Life Links 7/17/12

Virginia's attorney general Ken Cuccinelli has refused to agree to a Board of Health plan which would allow abortion clinics to avoid meeting new abortion clinic regulations.

"The Board does not have the statutory authority to adopt these Regulations," it says. "[T]he Board has exceeded its authority. Thus, this Office cannot certify these Regulations."

The action by the attorney general's office is not the final word on the subject. The regulations, which would require extensive renovations, will continue to go through executive branch review. The attorney general's office was only the first step in that process.

A Virginia woman is suing her employer after she was allegedly fired after she wouldn't get an abortion.

The lawsuit claims restaurant President Leopoldo F. Aguirre Sr. ordered the firing and told Shomo that customers don't want to see "a belly" on their waitresses.

Bei Bei Shuai has rejected a plea deal which would have allowed her to plead guilty to attempted feticide and avoid murder charges.

Shuai was eight months pregnant on Dec. 23, 2010, when she ate rat poison after her boyfriend broke up with her. Shuai was hospitalized and doctors detected little wrong with the unborn child's health for the first few days. The premature girl, Angel Shuai, was delivered by cesarean section Dec. 31, but died from bleeding in the brain three days later after being removed from life support.

FOXNews has a long article on fetal surgery which profiles Addison Kelly, a five-year-old girl who had a tumor removed from her chest cavity when she was in the womb. Also of interest are efforts by researchers to use fetal treatments sooner and sooner.

Efforts under way in fetal surgery involve using less invasive or earlier treatments. One hope is that procedures done today for fetuses who are twentysome weeks old could be done sooner, with greater benefit.

Dr. Alan Flake, director of CHOP's Center for Fetal Research, is working with stem cells from adult bone marrow to develop a treatment for the blood disorder sickle-cell anemia that could be administered 12 to 14 weeks into pregnancy. Clinical trials of the therapy should begin in a year or two.

Another less-than-empowering abortion story

From Kelly Gray, a self-described "extremely pro-choice" volunteer with the Bay Area Doula Project:

I was 18 when I had my first abortion. For a week and to my surprise, I intended to keep my baby. Previously, I had never wanted children but I suddenly found my hand resting on my tummy, I took pride in my full breasts, and I looked keenly at young children while smelling their hair as they sat in my lap. I convinced myself that I was glowing. In time, about seven days to be exact, it became clear that my partner did not share my thoughts. My parents assumed I was calling Planned Parenthood, and when I hesitated they made an appointment for me at a private clinic. The doctor said, “You need to make a decision that will allow you to look into your own eyes, day after day.” I knew instantly that the ethical, responsible thing to do, as a pregnant mother, was to abort my pregnancy.

So she intended to keep the child until her partner disapproved, her parents made an abortion appointment for her and an abortionist talked her into an abortion. That's pretty much the opposite of empowering.

Overheard: Taranto on Roiphe

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal discusses Katie Roiphe's Slate piece (which I discussed Tuesday) as an example of how liberals tend to lose arguments because they follow the framing advice of George Lakoff.

This is an important insight, not only into the way the left debates and otherwise communicates, but into the way the left thinks--or fails to think. The book's subtitle, after all, promises an instruction in "Thinking and Talking Democratic." Lakoff and Wehling command their readers not only to act as if opposing arguments are without merit, but to close their minds to those arguments. What comes across to conservatives as a maddening arrogance is actually willed ignorance.......

Through her use of rhetorical questions and the passive voice, Roiphe considerably softens a position that, stated flatly, amounts to this: A woman's desire is sufficient to justify her "absolute control" over whether her unborn child is a human being or a disposable object.

When you put it baldly like that, it is a monstrous proposition. One begins to understand why Lakoff-style willed ignorance is such a seductive alternative.

Life Links 7/11/12

At Jezebel, one anonymous woman who describes herself as "a visible pro-choice advocate and public figure," explains why she won't "come out" about her abortion and openly wonders if efforts by pro-choice groups to have women share their abortion experiences does more harm than good for the pro-choice movement.


The New York Times reports Feng Jianmei, the woman who was forced into an abortion at 7 months in China, will receive a payment from her local government. According to the People's Daily online the payment will be approximately $11,000.

Zhang Kai, Deng's attorney, submitted an appeal to the Ankang police and procurators on July 2, asking authorities to file a case and start investigations into the local officials involved. However, Deng returned home during the past weekend and decided to hold negotiations with the local government agencies.

"I've given up legal appeals and agreed to take the compensation offered by the township government," Deng told the Global Times Tuesday.

"We just want our normal life back," he said.

The Des Moines Register is covering Sue Thayer's whistleblower lawsuit against Planned Parenthood.

The suit alleges the nonprofit organization illegally billed Medicaid for services related to elective abortions. Elective abortions, defined as abortions in which the mother's life is not threatened, are not covered by Medicaid under federal and state law. The document also claims Planned Parenthood "unbundled" services related to elective abortions — such as blood pressure tests, blood tests and other procedures — and billed those to Medicaid, but not the actual abortions.

The lawsuit also alleges Planned Parenthood staff in Storm Lake and other clinics prescribed birth control pills for as long as 14 months without a qualified health care professional ever directly seeing patients or conducting a follow-up visit. A qualified health care professional should have seen the women at least once every three months, the suit says.

Will the pro-choice movement abandon the strategy of dehumanizing the unborn?

At Slate, Katie Roiphe addresses the elephant in the room for the pro-choice movement after reading a NY Times piece about the possibility of requiring men to provide for women they impregnate during pregnancy (termed "preglimony" by Shari Motro). After discussing Motro's proposal to require both sexes to "take responsibility for (conception's) economic consequences," Roiphe discusses the proposal's implications to the pro-choice movement and the fear that the proposal would acknowledge the unborn as life (my emphasis).

I don't actually think it is in the interests of feminism or the pro-choice movement to cling so rigidly to outdated notions of "life." It no longer helps our cause to try to argue that the fetus is not "life." The reason for this, as people have noted, is that technological advances, like sonograms, where you can see feet on a fetus in the first trimester, have made those claims clearly and patently hollow to even ardently pro-choice people who have seen the black and white staticky fuzziness take shape into human form. How can we possibly claim that the moving creature, with feet and toes that we can see, is not "life"?

It seems to me that the pro-choice movement doesn't need to cling to these ideas, or this rigid '70s-era idiom, to make its central argument acceptable to the larger public. The idea that a woman should control her reproductive choices is still a vivid and moral one even to a population that understands full well that a fetus is a baby-in-progress.

Can we admit that a woman has the right to choose, while also acknowledging what we see on sonograms? Can we say "embryos" and "fetuses" do represent some form of "life" without conceding a woman's absolute control over the womb that bears them? A person who has had an abortion knows, and in fact has always known, and experienced very intimately this charged ambiguity: An unborn fetus that is wanted is a "baby," and an unborn fetus that is not wanted is a "fetus."

I think the new technologies, and the new demographic realities, in which unwed mothers need protections, demand a more imaginative, honest rhetoric. Paradoxically, I think in the long run it will only help the ongoing fight for reproductive rights, to evolve with the times, to trailblaze a way of thinking that encompasses the ambiguities we know, and can see, are there.

This has to make the old guard cringe. For years, the pro-choice movement and the abortion industry have worked to dehumanize the unborn in an effort to make abortion less of an abomination and now Roiphe openly says the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement is outdated, patently hollow, and less honest and fashions the movement's old guard as cave women rigidly clinging to a "'70s-era idiom." She basically admits the pro-choice movement has been intentionally deceiving people for decades but now with technological advances those deceptions are no longer plausible. In light of this, a new strategy (one which doesn't dehumanize the unborn) and new arguments are necessary.

I think Roiphe makes a mistake when she assumes "(t)he idea that a woman should control her reproductive choices is still a vivid and moral one even to a population that understands full well that a fetus is a baby-in-progress."

For some of the population - yes. But for large swaths - no. It's much easier for abortion advocates to defend abortion to the public-at-large when they can speak of the need for reproductive rights as taking precedence over the non-life of a dehumanized embryo or a parasitic fetus. Those arguments become less persuasive to many when the dehumanized embryo is no longer dehumanized but considered a "baby-in-progress." A woman's right to do whatever she wants with her body is more sell-able to the public when the body and life of the unborn child are not seriously considered.

I think Roiphe's position also shows the disconnect between the academic pro-choicers like herself, who don't want to look foolish by acting like the unborn aren't alive, and the establishment ground soldiers at NARAL and Planned Parenthood, who don't care about looking foolish and will use any means to keep abortion legal.

NARAL and Planned Parenthood understand that a large segment of their supporters and our population (often individuals who've had or could have a personal experience with abortion) are at least somewhat (if not mostly) content to put up a mental wall where on one side wanted unborn children are humanized while unwanted unborn children are dehumanized. It makes not a peep of sense to those, like Roiphe, who think about it but that weak wall is what is keeping the pro-choice movement together.

Life Links 7/10/12

Another forced late-term abortion case in China is garnering attention.

Pan Chunyan's pregnancy was terminated at nearly eight months in April because she had violated the one-child policy, Beijing-based lawyer Zhang Kai said.
Her husband sought legal help after hearing about another recent forced late termination in Shaanxi province…..

"They already paid a penalty but the pregnancy was still terminated forcibly," Mr Zhang told the BBC. He said Mr and Mrs Wu's violation of the one-child policy did not give officials the right to terminate the pregnancy.

In an open letter published by US-based aid group China Aid, Mr Wu said "a group of people" took his wife "forcefully" to a local hospital on 6 April after a brief detention, where she was given an injection.

China Aid has an open letter from Mr. Wu about the forced abortion of his unborn child.


FactCheck.org finds that the Obama campaign is twisting Romney’s position on abortion in their latest ad.


In Colorado, a five-time DUI offender is responsible for a crash which injured a pregnant woman, her five-year-old son and killed her near-term unborn child.

Why can't pro-choice bloggers make an argument?

At Feministe, guest blogger Anna Lukas Miller provides a perfect example of why the pro-choice movement is losing the argument on abortion.

First she shows ignorance in describing women who have abortions:

After all, she is in good company—one in every three women gets an abortion, and sixty percent of those women are already married.

Ummm.... nope. Usually around 80-90% of women who have abortions are unmarried. Maybe she's thinking "sixty percent of those women already has a child." Maybe she should have actually done some research instead of just parroting Planned Parenthood.

Then she shows a complete inability to make an argument or for some reason believes cursing at those who disagree with her is in some manner persuasive.

So, I would like to say a few words to all of the Republican (and Democrat) legislators trying to make abortion inaccessible—first through manipulating insurance plans away from covering it, then through enforcing mandatory counseling, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds designed to guilt women about their choice and then through absurd regulations designed to shut down abortion clinics, making abortion nominally legal but inaccessible.

Those words? (Expletive). You. All.

Then she goes back to ignorance by ridiculously claiming that all prolife legislators are men.

You are all men. You have no idea what it is like to be a woman, and what it is like to be pregnant, not be sure if you are pregnant or even any grasp of how much taking a pregnancy to term affects every aspect of daily life—and then the future thereafter.

It's almost as if she can't imagine that women like Kelly Ayotte or Cathy McMorris Rodgers or any of the numerous prolife female state legislators exist.

Then on to an ad hominem. Males have "no role in the abortion debate" except to agree with her even though it appears her knowledge of the topic is exceptional low.

As men who wish to be called men, you have no role in the abortion debate other than to unquestioningly support women in whatever choice they might choose to make.

With a "thought" process like this, you start to see why the pro-choice movement doesn't have the public advocacy strength it once did.

Life Links 7/9/12

In Indiana, a local prolifer has pointed out to the Justice Department how the Fort Wayne abortion clinic doesn't adhere to the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The executive director of Allen County Right to Life today filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice against the Fort Wayne Women's Health Organization, alleging that the clinic at 2210 Inwood Drive does not provide handicapped parking spaces or a ramp for wheelchair access -- an omission Humbarger says could endanger women who have just undergone surgery there.

The Right to Life Office moved to 2126 Inwood a year ago, and Humbarger said that she has seen "women leaving (the clinic) in apparent discomfort. Moreover, these women were unable to walk unassisted - apparently as the result of having undergone an abortion. These women had to walk down steps and across a parking lot to their vehicles. On each occasion, these women were being physically held up by a (clinic) employee and/or an unidentified person.

Also in Indiana, a Medicaid official claims Indiana's attempt to defund Planned Parenthood runs contrary to federal requirements.

Hearing officer Benjamin Cohen wrote that the Indiana law violated the federal requirement that individuals must have the freedom to obtain care from any qualified provider. Restricting that choice just because a care provider also offers non-covered care isn't allowed, he wrote.

Indiana asked the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago last August to lift U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt's June 24, 2011, preliminary injunction blocking parts of the abortion law. The court has not yet ruled.

India's FDA is cracking down on the illegal distribution of abortion drugs in an effort to stop sex selection abortions. This crackdown has led some chemists to stop stocking the pills entirely.

Gynaecologists in the city claim that following a crackdown by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on illegal sale of abortion pills to curb sex-selective abortions, chemists are reluctant to stock the pills, especially those prescribed to terminate a second trimester (between 12 and 20 weeks) pregnancy. The sex of a foetus can be determined during the second trimester.

Prolifers in Ohio (including Stand True's Bryan Kemper) are suing Sinclair Community College after the campus police forced them to take down a banner and lower their signs.

Life Links 7/6/12

Celebrity news sites are abuzz about this letter to the editor from Brad Pitt's mom which appeared Tuesday in the Springfield News-Leader. Jane Pitt writes that she's planning on voting for Mitt Romney partly because he is against abortion.


Blogger Infinite Grace reflects on her year of blogging about her post-abortion journey.


In India, their FDA has found discrepancies in the abortion drugs stocks of 21 doctors.

"The administration is verifying which of these 21 gynaecologists do not have licences under Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act. Notices will be issued to these doctors and they will face action," Yadav said.

The AP has a story on Mississippi's lone abortion clinic and its struggle to stay open.

Life Links 7/5/12

Fifteen Chinese scholars have issued a public letter calling for Chinese government to rethink their one-child policy.

"The birth approval system built on the idea of controlling population size as emphasized in the current ‘Population and Family Planning Law' does not accord with provisions on the protection of human rights contained in the nation's constitution," the authors of Thursday's letter wrote, adding that a rewriting of the law was "imperative."
.........
Researchers with the Research Development Center, a prominent government-affiliated think tank, added their voices to the chorus on Tuesday with an open call for Beijing to consider revising the policy, though they made no mention of Ms. Feng. Instead, the researchers focused on China's rapidly aging population and a predicted dearth of young workers that some have said could bring about a demographic crisis.

In Tennessee, the Obama administration is doing their best to keep Planned Parenthood affiliates open. After the Shelby County Commission voted in 2011 to contract with Christ Community Health Centers for family planning services, the Obama administration has jumped in to help the Planned Parenthood affiliate with 400K.

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen has announced Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region has been awarded $395,000 for its Title X Family Planning Services Program......

"Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region has been helping Memphis and Shelby County residents get the health care they need to lead happier, healthier lives for years," Cohen, D-Memphis, said in a release. "These new federal funds will help ensure the Title X Family Planning Program reaches those who need help the most in underserved communities."

NPR has a long story on forced abortion, the one-child policy and future population problems in China.


A husband and wife abortionist team in India has been arrested on suspicion of performing sex-selection abortions. They were on the run for 2 weeks after one of their midwives was caught attempting to bury an aborted female child.

Life Links 6/29/12

Deng Jiyuan, the husband of the Chinese woman who was forced into a 7-month abortion has resurfaced in Beijing after leaving his hometown and is seeking help to get his wife released from the local hospital.

Despite her requests to leave, Ms. Feng has been held in Shanxi Zhenping County Hospital watched over by local government officials, since being forced to abort her seven-month-old fetus on June 2.

In a sign that local officials may be bending to public pressure, Ms. Feng's sister-in-law, Deng Jicai, said by phone Friday evening that doctors had told her Ms. Feng would be released from the hospital following a final check up on Saturday. "Right now there is no one blocking us from leaving," Ms. Deng said. "Those government people have been gone since yesterday."

The New York Attorney General's office wants former New York NARAL leader Kelli Conlon to repay all of the NARAL money she spent on herself (apparently hundreds of thousands).

The complaint cites more than $250,000 of improper expenses, some falsely documented, while noting Conlin's salary was $380,000 in 2010 and she exercised increasing control over its outside bookkeepers and intimidated staff.

They included $75,000 for retail purchases, with nearly $50,000 for designer clothing and shoes at stores such as Barneys and Giorgio Armani, some described in expense claims as "event decor" for the nonprofits' fundraisers.

Others were $17,000 for a July rental of a Southhampton house; $12,200 to pay her children's nanny; $26,000 for personal travel; $18,500 in hotel expenses in Manhattan, where NARAL-NY has its office, though she lived in Brooklyn; $50,000 for non-business meals, including 120 from a sushi restaurant near her home; and $70,000 for car services, most for shuttling her children.

In another brick in the mounting tower of evidence that human embryonic stem cell research is so 2002, the University of Massachusetts embryonic stem cell bank will close at the end of the year as funding dries up. The state of Massachusetts wasted $8.6 million on it since the legislation passed in 2008.

The state invested $8.6 million in public funds to establish the bank at the medical school's Shrewsbury campus.

That decision in 2008 was seen then as a bold statement of support for research on human embryonic stem cells during a time when federal funding for work on the controversial cells was restricted. But advances in technology and changes to federal policies rapidly made the bank obsolete, state officials said......

Originally, the bank was seen as a repository for embryonic stem cell lines that were being created but were not eligible for federal funding under Bush-era restrictions. The field has evolved significantly since then, with President Obama's loosening of restrictions on federal funding and the development of new technologies for making stem cells......

"It's certainly unfortunate that this investment hasn't panned out as planned, but I think it's a very different case from investing large amounts of money in a single company," Widmer said.

Some scientists said they were not surprised to learn of the endeavor's failure. Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his impression was that the banking effort never fully got off the ground. It did not announce the availability of its first stem cell lines until 2011.

So they blew through nearly $9 million in tax funds and will only have been a functioning embryonic stem cell bank for 2 years?

Life Links 6/28/12

The last abortion clinic in Mississippi is suing to stop enforcement of the state's abortion clinic regulation law. None of the three abortionists who are employed there can get admitting privileges.

The clinic said the unjustified requirement in the law is that it requires anyone who performs an abortion at a clinic to be an OB-GYN with privileges to admit patients to a local hospital. Lawmakers said that is for patients' safety. The lawsuit says it's impossible for the clinic's physicians to get local hospital admitting privileges by Sunday......

Clinic spokeswoman Betty Thompson said last week that the three physicians who work at the clinic are OB-GYNs and have applied for privileges but haven't received them.

Two local Maryland law regulating crisis pregnancy centers have been struck down.

In a 2-1 ruling Wednesday, a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond ruled that the Baltimore and Montgomery County ordinances violated the pregnancy centers' free-speech rights.

In China, the husband of a woman forcibly aborted at 7 months has gone missing.

Deng Jiyuan traveled to Beijing last week to meet with lawyers and journalists to discuss the incident. But, according to his sister, Mr. Deng was met with fierce resistance. "More than 100 people and a dozen of cars showed up to stop him, and a man suddenly appeared and kicked my brother in the stomach," Deng Jicai said.

On Sunday, government officials purportedly urged local townspeople to unfold a banner near the hospital where Feng was located, which called the family "traitors" and ordered that they be excommunicated from the town. Meanwhile, photos were posted online displaying a red banner that reads, "severely beat the traitors and expel them."

Life Links 6/27/12

The Los Angeles Times is reporting the family planning officials who forcibly aborted a woman at 7 months pregnant and then laid the child's body next to hers for a picture have been supposedly punished.

Following the outcry, a municipal government investigation found that forcing the young woman to terminate her pregnancy so late in its term violated her rights, the official Xinhua news agency reported Tuesday. The township also illegally demanded an approximately $6,200 payment for a certificate allowing her to have a second child, which her family did not pay, the report stated.

The investigation found that officials "used crude means to violate her intentions," Xinhua reported.

The head of family planning in Zhenping county has been removed from his post, Xinhua reported. Other township, county and hospital officials were also punished, including another Zhenping family-planning official, who was given "administrative demerits," the news agency reported.

Meanwhile, the family of the woman is allegedly being harassed.

The Chinese father of a forcibly aborted baby whose case prompted an international outcry has been beaten and forced into hiding, while his wife and other family members have been labeled traitors by fellow townspeople, the man's sister said Tuesday.....

Apparently angered over the family's contacts with journalists, the local government has since organized a backlash against the family members, calling them traitors and keeping them under surveillance, Deng Jicai, a sister of the 30-year-old father Deng Jiyuan, said.

The Planned Parenthood in Columbia, Missouri is indefinitely suspending abortions again. This has happened before because of a lack of abortionist.

This isn't the first time Planned Parenthood has suspended abortions at the Columbia clinic while doctors were unavailable. The clinic halted abortions for four months beginning last October after its lone Columbia physician was sent overseas on active military duty.

Part of South Dakota's informed consent law will go into effect on July 1.

Women seeking abortions in South Dakota will be advised about the risk of adverse psychological outcomes and assessed by a doctor for the possibility that she was coerced into getting the procedure, under an agreement between Planned Parenthood and state officials.

Overheard: Ann Coulter on Rep. Lisa Brown

Ouch.

Her smashing crescendo was: "And finally Mr. Speaker, I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no'!"

It's not clear where Rep. Brown got the idea that the Republican caucus was planning on date-raping her, but I think there's been a terrible misunderstanding. The bill under consideration merely ensured the safety of women having abortions -- and, in a small way, the safety of the fetus, whom the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited legislatures from protecting directly......

For making inappropriate remarks during a legislative session, Brown was prohibited from making floor speeches for one day. Being an hysterical drama queen who believes the Michigan Legislature was thinking about her and her vagina, Rep. Brown responded to the sanction by claiming she had been "silenced." A vulgarian gets a one-day penalty, and suddenly she's Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Rep. Brown was not being silenced. She was being admonished for a crazy display of narcissism utterly irrelevant to the bill under discussion. I would never in a million years silence a woman because of her views on abortion, but I'd vote for a month of silence from this self-dramatizing freak.

Life Links 6/22/12

In Kansas, the State Board of Healing Arts has revoked the medical license of former abortionist and late abortionist George Tiller’s former rubber stamper Ann Neuhaus.

The administrative judge concluded in February that Neuhaus performed inadequate mental health exams in 2003 on 11 patients, aged 10 to 18. The judge said Neuhaus’ records didn’t contain the information necessary to show that she did thorough exams, and the patients’ care was “seriously jeopardized.”

“Her actions clearly show a disregard for her patients’ safety and care, which causes her to be a threat to any future patients she might have,” said Reese Hays, the attorney on the board’s litigation team who presented the case against Neuhaus.

MSN India has a story a couple whose sex-selection abortion business was shut down.

Sources in the police said the couple has admitted to running the abortion clinic but is not revealing the exact details. A sting operation conducted two years ago on the Mundes had revealed their willingness to conduct an abortion on a seven-month pregnant woman for just Rs 2,500.

Advocate and activist Varsha Deshpande, who runs the NGO Lek-Ladki Abhiyaan, said: 'Our scrutiny on them has revealed that they conduct, on an average, 20 abortions per day, which comes to 7,200 abortions in one year. The Mundes are known to be in collusion with a lot of doctors from remote districts in Maharashtra as well as Andhra Pradesh, from where people come to them to get their ultrasound examinations done'.

The local CBS news station in Miami has the story of an in-utero surgery in which a tennis ball sized tumor was removed from Lyna Gonzalez’s mouth when she was in the 17th week of gestation.

During her pregnancy, Gonzalez’s doctors discovered a benign tumor the size of a tennis ball growing on her unborn baby’s mouth. Doctors told Tammy there was little chance her daughter would survive birth – and if she did, she would require an immediate tracheotomy in order to breath and have multiple surgeries thereafter....

On October 1, 2010, Leyna Mykaella Gonzalez was born healthy, weighing 8 pounds, 1 ounce. The only sign of the surgery is a tiny scar on her mouth.

The Indianapolis Star has a long article on Planned Parenthood of Indiana CEO Betty Cockrum.

Life Links 6/21/12

At the Atlantic, Richard Florida discusses the Geography of Abortion in the U.S. A lot of it shows how incredibly wrong pro-choicers are when they act like prolife policies do nothing to effect the abortion rate(my emphasis).

First and foremost, the geography of abortion follows the red and blue political patterning of the states. It is positively associated with the share of state voters who voted for Obama in 2008 (.60 to .65) and negatively associated with McCain votes (-.58 to -.63). This is a dramatic change from 1974-1988, the period covered by the 1994 NBER study, which found that "extensive Republican or Democratic control in a state is uncorrelated with abortion rates."
...........
Abortion is most strongly associated with the fault-line of socio-economic class, across three key dimensions—income, education, and occupation. Abortion rates track closely with the wealth and affluence of states: the richer the location, the higher the rate of abortions (the correlations between the two range from .53 to .65). This effect is in line with previous studies and thus appears to be of long standing.

Planned Parenthood is no longer planning on turning a property they purchased in Auburn Hills, Michigan into an abortion clinic.

The proposed clinic was a source of tension in the community, with groups opposed to abortion conducting several protests at the site because they believed the procedure would be conducted there.

The group hadn't determined what services would be offered at the clinic, said Desiree Cooper, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan.

"We do not offer all of our services at all of our health centers. It just depends on the community and the need, and we hadn't made that assessment," she said.

Yeah, except the Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan president said a long time ago that Planned Parenthood was planning to provide abortions there.


Live Action released another video showing two abortion clinics in North Carolina willing to perform sex-selection abortions.

The local Planned Parenthood caught on tape has issued a statement from the national office. No word on whether the employee was fired or not.


The Detroit News has a lackluster editorial which attempts to argue that providing regulations on the abortion industry is bad because it would make abortions "needlessly costly and cumbersome." The editorial claims abortion clinic regulations aren't need because "Physicians already are personally licensed by the state and have to adhere to professional standards governing their treatment decisions. A state medical board will suspend or strip a doctor's license if he or she violates the standards."

Later, it notes a report which showed a number of abortionists who have violated basic medical standards and are still licensed but claims new regulations aren't need because "weeding out bad actors through heightened surveillance and enforcement of laws on the books would be a better approach than onerous new restrictions that discourage good doctors from providing the service. Perhaps the state's enforcement division needs more inspectors."

Michigan pro-abort reps. can't understand why their tantrums and lack of professionalism led to them being silenced for a day

Michigan pro-abort Representative Lisa Brown is making the news again after her speech against prolife legislation lost her House floor speaking privileges for a day (Rep. Barb Byrum also lost her privileges for throwing a mini-tantrum on the House floor). Another recent time Brown made the news was when a former staffer accused Brown of firing her because she was pregnant. The staffer also accused Brown of making a crude abortion comments during a prolife rally (another staffer claimed Brown would never say something that crude).

Some people who don't understand the state House rules on protocol and decorum seem to think that saying the word vagina is what got Brown in trouble and can't seem to fathom the context in which she said it might be at issue.

Let's examine the quote:

"I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no,' "

If I was a Michigan House member who favored the prolife legislation being voted on, I would consider this a personal attack. She claims they are interested in her vagina and uses the "no means no" phrase which is often used to discuss sexual assaults.

Besides Brown's accusatory comments and Byrum's mini-tantrum, Rep. Rashida Tlaib couldn't come up with argument so she called for a sex boycott.

State Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, called for women statewide to boycott having sex until Republican lawmakers reconsider the bills.

"Stop having sex with us, gentlemen," Tlaib said. "Find somebody else to do it with."

Life Links 6/5/12

Jordan Sekulow and Matthew Clark write about pro-choice hypocrisy on sex-selection abortions.

Writing at the XX Factor blog at Slate, pro-choice advocate Allison Benedikt demonstrated the convoluted logic of those on the pro-choice side who express discomfort with sex-selective abortion:

If pro-choicers object to aborting because of the sex of the fetus, aren't we then saying that abortion is "murdering" girls? Aren't we basically arguing that a fetus is not a blank slate but a future possibility? That is not the case to make if your goal is to protect abortion rights.

Benedikt is exactly right. If "these are fetuses with female genitals or male genitals—not little girls and little boys," why would the pro-choice community condemn sex-selection abortion at all?

At Slate, Rachel Larimore tries to reason with pro-choicers opposed to banning sex-selective abortions.

At the same time, too many in the pro-choice movement refuse to believe that anyone who's pro-life actually cares about the unborn. They can't allow themselves to believe anything but that we hate women and are afraid of sex, because if they acknowledge that our concern is for the unborn, they might have to challenge their own beliefs.

And so we can't even find agreement on an issue that should bring us together. I find the pro-choice critiques of PRENDA to be either tired and lazy or strangely hypocritical. As to the idea that sex-selective abortion isn't a big deal because it doesn't happen that often, well… women who work at Catholic hospitals only make up a tiny percentage of the overall workforce, so I guess all that hubbub about whether they should have employer-provided birth control isn't that big of a deal.

A girl from Arizona with hypotonia (aka Floppy Baby Syndrome) is walking after receiving a transplant of her own cord blood stem cells and physical therapy.


In other cord blood stem cell news, a Florida newspaper has a long story on a toddler who is part of an FDA-approved clinical trial to see if their own cord blood stem cells can help children with sensorineural hearing loss.

Planned Parenthood says it opposes sex-selection abortion. Say what?

In a letter to the Washington Post, Planned Parenthood employee Chloe Cooney (director of global advocacy) claims, "Planned Parenthood opposes sex-selection abortion." Huh? Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards claims the same thing in a press release.

“As the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health provider and advocate, Planned Parenthood knows all too well that women still face gender discrimination in this country,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “We oppose sex selection abortion."

What's going on here? Planned Parenthood is actually stating they oppose a type of abortion. Isn't that a first?

Shouldn't someone ask them why they're now supposedly suddenly opposed to a woman freely exercising her right to abortion based on the child's sex?

Don't they trust women to make the best decision for themselves and their families anymore?

Are they saying that some women's reproductive choices aren't valid?

Because that goes against everything Planned Parenthood and the pro-choice movement has been preaching for decades.

Persuasion is now apparently beyond the pale at Auckland University

Auckland University has apparently caught a sickness which has previously taken hold in Canada.

Auckland University Student Association president Arena Williams has called for a special general meeting next month, which could see ProLife Auckland being barred from associating itself with the university.

An announcement for the meeting said the association would consider whether the "Prolife Club be disaffiliated for propagating harmful misinformation [sic]".

"Recently we've received complaints from students after [ProLife Auckland] handed out fliers at the campus," said Williams.

"On the fliers there was information which some felt was pressuring them into making different decisions than they normally would."

The horror!!!

No word on whether the debate club will also be purged.

The idiocy continues:

Williams said it was not appropriate for her to say how the distributed information was harmful.

So the club should be banned for distributing harmful but no evidence is provided for how it was harmful? Classic.