neglect of this 13-year-old child, based on the above," inspectors wrote. "Neither the Registered Nurse, the Medical Doctor, nor any other Center staff reported the suspected abuse or neglect to the authorities as required by law."

A local CBS station has the statement issued by Planned Parenthood of Alabama.

The video of Live Action’s undercover operation is here.

Prolifers are callous towards children?

Rarely do I see a pro-choice blog post with a title containing this much cognitive dissonance: Roundup: Anti-Choicers' Callous Disregard for Children

Apparently, prolife abortion clinic protesters show "callous disregard" for children by protesting at a facility which kills children.

Rachel Larris seems to think holding up graphic pictures of dead unborn children is worse than the killing of those children.

Life Links 2/10/10

It's interesting to hear abortion clinic escorts (who often seems to be proud of how they react to clinic protesters) admit to being so incredibly mean-spirited.


The Boston Globe has an article on abortion clinic protesters who daily picket an abortion clinic which recently moved into a neighborhood close to an elementary school.


Here's an article to make you incredibly wary of stem cell tourism.

A General Medical Council (GMC) hearing was earlier told nine men and women, the majority of whom were suffering from the ''progressive and aggressive'' form of the disabling neurological disease, consulted Dutch-trained Dr Robert Trossel in the desperate hope they could achieve a marked improvement in their health.

The sufferers who travelled to his clinic in Rotterdam raised thousands of pounds to fund the therapy but there was ''no evidence'' that the substance injected into them by Dr Trossel contained stem cells or that it was fit for human use, the GMC earlier heard.

Authorities in Iowa have decided against charging a pregnant woman with attempted feticide after she fell down the stairs. Christine Taylor (who is in her third trimester) said she didn't try to intentionally kill the child but almost blacked out and then tripped down the stairs.

According a police report, nurse Tiffany Prickett said Taylor told her in the emergency room she did not want the baby. "She had asked Christine if she just didn't want the kid tonight, and Christine told her that she hadn't wanted the baby all along," the report said.

Later, the nurse brought in a doctor who asked several other questions about whether she intended to end her pregnancy.

Taylor acknowledges she was very emotional at the hospital.

"I never said I didn't want my baby, but I admitted that I had been considering adoption or abortion," she said. "I admit that I said I wasn't sure I wanted to continue the pregnancy. My husband sends me money, but money doesn't make a parent. I don't have anybody else to turn to."

.....

Taylor said if she really had wanted to end her pregnancy, she knows she could have gone to Planned Parenthood to do so.

"I believe in a woman's right to choose, but for me personally, I just have thought I couldn't sleep at night if I did," she said.

Life Links 2/9/10

In Ohio, House Speaker Armond Budish has turned down a request to honor National Right to Life's oratory contest winner on the house floor.

Perhaps his real message to Ohio's teens is that excelling in public speaking isn't worth being honored if their views are different than his," said Mike Gonidakis, executive director of Ohio Right to Life.

This is somewhat interesting. NARAL Wisconsin's former board president is allegedly a thief.

Katherine M. Venskus, 34, of Oconomowoc, allegedly used the card belonging to Minneapolis-based Public Affairs Company to make $15,473 in unauthorized purchases, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Circuit Court.

Venskus was known as Katherine Heringlake when she pleaded no contest in 2002 to forgery, a felony, for stealing almost $13,000 from the National Abortion Rights Action League of Wisconsin, when she was president of its board of directors.

At least one pro-choice student at McGill University in Canada believes in the freedom of speech. In the McGill Tribune, Brendan Steven takes apart his university's Student Society and their plans to discriminate against the prolife group on campus.

But on Wednesday, a motion will be presented at the GA entitled "Discriminatory Groups" that threatens those very rights. This motion makes some wild claims. It claims that denying a woman access to abortions is "an act of discrimination." On the grounds that pro-life groups are therefore "discriminatory," it seeks to alter SSMU's equity policy to include a clause that would prevent SSMU from granting full or interim club status to any pro-life group. The motion also claims that Choose Life utilized coercive tactics at the now-infamous "Echoes of the Holocaust" event.

This entire motion offends me.

The claim that pro-life groups are fundamentally discriminatory is absurd. It has no rational justification. I make this statement as a person who is fundamentally pro-choice. But that doesn't prevent me from understanding the sincere arguments of the pro-life side of the debate. How is the belief that a fetus is a child discriminatory? Whether life begins at conception is both a scientific and a spiritual question, not a question of sexism.

Living in their own worlds

Sometimes I'm just blown away by how thoughtless people are.

For example, I can’t believe Jessica at Feministing and Jesse at Pandagon are this incredibly thoughtless. They’re actually wondering why the Focus on the Family Super Bowl ad didn’t mention abortion.

But really, I have the same question that Jesse does: "[I]f the anti-choice position is so true, so mainstream and so critical to the future of our nation, why did Focus on the Family spend $2.5 million to avoid saying anything whatsoever about it?"

Ummm.... Maybe because CBS wouldn’t allow it. Remember Focus on the Family had to work with CBS to get their script approved.

Has their own ridiculous “CBS shifted their standards to allow abortion ad” rhetoric influenced them so much that they can’t see the obvious answer?

NARAL's response to Tebow ad

Before Focus on Family's Super Bowl ad aired on Sunday, it appears that NARAL was forced into taking some kind of the position on the ad after a lot their members wondered what they thought.

Their response is here. They basically seem to oppose the ad solely because Focus on the Family is behind it.

Focus on the Family has an unmistakable anti-choice, anti-birth-control, anti-sex-education, and anti-gay agenda. Its views on women are insulting and dangerous.....

Instead of watching Focus on the Family's ad, for 30 seconds, just focus on… something else. Use Facebook and Twitter to tell everyone why you object to the ad and tell them what you'll focus on instead of watching it.

NARAL President Nancy Keenan also did a Huffington Post column and NARAL shot a video of her answering some questions from a NARAL staffer.

Life Links 2/8/10

Pro-choice intolerance is alive and well in Canada where the University of Victoria’s Student Society has taken away the official club status of their campus’ prolife group Youth Protecting Youth “after receiving a complaint that anti-abortion advocacy ‘inherently discriminates’ against women.”


In Nepal, a young man has admitted to killing his girlfriend because she wouldn’t get an abortion.

Dickson Malla, boyfriend of the deceased girl Shushila Sahani, owned up the murder before the police four days after detention.

Malla and Sahani were in a relationship for the past six months and Sahani had been pregnant lately. After being pregnant Sahani tried to convince Mall for marriage, while Malla tried to pressure her for abortion, according to the police.

I called her in the pretext of eloping Tuesday night and pressured her to abort, Malla said. I murdered her as she refused to do so.

It’s really interesting watching pro-choicers squirm through their attempts to reconcile their years of abstinence education bashing with the new study showing one abstinence education program working better than a comprehensive sex ed program at reducing sex among teens.

Jill Filipovic is the latest case. Less than two weeks ago she placed the blame of the rise in pregnancies among 18 and 19-year-olds solely at the feet of abstinence-only education. But now after years of attacking abstinence education, it appears Jill was only opposed to abstinence-until-marriage programs.

Maybe I’m mistaken but I never recall Jill posting anything about how abstinence-only-education could work if it wasn’t abstinence-until-marriage-education. Instead, I recall numerous over-generalized comments which attacked any abstinence-only-education and lumped every kind of abstinence education together as bible-thumping moralizing (just like her recent column which assumes every abstinence-until-marriage program amounts teaches “condoms don't work and premarital sex is immoral” ).

Jill thinks the successful abstinence-only program “was exactly what the abstinence portion of a good comprehensive sex-ed class would look like. And it adds to the body of evidence that medically accurate, non-shaming sexual health education is the best and most effective kind of sex ed out there.”

Except that the abstinence-only program wasn’t a sex ed program. Students were less likely to have sex if they were in the abstinence-only program as opposed to the comprehensive program. Jill still seems to be having a hard time accepting the results of the study which show abstinence-only working better among some children than comprehensive program.

Thanks for the free publicity NOW

The downright stupidity of NOW never ceases to amaze me. Even after Focus on Family’s incredibly subdued Tebow ads (pre-game ad and game ad) aired and anyone whose IQ isn’t two standard deviations below the norm realized the ads were nothing to get worked up about (they weren’t political or controversial), NOW is doubling down and acting like one of the ads, which jokingly shows Tim tackling his mother, was offensive.

NOW president Terry O'Neill said it glorified violence against women. "I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it," she said. "That's what comes across to me even more strongly than the anti-abortion message. I myself am a survivor of domestic violence, and I don't find it charming. I think CBS should be ashamed of itself."

How messed up is the pro-choice movement when Frances Kissling seems like the lone voice of reason?

Not all abortion-rights supporters agreed. "It's absurd to claim that this is an endorsement of violence against women," said Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for Choice. "These people came across as affectionate, loving, funny and happy."

But, Kissling said, Focus on the Family was lucky that abortion-rights groups raised objections. "If there had not been all of that publicity over the last two weeks, this ad could have passed almost unnoticed. Who would have known what they're talking about? It's so subtle."

It’s especially fun to read ignorant pre-Super Bowl columns like this one from NBC sports contributor Mike Celizic. Or this one from the New Republic’s Michelle Cottle who didn’t think CBS should air the ad because she’s a “protective parent.”

Oh yeah. Randall Terry is not part of the prolife movement as far as I am concerned. Please go away and never come back.

Friday Baby Blogging

Doesn't Planned Parenthood at least have some D-list athletes?

Seriously? Sean James? Never heard of him before? Yeah me neither. Because he was an undrafted free agent who signed with Minnesota Vikings in 1991 and retired from football shortly thereafter.



Why can't either James or Joyner say the word "abortion." That's what they're talking about but if someone wasn't familiar with the abortion debate and how pro-choice organizations are constantly trying to frame abortion and come up with new ways of making child-killing seem reasonable, then they'd have no clue what they were talking about.

"Every woman will be valued?"

Does that mean Planned Parenthood is now going to oppose sex-selection abortions? Not likely.

Life Links 2/4/10

Scientists have discovered that they can find signs of awareness in patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state.

The new research suggests that standard tests may overlook patients who have some consciousness, and that someday some kind of communication may be possible.

In the strongest example, a 29-year-old patient was able to answer yes-or-no questions by visualizing specific scenes the doctors asked him to imagine. The two visualizations sparked different brain activity viewed through a scanning machine.

"We were stunned when this happened," said one study author, Martin Monti of Medical Research Council Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. "I find it literally amazing. This was a patient who was believed to be vegetative for five years."

A car crash which led to the deaths of twin unborn children is re-opening the debate in Vermont over a prenatal protection law.

As Cardinal’s Subaru wagon approached the Wolcott/Morristown line, it collided head-on with a Subaru sedan driven by 19-year-old Ian Masse of Craftsbury.

Later that day, as Cardinal struggled at the hospital with numerous injuries from the crash, she learned that her twin fetuses — she was eight months pregnant — didn’t survive.

This recent accident is similar to another car accident which occurred in August.

If her story sounds familiar, it is eerily similar to that of Patricia Blair, a Bennington woman who lost her six-month twin fetuses in a car crash in August. Blair was outraged to learn that charges against the other driver in her crash would not relate to the deaths of her fetuses. She is fighting for changes in state law that would allow that.

Theo Caldwell writes in Canada’s National Post about finding common ground on abortion.

Meanwhile in this country, a recent Angus Reid poll finds that only one in five Canadians is aware that our abortion law (or lack thereof) permits a woman to have unrestricted access to abortion at any time during her pregnancy. Contrary to the received wisdom about Canadians’ social attitudes, the poll found that “respondents are almost evenly divided on whether the health care system should fund abortions whenever they are requested.”

Abortion is often described as a “divisive” issue — usually by those who want the other side to give up. Yet there is common ground. One finding of the Angus Reid poll, for instance, tells us that: “A large majority of Canadians (79%) would back an initiative in their own province that would make it mandatory for health care workers to offer information to pregnant women about alternatives to abortion.” This suggests most people agree that even if abortion will never again be illegal, it remains broadly undesirable — a last option when others have been exhausted....

So, what if we agreed that, as long as public money subsidizes abortion, an equal or greater amount should go toward a mechanism to find homes for unwanted babies?

California Medical Board: We let one troubled abortionist monitor another troubled abortionist

The California Medical Board allowed Christopher Dotson, abortionist who previously had faced disciplinary action, to monitor abortionist Andrew Rutland, who (while supposedly being monitored) botched an abortion which led to a woman's death.

Even before the death of the abortion patient last year, both doctors had had serious run-ins with regulators. In a high-profile case, Rutland surrendered his license in 2002 after the medical board accused him of mishandling the deliveries of two infants who died. He was allowed to return to practice under certain conditions, including that his work be monitored by another doctor.

Records show Dotson also had been accused of mishandling two cases in which patients died....

In 2007, Dotson and a second physician, Josepha Seletz, of Eve Surgical Center, agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit over the death of a mother of two, according to documents filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The family alleged that the woman, Oriane Shevin, was improperly given Mifepristone -- which is used for early pregnancy termination -- and did not receive proper follow-up care, the documents show. As a result, the family said in the court records, she acquired a fatal infection.....

Records show that Dotson wrote favorably on behalf of the accused physician, even after the abortion patient died.

In an Oct. 9 report to the state, for instance, Dotson wrote: "Dr. Rutland and I discussed at length the tragic death of a patient by the name of Ying Chen who after the injection of a local anesthetic preparatory for a pregnancy termination suffered an anaphylactic reaction. In spite of appropriate resuscitation efforts, she succumbed in the hospital.

"In my opinion, Dr. Rutland is taking his probation very seriously and doing everything he can to more than meet the requisite requirements."

William Heisel has more on Dotson's background.

Dotson was among the rarest of the rare, a doctor who had been reported to the medical board by his hospital. Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles said Dotson had been negligent in the treatment of multiple patients. He lost his privileges to practice there.

One of Dotson’s patients died following an abortion in February 1992. The board said that Dotson failed to adequately examine her and should have classified her case as high risk. Because he did not, the board said, the patient ended up bleeding severely from her uterus. Dotson was not prepared to respond. He did not have the right equipment, and he was not able to give her a blood transfusion quickly enough.

Heisel also notes that Rutland asked for Dotson to be his supervisor.

Life Links 2/3/10

Sally Jenkins on NOW's reaction to Focus on the Family's Super Bowl ad with Tim Tebow:

I'm pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I've heard in the past week, I'll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the "National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time." For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow's 30-second ad hasn't even run yet, but it already has provoked "The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us" to reveal something important about themselves: They aren't actually "pro-choice" so much as they are pro-abortion.

Ouch.


Amie Newman shows how lazy some bloggers at the RH Reality Check blog are. She wonders openly about how Focus on the Family got the money for their Super Bowl ad.

Ummm.... do some research. Besides Focus' press release there are more than a few articles out there where Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger talks about how the ad was funded.

"Every cent for this ad was paid for by generous donors who specifically gave for this project because they are excited about this opportunity for Focus to show who we are and what we do," Schneeberger said.

A woman from South Dakota named Paula Barber who has MS is claiming she received an embryonic stem cell treatment in Mexico. At that leading scientific center of Tijuana, no less.

Some people are so incredibly gullible.

When does abstinence education = comprehensive sex ed

When delusional pro-choicers like Robin Marty can't deal with the reality that one type of abstinence education might work better at delaying sexual activity than a type of comprehensive sex ed.

After quoting the Washington Post article on the story, Marty deceptively describes the study like this:

A class that says you should wait to have sex, and that a condom might be a good thing to use? Call me crazy, but that sounds like a sex ed class to me.

Ummm..... when did the article ever say the study said condoms were a good thing to use?

Oh, right.... it didn't. It just said the study didn't disparage condom use. It didn't say anything about telling kids that condoms were a good thing to use.

This is one to remember when pro-choicers act like they're objective pragmatists who really care about what science teaches us about how to delay teenage sexual activity.

Marty's delusions continue:

Reasonable parties have always wanted to teach a comprehensive approach that tells teens that you should wait to have sex, but if you don't, you need to protect yourself and your partner from pregnancy and disease, especially via the use of condoms.

This latest study totally supports those findings.

Ummm... no they don't. They showed that kids which received the comprehensive sex ed class were more likely to engage in sex than children who received the abstinence-only class.

Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.

Why are they angry with the Tebow ad again?

At Feministe, Jill claims pro-choice feminists aren't upset with Focus on the Family's Super Bowl ad featuring Tim Tebow, they're just mad at CBS for supposedly having double standards.

It’s that CBS has, for the past few years, regularly rejected ads from left-of-center organizations — MoveOn.org, PeTA, and the United Church of Christ. CBS was clear that it did not accept ads on contentious or controversial subjects such as, apparently, democracy, animal rights and gay rights. But an ad about abortion, from Focus on the Family — one of the most radical, right-leaning organizations out there? Apparently totally fine.

Maybe Jill hasn't been following this topic very closely (or maybe her she thinks everything pro-choice opinion mirrors hers on this issue) but there have been more than a couple feminists and feminist organizations who have opposed the ad for more than just CBS' supposed double standard.

For example, NOW's President had this to say about the ad she hasn't seen,

NOW President Terry O'Neil told the Associated Press that the planned ad is "extraordinarily offensive and demeaning."

"That's not being respectful of other people's lives," O'Neill said. "It is offensive to hold one way out as being a superior way over everybody else's."

Others have accused Pam Tebow of lying about the being counseled to have an abortion because abortion is illegal in the Phillipines.

I think this is about a little more than thinking CBS has double standards. At least for some people.

Life Links 2/2/10

The Washington Post has an article on a new study showing that abstinence-only education was more successful in delaying sexual activities among African-American middle-school students than other types of sex education.

The study released Monday involved 662 African American students from four public middle schools in a city in the Northeastern United States. It was conducted between 2001 and 2004.

Students were randomly assigned to go through one of the following: an eight-hour curriculum that encouraged them to delay having sex; an eight-hour program focused on teaching safe sex; an eight- or 12-hour program that did both; or an eight-hour program focused on teaching them other ways to be healthy, such as eating well and exercising. The abstinence-only portion involved a series of sessions in which instructors talked to students in small groups about their views about abstinence and their knowledge of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. They also conducted role-playing exercises and brainstorming sessions designed to correct misconceptions about sex and sexually transmitted diseases, encourage abstinence and offer ways to resist pressure to have sex.

Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.

I'm amazed that a single 8-hour program could have this kind of significant results.


Never known from shying away from saying something incredibly stupid, the View's Joy Behar said that Tim Tebow could have "easily become some kind of a rapist pedophile."


A group of stem cell researchers are claiming that a small group of scientists are blocking their work from being published.

The open letter to the major scientific journals claims that "papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile. At the same time publication of truly original findings may be delayed or rejected"....

These kinds of allegations are not new and not confined to stem cell research. But professors Smith and Lovell-Badge believe that the problem has become particularly acute in their field of research recently for two reasons.

Firstly, research grants and career progression are now determined almost entirely by whether a scientist gets published in a major research journal. Secondly, in stem cell science, hundreds of millions of pounds are available for research - and so there is a greater temptation for those that want the money to behave unscrupulously.

In the UK, the papers are ablaze with the story of soccer star John Terry's affair with an ex-teammate's now former girlfriend and how she had an abortion after becoming pregnant.

Kim Kozlowski is a U-M employee posing as a Detroit News reporter

This Detroit News article on the lack of genetic diversity among embryonic stem cell lines is absolutely ridiculous. Kim Kozlowski has obviously been in the bag for embryonic stem cell research for a while but this article could be a University of Michigan press release.

Notice how she doesn't get a single quote from any one opposed to embryonic stem cell research or a quote from any legislator in favor of current legislation to regulate embryonic stem cell research.

Sean Morrison is allowed to lay down this blatant lie unopposed.

But this work won't proceed if lawmakers make laws regulating embryonic stem cell research that was approved by voters in 2008, Morrison said. On Jan. 20, a six-bill package was voted out of the Michigan Senate Health Policy Committee and is now headed to the full Senate floor. Proponents say some parameters are needed but opponents say it would halt the research.

Here's a question most high school reporters would consider asking Morrison:

How would the bills prevent U-M researchers from do research on human embryos donated by African-American parents?

I would love to hear Morrison's response to that basic question.

I feel so sorry for people like Amy Jackson. Here she is caring for her husband with Parkinson's and hoping he could one day be cured. And then you have these vultures like Sean Morrison come by with their white lab coats and act like embryonic stem cells are going to cure him, intentionally giving this woman false hope. All so Sean Morrison can get some more research funds and do whatever research he wants. Morrison knows that providing basic regulations to the embryonic stem cell industry isn't going to stop the non-existent flow of cures. It can't even prevent him from killing human embryos.

And then you have reporters like Kim Kozlowski who aid and abet researchers like Morrison and allow them to prey on people's ignorance, hope and trust in scientists.

Not so much - Obama's abortion reduction proposals

I'll be sure to have this article by Newsweek’s Lisa Miller on hand the next time some liberal prolifer tells me that Obama is supposedly working hard to reduce abortion (or at least “reduce the need for abortion”) based on Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Insiders say that the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships—an advisory panel on values that the president launched last year to much fanfare—is all but a sham. Its members, two dozen faith leaders from diverse backgrounds and traditions, can't agree on anything but the most watered-down positions; some doubt that their policy recommendations—on global poverty, fatherhood, and interfaith dialogue—due out this month will get any kind of hearing inside the West Wing.

Life Links 2/1/10

Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman offer some advice to pro-choice groups on how to learn a lesson from Focus of Family’s prolife ad featuring Pam and Tim Tebow.

For abortion rights supporters, picking on Tim Tebow and his mom is not the way to go. Instead of trying to block or criticize the Focus on the Family ad, the pro-choice movement needs its own Super Bowl strategy. People want to be inspired, and abortion is as tough and courageous a decision as is the decision to continue a pregnancy. But the conversation is being led by Focus on the Family and its quarterback ambassador. It's a high-profile example of the savvy way the antiabortion movement has tailored its message.

Interestingly, it appears neither of them knew Tim Tebow was born in the Philliphines where abortion is illegal.

Pam Tebow was indeed courageous and had the legal right to choose, a point the pro-choice movement can readily make in response to the ad.

They also note how science has played a role in making people more prolife.


The New York Times also thinks the reaction of pro-choice groups to the Tebow ad is “puzzling and dismaying.”

A letter sent to CBS by the Women’s Media Center and other groups argues that the commercial “uses one family’s story to dictate morality to the American public, and encourages young women to disregard medical advice, putting their lives at risk” — a lame attempt to portray the ad as life-threatening.

CatholicEducation.org has Professor Robert George’s comments at the March for Life’s Rose Dinner.

Of course, from the pro-life vantage point, success on the judicial front is only the prelude to the larger political struggle over abortion. If Roe is reversed, the result will be to return the matter to the domain of ordinary democratic deliberation for resolution by the state legislatures or the Congress. The burden will then be on the pro-life movement to win the struggle for the soul of the nation. We must, with God's help, persuade our fellow citizens to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence by bringing the unborn fully within the protection of our laws.

A local prolife group in Canada will air an ad on local television featuring images of aborted children.