Life Links 9/30/11

A Kansas law restricting the coverage of elective abortion in insurance coverage will stand while a court challenge takes place.

Ruling in Wichita, U.S. Senior District Judge Wesley Brown found that the ACLU failed to prove that the Legislature's primary motive was to create obstacles for women seeking an abortion.

The law bans private insurers from providing elective abortion coverage in Kansas unless the procedure is necessary to save the mother's life. The bill allows coverage for abortion, but women have to buy a separate rider at additional cost.

"On its face, the act does nothing to directly prohibit or restrict a woman from obtaining an abortion," Brown wrote in his 19-page opinion.

Scott Klusendorf shares his thoughts on Ray Comfort's "180" film.


A Planned Parenthood in Flagstaff is warning of future back alley abortions since women from Flagstaff area seeking abortions are now referred to a Planned Parenthood in Phoenix because Arizona's law no longer lets nurse practitioners do abortions. The reality that Planned Parenthood can't find an abortionist with a medical license willing to go to Flagstaff is somehow everyone else's fault.

Otterstein, the nurse practitioner in Planned Parenthood's Flagstaff clinic, said her 30 years of experience suggests that women won't stop having abortions but may opt for unsafe procedures, including late-term abortions caused by saving for travel expenses.

"I'm very sure we're going to see illegal abortions crop up, which can be very serious because they can lead to deaths," she said.

Yes, because we've never heard this scare tactic before. Oh wait.....parental consent, waiting periods, etc.


We know not much work is happening at the women's studies department at Purdue. Here's how one employee responded to the Genocide Awareness Project being on campus.

Laurie Graham, assistant director of women's studies, said someone emailed her and told her about the protest. When she saw it herself on the way home for lunch, she was horrified.

She returned with a sign supporting the right to choose. She and a colleague spent the afternoon receiving high-fives from passing students and gathering signatures of support.

"It's not genocide; it's not the Holocaust; it's not racial lynching," Graham said, referring to the graphic images. "I'm so offended by the whole thing. I thought I've just got to do something."

Life Links 9/29/11

Mexico's Supreme Court upheld Baja California's abortion law.

After three days of debate, the justices opposing the measure fell one vote short of the eight needed to declare the legislation unconstitutional.

The state law establishes an obligation to protect life from the moment of conception and treats unborn children as persons.

One of the Thai morgue workers who hid the remains of aborted children has been sentenced to 3 years in jail.


An online Vancouver news source reports on Canadian abortion advocate Joyce Arthur's opposition to laws prohibiting prostitution.

"I saw a lot of parallels between the abortion issue and the sex-work issue," Arthur explained, quickly adding that it's not a "perfect" comparison.

First off, she said, sex work and abortion involve women having control over their bodies, rather than letting the state interfere with their choices. Both issues are linked in their own way to sexual expression. In addition, she noted that nobody likes to have an abortion. And many people also don't like the existence of the sex trade.

Bills to ban partial-birth abortion in Michigan will soon be signed by Governor Snyder. The most noteworthy part of this article is that the reporter actually describes partial-birth abortion. How often does that happen?

Life Links 9/28/11

At First Things, Joe Carter discusses reproductive technologies.

However, there are some methods and approaches that are indisputably unethical and temptations to act immorally abound.

A prime example is the routine practice of creating "excess embryos", a practice that is common, though not essential, to IVF. The procedure is inherently expensive, often costing between $10,000 and $30,000 per treatment and the likelihood of success is dismally low. Even the best of techniques offers less than a 50 percent chance that a live birth will occur. Because of these obstacles, couples are often tempted to set aside ethical concerns in order to increase the chances of fulfilling their desire for a child.

RH Reality Check's Jodi Jacobson has a hilarious post about Congressman Cliff Stearns' letter to and investigation of Planned Parenthood. She attacks him because the legislation isn't about jobs.

You know how jobs, the deficit, lack of health care, and the country's economic crisis are top priorities?

Florida Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns apparently does not......

Note to Congressman Stearns: Your own state has 10.7 percent unemployment. Think there might be better things to do?.....

While we wait for accountability of corporations, banks, and other entities responsible for the current economic crisis, while people struggle with unemployment, job uncertainty and lack of health insurance, the far right finds new and more invasive ways to crawl up women's legs.

Hmmmm..... Where was Jacobson's focus on jobs, jobs, jobs, when she was promoting legislation to regulate pregnancy centers or supporting a bill to permanently ban the Mexico City policy?


This is great news. A study has found chemotherapy doesn't harm unborn children.

Chemotherapy is safe for children born to mothers undergoing treatment for cancer, according to a study that may result in fewer abortions and premature deliveries.

Babies born at full-term to women who received cell- killing drugs while pregnant had normal health and intelligence at 18 months, the study found. Children induced prematurely in order to hasten treatment for the mother, representing two- thirds of the babies studied, were more likely to have lower intelligence scores. The results were presented at a cancer conference in Stockholm today.

"Frequently, because of the fear of chemotherapy, clinicians induce delivery and start to treat the mother," Amant said at a briefing with reporters in Stockholm. "Our message is actually that we prefer to give chemotherapy until the fetus is mature."

Life Links 9/27/11

A Colorado abortion clinic has withdrawn its application for a local grant for its teen clinic (which doesn't provide abortions) after community members spoke out against the grant.

The agency, which has operated a teen clinic in Longmont for five years and received city funding for eight, had asked for a $14,000 grant. City staff recommended it receive $11,000, but several residents objected to Boulder Valley Women's Health Clinic's being funded at all.

There appear to be at least a couple of San Francisco supervisors who aren't raving pro-aborts. Proponents of legislating the advertising activities of pregnancy centers didn't get everyone on their side.

Supervisors, after being briefed by the city attorney, said that in order to mount a strong defense against a likely legal challenge, the city would have to produce a record of false and misleading advertising.

But both Supervisors John Avalos and Sean Elsbernd, who serve on the committee, said such a record wasn't demonstrated. The best legislative backers could come up with were reviews on Yelp and a search on Google when people plugged in the phrase "abortions in San Francisco" and Plunkett's First Resort organization popped up as the second link.

"This legislative record here, to me, is empty," Elsbernd said.

And don't miss this quote from Supervisor Malia Cohen, the main proponent of the legislation,

"This legislation has been carefully crafted to ensure a balance between protecting the most vulnerable members of our communities and protecting the constitutional rights of everyone."

Talent contract for an unborn baby?

"Toddlers and Tiaras" stage moms, take note. Lorenzo Lamas' pregnant daughter, "The Bachelor" winner Shayne Lamas, is contemplating signing her fetus with a talent agency.

TMZ reports that the reality star's unborn child may have an agent with talent management company Z Group, who have presented a contract. Lamas, 25, and husband Nik Richie won't welcome the baby for another two months.

Forbes reporter Seema Singh shows bias and ignorance on stem cells

Media bias? What media bias? Here's Forbes reporter Seema Singh completely editorializing (and doing so poorly) in the first sentence of a story about stem cells.

A decade after George Bush set the clock back for stem cell research, the science is showing signs of regeneration.

Nowhere in the story is President Bush's stem cell policy described or is any evidence put forward that Bush's decision to limit U.S. federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research to already created lines "set the clock back."

Is there no editor at Forbes India?

That's okay because that kind of writing gets you a job teaching journalism.

Overheard: The prolife cause is by definition uncivil?

Amanda Marcotte's provide her thoughts about what civility is. Being mean and calling names is okay as long as you're using facts (or at least what Marcotte believes are facts).

I think the lesson in all this is that there are limits to the concept of civil discourse. I appreciate Goodman's desire for people to turn down the volume on the hostility and anger---her lecture was to be titled "A Civil Tongue: Welcome to the era of polarized politics, food fight cable shows, and ballistic blogging. How civility was shattered, who is winning, who is losing, and how do we call a truce to the mud wrestling"---but there's really no way for anti-choicers to conduct themselves civilly when promoting their cause. After all, the cause itself is uncivil. Civil people don't nose around in other people's private lives, try to impose their weird religious dogma on the unwilling, or try to destroy other people's pleasure just for the sake of doing it. But that is functionally what the anti-choice movement is about......

My conception of an ideal civil political discourse has less to do with turning down the snark and the name-calling than it does turning up the reliance on facts and reason. If our political system became more civil, it would do serious damage therefore to the anti-choice cause.

Life Links 9/23/11

At Public Discourse, Christopher Kaczor responds to Dennis O'Brien's "Can We Talk about Abortion" piece.

O'Brien does not deny the harm of abortion, but he does seek to contextualize it in the intimacy of gestation. The reality of pregnancy—the unique, intimate relationship of the human being in utero and the pregnant woman—changes the ethics of feticide: "The pregnant woman's womb is not just a geographic location for an independent entity that would be the same if it were located someplace else." To deny this reality is to reduce the pregnant woman to a "container."

The intimacy argument, as articulated by O'Brien, begs an important question: Why should independent moral status require independent physical status? We don't think that one conjoined twin may licitly or legally authorize a third party to kill her conjoined sister in order to terminate their intimate relationship. Indeed, the intimate relationship that always exists in pregnancy is a powerful argument against abortion. Every human fetus is a mammal, and every mammal has a mother. Sound ethical reasoning and just laws hold that human mothers and fathers have serious duties to care for and, above all, not harm their own dependent progeny. So, the intimate relationship that exists in every pregnancy gives rise to the duty of the mother not to harm her own child prior to or after birth, including by prematurely ending the child's life. Precisely because an expectant woman is a mother rather than a mere container, she has duties to her dependent unborn child.

Canada will start funding International Planned Parenthood again. This time only in countries where abortion is illegal.

Planned Parenthood, which provides an array of sexual and reproductive health services, including abortions, abortion counselling and training for providers, is getting the federal funding after Oda let the agency's previous request sit on her desk for a year without a response, and after a Conservative MP told an anti-abortion group that the government wouldn't be giving the organization any money.

Oda's decision to approve Planned Parenthood's proposal comes more than a year after Canada was embroiled in controversy over whether to fund abortions as part of a G8 commitment to improve maternal health in developing countries.....

The funding is worth $6 million over three years for Planned Parenthood to work in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Mali, Sudan and Tanzania, where abortions are illegal except in cases where the mother's life is at risk.

Pro-Life News of the Day reviews a recent story on Jezebel about a woman who allegedly went to a CPC in New York, thinking it was an abortion clinic.

Some things are just too much for the human heart to handle, and the knowledge that you're responsible for the death of a real live human being is one of them. She initially felt that the pregnancy center volunteers were honest and kind. But she can no longer feel that way, not after making the decision she made. And so, she demonizes the pregnancy center movement in an effort to avoid her grief. It isn't working, though: she says that "It's taken me the two years since [the abortion] not to break down every time I think about it."

Friday Baby Blogging

Go Blue

Big Smile

Life Links 9/22/11

Gender Across Borders has a series entitled "Tsk Tsk: Stigma, Shame, and Sexuality Series" in which a variety of writers discuss various feminist issues. The couple of posts I read had the following interesting quotes:

Lindsay Smith in "Oh, the Things These Socks Have Seen" discusses the reactions of her pro-choice friends to her having a second trimester abortion which was also her second abortion.

I have also been met with admonition upon disclosing that I was in my second trimester when I decided to have my second procedure. It's dismaying to learn that some of the most "dedicated" pro-choice supporters still subscribe to the idea that more than one abortion is irresponsible and that anything later than 6 weeks is cruel.

Paige Johnson, Vice President for Public Policy at Planned Parenthood Central North Carolina, in "Abortion, Small Towns, and Young Lives" describes abortion by saying:

Abortion is a life-giving, life-saving, dream-granting, mistake-forgiving medical procedure. No one likes being told what they should be grateful for but I don't know anything more life-changing or central as the right to decide when to have a child.

Robin Marty may have not fully comprehended this quote from an article she linked to about a mother with two uteruses.

The biology is routine: Egg plus sperm equals baby.

Whoops. You don't want that kind of biology info on the RH Reality Check web site, do ya?


Police in Spokane have served a warrant to Planned Parenthood for the remains of an unborn child aborted at their facility.

Police records say a 15-year-old girl became pregnant by a 21-year-old man in early August.

When her parents learned about the pregnancy from her school at the end of that month they took the teenager to Planned Parenthood......

According to detectives, if they pull the DNA they can match it to prove paternity, and prove the allegation of third degree rape of a child.

DNA testing can take several weeks and will likely be done with the help of the medical examiners office and the Washington State Crime Lab.

It's unclear who initially reported the alleged rape, but both schools and Planned Parenthood have to follow reporting laws.

$5 dollars says it wasn't Planned Parenthood who reported the alleged rape.


The Shelby County Commission has voted 6-4 to defer the decision to defund Planned Parenthood. Basically, the Democrats on the commission want to give Planned Parenthood funding despite Christ Community Health Center scoring higher on a checklist of service-related criteria.

Life Links 9/21/11

A Wisconsin man is facing homicide charges after his reckless driving resulted in the death of 5-month-old unborn child.

Emmy Kiecker wept Monday in Winnebago County Court during a preliminary hearing for Ozment as she gave the details of the crash that resulted in the death of her fetus. She was five months along with a normal pregnancy at the time of the crash, according to the testimony.

Ozment, 22, was driving a car south on County H near River Trail Drive in the Town of Wolf River when he came around a curve in the road, lost control of his vehicle and zigzagged into the front driver portion of Kiecker's car.

The Washington Post editorial board is wailing about Virginia new abortion regulations. They think it is "already hard" to get an abortion in a state where 26,000 abortions were performed last year.


Pro-choice columnist Ellen Goodman was dis-invited from speaking at a Catholic college in Pennsylvania because of her abortion views.

St. Francis University in Loretto, Pa., has canceled a lecture on civility by the syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman after an advocacy group called attention to her strong public support for abortion rights.

"After careful consideration, the university feels that the body of your work has reflected statements that are not in close enough alignment with some Catholic teachings and with the values and mission of the university as required for an event of this stature," provost Wayne Powel wrote to the Pulitzer Prize winner.

Life Links 9/19/11

In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last writes about China's one-child policy and its supporters.

It's hard to know what's at the root of all this admiration. Part of it may be a reaction to the gauche American habit of having children. Push environmentalists hard enough and eventually they devolve into overpopulation hysterics. Or perhaps appreciating One-Child is, like following professional soccer, just a way of peacocking moral superiority.

But the more charitable (and likely) explanation is that people who claim to admire China's One-Child policy simply don't know very much about it. Like where it came from. Or how it actually works. Or what it has really done to China's demographics. Joe Biden may not be willing to second guess One-Child, but many Chinese demographers are doing just that because they are terrified by what it has done to their country. The people who care most about One-Child—the Chinese—spend a lot of time these days not praising the policy but trying to figure a way out of it. Because it turns out that One-Child wasn't so much a policy as a trap.

At the end, Last discusses how years of China's one-child policy may have so dramatically changed how the Chinese view children that even if it was rescinded, it wouldn't matter.


Along those same lines, here's an article in the China Post about the rising trend in Taiwan for married couples to abort their first child. Taiwan's total fertility rate in 2010 was 0.895.


Pro-choice tolerance at it's finest. Georgia State students mindlessly chant "Trust Black women" but don't listen to a black woman who wants to speak to them.


A ballot proposal to legalize abortion in Liechtenstein failed.

Opponents won the referendum with a majority of 514 votes, out of 11,510 ballots cast. The official count put no-votes at 52.3 percent, ahead of 47.7 percent who favored the plan to decriminalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy or if the child is severely disabled.

The local DC FOX affiliate has an interview/debate on Virginia's new abortion regulations between Chris Freund, vice president of The Family Foundation and Tarina Keene, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Life Links 9/16/11

Yesterday, the Virginia Board of Health voted 12-1 to approve Virginia's new regulations for abortion clinics. All Governor McDonell's appointees voted in favor of it and 3 of former Governor Tim Kaine's nominees voted in favor of it as well. The law will take effect on January 1.

Representatives of the Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Roanoke are crying because they'll need to spend "hundreds of thousands" to bring their clinic into compliance. Planned Parenthood's web lists 6 clinics in Virginia which provide "abortion services."


In response to the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform's Truth Truck, a pro-choice individual has created a pro-choice comic book called "Think Pro-Choice," though there's not much thinking in it. Notably, they don't include the Truth Truck images and have a little blurb noting that "CCBR images would be UNACCEPTABLE in mainstream media."

And why would that be? Is it because they show the remains of a tiny human being mutilated by abortion choice.


In the Calgary Herald, Susan Martinuk discusses the Canadian case in which a mother guilty of infanticide was let off.

This determination that human life somehow has a lesser value when first born is the logical ending to decades of abortion PR, convincing women — and apparently girls — that human life has no value at any time while in the womb. Based on this decision, that devaluation has now been taken one step further in that a child has no value when first born. It makes one wonder where the cut-off date now stands for the state to protect a live child. Will that line soon move to a week? A month?

New York's NBC affiliate has a story on a child whose heart was drained of fluid before he was born.

Life Links 9/15/11

Virginia's State Board of Health will vote the proposed abortion clinic regulations today. The local CBS channel has video of the dueling protests.


A South Dakota man has been charged with trying to kill an unborn child by spiking his girlfriend's drink. He was extradited from Puerto Rico and faces up to 25 years in jail.

Vargas allegedly gave his girlfriend Blue Cohosh over a period from January to May of 2010, according to Pennington County chief deputy state's attorney Lara Roetzel.

"She became suspicious and contacted law enforcement," Roetzel said.

Blue Cohosh is known to induce labor or abortion in early term pregnancies, Roetzel said.

The woman delivered a healthy baby, she said.

The lack of parking spaces and the unwillingness of any area business to provide parking spaces has led Planned Parenthood to abandon its plans to build a clinic at a location in Redwood, California.

The surprise revelation came one week before the Redwood City City Council was to decide whether to allow the women's health organization to operate on El Camino Real despite the opposition of abortion foes.

It closed the book on an eight-month saga that included protests, a formal appeal, and a scramble by Planned Parenthood to find nine off-site parking spaces required by the clinic's use permit.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car had agreed to provide those spaces to the clinic across the street at 2890 El Camino Read, but later backed out of the deal.

At Public Discourse, Adam MacLeod writes about "Assisted Suicide: The Forgotten Front in the Fight for Life" in light of news that a Massachusetts voters will decide on a ballot initiative which hopes to legalize assisted suicide.


Indiana's fight to defund Planned Parenthood will remain up in the air until at least December. Planned Parenthood has continued to receive Medicaid funding since a temporary injunction was granted.

Overheard: Sex selection abortions haunt Indian woman

From an article in PRI's The World on sex selection abortions:

Anu is now 50 and can no longer get pregnant, but she can’t completely move on. She says the four abortions haunt her.

“I feel a very strong connection to the pregnancies,” she says. “Even now, I remember them all. When I sit doing nothing, I remember them all.”

Now, every time something goes wrong in her life, she thinks she is being punished. When her husband gets sick, she blames the abortions. When she has trouble finding suitable husbands for her daughters, she blames the abortions.

Anu used to pray and ask for a son. Now, she prays and asks for forgiveness.

“I aborted a child,” she says. “I feel I’ve sinned.”

Life Links 9/14/11

Both CBS News and the Amarillo Globe-News are covering Father Frank Pavone's suspension and his appeal to Rome.


A Michigan police officer has been arrested for killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child. He was supposedly on duty when he killed her and was at the scene of the crime the day after her body was found.


In Tennessee, Shelby County has decided against contracting out family planning services to Planned Parenthood. Instead, Christ Community Health Services will receive the 400k grant.


However, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England will receive $1 million dollars in family planning money after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took over the funding dispersal when New Hampshire's Executive Council was unable to find an alternative provider.

The question of the Planned Parenthood contract divided the all-Republican Executive Council. Yesterday, Councilor David Wheeler, one of the three councilors who voted against the contract, said the federal decision reveals the "arrogance" of the Obama administration. Wheeler, who lives in Milford, said he voted against all 11 family planning contracts decided in June because the federal family planning program allows referrals for abortion.

No prison time for mother who strangled newborn son in Canada

A Canadian judge has given a woman who killed her infant a 3-year suspended sentence for infanticide. Katrina Effert won't spend any more time in jail. According to this article in the Montreal Gazette, Effert has spent approximately 8 months in custody during the six years since she strangled her newborn son.

In one of the most extremely backwards statements ever made in history of the universe, Court of Queen's Bench Justice Joanne Veit said:

"Naturally Canadians are grieved by an infant's death, especially at the hands of the infant's mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother."

Why? Effert isn't dead. She's a killer. She hid her pregnancy, strangled her own child, tossed his body over a fence and then tried to cover up her crime.

Who in their right mind is grieving that a baby-killer had to spend 8 months in jail and then had to be supervised by her parents for 6 years?

Life Links 9/13/11

The Kansas Board of Healing Arts is holding hearings to determine if former abortionist Ann Kristin Neuhaus inadequately approved late-term abortions for abortionist George Tiller. Neuhaus was formerly Tiller's second-opinion rubber stamp for girls and women who wanted post 22-week abortions.

A complaint before the State Board of Healing Arts deals with Neuhaus' care for 11 patients — ages 10 to 18 — all at least 25 weeks pregnant, who received abortions from July to November 2003. Kansas law permits the abortion of a viable fetus starting at the 22nd week of pregnancy only if the woman faces death or "substantial and irreversible" harm to "a major bodily function," which in 2003 included mental health. Neuhaus diagnosed the young patients seeking abortions with anxiety disorder, acute stress disorder and single-episode major depression

Planned Parenthood of Arizona says it will no longer challenge Arizona's 2009 prolife law which restricts abortion in a variety of ways.

- Requiring a woman seeking an abortion to meet in person with a doctor 24 hours before the scheduled abortion.

- Allowing only physicians to perform first-trimester surgical abortions.

- Requiring that parental consent for minors seeking an abortion be notarized.

- Allowing health-care workers, including pharmacists, to decline to provide information or access to abortion, emergency contraception or birth control based on their personal beliefs.

Planned Parenthood of Arizona's president and CEO, Bryan Howard, said there were two reasons for the decision not to appeal: Financial and resource challenges demand that the organization focus on health care, and the court's ruling indicated that the chances of success in this particular case were not strong.

Note this especially:

Howard said about 50,000 Arizona women seek care from Planned Parenthood's 13 clinics each year, about 10,000 of them for abortions.

That's 20%. Not 3%.


Wesley Smith takes apart a variety of strawman arguments about ethics from stem cell researcher Paul Knoepfler.


Abortion protesters displayed the name of a man who owns an abortion clinic at his daughter's middle school. He owns the clinic where abortionist LeRoy Carhart works.

A small group of protesters stood outside Robert Frost Middle School in Rockville on Thursday, holding signs and a banner, during back-to-school night, officials said.

The student's father, who did not want to be named to protect the safety of his daughter, a sixth-grader at the school, said he saw the five protesters when he went to the school event.

Some held a large banner that showed his photo, his full name, his phone number and the words "Please STOP the Child Killing." Others held posters showing aborted fetuses.

Breakdown of New York City's abortions

The Chiaroscuro Foundation was developed a new website, nyc41percent.com, which has a map which compares the number of live births to abortions by zip code.

The zip code with the highest ratio, 10018, is in the Chelsea-Clinton neighborhood of Manhattan, with a ratio of 67%, followed by rates of 60% in two Jamaica, Queens zip codes and in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 10012, and Central Harlem-Morningside Heights neighborhoods. ....

Also at the Chiaroscuro Foundation's request, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene revealed that in 2009 48,627 of the 87,273 abortions in New York City, or 56%, were repeat abortions. 33,401, 38%, were paid for by Medicaid.

Life Links 9/8/11

The House of Commons voted down Nadine Dorries' abortion proposals.

An attempt to strip abortion providers of their role in counselling women was heavily defeated in the House of Commons this afternoon after a split between the original supporters of the amendment.

MPs voted by 368 votes to 118 – a majority of 250 – to reject the amendment by the Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries after she lost the support of her co-sponsor, the former Labour minister Frank Field.....

Field withdrew his support for the Dorries amendment after Anne Milton, the health minister, said the government would try to implement the spirit of her proposal.

A New Orleans abortion clinic has been shut down again.

For the second time this summer, the state says it has shut down a Gentilly medical clinic that provides abortions. The Department of Health and Hospitals on Tuesday issued a cease and desist order to Gentilly Medical Clinic at 3030 Gentilly Blvd. The order flows from an inspection in May that found that "the facility failed to provide nursing services to meet the needs of its patients and adequately monitor women in recovery following a procedure."
........
DHH spokeswoman Lisa Faust said the clinic later reopened under a temporary court order, but it didn't file a timely appeal to DHH Secretary Bruce Greenstein's underlying license revocation.....

Greenstein's order completes the state's administrative closure of the clinic, Faust said.

A court appeal still is possible.

The prince of Liechtenstein says he will veto a proposal to legalize abortion in the first 12 weeks or if the child is disabled. The proposal will be voted on in a September 18 referendum.


A California man has been charged with murder after driving drunk and crashing his car into another car and leaving the scene. The car crash resulted in the death of a 20-week-old unborn child.

Life Links 9/7/11

The Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood would like you to believe they're an independent research organization and are no longer affiliated with Planned Parenthood? Not so much.



In China, conjoined twins have been successfully separated at 4 months. They were conjoined at the chest and abdomen.

Liu Jinfen, director of Shanghai Children's Medical Center, said they had detected the abnormality early enough into the pregnancy to allow abortion, but the parents chose to have them.

A 19-year-old Georgia woman and her unborn child died recently after a bag of methamphetamines breaking in her stomach.

Life Links 9/6/11

Britain is now embroiled in an abortion controversy. Some members of parliament want a conscience vote on legislation to require abortion counseling be performed by organizations who don't perform abortions. Now, Nadine Dorries the MP behind the legislation claims there's a covert whipping operation underway as Prime Minister David Cameron is opposed to the legislation and fears if passed it could hurt his coalition.

In other UK abortion news, the Telegraph reports that statistics from a sample of clinics show abortion providers may be lying about how many women forego abortions after undergoing their counseling.

Just one in 10 women who book consultations with Maries Stopes and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) decide against having an abortion, according to figures from a sample of clinics.

This is half the proportion regularly cited by the charities, who have claimed that one in five women who have consultations decide to keep their baby.

Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Mitt Romney's answer during a recent debate on abortion and the 14th amendment.

What does Gov. Romney think of the effort by Congress and the president to ban partial-birth abortion during the last decade? The Supreme Court had already struck down state laws against partial-birth abortion. Was it "constitutional chaos" for Congress to ask it to reconsider the question? And on what constitutional ground does Romney think Congress acted? Does he believe that Congress was regulating interstate commerce? Or does he see that it was attempting to vindicate rights of unborn persons to have the same protection from having their skulls punctured and vacuumed out that other human beings enjoy?

At Public Discourse, Mark Leach discusses the IOM's recommendation for free prenatal screenings and Down Syndrome.

Buried in the IOM report is the recommendation for no-cost well-woman visits; these visits include prenatal care—and thus prenatal testing for "genetic or developmental conditions." The regulation was issued as part of the PPACA's coverage of preventive services. This prompts the question, how does prenatal testing prevent Down syndrome?

The IOM report defines preventive services "to be measures . . . shown to improve wellbeing, and/or decrease the likelihood or delay the onset of targeted disease or condition." Down syndrome occurs at conception. Prenatal testing simply identifies whether a pregnancy is positive for Down syndrome—a prenatal diagnosis after which most women choose to terminate their pregnancy. A prenatal test does not decrease the likelihood of Down syndrome in a person; it does allow for a decreased likelihood of a person with Down syndrome surviving beyond the womb. If this is how HHS is justifying prenatal testing for Down syndrome as preventive care, then HHS has ushered in a program meant to target future children like Juliet.

Life Links 9/2/11

Nicola Riley, a Utah abortionist and former employee of infamous abortionist Steve Brigham, has been fined 10K for lying about her criminal history when she applied for a license to practice medicine. While her license hasn't been pulled, Riley has agreed not to perform abortions in Utah while she's being investigated for her role in Brigham's abortion caravans.


As far as I've seen, CBS is the first American mainstream media outlet to cover the newest abortion/mental health study.

For the study, researchers analyzed data on 877,000 women, including 164,000 who had an abortion. They found women who had an abortion experienced an 81 percent increased risk for mental problems.

Women who had an abortion were 34 percent more likely to develop an anxiety disorder, 37 percent more likely to experience depression, 110 percent more likely to abuse alcohol, 155 percent more likely to commit suicide, and 220 percent more likely to use marijuana.

At National Right to Life's blog, Randall O'Bannon has more.

Moreover, Coleman’s meta-analysis showed that 9.9% of the incidence of mental health problems in the population group of aborted women was directly attributable to abortion. This also included 34.9% of suicides in this group.

The Guardian goes all in on attempting to provide the most biased look inside an abortion clinic ever. Though she's inside an abortion clinic, Rachel Williams doesn't describe what happens in an abortion at all. We now all about the anesthetics, the waiting room and recovery rooms, and the counseling but nothing about the actual abortion procedure. Nor does she describe what happens to the remains of aborted children. Those factoids are left out so clinic workers can continually describe themselves and their work positively.

Kevin Drum is confused about science, life and what prolifers believe

In Mother Jones, blogger Kevin Drum attempts to explain his beliefs on what the unborn are and argues that whether or not the unborn are living human beings is not question for science.

I'm afraid there's some semantic hairsplitting going on here. Of course a fetus is life; so is a human egg, and so is a human sperm. That's never been at issue. But in the context of abortion, life is just shorthand for human life, and whether a blastocyst or a fetus qualifies as human is very much a religious and metaphysical question. It's certainly not a scientific one.

First, Drum confuses parts and wholes. Egg and sperm are life in the same way that skin cells are life. They're part of a human organism. The unborn aren't parts of another human organism. They are organisms unto themselves. We know this because of embryology, not Christianity.

Second, Drum's claim that whether an unborn organism is human or not is a question for religion or metaphysics is profoundly silly. If you came across the remains of a miscarried big cat, would you use religion to figure out which species of big cat is before you? Of course not. You'd use science. Imagine: "My Buddhism tells me that's a panthera leo." "No, no, no... my Christianity says it's a panthera tigris."

The list of criteria for being a person endowed with rights starts with being a human being. Those of us in the pro-choice camp don't believe that the mere presence of cellular machinery and a human genome makes one a human being. Those in the pro-life camp do — though I'd note that for many of them, their actions don't back up this professed belief.1 But whichever camp you're in, this isn't a question that science can answer. Pretending otherwise is little more than a tawdry rhetorical trick designed to give your arguments an authority they haven't earned.

Instead of providing the slightest bit of reasoning for why science can't tell pro-choicers what kind of organisms the unborn are (as opposed to any other organism when science works perfectly well), Drum merely asserts it while strawmanning prolifers. I'm aware of no prolifers who thinks cellular machinery (whatever Drum specifically means by that) and a human genome makes one a human being. If so, prolifers would be opposed to the death of skin cells. We're not. We're opposed to the killing of tiny human organisms.

If you really, truly believe that a fertilized egg is a human life, your opposition to abortion will be absolute with the sole exception of abortion that's necessary to save a mother's life.

That's me.

You won't support exceptions for rape and incest any more than you'd allow the killing of a child who was the product of rape or incest.

No support for rape and incest exceptions here.

You'll also oppose fertility treatments, which routinely create and destroy more fertilized eggs than they use.

I oppose fertility treatments which create more embryos than could be implanted.

Some pro-lifers do indeed feel this way. But many don't. At a visceral level, these semi-opposers obviously have an aversion to abortion that stems from some source other than a belief that human life begins at conception.

It's true. Some people who describe themselves as prolife have an aversion to abortion but have exceptions. Sometimes, in the case of politicians, it's because they think it's politically practical. Other times they have such a feeling of empathy towards rape victims they don't think about how their position (rape exceptions) collides with their beliefs (the unborn are valuable living human beings).

But how does the inconsistency of some prolifers prove that science can't tell us whether the unborn are human organisms or not? It clearly doesn't.

Drum offers not a single valid or even substantial reason for why he thinks religion and metaphysics can tell us what the unborn are biologically. Not one. He just asserts it and then calls prolifers inconsistent as if that can cover his unreasonable, unsubstantiated claim.

Religion and metaphysics can help us determine if the unborn have value and deserve protection but they can't tell us what something is biologically anymore than social studies could tell us what the chemical makeup of Vicodin is. When we can't agree about what something is biologically, it's somewhat difficult to even begin to determine it's value. That's what Drum is doing here. He's derailing the conversation before it even gets started.

Indiana woman chooses life for her unborn conjoined twins

Via the Chicago Sun-Times:

Facing adversity, criticism and an uncertain future for her conjoined twins, Amanda Schulten says she chose life.

Despite the devastatingly low probability of survival, the single Marengo mother-to-be said that, for her, there was just no other option.

Joined at the heart, her daughters — whom she's already named Hope and Faith — should be given a chance to live, Amanda said, no matter how long those lives may be.

Strong in her Catholic religious beliefs, Amanda said she loves her children unconditionally and cannot interfere with God's will.

"He has a plan for me, and for them," she said. "We never know when our last day will be. We have to enjoy it, and appreciate health while we have it."
......
"The doctor said the babies won't make it, and termination is the best option," Amanda said. "I broke down. I wasn't thinking about abortion, I was thinking, ‘Will they survive?' Not ‘I want them to die.' "

Amanda never returned to that doctor's office.

Here's Amanda's blog whose latest entry indicates that she's been admitted to the hospital and a C-section has been planned.

What does it take to have an abortion clinic worker think that you rock?

How about dangerously self-inducing a late-term abortion on Christmas Eve using abortion drugs approved only to be used early in pregnancy, storing the dead body of your unborn child in your room until her remains began to smell so bad you moved them outside, and then challenging the law which you clearly broke.

Despite the pronouncements of an abortioneer, Jennie McCormick doesn't rock. Not in the least.