Life Links 3/19/14

A Lutheran charity has purchased the former Delaware abortion clinic where Kermit Gosnell worked part-time.


In Arizona, all health clinic are inspected without warning.  That is except for abortion clinics, which get 10 day warning.

Inspectors work through observations, interviews and reviews of documents, like patient files and policies. They’re checking, for instance, to see if a clinic has a disaster plan or if employee experience matches up with job duties. If it passes, the facility gets a stamp of approval for up to 24 months.

“All of the surveys are unannounced,” Belden said.

But there’s one big exception. Abortion providers get a 10-day heads up.

"Pregnancies they can carry" is the latest jargon Jessica Valenti is using to attempt to ignore the unborn child.  

Anti-choicers cannot escape the truth of their movement: despite rhetorical efforts to the contrary, the foundation of fighting against abortion accessibility is the idea that women are less important than the pregnancies they can carry.

This is why the pro-choice side is losing.  They can't accurately describe the prolife position.  Therefore, they can't make solid arguments against it.  They're stuck trying to come up with lamer and lamer ways of dehumanizing the unborn.  

When your senior legal analyst has no clue what she's talking about, you might want to find a new senior legal analyst

     
In a recent piece for RH Reality Check, their Senior Legal Analyst Jessica Mason Pieklo argues that prolife business owners are trying to undermine settled science by claiming they have moral qualms with covering emergency contraceptive.  

The question, framed by Reuters as “deceptively simple” of whether certain forms of birth control prevent conception or destroy a fertilized egg, is not actually a controversy or debate within the mainstream scientific and medical community. In fact, the mainstream scientific and medical community all agree that the vast majority of emergency contraceptives don’t prevent fertilization, and that pregnancy begins at implantation.

The last sentence is confusing because I’m wondering if Pieklo thinks fertilization and implantation are synonymous or if she made a typo.  Pieklo links to a Guttmacher paper which undermines her claim since it says, “Rather, both Plan B and ella work primarily by preventing ovulation” which, if true, would mean they do prevent fertilization since there would be no ovulation, ergo no fertilization. 

She also doesn’t seem to understand that defining pregnancy as beginning at implantation doesn’t change whether a human embryo (or “fertilized egg” in RH Reality Check jargon) is destroyed or not.  Nor would it alleviate prolife concerns.  Maybe this is a case of pro-choicers constantly trying to use language to deceive others that they struggle to understand the meaning of the terms they're using. 

The more you read of Pielko, the more you realize she doesn’t appear to have any clue what she is talking about.   

In 2003, Congress passed the “Partial-Birth Abortion Act,” a law that banned a specific type of abortion procedure known as an intact D&E (dilation and evacuation) without any exception for the life of the pregnant person.

Wrong.  Here’s the text of the law in PDF. On the bottom of page 6, the text clearly has a life of the mother exception.

This subsection does not apply to a partial-birth abortion that is necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.

Pielko continues talking about the law:

The law was eventually challenged, and in 2006 the Roberts Court sided with Congress, holding that so long as a matter of science is up for debate, lawmakers are free to pick a side in that debate in passing legislation if their doing so is reasonable.

Nope.  The case was decided on April 18, 2007.

If Pielko’s the senior legal analyst at RH Reality Check, I can’t imagine how bad the regular legal analyst’s are. 

Life Links 3/6/14

A woman seeking to replace racist Alabama State Rep. Alvin Holmes responded to his comments in which he said white would encourage abortion if their daughters were impregnated by a black man. 

"He said that being pro life was for white people, that's not true. Pro life is loving babies whether they're inside the womb or outside of the womb. Whether you're black or white - it doesn't have a color," said Tijuanna Adetunji.

An accidental break room fire at Martin Haskell’s Indianapolis abortion clinic caused $30,000 worth of damage.  While all patients had left, five clinics staffers were there at the time. 


The University of Georgia paper, the Red and the Black, has a number of pictures showing pro-choice students attempting to cover up a recent prolife display which includes images of abortion victims.  One pro-choice student’s sign indicates she thinks legal abortion ended women dying from unsafe abortions. 


Whole Woman’s Health is closing 2 clinics in Texas. 

Whole Woman’s Health in Beaumont and McAllen will close after providing abortions in the areas for a decade. Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Woman’s Health, which operated five abortion clinics before the law went into effect, said the provision requiring physicians to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic was proving the most problematic.

Miller said hospitals near her McAllen clinic refused to grant her physicians’ applications for privileges. Some hospitals in the area require their privileged physicians to live nearby. Others require a current physician to co-sign applications for privileges, which many are unwilling to do for fear of being targeted or stigmatized.

In Beaumont, one 75-year-old physician secured privileges, but a second one could not, Miller said.

Life Links 3/5/14

A pro-choice legislator in Alabama is claiming prolife legislators wouldn’t be prolife if their daughters were impregnated by a black man.              

But during the debate, Rep. Alvin Holmes, D-Montgomery, said that his Republican colleagues would support abortion if their daughters were impregnated by black men.

"Ninety-nine percent of the all of the white people in here are going to raise their hand that they are against abortion," he said. "On the other hand, 99 percent of the whites who are sitting in here now, if their daughter got pregnant by a black man, they are going to make their daughter have an abortion."

As horrible as these comments are, I’m guessing the national media will look the other way.  Listen to the audio which makes Alvin Holmes sound even more awlful as assumes nearly every white person would be ashamed to have a bi-racial grandchild. 


At the Huffington Post, a University of Michigan student (who is a former Planned Parenthood intern) has a rambling, poorly edited piece regarding access to abortion which has a number of gems.

In fact, I did not know anyone who was pro-life growing up except for the one house in my town that posted pro-life lawn signs....

Other laws were put in place to incite guilt and trickery like prohibiting doctors who work for a state-funded women's health service from referring patients elsewhere for an abortion.....

All of these circular mechanisms entrap women with financial and emotional burdens that actualize into limited freedom....

Planned Parenthood of Arizona is suing to prevent a state law regarding abortion drugs from taking effect.

The 2012 law now being implemented says any medication used to induce an abortion must be administered "in compliance with the protocol authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,'' as outlined in the final labeling instructions for that drug.

In the case of RU-486, that means only through the seventh week of pregnancy. But Planned Parenthood advertises that it uses it into the ninth week.