Life Links 3/24/15

A member of 40 Days for Life was praying outside a Planned Parenthood in Austin, Texas when someone in a car threw a flaming object at her. 

Police arrested a driver Monday night who they say threw a flaming object from a car near the Planned Parenthood clinic on East Ben White Boulevard near South Congress. Austin police received the call shortly after 6 p.m., and members of the bomb squad responded. No one was injured and nothing was damaged, police said.

A man in Pennsylvania was arrested for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl after he tried to get an abortion for her. 

Shenandoah police say a social worker from Massachusetts reported a man using the name “Carlos” from Shenandoah was looking to get an abortion for his 12-year-old girlfriend.   

The New Hampshire Union Leader rips into Senator Jeanne Shaheen for her opposition to the Justice for Victims of Sex Trafficking Act. 

Sex trafficking is a crime that almost exclusively victimizes women and girls. According to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, 90 percent of sex trafficking victims in the United States last year were female. Shaheen is refusing to help these abuse victims until Republicans agree to make taxpayers finance abortions. What a loathsome, cowardly, cynical thing to do.

A teenager charged with killing her mother in Bali is claiming her mother forced her to have two abortions and was attempting to force her to have a third. 

He said von Wiese-Mack had "forced" her daughter, Heather Mack, to have two earlier abortions and was seeking legal control so that she could compel a third procedure to terminate the teen's latest pregnancy.

Mack, 19, gave birth this week to a girl in an Indonesian hospital. She and her boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, 21, of Oak Park, are charged with murder in her mother's August death. They could face a firing squad if convicted.

Life Links 3/18/15

Is a California Planned Parenthood employee shipping pounds of pot?  That what it sounds like to me.

This week a Planned Parenthood in California received a package with their address as the return address after the postal service was unable to deliver the package to an address in Georgia.  Some employees were suspicious of the package so they called in the bomb squad which found:

Inside the package was about four pounds of marijuana, baby diapers and a thank you card, Swithenbank said.

The card wasn’t written on in the inside, but was left blank with a generic greeting, he said.

Mollie Hemingway writes on how Planned Parenthood and NARAL got the Senate Democrats to vote against the human trafficking legislation they all favored just weeks ago.

Prior to March 10, no Democrats opposed the bill and Planned Parenthood and NARAL didn’t issue a peep about it. Since the afternoon of March 10, when Barbara Boxer dropped her support and Planned Parenthood decided to launch its public relations campaign against the bill, Planned Parenthood has tweeted some 60 times trying to gin up opposition — more than 60 percent of its tweets during that time. Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, tweeted a couple dozen times, also beginning on March 10. And NARAL tweeted against the bill nearly 47 times, again beginning on March 10. Heck, almost like it was all coordinated.

It’s certainly not a surprise that the Democratic Party is so controlled by Planned Parenthood, but it was still remarkable to watch the whole thing transpire in real time.

Kay Hymowitz discusses the class gap in unplanned babies.

One way of examining the question of whether hardship is at the root of the unplanned-baby gap is to ask whether locales with more publicly funded family-planning clinics have less unplanned pregnancy. Guttmacher estimates the percentage of the need for publicly funded services that is met in each state and the number of women per 1,000 who have unplanned pregnancies. But as the scatterplot below shows, there is no solid relationship between the two. Alaska and California outperform other states in terms of servicing needy women: About 60 percent of the need for publicly funded care is met. The states' unintended-pregnancy rates, though not the highest in the nation, are still impressive: 50 out of every 1,000 women. That’s about the same as a number of states, including Arizona, Ohio, and Illinois, that are only helping about 20 percent of the women who need it. That sure makes it look like money and access by themselves cannot explain the unplanned-pregnancy gap

Life Links 3/4/15

A Pennsylvania man named John Frazier has been arrested after he allegedly offered a baby sitter $100 to attack his ex-girlfriend and make her miscarry their child after she wouldn’t have an abortion. 

Police say Frazier asked his baby sitter neighbor for help after his ex-girlfriend refused to have an abortion or give the child up for adoption.

They say the baby sitter was shocked and immediately refused.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has publicly endorsed legislation to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. 

"As the Wisconsin legislature moves forward in the coming session, further protections for mother and child are likely to come to my desk in the form of a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks," his letter said. "I will sign that bill when it gets to my desk and support similar legislation on the federal level.”

The ACLU is going after a hospital in Washington because it doesn’t provide abortions.

Jefferson Healthcare officials are in the process of responding to an ACLU letter dated Feb. 18 that challenges the local public health care system’s failure to offer abortions. In that letter, ACLU policy council official Leah Rutman asks Jefferson Healthcare to “change its policies and practices to fulfill its obligations” with the 1991 Reproductive Privacy Act (RPA).

“We believe that Jefferson Healthcare’s failure to provide abortion services violates state law,” Rutman wrote. “Our goal is to ensure that women seeking reproductive health care services at Jefferson Healthcare have access to the full range of services as required by law.”