Life Links 1/31/08

I'm with Scott on this one. Steve was kind enough (thanks Steve!) to send me a copy of his book Common Ground Without Compromise to review (I'm hopefully post something here in the next couple of weeks). While Steve does believe prolifers can find common ground with pro-choice individuals (over things like late-term abortions, sex-selection abortions, etc.), he's not someone who puts compromise above the sharing the truth.


Not Dead Yet would like to introduce Peter Singer to Brad Hennefer.


National Right to Life PAC has issued a statement on the remaining presidential candidates in which they say nice things about the remaining Republican presidential candidates.


Abortionist George Tiller has been ordered to turn over records of his post-viability abortions.


The abortion pill RU-486 (aka Mifrepristone) is produced by the same Chinese company whose leukemia drugs have harmed patients in China. The leukemia drugs were produced at a different plant than the abortion drugs.

Life Links 1/30/08

Petition language has been submitted by those interested in killing human embryos for research in Michigan. I'll try to find the wording and let you know if the language actually does affirm "Michigan's law prohibiting human cloning." This would be interesting considering those in favor of killing embryos for research in Michigan have also typically wanted to push human cloning for research. Maybe the creation of induced pluripotent cells has slowed down that drive.


Giuliani is out of the presidential race.


So is the phoneyist man in America.

NOW New York goes beserk

Imagine there not being a single person at the New York State National Organization for Women who had the mind to prevent this type of insanity. How many people would that press release go through and not one person spoke up to say, "Isn't this a little crazy?"

"How late is too late?"

Jonathan Kay (who identifies himself as a pro-choicer in favor of gestational limits) reports on The University of Toronto Law School's "Symposium to Mark the 20th Anniversary of R. v. Morgentaler."

Osgoode Hall Law School professor Shelley Gavigan, the most militant and stereotypically feminist of the conference panelists, declared categorically that "The unborn child and the pregnant mother speak with one voice — and that voice is hers." The fact that some of her students didn't see things her way only meant that "I have some work to do on the pedagogical front...."

And yet, beneath the veneer of tribal sisterly celebration, I did manage to detect a strain of underlying tension. It came out on those few occasions when one of the speakers made oblique allusion to that taboo question in the pro-choice camp: How late is too late?...

Similarly, why did Gavigan take such pains to dismiss anecdotes of women having abortions for capricious reasons (e.g., looking good in a bikini on an upcoming vacation) as "preposterous misogynistic fables." If it is really true that "the unborn child and the pregnant mother speak with one voice," then presumably they have the right to assume a voice that is selfish and vain. If the "dominant ideology of the unborn child" is nothing but a misogynistic construct invented by patriarchal moralists, why does it matter if that so-called unborn child weighs one pound — or five? Why strike such defensive postures against a issue that no one in the room would even discuss?

The answer to this last question, I think, is that these women are not as doctrinaire as they pretend to be. Within their own minds, they do wrestle with these important moral questions. But when in public, none of them feel comfortable exploring them. Locked in what they feel to be a tribal culture war against pro-lifers, they allow themselves no nuance. That is why on Friday, by unspoken agreement, they eschewed the opportunity for real intellectual give and take on the one fundamental aspect of the abortion issue that has needed to be addressed since January 28, 1988, and instead focused on self-congratulation, paranoia and sisterly bonding.

When your movement's slogan are "Who decides?" and "Trust women" and you dismiss prolifers as misogynists who want to control women it becomes horribly difficult to oppose any abortion, regardless of the gestation or reason.

Talking about late term abortions puts these kinds of pro-choicers between a rock and a hard place. They must either affirm they think abortion should be legal through all nine months of pregnancy or admit that they don't trust certain women to decide what to do with their pregnancies (which in turns creates a huge hole in their argument).

Life Links 1/28/08

Jason Dulles expands on my thoughts regarding the bodily autonomy argument and late-term abortions.


Rita Marker and Wesley Smith are interviewed in separate segments by Focus on the Family.


Here's a story about another illegal abortion clinic in South Africa.

We met Maama Mindi, who offered us "quick-fix" tablets that should be vaginally inserted and would, she claimed, dissolve the contents of the uterus.

"Trust me, it is safe. At six weeks it's not a baby yet, just blood," she told the Dispatch's investigation team inside a cramped room in the house, the walls of which were plastered with posters promoting "Quality, Reliable Herbal Remedies" offered by Mindi and a Professor Kamu from Kilimanjaro.

Brigitte Pellerin and Andrea Mrozek, founding members of www.prowomanprolife.org have an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen where they discuss abortion in Canada and Flipsyde's song Happy Birthday.


Two groups of researchers used stem cells derived from bone marrow to treat animals who suffered strokes.

"ABORT!!"

That was one of the text messages wannabe casanova David Colby, former CFO of "health insurance giant WellPoint Inc. ," allegedly sent to one of his girlfriends after he impregnated her.

Another lawsuit was filed last month by Elizabeth Cook, a Los Angeles woman who met Colby in 2006 at a function for a California school their children attended.

A single mother with two children, she says in court papers that she dodged his initial advances but relented under a bombardment of calls, texts and e-mails, many of them containing sexually explicit propositions.

She says she soon broke her lease at his urging, with plans to move into his Lake Sherwood home. She says she stopped searching for ways to afford the brain surgery her severely epileptic 6-year-old son needed after Colby promised to pay. Then, she says, she got pregnant, and the text messages abruptly changed tone.

"ABORT!!" Colby allegedly told her in flurry of text messages included in the lawsuit. "Get rid of it. Have an abortion and we can be together."

(Her attorney would not comment on the case. According to court papers, Cook was still pregnant as of Dec. 31.)

Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey

Life Links 1/25/08

Proponents of legalizing the killing of human embryos for research in Michigan are planning on raising $10 million to $20 million for a constitutional ballot initiative. Their current fundraising will need a boost to get them to those numbers.


Scientists have located stem cells in the pancreases of mice.


In an interesting piece at the RH Reality Check Blog, Frances Kissling kindly corrects a previous deceptive post at the RH blog by Marcy Bloom about abortion in Spain. She also provides the definition of "health" in Doe v. Bolton and says the Supreme Court "defined the health exception quite broadly."


American Right to Life is attacking Ann Coulter for endorsing Mitt Romney. They make a variety of claims about Mitt Romney in a press release which claims that corroborating links are at this web page but when you go to the web page there aren't any corroborating links to prove their charges. Apparently, American Right to Life believes the road to ending legal abortion in 12 years is paved by paying for television attack ads on Fox News aimed at Mitt Romney.

Do women have supreme ownership of their bodies or not?

Christianity Today recently interviewed Barack Obama, focusing mainly on his faith but the second page of the three page interview starts with a question regarding abortion and Obama's votes against prolife legislation. Obama responded by saying,

Ultimately, women are in the best position to make a decision at the end of the day about these issues. With significant constraints. For example, I think we can legitimately say — the state can legitimately say — that we are prohibiting late-term abortions as long as there's an exception for the mother's health. Those provisions that I voted against typically didn't have those exceptions, which raises profound questions where you might have a mother at great risk. Those are issues that I don't think the government can unilaterally make a decision about. I think they need to be made in consultation with doctors, they have to be prayed upon, or people have to be consulting their conscience on it. I think we have to keep that decision-making with the person themselves.

Obama is well-aware that "health" with regards to abortion has been expansively defined by the Supreme Court to mean whatever a woman can think of and an abortionist will agree to.

But reading Obama's statement here and numerous posts by pro-choice bloggers this week, I'm continually left scratching my head at how they don't see how their opposition to (at least for those who do oppose) late-term abortions completely undercuts their reasoning (women should be allowed to make these decisions because of bodily autonomy) for why certain abortions should be legal.

If women should have the right to have abortions because, as pro-choice blogger Amanda Marcotte believes the Supreme Court opined, "Your body belongs to you," then why on should any kind of abortion be restricted? Do the bodies of women who are 8-months-pregnant no longer belong to them? Does a woman lose her rights and her ability to make decisions the moment she enters the third trimester? If not, then why should this kind of abortion be restricted in any way? Why should pro-choicers like Obama need to hide behind this qualifying language of "health?" If pro-choicers believe that a woman owns her own body and can do with it whatever she desires and we should trust her to make the decision, then how can pro-choicers want any kind of restrictions on late-term abortions?

Now, maybe a pro-choicer would argue that late-term abortions are rare and only occur for serious reasons. But this dodges the question. It shouldn't matter if they are rare or not and if they only occur for certain reasons or not. If the reason some pro-choicers believe abortion should be legal is because a woman owns her own body then it follows that those pro-choicers should believe abortion should be unrestricted throughout all of pregnancy.

Others pro-choicers might feel/argue that abortion should be restricted after a certain time period because at that time (be it viability, six months, etc.) the unborn becomes what they consider a person. Notice how this adds a rather large exception to the "Women own their bodies" argument. Now it's "Women own their bodies but can't kill persons even if that person is in their body." Then the question quickly becomes "Who is a person?" and "What's the difference between human beings and persons?"

Life Links 1/24/08

Barbara has a continuous photo journal of her March for Life 2008 photos at ProlifeBlogs.


Scott Klusendorf has an interview with Focus on Family about reaching hearts on abortion.


David Frum discusses R v. Morgentaler, the ruling which legalized abortion in Canada.


According to the Catholic News Agency, McCain hasn't changed his position on embryonic stem cell research. In a recent piece explaining his McCain endorsement, Gerard Bradley hinted that McCain's position may have changed in lieu of the news that scientists can created induced pluripotent stem cells without killing embryos.

Yale Daily News - a tool for future abortionists?

Yesterday, the Yale Daily News published an online article (linked to in this post) in which Rasha Khoury, a member of Yale's Medical Students for Choice, was quoted as saying,

It's not as scary as it seems. It's just blood and mucus," Khoury said, referring to the fetus remains in the device. She added, "You'll be able to see arms and stuff, but still just minuscule."

The article was focused on a presentation in which some of the Yale Medical Students for Choice explained abortion procedures and used papaya to demonstrate how an unborn child is sucked out of a uterus. After a couple of hours, the article was scrubbed from their web site.

Today, the Yale Daily News is featuring a long op-ed from Khoury explaining her presentation. I don't know what happened at the presentation (or the Yale student body's reaction to the original story) but it appears that this op-ed is all about Khoury defending herself.

Khoury now writes,

When I was asked what the contents removed from the uterus with the aspirator looked like, I said “blood and mucus,” referring to products of conception, which are then carefully studied in a separate room to ensure the gestational sac and fetal parts (if old enough), are present, ensuring that the procedure was carried out successfully.

Notice how she's very careful to use the term "fetal parts" this time instead of mentioning specific body parts like "arms and stuff" because she wouldn't want to repeat the mistake of humanizing the fetus in the minds of some.

Why the original article was scrubbed hasn't been explained as far as I can tell.

If you're wondering why the Yale Daily News gets rid of articles which provide evidence to the heartlessness of future abortion providers and then provides one future abortion provider with a large number of words to defend herself, you can type a message to Andrew Mangino who is the editor-in-chief and to Kanya Balakrishna and Cullen Macbeth who are managing editors of the Yale Daily News here. I'm also wondering if online editor Steven Siegel played any role in the removal of the original article.

"Every year they march"

Mark Hemingway writes on and provides some picture of the March for Life. More pictures are available here.

Is the only reason to be opposed to human cloning the fear of "cloned armies of human killing machines?"

After reading this piece by Ellis Henican, one might get that impression. I've never read anything from anybody talking about how they're opposed to human cloning experiments because those experiments might lead to "cloned armies of human killing machines." It's like Henican just finished watching one of the recent Star Wars movies and came up with this.

Fred's out

I guess one of the lessons learned from Fred Thompson's rather quick departure from the presidential race is that organizations shouldn't base their endorsements on the results of national polls taken in October. Will National Right to Life PAC issue another primary endorsement?

Giuliani's numbers in recent polls are fairly clear evidence that national polls taken months before any primary or caucus takes place aren't the best predictors of who the nominee will most likely be.

"You'll be able to see arms and stuff...."

UPDATE: For some reason or another the following article is no longer on the Yale Daily News web site.

What kind of person can say something like this:

"It's not as scary as it seems. It's just blood and mucus," Khoury said, referring to the fetus remains in the device. She added, "You'll be able to see arms and stuff, but still just minuscule."

The speaker is Rasha Khoury, a member of the Yale Medical Students for Choice and someone who wants to be an abortionist.

Later on in the article, Khoury notes that not all women feel relief after an abortion.

"Often times, women are crying and cursing and saying they're going to hell," Khoury said. "It may be a quick and easy medical procedure, but it definitely is a very involved social-medical procedure."

HT: The Corner

Ethics? We don't need no stinkin' ethics.

So much for that stem cell ethics committee in New York, eh? From this editorial by Daniel Sulmasy it sounds like Governor Spitzer created the ethics committee just to appear as if he actually cared.

Ethics-committee members hold diverse views on the controversial kinds of stem-cell research. Nonetheless, the committee unanimously recommended that the board hold off on funding these practices for six months so that the committee could examine these thorny ethical issues carefully and recommend guidelines.

The ethics committee thought that ethics mattered.

But perhaps ethics doesn't matter much in New York. The board's funding committee, composed almost exclusively of scientists and advocates for embryonic-stem-cell research, agreed on ambiguous guidelines that permit all the controversial practices noted above: cloning, chimeras, parthenogenesis and creating human embryos solely for research.

Full-speed ahead. Ethics (or even any discussion of them) be damned.

The ethics committee's sensible plan of ethical due diligence proved intolerable to the funding committee. It argued that even temporary limits would "send the wrong message to scientists."

And we wouldn't want those poor, little scientists to worry about what's ethical or not. They might leave for another state if they don't what they want when they want it.

This precipitous funding decision sends the wrong message - namely, that the discussion of research ethics should never encumber scientists' work. That's a dangerous premise for any society to hold. Was a six-month delay to allow ethical review really too much to ask? It's preposterous to propose that this would've had a "chilling effect" on science.

Indeed.

Note to Spitzer: Just because New York is known as the Empire State, that doesn't make you the Emperor.

Sanctity of Human Life Day 2008 Life Links

Family Research Council has a live feed of the Blogs for Life conference, though it is currently not working for me.


Justin Taylor interviews Robert George about Roe v. Wade and abortion.

Let's give up on no one. Let us treat everyone, even our opponents in this profound moral struggle, with respect, civility, and ungrudging love. Loving witness is something all of us can give. And lovingly witnessing in our churches and communities to the sanctity of human life is something all of us are called to do.

Scott Klusendorf summarizes Robert George's and Christopher Tollefsen new book - Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. Meanwhile, Marvin Olasky interviews George and Tollefsen about the book.


Nancy Gibb has a piece in Time discussing the various probable reasons why abortion rates have fallen.


Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling have an editorial in the LA Times where they admit, "Advocates of choice have had a hard time dealing with the increased visibility of the fetus. The preferred strategy is still to ignore it and try to shift the conversation back to women. At times, this makes us appear insensitive, a bit too pragmatic in a world where the desire to live more communitarian and "life-affirming" lives is palpable." They close by writing,

If pro-choice values are to regain the moral high ground, genuine discussion about these challenges needs to take place within the movement. It is inadequate to try to message our way out of this problem. Our vigorous defense of the right to choose needs to be accompanied by greater openness regarding the real conflict between life and choice, between rights and responsibility. It is time for a serious reassessment of how to think about abortion in a world that is radically changed from 1973.

I know Kissling has said this type of thing before but it seems to be a rather stunning admission (that there's actually a real conflict between life and choice and the pro-choice movement needs a serious reassessment regarding how they think about abortion) from the former head of NARAL.


Planned Parenthood plans on getting more involved in the 2008 elections.

"This decision defied everything I believed in.."

Kate shares her experience with abortion and how her parents' reaction to the unplanned pregnancy of her brother's girlfriend played a role in her decision making process.

Deciding that I could not endure my parents incessant and demeaning lecturing, nagging and manipulating, I opted for an abortion. This decision defied everything I believed in, but as I could not figure out how to conceal a pregnancy from my parents, I chose the "easy way out". If I'd had the baby, I would have wanted to give her/him up for adoption.....

When I was 30, I had a quasi-nervous breakdown about the abortion. I had no idea that it bothered me so much. I uncontrollably heaved waves of tears, and in between sobs blabbered about having an abortion, and how I murdered my unborn child. I went on to say that I felt guilty that I'd had such a good life and that after the abortion, I went on to have fun and finish college and do all of the things I'd always hoped to do and that I didn't deserve my life.

Sickening

Dawn Eden links to the blog of someone claiming to be a Planned Parenthood employee. The blogger shares the story of how she didn't report her suspicions that her 12-year-old patient looking for birth control might be in a situation where she's being taken advantage of by an older man. The blogger is too concerned about being "patronizing" to the 12-year-old girl.

Life Links 1/21/08

Nicole Russell has some thoughts about the March for Life which strongly mirrored some thoughts I had last year when I attended the March. I thought I wrote some of those thoughts down but I can't seem to find them.

Still: What if every person who wanted to attend a rally this year spent those hours instead volunteering at a local crisis-pregnancy center? Or, what if they took the money that they would have spent traveling to a rally — and the money that they could have earned had they worked for those hours instead — and purchased baby diapers, formula, and clothes to donate to mothers who have chosen life in spite of being in difficult circumstances? Many community groups already sponsor such efforts — often coinciding with "Sanctity of Human Life Sunday" that many churches observe at the end of January — volunteering at or providing material support for local crisis-pregnancy centers. But it's still hard not to see the wasted opportunity cost of 200,000 people getting themselves to Washington to be seen marching on the Mall — when those resources could be used to reach out in far more personal and effective ways.

The March for Life is great time for prolifers to come together and make a public stand. There will most likely be at least a couple of articles in large newspapers. It probably goes down as a really fond memory for the multitude of young people there. But sometimes I wonder if all the resources spent on bringing the thousands of people to Washington and back would be better spent elsewhere.


Michael New discusses abortion statistics and the good news for prolifers about prolife legislation even if the media would prefer to tell another story.


Kaye McSpadden should take the time to read Michael New's piece before writing editorials like this .

However, despite imposing more restrictions than many countries, the U.S. continues to have one of the highest abortion rates in the industrialized world. Clearly, increasing restrictions does not work to reduce abortions.

The old two-prong attack: bad facts and a logical fallacy. McSpadden heads the Indiana Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice but apparently isn't a member of the clergy herself but does appear to be active with the Unitarian Universalists.