Life Links 11/29/12

Wesley Smith links to a Daily Mail article which discussing how doctors in the UK are dehydrating infants to death.

The LCP was devised by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool for care of dying adult patients more than a decade ago. It has since been developed, with paediatric staff at Alder Hey Hospital, to cover children. Parents have to agree to their child going on the death pathway, often being told by doctors it is in the child's ‘best interests' because their survival is ‘futile'.

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children.
'‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die'

She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a "reasonable" number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

At Live Action, Rebecca Frazer points out the ridiculousness of Planned Parenthood of Indiana promoting themselves as an adoption referrer.

Yes, you read that right. Planned Parenthood is excited that they have contributed to a whopping twelve adoptions in six years.  If we do some simple math that comes out to an average of two adoptions a year.

Last year alone, Planned Parenthood of Indiana performed 5,250 abortions.

5,250.

That means that if 2011 was an average adoption year, Planned Parenthood helped with one adoption for every 2,625 abortions they performed.  Perhaps they should send their adoption counselors back to job training.

Matthew Hennessy discusses how abortion caused a rift among Down Syndrome advocacy organizations.

"As an advocacy organization, we don't feel it's appropriate to promote the value of those with Down syndrome while at the same time also discussing the possibility of abortion," Tolleson told me.

Notably, he said, this sentiment was given voice within NDSC by so-called self-advocates, adults living with Down syndrome who are participating in ever-greater numbers in the outreach and education efforts of such organizations.

"Our self-advocates told us that it was not appropriate in a pamphlet coming from their advocacy organization to talk about abortion as co-equal to any other option," Tolleson explained. "They did not feel that was respectful to them."

Life Links 11/28/12

Abortionist Willie Parker and other Mississippi abortionists were unable to obtain admitting privileges at any hospital near Jackson, Mississippi so the state's lone abortion clinic has filed suit to prevent the state of Mississippi from enforcing the law which went into effect in July. 

The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Sam Mims, R-McComb, said the clinic has had ample time to comply with the new law. He also denied the clinic's claims that the law hands over control to the hospitals, whose application denials could force its closure.

"The legislature doesn't control what hospitals in the Jackson metro area do," Mims said. "They have their own committees and bylaws set up, and they have to make the best decisions."

Mims said it's up to the judge now.

The clinic's providers already are board-certified ob-gyns, but only one had admitting privileges at the time of the law's passage. That physician provides only limited service at the clinic, Bernyk said. Those who provide the majority of procedures, including Dr. Willie Parker, were denied privleges after a months-long effort by the clinic to obtain them.

Why does Planned Parenthood's Jill June think seeing 4D ultrasound images will shame, coerce or make a woman change her mind about getting an abortion?  It's just a clump of cells, right?

An anti-abortion group wants Nebraska lawmakers to pass legislation that requires four-dimensional ultrasound images of human fetuses to be posted on a state website.

So-called 4-D ultrasounds take images of the fetus from several angles, showing such things as facial features and capturing movement.

Jill June, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, said women should have all the information they need to decide whether to have abortions.

"Such information should support a woman, help her make the best decision for herself, her family and her circumstances, and enable her to take care of her health and well-being. Information should not be provided with the intent of shaming, coercing or making a woman change her mind," she said.

For some reason the editorial board of the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel thinks a poll showing the public favors more restrictions on abortion is a good argument against adding more restrictions to abortion.

Public polling shows that most people in the U.S. favor the idea of legal abortion. A CBS News/New York Times poll in September is typical. It found that 42% thought abortion should be "generally available," while 35% said "available under stricter limits" and 20% said "not permitted."

Either Amy Sullivan can't do a google search or feels she needs to lie about the prolife movement

Amy Sullivan has a post at a TNR blog which claims prolifers aren't happy about and "conveniently ignore" the drop in abortions reported by the CDC. Regarding the drop in reported abortions to the CDC, Sullivan writes:

This should be welcome news for those who oppose abortion and for those who want women to have more control over their reproductive abilities (and for the millions of Americans who fall into both camps). So you might think that abortion opponents would be thrilled about this latest news. You would be wrong.

That's funny because I've read items about this report from National Right to Life, LifeNews, Jill Stanek, Live Action, World Magazine, and National Review.

Amy has no evidence prolifers aren't happy about the drop in abortion so she notes that representatives of two prolife organizations (Charmaine Yoest of AUL and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council) have pointed out the number of women who died from abortion went from 6 in 2007 to 12 in 2008. It is apparently beyond pale for prolifers to note how legal abortion isn't safe for all women.

I should also point out that both Yoest and Perkins mention the 5% drop in abortions (as opposed to ignoring it) in the links Sullivan provides with Yoest saying it was "a real cause for giving thanks."

Apparently, to Sullivan and TNR giving thanks for a drop in abortion equals ignoring it and not being happy about it.  Anything to vilify the prolife movement, huh, Amy? 

Life Links 11/20/12

A Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Pennsylvania has temporarily halted surgical abortions until they can comply with the state regulations for abortion clinics.


Three prolife student groups have been recognized at universities in Australia. For some oh-so-tolerant pro-choicers, this could be dangerous.

The National Union of Students opposes the group, and president Donherra Walmsley said she would be watching closely to see if the movement continued to expand. "Whether it will spread outside NSW is the next big question for us," Ms Walmsley said. "Students should be allowed freedom of expression, but our concern is, despite what they've said, these clubs do appear to be promoting an explicitly pro-life agenda.

Imagine that, a prolife group promoting a prolife agenda. The horror!


Indian researchers are improving on their use of adult stem cells to treat type 2 diabetes.

Improvising upon its study in 2008, PGI which has tried 2 shots of stem cells has found that the rate of success increased from 70% to 80%. Out of 10 patients who were given the shots of .3 billion stem cells from their own body , 9 were off insulin completely.

Overheard: Taranto on Giles

James Taranto comments on Nancy Giles imbecilic theory in which she thinks attempts to ban abortion are about "building up" the white race.  Giles has since pulled a "sorry if" apology and claimed her comments were a "weird joke."

Have you noticed how abortion proponents always seem to come up with amazingly strained theories about opponents' motives--they hate sex, they want to control women, etc.? Abortion opponents say they believe that unborn children are human beings with the right to life. One may disagree, but that belief is an entirely straightforward and reasonable explanation for why someone would take an antiabortion position.

Apparently the pro-abortion side fears if it acknowledged that position is sincerely held, that would be tantamount to acknowledging it may be true.

If you read pro-choice blogs, you'll notice that in recent years they rarely ever make arguments regarding the prolife position and attempt to show how it is wrong or illogical.  Instead, more and more they focus on trying to position prolife individuals, prolife politicians or the prolife movement in a way where they can then claim the only real reason for an opposition to abortion is misogyny. 

You could call it the Marcottization of the pro-choice movement. 

Life Links 11/15/12

I'm amazed at the amount of and the prominence of the coverage over the death of Savita Halappanavar (a pregnant woman living in Ireland whom doctors allegedly refused to induce when she was having a miscarriage until the child's heartbeat stopped) compared to the deaths of women like Tonya Reaves, who die when an abortion is botched. 

Eilis Mulroy provides some basic reasoning to a tragic situation abortion advocates are attempting to parlay into liberalized abortion laws in Ireland.

The question that needs to be asked is: was Ms Halappanavar treated in line with existing obstetrical practice in Ireland? In this kind of situation the baby can be induced early (though is very unlikely to survive). The decision to induce labour early would be fully in compliance with the law and the current guidelines set out for doctors by the Irish Medical Council

Those guidelines allow interventions to treat women where necessary, even if that treatment indirectly results in the death to the baby. If they aren't being followed, laws about abortion won't change that.

The issue then becomes about medical protocols being followed in hospitals and not about the absence of legal abortion in Ireland.

A Nevada judge has decided not to force a woman who is mental impaired to have an abortion. 

The 32-year-old woman's legal guardian told KRNV-TV (http://tinyurl.com/ag7jete) on Wednesday that Judge Egan Walker had agreed that the woman wants to carry the pregnancy to term and that the evidence doesn't show it's medically necessary to abort the baby.

After taking the abortion option off the table, Walker said he plans to hold additional medical evidentiary hearings in the weeks ahead to determine the safest way to proceed.

The Washington Post's Election 2012 Blog writes about the money Planned Parenthood spent on the election.

Combined, the two Planned Parenthood advocacy groups say they spent $15 million on ads, phone calls, events, mail and door-to-door canvassing. In 2008, their campaign spending was about $4 million total.

In large part, Planned Parenthood's success is due to President Obama's victory. Most of the groups' money went towards boosting Obama or attacking Romney. Eighty-seven percent of funds spent by Planned Parenthood Action Fund and 80 percent of spending by Planned Parenthood Votes went toward the presidential race, according to the Sunlight Foundation tallies.

Libby Anne's phony "aha" moment

Libby Anne at Patheos is trying to explain how she, as a supposedly Students for Life president, changed her worldview on abortion over a lunch break based on one article in the New York Times.  She's doing this after I expressed my opinion that her story is a work of fiction in previous comment threads and was then backed up when she revealed she knew nothing about 2nd trimester abortions. 

Her explanation is incredibly weak.  It basically just reasserts what she said earlier and again reads to me like the work of sheltered pro-choicer pretending to have been very involved in the prolife movement. It makes no sense to me that the president of a SFL group wouldn't at least bring her thoughts up to her group, or her family or the local prolife organization before completely changing her worldview.  This comment was also notable.

In contrast, every pro-lifer I knew was politically conservative and in opposition to things like welfare, mandated paid maternity leave, subsidized daycare, and even things like Head Start.

That's how sheltered pro-choicers see pro-lifers.  Every pro-lifer?  Really?  There wasn't a single pro-life person in the SFL group who was okay with Head Start?  Interestingly enough, in my time in the pro-life movement, I probably wouldn't know where the majority of the people I know in the movement stand on those issues.

Why was it that sexually liberal Western Europe, where abortion was legal, had the lowest abortion rate in the world? And why was it that Africa and South America, where abortion was banned in nearly every country, had the highest abortion rates? I realized immediately that these questions were crucially important if one wanted to bring down the abortion rate. It was an epiphany moment. And yet, these were questions I had never heard asked in the pro-life movement.

Then why didn't she ask these questions to her prolife friends, family and other acquaintances?  It's not like she claims she read the article and then challenged other prolifers with her thoughts and they had no response (or maybe that's the next work of fiction blog post).  She just changed her mind based on the guessestimated numbers from organizations she knew were pro-abortion.  Yeah, right.  This story may fool a group of pro-choicers who have certain ideas about prolife movement but nothing about this story rings true to me. 

Nancy Giles needs to do some basic research on abortion

Nancy Giles, a contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning show, was on MSNBC and in one quick statement proved she knows nothing about who gets abortions or the prolife movement and probably proved she shouldn't be working in the news business.  It also gives us another insight into the thinking in major newsrooms.

When talking about election results Giles said,

"You know when you just showed that graph of the decline in the numbers (of white voters)," she continued, "I thought, 'Maybe that's why they're trying to eliminate all these abortions and stuff. They're trying to build up the race."

Giles is apparently completely unaware that minority women have much higher ratios and rates than white women.  From the CDC's abortion surveillance report:

Non-Hispanic white women had the lowest abortion rates (8.7 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15--44 years) and ratios (140 abortions per 1,000 live births), whereas non-Hispanic black women had the highest abortion rates (33.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15--44 years) and ratios (472 abortions per 1,000 live births).

So if the prolife movement was really trying to "build up the white race" they wouldn't be trying to stop abortions.  But hey, you wouldn't want truth or knowledge to get in the way of ignorance and bias.

Life Links 11/6/12

A couple in Nevada is fighting to prevent a court from ordering their mentally disabled daughter from being forced to have an abortion.

The couple on Friday filed a motion asking the state's highest court to halt the proceedings by Washoe County District Judge Egan Walker, saying he lacks authority to make such a decision for their mentally impaired daughter, who officials say has the mental capacity of a 6-year-old.....

The couple, who have remained anonymous, said that as their daughter's  legal guardians, they have exclusive authority over her healthcare decisions, and that both they and she want the baby carried to term, in line with their Catholic religious beliefs.

At Yahoo! News Liz Goodwin points out a few enduring myths about women voters.

Myth No. 1: Women are more in favor of abortion rights than men are

For the past year, Democrats argued Republicans are waging a "war on women" for wanting to make all abortions illegal, while Republicans  countered that Democrats don't want any restrictions on abortion. Each side is attempting to paint the other as extreme, hoping to pick up on-the-fence women voters in the process.

But, despite how they're sometimes portrayed in the news media and by political candidates, female voters are about as divided on abortion as men are.

"One of the central myths in American politics is that women are more pro-choice than men," Karen Kaufman, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who has researched the gender gap, told Yahoo News.

Arizona's 20 week ban on abortions was argued before the 9th Circuit Court.  Looks like the law may eventually be headed to the Supreme Court.

Even Judge Andrew Kleinfeld, a reliably conservative jurist appointed to the appeals court by former President George H.W. Bush, said Arizona's law appears to wrongly prohibit abortions before "viability," when the fetus can live outside the womb. Viability is generally considered to occur sometime after 23 weeks of pregnancy. The county's seminal Supreme Court 1973 abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, said states cannot prohibit abortions outright prior to viability.

Abortion protesters win case at Supreme Court

Abortion protester Steven Lefemine won a case at the Supreme Court today. The court ruled a South Carolina county has to reimburse Lefemine's lawyers after officers told him to stop protesting at the corner of a busy intersection.

According to court paper, an officer arrived and told Lefemine he was causing a traffic disturbance and that he must "remove the signs." He did as instructed, but later filed suit against Sheriff Dan Wideman with the help of the National Legal Foundation, a self-described "Christian public interest law firm" in Virginia Beach, Va.

A federal judge in Greenville, S.C. agreed that the 1st Amendment guaranteed Lefemine's right to the "display of graphic signs," so long as he did not cause a traffic disturbance. But the judge also shielded the sheriff and city officials from paying damages in the case.

He also denied attorney's fees to Lefemine. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the judge’s decision in March.

Without hearing arguments in the case, the Supreme Court reversed the rulings and said Lefemine was due civil rights fees as the "prevailing party" in his suit against the sheriff.

Life Links 11/2/12

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Bob Kerrey's memory must be going bad.  He also doesn't seem to understand the ban that got overturned was a state ban, not a federal one.

Kerrey acknowledges that his vote against the partial-birth abortion ban was unpopular in some quarters, but he argued it was the right thing to do. He noted that the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled the ban unconstitutional.

"It's an unpopular vote, in part, because it was misunderstood," said Kerrey.

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a partial-birth abortion ban. However, in 2006, the court upheld a similiar version of the law, which stands today.

Jamie McKay, a 19-year-old who was MTV's 16 and Pregnant has revealed she had an abortion which she regrets.

"Thank you all for the love and support but I want you to know I did not miscarry. I chose abortion. I chose it out of fear. I feel like I made a mistake and I can't take it back," the reality TV star revealed to her followers.

"I have had this in my heart and it has been very hard on me," she continued. "I was afraid to be judged by my family, my mother, even my dad. So I did it before they could find out. I should have looked into my options more but I didn't. Ryan has been supportive through it all in case you all were wondering he is the father of that child too. And he let me make my decisions. I got on birth control right afterwards."

While the 19-year-old teen mom's heartfelt honesty sparked many supportive comments, Jamie also got some vicious attacks after she posted a photo (which has since been taken down) of her ultrasound, with the caption, "Rest in peace little angel. September 17, 2012."

The New York Times has a long article on Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life.

Yoest takes pleasure in the idea of being the underdog fighting the liberal orthodoxy. She repeatedly brought up Planned Parenthood and its president, Cecile Richards, comparing A.U.L.'s $4 million budget with Planned Parenthood's $1 billion. "If the pro-choice side got traction, it's because Cecile Richards has the bigger microphone," she would say. Or, "We have to be countercultural — after all, Cecile Richards has the self-appointed duty of defining what's pro-woman these days."