Life Links 1/31/13

An abortion clinic in Lima, Ohio has closed. Note the hilarious bias in the article.

A pregnancy services provider that lists non-surgical abortion among its services has shut its doors in Lima, but as of now, it's unclear whether the closure is temporary or permanent.

The Capital Care Network Lima office had its front door locked, lights off and curtains pulled shut Wednesday afternoon.

Several calls made to the Lima and Columbus offices went unanswered — many of the calls would not go through.

The wide range of pregnancy services that "pregnancy services provider" Capital Care Network Lima provided included abortion, abortion, abortion, emergency contraception, pregnancy testing and abortion counseling.


Greg Cunningham responds to an essay calling on prolifers to not use graphic images of abortion. 

Of course pictures are not a panacea.  Many women so harden their hearts that no influence can reverse their decision to abort.  But attributing their abortion decisions to abortion photos is a contention for which there exists not a shred of credible evidence.  I have never heard anyone say "I never accepted abortion until I saw a picture of it."  I have heard countless people say "I always accepted abortion until I saw a picture of it."  The pro-life movement is sadly ignoring the lessons we should take from multiple studies which have repeatedly shown that stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing pictures are an effective means of reducing smoking.  We know experientially that abortion photos also reduce abortion.

Avik Roy attempts to imagine what a middle ground on abortion would look like. 


Mark Tooley discusses the United Methodist Church's position on abortion and his hope that they'll eventually change. 

Last year's United Methodist General Conference was prepared to accept a committee recommendation to withdraw from the abortion coalition until a legislative logjam and liberal maneuvers prevented a floor vote. In 2000, the United Methodist Church did oppose partial-birth abortion and has over the years backed other limits on abortion. But the church agencies belonging to the abortion coalition remain uncompromisingly pro-abortion rights. For Roe v. Wade's 40th anniversary, they expressed no sadness over the more than 50 million abortions since 1973.

Abortionist Lisa Harris undermines War on Women rhetoric

Nearly anytime state legislators introduce a law which will require abortion clinics to meet the requirements of other centers which provide surgery, abortion advocates howl. Pro-choice legislators rise to speak about how horrible the legislation would be if passed and would lead to back-alley abortions. Pro-choice groups claim that all or nearly all abortion clinics will be forced to close.

Here's local Planned Parenthood president Lori Lamerand on Michigan's H.B. 5711 after it passed the state legislature and was signed into law.

Planned Parenthood's leader in metro Detroit said the new law would lead to fewer choices for pregnant women. Its requirements are appropriate for invasive surgery sites but "onerous" for abortion clinics and "designed to shut them down," said Lori Lamerand, president of Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan.

But then after the legislation passes, we eventually discover that the legislation won't actually close down the majority of abortion clinics.  

Abortionist Lisa Harris, who does abortions for the Planned Parenthood Lori Lamerand runs, is now saying the restrictions probably won't affect abortion clinics.

"There are four components to the new law. The first is that health centers that provide 120 or more surgical abortions per year and advertise those abortions be licensed as free-standing surgical centers. The law does include waivers… Clinics will very likely be able to comply with this regulation. That means that women are unlikely to be directly affected by the component of the new law."

What!?!? I thought this legislation would lead to "fewer choices for pregnant women" and back-alley abortions.  I thought there was a War on Women going on and this was "the biggest assault on women's health in the state's history?"

How did the signed legislation change so much in a month?

Listen to the whole interview with Harris if you get a chance. It's incredible the number of absurd assertions an abortionist like Harris will make in a friendly setting like public radio. She acts like every abortion provider she's ever heard of has women's health as their top priority and every clinic she knows of properly disposes of fetal remains despite two Michigan abortion clinics making news for dumping bodies in dumpsters. 

Life Links 1/30/13

In South Carolina, an abortion advocate has been accused of trying to hit a sidewalk counselor with his car.

When asked if he hit Gasque with his car on purpose, Center replies, "No, of course not." He says Gasque and other abortion protesters have been violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law that makes it illegal to block or intimidate people who are trying to obtain reproductive health services or abortions. "My window was open, and I kept telling him to get out of the way, get off of clinic property," Center says. "You could tell that he was two feet inside the driveway."

The article includes a video of the incident which clearly shows Larry Center (a former abortion clinic escort) driving his car at William Gasque even though Gasque is at the left side of the driveway (from the perspective of someone exiting the clinic parking lot) and if Center weren't trying to hit Gasque, he would have used the right side of the driveway. 


In California, a man named John Collins has been charged with attempted homicide (among other crimes) after he attempted to kill an unborn child in a Target parking lot.

According to Trim, the woman got away in the damaged vehicle, but the suspect followed her to a nearby retail parking lot where the confrontation resumed.

"During that time, he armed himself with a baseball bat again," said Trim.  "And, according to the victim, swung the baseball bat, striking her in the stomach. She is seven months pregnant."

In addition to attempted homicide, Collins is charged with domestic violence, assault with a deadly weapon and making death threats.

The woman was taken to a local hospital.  She and her unborn child are said to be okay.

An assemblywoman in California has taken up the mantle of "increasing access to abortion" in the state where it is arguably most accessible.  Her bill would allow non-physicians to be abortionists. 


The prolife student group at Oklahoma State is suing the university after being preventing from distributing leaflets with images of abortion. 

Irin Carmon: Prolifers are misogynists because they don't accept pro-choice framing

At Salon, Irin Carmon attempts to defend abortion advocates who frivolously claim prolifers are misogynists despite evidence to the contrary.

Douthat implies that supporters of abortion rights have wrongly painted the anti-abortion crowd as misogynists instead of recognizing their sincere concern for the fetus. But the truth is, while plenty of pro-choice people are ready to spell out how they feel about the tension between women's choices and the rights of the unborn, the anti-abortion movement has never been able to acknowledge that abortion is profoundly a women's issue, unless they're pivoting to "protecting" women from it. It is still an inconvenient truth that someone has to carry that developing fetus, someone has to give birth to it, and someone has to care for it — all roles that are either exclusively or mostly female.

So while some ("plenty" seems to be an exaggeration) pro-choicers are able to admit the unborn are human beings and killing them (or "sacrificing" them as Mary Elizabeth Williams would say) should be legal, prolifers don't accept the idea that abortion is mainly about women.  Instead, they believe it's mainly about the unborn.  And this proves what exactly?  This proves prolifers hate women? How?

Seems to me that Carmon is basically asserting that prolifers are misogynists simply because they're not pro-choice.  

Then again, when you start a sentence with "But the truth is..." and then issue an assertion sans evidence, a valid argument won't be forthcoming. 

Sure, if abortion is illegal, a woman will have to carry and give birth to her child.  How does prove that the profound issue regarding abortion isn't what is about to be killed?

I could use Carmon's same argument to claim individuals opposed to mothers killing their infants are misogynists because they don't believe that killing infants is profoundly a women's issue. 

Life Links 1/28/13

Ross Douthat on the various attempts to claim "Misogyny!" is the main motivating factor of the prolife movement.

But such an understanding was too simplistic when Nellie Gray founded the March for Life, and it's grown steadily less compelling with time. As Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College pointed out last year, pro-life sentiment has been steady over the last four decades even as opposition to women in the work force (or the military, or the White House) has largely collapsed. Most anti-abortion Americans today are also gender egalitarians: indeed, Shields notes, pro-life attitudes toward women's professional advancement have converged so quickly with pro-choice attitudes that "the average moderately pro-life citizen is a stronger supporter of gender equality than even the typical strongly pro-choice citizen was in the early 1980s." Among the younger generation, any "divide over women's roles nearly disappears entirely."

The pro-life cause has proved unexpectedly resilient, in other words, not because millions of Americans are nostalgists for a world of stricter gender norms, but because they have convinced themselves that the opportunities the feminist revolution won for women can be sustained without unrestricted access to abortion.

MSNBC host Toure shows himself to be completely self-involved when he thanked "God and country" from saving him from having to support a child earlier than he wanted.


New York Times editorial writer Juliet Lapidos seems to favor a rapist's right to choose. Somehow legislative language which is clearly designed to punish rapists who coerce their victims into abortion will somehow ban abortion in cases of rape. I'm not sure if she willfully ignoring the section of the legislation which reads "with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime or if in her attempt to parrot pro-abortion blogs, she never actually read the text carefully.

Life Links 1/25/13

Gerard Bradley discusses the Paradox of Personhood and how the Supreme Court refusal to address the most foundational question could resurface.

Roe's shaky edifice is built on a studied and stubborn refusal to address the foundational question about who the law is for. This reticence is all the more remarkable because none of the seven justices in Roe's majority seems to have believed that the unborn really are persons. They reckoned nonetheless that the constitutional law they produced could not be grounded in any answer—theirs, yours, mine—to that philosophical question. Their reticence was supposed to credential the Court's judgment as somehow uniquely objective and thus supremely authoritative.

Despite the claims of some abortion advocates, Daniel Williams notes how the prolife movement formed in many states before Roe.  

In the spring of 1971, pro-lifers defeated abortion legalization bills in all twenty-five of the state legislatures that considered them. The next year, their record was almost as successful: Only one state liberalized its abortion law, and it did so only under court order. Pro-lifers were equally successful at the ballot box. When Michigan and North Dakota introduced voter initiatives to legalize abortion in 1972, pro-lifers defeated both measures by wide margins. By the end of 1972, pro-lifers thought that they were probably within only one year of repealing New York's permissive abortion law, and the director of Planned Parenthood's Western Region division worried that pro-lifers would soon make abortion illegal in California too. "In the West we view '73 as a difficult year for abortion," he confided to a colleague in the summer of 1972.

Michael New reviews Dr. Monica Miller's book Abandoned.

Overall, the best service this book provides is to give the reader a window on the pro-life movement from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. During this time, clinic blockades played a  prominent role in the right-to-life movement. This was for a couple of reasons. First, the Roe v. Wade decision occurred as the Vietnam War was concluding. Many thought that the same civil-disobedience tactics used by opponents of the Vietnam War would be useful in stopping abortion. Second, those who engaged in clinic blockades thought that these tactics were strategically shrewd. When arrested, pro-lifers invoked a "necessity" defense — stating that their conduct was justified as necessary to prevent public or private injury. They hoped a necessity defense would allow attorneys to present evidence documenting the humanity of the unborn — and ultimately lead to a reversal of Roe v. Wade.

The Pope has tweeted support for the March for Life.

Abortion clinic raided in Bangkok

From the Bangkok Post:

Police were acting on an anonymous tip that an abortion clinic was operating in Phahon Yothin area.

They raided the clinic after an assigned patrol police was refused entry to it, Pol Lt Amnart Harn-Chana, deputy chief of the Bang Sue police, said.

He said police had to pressure the clinic's staff to open its door after they refused to co-operate for more than 40 minutes.

Police found a seven-months pregnant woman, aged 21, at the clinic. She was sent to Ratchawithee hospital....

The clinic provided services for women who were six to seven months pregnant, at the rate of 30,000 baht.

30,000 baht is equivalent to about $1,000 U.S. dollars.  

Life Links 1/24/13

The Detroit News columnist Laura Berman has a rudderless and rather pointless column discussing Planned Parenthood's attempt to re-frame the abortion issue and dump the "pro-choice" label.  It's entitled "Rhetoric impedes abortion debate" which is odd coming from someone whose columns have been permeated with pro-choice rhetoric for years.  Maybe it's just prolife rhetoric which impedes pro-choicers from having their way? 

I think a lot of the talking heads who are basically Planned Parenthood tools are having a difficult time taking Planned Parenthood's newest talking points and trying to make them sound cohesive with their beliefs and arguments. 


Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk abortion, the prolife movement and single mother families in Salon and argue that the success of the prolife movement is the cause of the rise of out-of--wedlock births.  Ross Douthat responds:

But Cahn and Carbone's suggestion notwithstanding, for whites as well as minorities the steepest increase in the out-of-wedlock birth rate actually occurred in the years immediately following Roe itself. (If you look at figure 13 in this document, you'll see that the white out-of-wedlock birth rate nearly quadrupled between 1970 and 1990; it has only risen by about fifty percent in the two decades since.) Meanwhile, divorce rates and teen pregnancy rates both rose with the abortion rate and then fell with it from the early 1990s onward — which, again, is not exactly the pattern you'd expect if abortion-on-demand was a major boon to the two-parent household, and pro-life sentiment a significant driver of family breakdown. 

Some pro-choice tolerance at DePaul:

At about 5:00PM Tuesday evening the DePaul YAF chairman, Kristopher Del Campo, along with other executive board members, went to remove the flag display. But what they found was startling; the flags had been removed and stuffed into trash bins inside and outside the entrance to the DePaul library.

Salon writer admits the unborn are "human life" "worth sacrificing"

Lots of interesting quotes in this piece from pro-choicer Mary Elizabeth Williams in which she admits the unborn are living human beings, points out the problems in trying to pretend they're not, encourages other pro-choice people to abandon their attempts to act like wanted children are somehow different than unwanted ones and then claims (as if she were a worshiper of Moloch) that the lives of the unborn are "worth sacrificing."

Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that's what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn't make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.....

When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of "scraping out a bunch of cells" and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of "the baby" and "this kid.".....

It seems absurd to suggest that other only thing that makes us fully human is the short ride out of some lady's vagina. That distinction may apply neatly legally, but philosophically, surely we can do better.....

If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I'd have an abortion. I'd have the World's Greatest Abortion.....

In an op-ed on "Why I'm Pro-Choice" in the Michigan Daily this week, Emma Maniere stated, quite perfectly, that "Some argue that abortion takes lives, but I know that abortion saves lives, too." She understands that it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

How can this not be a parody?

Does no one at the Center for Reproductive Rights realize how ridiculous this video is?  Mehcad Brooks reminds me of Al Pacino's in the Devil's Advocate.  

Katha Pollitt: No pro-choice groups calls for abortion on demand

In her piece on Planned Parenthood's shift away from the "pro-choice" label, Katha Pollitt seems to not understand the movement she supports so strongly.

An "extreme" pro-choice position would be the one pro-lifers falsely claim Roe protects: it would permit abortion on demand up until the day before birth. No pro-choice organization calls for that.

Not one? Are you sure? Because "Abortion on Demand and Without Apology" is slogan used by a variety of pro-choice groups.

At a pro-choice event during the week of Roe's 39th anniversary we read this in the Daily Caller:

After O'Neill's remarks, the pro-choice gathering formed a circle and welcomed participants to explain why they support "abortion on demand and without apology."

The NBC News broadcast from last night features abortion advocates shouting "abortion on demand and without apology" while holding signs reading the same.

Does someone as ingrained in the pro-choice movement as Katha Pollitt really not know what pro-choice groups call for? 

Life Links 1/22/13

National Review's editors discuss Roe at 40.

Pro-lifers are not winning: The suggestion is obscene. Nearly 56 million human beings have been killed in the womb since Roe, a toll that rises another million each year. The pro-life movement's achievement is a witness, not a victory. We have maintained resistance to an injustice rather than vanquished it.

But neither have we suffered a final defeat, nor will we so long as Americans remain who are willing to stand for the country's true founding principle: that all men are created equal by their Creator; that all of them have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whatever their creed or station, their race or their place, their might or their weakness.

NBC/WSJ has a new poll out on abortion and Roe v. Wade.  The poll results again show that large swaths of the population (41%) in this poll don't know anything about Roe v. Wade and when the pollsters give an inaccurate description ("first three month" baloney) of Roe's results, the majority are opposed to overturning it.  31% claimed they thought abortion should always be legal which seems high.  Imagine this follow-up: "So you think it should be legal to have an abortion in the 8th month of pregnancy?" 

The poll's options seem to favor the pro-choice side as the pro-choice options are always legal or legal most of the time while the prolife options are illegal without exceptions and illegal with rape/incest/mother's life exceptions.  There is a rather large gap and many plausible positions between legal "most of the time" and illegal except for exceptions. 


At First Things, John Murdock discusses the March for Life and wonders why more evangelicals don't participate.

My experience is that rank and file evangelical Protestants like myself generally just give lip service and votes to the life issue and are a small minority at the March for Life. I don't know exactly why that is the case. Certainly, there are thousands of evangelicals doing important grass roots pro-life work like running crisis pregnancy centers, and there are many notable examples of passionate peaceful protest efforts flowing from non-Catholic traditions.

Russell Moore on "Is the Pro-Life Cause Winning?":

Yes, it's a win just that the concept of "pro-life" is still alive. The abortion rights movement probably assumed that forty years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion that the issue would be as settled as school integration or women's suffrage. It's still a controversy, and the pro-life side hasn't been sidelined by history.

And it's true that there have been some gains in the numbers of doctors who, for conscience reasons, are unwilling to go along with the lie that abortion is "health-care."

That said, we must remember that the large numbers of self-identified pro-life people might itself in some instances be an indicator of just how embedded the abortion rights culture is in American life.

Pro-choice strategy 101: Ignore the prolife argument, attack the messengers

In an editorial for the Guardian on Roe vs. Wade at 40, Jill Filipovic has a number of unsupported assertions about abortion and the prolife movement. Many of them are beyond absurd and show why abortion advocates often avoid debate.

And the central opposition to abortion rights isn't about saving babies, promoting family or protecting women; it's about controlling female sexuality and trying to return to a time when women were forced or coerced into subservience. To anyone who has taken even a cursory look at reproductive rights activism, it's obvious that decreasing the abortion rate isn't nearly as much a concern for the pro-life movement as controlling women is.

This is just laughable but this is disappointingly becoming almost a cornerstone assertion among abortion advocates. They can't make good arguments (or are too lazy to) regarding why it should be legal to kill innocent human beings in the womb so instead they defame prolifers as misogynists who want to keep women barefoot and pregnant.

For some reason, abortion advocates never address why prolife organizations spend countless hours attempting to defend the lives of human embryos from deadly experiments (embryonic stem cell research) or work to prevent the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Those activities must somehow also be about controlling female sexuality but abortion advocates just haven't figured out how they are yet.

We know what leads to a low abortion rate: comprehensive sex education, affordable and available contraception, rights for women, and a progressive sexual culture.

Really? So if we look at a map of the United States, we'll find that the states with the lowest abortion rates have the most progressive sexual culture and progressive politics? You know, states like California and New York?

Oh wait.....

What?  How can this be? Doesn't this map show us nearly the exact opposite of what Jill claims? Aren't the lowest abortion rates mostly in states with more prolife laws and have populations with more conservative sexual mores?  Who knew South Dakota and Oklahoma were so progressive?  

Outlawing abortion doesn't lead to a lower abortion rate, and some of the countries with the highest abortion rates on the planet are places where it's illegal. So if outlawing abortion doesn't mean fewer abortions, what purpose does it serve? Punishing women and making their lives miserable, apparently – illegal abortion doesn't mean fewer abortions, it means more dangerous procedures and higher maternal mortality rates.

Really? So Ireland, Poland and Malta have the same abortion rate as New York City? Jill, like many abortion advocates, prefers to compare apples (inaccurate, guessestimated abortion rates in developing countries by organizations which advocate for abortion) to oranges (abortion rates in developed countries) but rarely do abortion advocates mention the abortion rates in developed countries where abortion is illegal. Also, rarely do abortion advocates examine and compare abortion policies and abortion rates in individual states. Why is that? Doesn't it seem to make more sense to compare abortion rates in the U.S. population over different states than act like the U.S. would resemble the Congo if Roe v. Wade were overturned?

Despite knowing the key to a lower abortion rate, the so-called "pro-life" movement refuses to use it.

Wrong Jill. We don't agree with you regarding what's key to lowering the abortion and you know that. Just because you think something (based on incredibly flimsy evidence) doesn't mean the whole prolife movement agrees with you.

Instead, they feign concern for babies while doing absolutely nothing to help children and everything in their power to make women's lives harder and more dangerous if those women dare to believe that they're entitled to a fulfilling sex life.

Notice how Jill never attempts to make a argument for why it should be legal to kill unborn children past the "illegal abortion is dangerous" argument. She doesn't even attempt to dehumanize the unborn. She just tries to take them out of equation. Maybe that's what abortion advocates are left with. Their attempts to dehumanize the unborn don't work in an era of ultrasound parties so they're left with demonizing prolifers.  Doesn't seem very persuasive in the long run. 

With the pro-life moniker, anti-abortion forces, it seems, are winning the rhetorical war, if not the cultural one. They've managed to stake out better rhetorical ground: by preying on American anxieties about female sexuality, they've managed to get more Americans backing their ideas in theory (though not at all in practice).

Americans have anxieties about female sexuality and the prolife movement preys on those? Huh? This so absurd. Yes, the prolife movement is constantly (through commercials and radio ads) preying on the public's overwhelmingly anxieties about female sexuality. Which is why Jill provides absolutely no evidence for this.

More unresearched facts:

The highest recorded teen pregnancy rate in the United States was in the middle of the 1950s. The difference, of course, is that those teenagers got married instead of pursuing the range of options available for young women today.

Or they were married in their teens before they got pregnant and were perfectly fine raising children like my grandparents were.

Pro-life groups believe that the best model for society is one in which men and women occupy separate and distinct roles, with the man as the family leader and breadwinner, and the woman as the domestic caretaker and helpmeet.

Somebody better tell Chairmaine Yoest, Carol Tobias, Serrin Foster, and all the other women who lead prolife groups they better resign from their positions and get back to domestic caretaking.

What's really sad is that Jill didn't always write like this. I don't know if it's been the experience of running an echo chamber pro-choice blog or just the difficulty of actually having to address prolife arguments which has skewed her writing or maybe it's just the market. Pragmatic, well-reasoned and well-researched editorials on abortion probably don't go over real well with Guardian readership.

Life Links 1/21/13

Businessweek profiles Michigan abortion clinic owner Rene Chelian.  While the article seems to try to make Chelian a sympathetic victim of the prolife movement, I think some facts would prevent most readers from seeing Chelian as a poor abortion provider including her 6,500 square foot house, her 2-karat diamond ring which she removes when she goes to Lansing to lobby, and the 200,000+ her and her husband are paid by the clinic,


ABC has an article on a documentary film "After Tiller" which follows 4 abortionists (Warren Hern, LeRoy Carhart, Susan Robinson and Shelley Sella) who commit third-trimester abortions.  Robinson notes that many of the 3rd trimester abortions are performed for completely elective reasons on women who didn't know they were pregnant. 

"Then there's the group of women who didn't know they were pregnant," she said. "They were told they were not pregnant for one reason or another and they are just as desperate. 'I already have three children, my husband just lost his job and I can barely put food on the table. If I add a new baby to this family, we'll all go under.'"

The Crescat discusses her abortion experience.

The glass container was half full and splattered with blood. Even the tube that fed into the container was crusted with blood. What I saw inside the collection container defies belief, little baby parts swimming in a bloody muck. All those graphic photos you've ever seen of tiny dismembered arms and legs are accurate. Only this wasn't just one set of tiny arms and legs… this was more than I could count. This wasn't just one baby that was aborted and some careless worker forget to remove from the room. This looked like all the babies that had been aborted that day. All together in one glass container, swimming in a gruesome soup of blood and bits. They hadn't even bothered to clean the equipment between patients and I suddenly realized they had every intention of using the same filthy equipment on me.

The AP has a long article on the abortion debate 40 years after Roe.

Pew Forum survey on abortion finds Pew can't accurately describe Roe v. Wade and millennials are incredibly ignorant

I've always thought that surveys looking for public opinion on Roe v. Wade were next to useless because the vast majority of people don't actually know what Roe did and the survey is unlikely to provide an accurate description. The latest Pew Forum survey confirms my belief.

Here's how they describe Roe:

"In 1973 the Roe versus Wade decision established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its Roe versus Wade decision, or not?"

Why do media outlets continue to lie about Roe only allowing abortions for the first 3 months? Have they ever had to defend this absurd description?

What might be even more depressing is that large swaths of the public (especially the under 30 crowd) have no clue what Roe v. Wade is.

Among those younger than 30, just 44% know that the case was about abortion; 16% say it dealt with school desegregation, and 41% either say it dealt with another issue (the death penalty or the environment), or do not know.

Planned Parenthood has new slogan, same message

In their never-ending struggle to make legal abortion throughout pregnancy (including tax-funded abortion) something the majority of public agrees with, Planned Parenthood has abandoned the "pro-choice" slogan and is now pushing "Not in Her Shoes" as a new slogan with a web site and a promotional video.

Of course, they don't really have anything new to say.  Just the same, tired old arguments they've been using for decades.


The reasoning of the promotional video makes no sense. We're told abortion is "not simple," "can be complicated" and it's not a "black-and-white issue" but then we're given a slew of black-and-white conclusions/assertions including:

"Politicians don't belong in a woman's personal medical decisions about her pregnancy."
"We just don't know a woman's specific situation."
"Ultimately, decisions about whether to choose adoption, end a pregnancy or raise a child must be left to a woman, her family, and her faith with the consul of her doctor or health care provider."

Life Links 1/15/13

There are some unforeseen effects of having a one-child policy and have a generation of people grow up without siblings.

One particular game focused on trust. The first player was given a sum of money, and had the option to either keep it or give a portion to a second player. Whatever sum the player chose to give away would be doubled, and the second player would then have the opportunity to give some back to the first player. In both player positions, the post-policy group chose to give away less money, demonstrating that they were generally less trusting of other players and likewise less trustworthy. In other games they shied away from risk and competition, tending instead toward pessimism and in some cases even neuroticism.

 
The Washington Post has an article on Allegheny Reproductive Health Center abortion clinic and abortion history in Pennsylvania.  Interestingly, writer Sarah Kliff fails to mention why the state of Pennsylvania passed a law in 2011 which "requires surgical abortion clinics to become certified as ambulatory surgical centers and meet other rules." Wouldn't want to bring up Kermit Gosnell, eh? 


NARAL has selected a new president named Ilyse Hogue.  From what I can tell, she hasn't written much on the issue of abortion and is more of a liberal movement insider as opposed to an abortion movement insider. 




In Alabama, a 70-year-old woman was arrested for spraying holy water after an abortion supporter claimed she was sprayed in the face.

In a Monday interview, Fecteau said the "unknown substance" was holy water that she keeps in a squirt bottle. She said she sprayed it because someone from the pro-choice group was walking close to her while burning a "noxious material."

Jeremiah McCloud, abortion survivor

Records:failed abortions at Musk clinic

A Muskegon woman said she paid Dr. Robert Alexander $320 for an abortion in 2009 and left his clinic believing he had ended her pregnancy.

Three years later, her son, Jeremiah, likes to ride his bicycle in his mom's living room and play on a toy computer.

The story goes on to note Jeremiah's mother filed a report with Michigan's Bureau of Health Professions which decided not to investigate. 

In that complaint, which Target 8 obtained, a doctor who treated McCloud after the failed abortion wrote his opinion: “that Dr. Alexander was grossly negligent in this case,” and that he could have killed her.
 
But records show the Board of Medicine determined that no investigation was needed.
 
A document titled “Board Review Sheet” explained the reason the state decided not to investigate McCloud’s complaint.
 
According to the document, “Appropriate evaluation of the patient was performed. She was outside the legal limit for voluntary termination of pregnancy and was informed of such by the licensee. Patient was refunded her payment. No breach of standard of care, no fraud, no unethical practice.”

So they believed the abortionist without doing an investigation or taking the time to seriously evaluate the claims of the doctor who treated McCloud after the abortion.

Shady abortionist botches abortion.  Complaints filed.  State health group does nothing. It's like Kermit Gosnell 2.0.

Abortion group leader interviewed by Salon

At Salon, Nancy Keennan, the outgoing leader of NARAL, is interviewed.  Some interesting quotes below.  

In regards to Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock and rape exceptions:

Let's keep in mind who's talking about it: They are. They want abortion banned even in the case of rape and incest. That's how extreme and out of touch they are with the American public.

This is so hilarious.  As if Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin called press conferences and made their lack of rape exceptions the foundation of their campaigns as opposed to be grilled about it by the media. 

The other side, I almost find it humorous when they say they could portray him (President Obama) as extreme when they are the extreme group here. They are the ones trying to outlaw birth control in this county. That is so out of the mainstream.

Do the leaders of the pro-choice movement actually think prolife groups are trying to outlaw birth control?  Or is this just to rile up the troops? 

As I've said to many elected officials, women hear their gods. They don't need to be listening to the gods of politicians.

Regarding how younger pro-choicers take offense when the older pro-choicers mention young people are less pro-choice or somehow less dedicated to the cause. 

I was not speaking about the young women who have committed their lives and dedicated enormous energy to this movement, men and women. I'm talking about that group of millennials out there under 30 who have not connected the personal to the political on this issue. They are a very large generation, there are about 76 million of them. They are pro-choice, but they don't put the issue of protecting this decision at the top of their list. So there is an intensity gap. If you put five pro-choice millennials in a room, probably one of them would vote their pro-choice values as a very critical factor for them, but if you put five anti-choice millennials in a room, almost two of them would vote their anti-choice values [based on our research].

RH Reality Check blogger Robin Marty laments closure of dirty, unsafe abortion clinic

Almost unbelievably Robin Marty at the RH Reality Check blog is lamenting the closure of the dirty, unsafe, and unsanitary abortion clinic in Muskegon.

Notably absent from her post is the story which features photos from inside the clinic and notes the various horrible things the police found.  I can't fathom how anyone (regardless of how pro-abortion they are) could think this clinic should stay open.

Life Links 1/8/13

NY Times article on pregnancy centers ends with this:

Amanda Hall met Care Net's definition of "abortion-vulnerable." Twenty-five, pregnant with her second child, her husband in jail, she was facing eviction.

Although uncomfortable about abortion, she checked "undecided," saying, "I can't support two kids."

Care Net let her stay in a house Ms. McGregor owns, found her a job, negotiated debt payment plans, offered Bible study and other classes. She gave birth in March.

"Everybody here," she said, was "like a different family."

A Tennessee woman has been arrested for a DUI-child endangerment.  The child being endangered was her unborn child.

Maria Guerra was driving in a car by herself when she crashed on I-240 Sunday morning just south of Walnut Grove. Her blood alcohol content was only half the legal limit, yet, she is charged with DUI-child endangerment with a child under 18 because she told an officer she is four months pregnant.

Memphis police say Guerra smelled of alcohol, was unsteady on her feet, and had bloodshot eyes.

In the UK, the Daily Mail reports that doctors are asking a judge to allow them to abort the child of a mentally impaired women.  They claim the woman's pregnancy combined with her sickle-cell disease is threatening her life. 

Photos show horrible conditions at Muskegon abortion clinic

Safe, legal and rare, huh?  I certainly hope some reporter shows these pictures to Lisa Brown and asks why she thinks abortion clinics shouldn't be regulated and inspected.

Photos show abortion clinic violations

And you wonder why the pro-choice movement has been losing?

The cover of this week's Time Magazine reads "40 years ago, abortion-rights activists won an epic victory with Roe v. Wade.  They've been losing ever since."

Below is a video of former state legislator (and current Oakland County clerk) Lisa Brown speaking in December against the same legislation which lead to the original "vaginagate" controversy over the summer in Michigan. 

I submit this as a reason why they've been losing.  They seem unable or unwilling to make arguments or even attempt to persuade people who don't agree with them.   



Why would the House Democrats post this on YouTube?  There's no argument.  There's nothing persuasive or educational about this.  It's just an angry, conceited individual making an absolute fool of herself. 

Amanda Marcotte proves she has no clue what she's talking about again

The intrepid Amanda Marcotte recently took it upon to comment on a piece of prolife legislation which recently passed in Michigan despite knowing next to nothing about the legislation. Besides, taking information from Al Sharpton's show, Marcotte doesn't have much to say specifically on the legislation except that it's bad. One of her non-Sharpton cribbed complaints is the part of the legislation which governs the disposition of the remains of aborted children. Marcotte writes about the part of the law which prevent the remains of unborn children from being thrown into dumpsters.

Indeed, one of the most surreal aspects of it is the requirement that abortion clinics do all these special things to dispose of quote-unquote fetal remains, even though 79% of abortions do not actually involve a fetus, but are done at the embryonic stage.

If Marcotte had taken the time to read the legislation (or even the first page of the legislation), she would have discovered the legislation defines "quote-unquote" fetal remains (my emphasis).

"Fetal remains" means a dead fetus or part of a dead fetus that has completed at least 10 weeks of gestation or has reached the stage of development that, upon visual inspection of the fetus or part of the fetus, the head, torso, or extremities appear to be supported by skeletal or cartilaginous structures. Fetal remains do not include the umbilical cord or placenta.

So, in other words, abortionists don't have to do "special things" to dispose of the remains of unborn children killed before 10 weeks who don't have visible body parts after being killed.

Marcotte's gripe with the legislation is completely empty. Whoops.

Life Links 1/4/13

A businessman in Portland, Oregon who was mad at prolifers who protest outside a Planned Parenthood next to his business organized pro-abortion protest to counter the prolifers.  The video of the protest/counterprotest includes showing some of the posters of aborted children and a crazy pro-abort who thinks prolifers are violating a woman's constitutional right by protesting. 

The anti-abortion protesters held large full-color signs which they say depict aborted fetuses, while other protesters loudly recited religious admonitions against abortion.

That was largely drowned out by the group gathered in front of Guitar Grave and Mike's Restaurant, Fink's businesses, who chanted slogans like "Abortion is health care and health care is a right." Fink used social media to rally support and offered free sandwiches and coffee to the counter-protesters.

The New York Times has an article on an abortion hotline in Chile which is straddling the law in a country where abortion is illegal.

In a country where abortion is entirely illegal, even in cases of rape or when a woman's life is in danger, the hot line is a risky endeavor. Operating in a legal gray area, volunteers face a daunting prison sentence if a conversation veers too far from a lawyer-approved script. The hot line already has had three lawsuits brought against it, though all were eventually dropped.

Paul Ryan will be the keynote speaker at the SBA List's dinner in April.

West Michigan abortion clinic will stay closed

Kudos to WOOD TV for doing some investigation into this now-closed abortion clinic in Muskegon and the ex-con abortionist who ran it.

Thursday, for the first time, Muskegon Public Safety Director Jeffrey Lewis said there were 11 potential fire and health-related violations.

"There was a leaking roof, poor housekeeping resulting in a large fire load, several containers of hazardous material that was not stored in the proper cabinets and wasn't labeled properly, combustible materials stored near an ignition source," he said.

There was also no key box to allow fire department access to the building, the electrical panel and furnace blocked by stored materials and exit signs not properly lit and not functioning. But he refused to disclose the other four findings.

"We felt these were safety issues that could affect the clientele that visited the clinic," Lewis said. He added that Dr. Robert Alexander, who ran the clinic, told Muskegon city officials he will not reopen the clinic that's been operating in the area for at least 20 years.

"There are certain standards that he has to meet with the state of Michigan and he feels at this time he cannot meet those, and he doesn't want to entertain that and so our information is that he is not going to reopen the clinic."

Life Links 1/3/13

Jon Shields has a piece in First Things which discusses how Roe v. Wade led to a collapse in the pro-choice movement while spurned the prolife movement to affect our culture.

While Roe bred apathy and conservatism in pro-choice ranks, it energized many pro-lifers. With the Supreme Court having removed abortion from the political process and deprived pro-lifers of normal avenues of political influence, some decided to blockade abortion clinics instead. Between 1977 and 1993, pro-life radicals orchestrated some six hundred blockades, leading to more than 33,000 arrests.

Most pro-life activists, however, dedicated their lives to changing the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens, rather than simply obstructing them from procuring abortions. The more Americans who opposed abortion on moral grounds or were offered practical alternatives to abortion, such activists reasoned, the fewer abortions, whatever the laws of the land. These pro-life advocates quietly began countless conversations with ordinary citizens and continue to do so in great numbers.

At Public Discourse, Melissa Moschella discusses recent decisions on the HHS Mandate and the attempt of some judges to play theologians.

In the HHS mandate cases brought by Frank O'Brien and the Green family, however, the judges found no reason to doubt either the plaintiffs' sincerity or the religious nature of their beliefs. To remain within the limits of their competence, their investigation into the applicability of RFRA—and therefore of the need for the government to defend the mandate as narrowly tailored to the achievement of a compelling state interest—should have stopped there.

Unfortunately, it did not. Instead, the judges crossed the line by denying the substantive correctness of the plaintiffs' belief that providing insurance coverage for contraceptives and/or abortifacients is morally wrong. As Judge Jackson put it, despite the plaintiffs' sincere claims to the contrary, "the challenged regulations do not … prevent plaintiffs from acting in accordance with their religious beliefs."

In effect, Judges Jackson and Heaton are telling the Greens and Frank O'Brien—and by extension the 108 other plaintiffs challenging the mandate as well—that they, and the religious authorities who support them, simply have their theology wrong.

Christianity Today interviews Russell Moore about adoption.

What's the greatest benefit of being an adoptive parent?

The adopting of our two sons demonstrated to us something of the love of God for us and gave us a relationship that we never would have found on our own. We love our sons and they've brought so much to our family that we never could have planned out ahead of time.

And the greatest challenge?

The greatest challenge is confronting the idea that there's somehow a difference between adopted children and biological children in terms of affection, in terms of the structure of the family, which is not true. There's no such thing as adopted children. There are only children who were adopted. In a biblical understanding, "adopted" is a past-tense verb, not an adjective. So once someone has been adopted into the family, that person is part of the family with everything that that means.

 Christopher Kenyon Simpson has pled not guilty after being accused of killing Ka'Loni Marie Flynn and her unborn child.

Prosecutors allege Simpson shot Flynn after she told him she was pregnant. Lawyers for Simpson don't want prosecutors to be able to use phone records that allegedly place Simpson in the area of the slaying on grounds that authorities obtained them without a warrant.

Georgia abortionist indicted for medicaid fraud

Abortionist Andre Damian Williams has been indicted in Georgia for allegedly taking medicaid funds to perform abortions.

Andre Damian Williams was indicted on Dec. 20 on one count of Medicaid fraud for allegedly accepting $205,003 in Medicaid funds for services not rendered and for services associated with the performance of elective abortions, according to Lauren Kane, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Attorney General's office.

From January 2009 to September 2011, Williams owned two businesses, Legacy Obstetrics and DeKalb Gynecology Associates. The primary business at DeKalb Gynecology Associates was the performance of elective abortions, Kane said in an emailed statment.