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.

Life Links 5/31/12

Was this New York Planned Parenthood employee fired as well for not being smart enough to know she was being tricked? From the intro to this video (where the red dots are placed on the U.S. map), it looks like Live Action has a few more of these videos. How many Planned Parenthood employees were unable to realize that a woman asking for a sex-selection/family balancing abortion was an unusual circumstance?


Michael Hiltzik responds to Alan Trounson's and Jonathan Thomas' response to a Hiltzik's column which noted CIRM's misleading ad campaign by looking at the ads.

So let's look at the record. It may be true that no ads for Proposition 71 used the term "miraculous cures," but then neither did I. What did the ads promise, however? Several of them have been archived by UCLA, and here's what we find.

Reeve taped an ad shortly before he died, in which he observed, "Stem cells have already
cured paralysis in animals. Stem cells are the future of medicine."

Michael J. Fox taped an ad in which he urged, "Vote yes on 71, and save the life of someone you love."

Joan Samuelson, a leading Parkinson's patient advocate, is shown in another ad asserting, "There are more Americans than I think we can count who are sick now, or are going to be sick in the future, whose lives will be saved by Prop. 71." Shortly after the measure passed, Samuelson was appointed to the stem cell program's board.

Do these ads amount to promising "miracles"? Given that the essence of scientific research is that no one can predict the outcome, to assert as fact that "lives will be saved by Prop. 71" is plainly to promise something downwright extraordinary, if not outright miraculous.

Robin Marty needs to open mouth, insert foot. It's amazing how the regular bloggers at RH Reality Check like Marty and Jodi Jacobson have an incorrect understanding of what Roe v. Wade did. They assume it actually protects children/confers rights after viability as opposed to allowing states to pass laws. If the state doesn't have a law on the books, there's no protection.

Marty writes, "In D.C., an abortion post-viability is allowable for the exact same reasons it is allowed under the established criteria in Roe v. Wade: life or health of the mother." Let's stop right there. Marty has just made what used to be known as a "schoolboy error." (Are we still allowed to say that?) She apparently slipped into thinking that Roe v. Wade itself imposed some affirmative limitations on abortion — by which I mean, some limits that are constitutionally required and that therefore, somehow, are in force everywhere.

But that premise is entirely erroneous. I am not aware of any attorney, on any side of the abortion issue, who has ever defended such an assertion.

As far as I know (and I've done some reading on this subject), the U.S. Supreme Court has never held, in Roe v. Wade or any other ruling, that any legislative body is required to adopt a limitation on abortion, at any stage in pregnancy, with respect to any jurisdiction. Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, all other abortion-related Supreme Court decisions deal entirely with what limitations on abortion the Supreme Court will permit state, local governments, or Congress to apply to abortion.

Cassie Farrell responds to a Joyce Arthur piece.

What Choice Joyce and her cronies need to understand is that their lies simply aren't cutting it in Canada anymore. Instead of formulating a sound argument, they attack the legitimacy of the debate. However, the debate is on, and isn't going away until the right to life for all Canadians is acknowledged and ensured.

Planned Parenthood staffer got fired for getting tricked, providing nonjudgmental care

Via the Huffington Post:

A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman told The Huffington Post on Tuesday the staffer in the video "did not follow our protocol" for dealing with "a highly unusual patient scenario."

"Planned Parenthood insists on the highest quality patient care, and if we ever become aware of a staff member not meeting these high standards we take swift action," she said in a written statement. "Within three days of this patient interaction, the staff member's employment was ended and all staff members at this affiliate were immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters. Today opponents of Planned Parenthood are promoting an edited video of that hoax patient encounter."

This spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America also told The Huffington Post that the organization condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide "high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into" its health centers. That means that no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions (Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Illinois).

So in other words, this staffer wasn't fired for not providing a high standard of care. She was fired because she didn't follow Planned Parenthood protocols which attempt to avoid employees being caught on camera by Live Action actors ("highly unusual patient scenario") doing what Planned Parenthood is proud of doing (providing nonjudgmental care to all women who want abortions regardless of their reason).

That's a tough situation to put an employee in. Basically, if they aren't smart enough to realize they're getting taped by Live Action, then they get fired.

Live Action was pretty clever with their scenario. At the end of the video, the PP worker notes she hopes the actor gets her family and the actor says, "Yes. My boy and my girl." This leads me to believe the actor started the conversation by noting that she already has a girl child but wants to "family balance" and have one boy and one girl. This probably comes off as more normal/less unusual than wanting to abort a girl because you dislike girls or don't want to pay a dowry.

Some IVF clinics offer "family balancing" via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis because some couples want the "perfect family" with one boy and one girl. So - if you're Planned Parenthood employee is that a "highly unusual patient scenario?" Maybe. But to some people (especially those nonjudgmental types at PP) attempting to balance your family isn't unusual at all, but just another innocuous personal preference choice in the long line of reproductive choices.

I guess we should have known this was coming since Planned Parenthood basically admitted in their press release in April that staff had been fired.

Planned Parenthood has extensive guidelines and training requirements for all staff who may encounter difficult or unusual questions, such as those posed by the hoax patients. If a health center learns of an instance where a staff member has not fully followed policies or procedures, swift action is taken to remedy the situation.

How many more PP staffers got fired because they weren't quick to know they were being taped?

Get it right AP: Angel Shuai died as a baby not a fetus

Really Associated Press? Is it really too much to accurately describe a child named Angel Shuai, who was delivered at 33 weeks gestation and lived for 3 days as a baby? Do you still employ editors? Or does the AP style book require writers like Charles Wilson to describe any child whose life was ended prematurely as a fetus.

Unfortunately, FOXNews, ABC News, the Washington Post and numerous other media outlets don't understand that a child who survives her mother's suicide attempt and dies three days later isn't a "fetus."

It's almost like a mother's desire to kill her child supernaturally makes the child a "fetus" regardless of whether the child survives birth or not. As far as I can remember, the AP doesn't typically use "fetus" language to describe premature infants who die, at least as long as the child was wanted.

Life Links 5/24/12

Abortion advocates are attempting to find the bright side of the record low (41%) percentage of people who self-identified as pro-choice in a recent Gallup poll. Abortion Gang member KushielsMoon and NY Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal play a similar note.

Rosenthal:

But only 20 percent of Americans say they think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. A majority, 52 percent, think it should be legal under certain circumstances, and 25 percent say it should be legal in any circumstance. In other words, there are more pro-choice absolutists than pro-life absolutists, and far more people who take a middle position than absolutists on either side.

KushielsMoon:

Now, this might sound like a serious problem to some pro-choice advocates. However, one needs to look further into the polling to see the real situation.

52% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal under some circumstances. An additional 25% believe it should be legal under any circumstances. Together, that means a whole 77% of Americans support abortion being legal. In contrast, only 20% believe abortion should always be illegal (and that's down 2% from last year!).

Obviously, this is a case of people not understanding what "pro-choice" and "pro-life" really mean.

Or maybe it's a case of you not actually reading the complete poll results as Ramesh Ponnuru explains.

Here are the latest numbers: As of May 3–6, 20 percent of Americans think abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances," 39 percent say it should be "legal only in a few circumstances," 13 percent say it should be "legal under most circumstances," and 25 percent say it should be "legal under all circumstances."

The vast majority of opponents of legalized abortion have been willing to bestow the "pro-life" label on politicians who do not take the position that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. George W. Bush, for example, favored exceptions to a ban for cases where pregnancies threatened the mother's life or resulted from rape or incest. One might say, then, that his position amounted to thinking that abortion should be legal "only in a few circumstances." The two relatively life-protective positions get a combined 59 percent, the two less-protective positions get 38 percent.

Robin Marty attempts to prove that if abortion is difficult to get, women will go to desperate lengths to end their pregnancy by highlighting a British woman who died after drinking concentrated vinegar in a home abortion attempt. One large problem with this argument is abortion is readily available in Great Britain and paid for by tax dollars. So the example undercuts Marty's argument because it shows that some women, regardless of how much access there is to abortion, will do stupid, dangerous things.


Planned Parenthood is opposed to forced abortion so much that they issued a press release regarding Chen Guangcheng after he already made it safely to the United States. Gee, thanks.


The Daily Mail is reporting that an abortionist in Spain has been ordered to pay child support on a child he failed to kill.

A Spanish judge ordered the unnamed gynecologist to pay £780 a month maintenance to the boy's mum after he bungled a termination at a clinic in Majorca.

She checked in for an abortion in April last year when she was eight weeks pregnant - and returned three months later for another thinking she was carrying a second child.

Tests revealed the gynecologist had misread an ultrasound and the unborn baby thought to have been aborted was still alive.

Doug Kmiec's weak defense of Obama

In a commentary for the National Catholic Reporter, Doug Kmiec again proves something we've known for a while. He's a dupe. While he recognizes the Obama administration has erred with its HHS mandate, he doesn't think Obama's is to blame. In Kmiec's world, President Obama is just a poor schmuck whose underlings have run amok.

Unwittingly, perhaps, the president has allowed his appointees to drift into the secular lane and stay there.....

The noise of opposition could not be hidden from the president any longer, and the president reacted by shifting the obligation of the mandate away from employers to insurers......

Jenkins introduced the president at Notre Dame with a quotation from the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council and their pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes: "Respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them."

For now, I remain convinced Obama takes this seriously. Unfortunately, too many working for him do not.

Kmiec remains convinced based on what? Obama's empty promises? His appointment of the rabidly pro-abort Kathleen Sebelius to head the HHS? The administration's consultations with Planned Parenthood's president regarding the mandate? The fact that Cardinal Timothy Dolan told President Obama directly he was disappointed with the policy? The administration's embarrassing lack of thought, research or knowledge regarding the Constitutional principles in play?

Robert George takes apart another part of the commentary where Kmiec claims Obama isn't pro-abortion, he's just "pro-decision-making by pregnant women."

"Pro-decision-making by pregnant women." So this is how we, as defenders of the lives of children in the womb are to characterize the question of abortion? Someone like President Obama who would protect the lawfulness of deliberate feticide, enact policies to make it as widely available as possible, and support its funding with taxpayer money is not pro-abortion, he is merely "pro-decision-making by pregnant women"? Even when the decision (carefully left undescribed) is, in truth, a decision about whether to kill the child? It's this kind of abuse of language that people seem always to resort to when we want to obscure from view a deep injustice that is being done against our fellow human beings.

Indian abortionist allegedly fed aborted babies to his dogs

An Indian paper is reporting that authorities have arrested abortionist Sundam Munde, who allegedly fed the remains of aborted children to his dogs as a way of disposing of their bodies.

Notably, the doctor, Sundam Munde from Beed was arrested and booked under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act last week. What is more shocking is the fact that Munde's wife was also his partner in the crime.

The Munde couple had four pet dogs and after the abortion they used to feed the foetuses to the pets after performing abortions, report said.

Life Links 5/21/12

Here's another horror story regarding how some people in Asia are using fetal remains. In Bangkok, a man has been arrested after authorities discovered he was trying to the bodies of unborn children which had been roasted and covered in gold leaf.

Police said Taiwan native Chow Hok Kuen, 28, was arrested after police found the fetuses -- from 2- to 8-months-old -- in a suitcase in a hotel room in the Yaorawat area, Bangkok's Chinatown, the Bangkok Post reported.

The man had bought the fetuses several days ago from a Taiwanese man in Thailand for $6,500 and planned to sell them on Taiwanese Web sites for up to six times that amount, police said......

In Thai black magic rituals, the Post said, preserved fetuses are believed to bring good fortune to their owners and are often kept in shrines at homes or businesses.

The New Woman All Women abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama will close it's doors after today.

The clinic's owner agreed in April to surrender the facility's license after an investigation by the state Department of Public Health found problems including two instances in which patients were given overdoses of a drug and were transported by ambulance to a hospital.

As part of the agreement, the state ordered the facility to cease performing abortions by May 11 and surrender its license by today unless a new operator could successfully apply for a state license.

In Australia, they've discovered how abortion clinic anesthetist James Peters gave Hepatitis C to numerous women.

He said Dr Peters was using pre-filled syringes of anaesthetic drugs on himself, while his back was turned to other staff or when he was alone.

''The accused has then returned the contaminated syringe to the patient tray and used the contaminated syringe to administer the remaining drug to the patient, thereby infecting the patient with hepatitis C,'' Mr Silbert said.

Dreams of our daughters? Free birth control and abortions?

This commercial from the Obama campaign is horribly unpersuasive. Yes, birth control is commonly used but why does that mean employers who oppose contraceptives should be forced to cover it?

Are regular people really supposed to believe our daughters' dreams are at stake if employers are forced cover contraceptives and Obama isn't allowed to implement his pro-abortion policies?

Life Links 5/18/12

Michael J. Fox is finally curbing his embryonic stem cell enthusiasm while lamely trying to cover his rear.

"It's not so much that [stem cell research has] diminished in its prospects for breakthroughs as much as it's the other avenues of research have grown and multiplied and become as much or more promising. So, an answer may come from stem cell research but it's more than likely to come from another area," he said.

During the interview, Deborah Brooks (co-founder of Fox's foundation) then mentions some of the problems with putting embryonic stem cells into the brains of people with Parkinson's. You know, the same problems prolife people have been noting for years and the same problems that Dr. Oz told Fox about on Oprah like 3 years ago.


Melinda Henneberger wonders why all the "choice" advocates have been so quiet on Chen Guangcheng.

In the United States, much of the support for Chen has come from those who oppose abortion. But where are the abortion rights supporters? There is so much talk about the search for common ground on the abortion issue — sincere talk, I believe. But if the brutal oppression of women robbed of any semblance of "choice" isn't something we can all agree on, I don't know what would be.

A Texas man has been sentenced to 40 years in jail for sexually abusing his daughter over a period of years.

The assaults resulted in a child, a miscarriage and two abortions, Assistant District Attorney Jeff Swain said.

The 48-year-old man pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault. He will have to serve half of his sentence before being eligible for parole, Swain said.

The woman "is certainly happy with the result," Swain said, adding that it is "a deserving sentence."

The daughter, who is in her mid- to late 20s, came forward last July.

"She did not want the same thing to happen to other girls," Swain said.

In New York state, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino veto an abortion buffer zone law.

Calling it unconstitutional and "harmful," Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino on Friday vetoed legislation that would have prohibited anti-abortion protesters from blocking patients and workers access at health clinics.

Time for a reality check Soraya Chemaly - a baby that lives for 3 days after being born isn't a fetus

UPDATE: Chemaly has corrected her post after I tweeted her. She now notes the child was a newborn.

RHReality Check writers are going all out to defend Bei Bei Shuai, a woman whose suicide attempt ended up killing her child.

Soraya Chemaly even uses the term "fetus" to describe the child.

Last week, the Indiana Supreme Court declined to drop feticide and murder charges against a woman named Bei Bei Shuai, who has been in jail for 14 months and faces 45 years in prison because, after attempting suicide while pregnant, her fetus died.

Actually, if Chemaly examined the article she links to, she would discover a fetus didn't die but a newborn infant (born at 33 weeks) did. Three days after being born.

Shuai's attorneys contend the Chinese immigrant living in Indianapolis ate rat poison in a suicide attempt, not to kill her baby, and that she was suffering from depression. Prosecutors have said she wanted the baby to die. The baby died three days after being born.

Are newborn children who die three days after being born now considered fetuses to the pro-choice movement?

I guess that's the logical extension of abortion arguments. A woman's right to control her body and end her pregnancy how and when she sees fit also includes the right not to be prosecuted if the means of killing's one child results in a living baby who happens to die after birth. As long the decision to kill and effort to do so is made while the child is still inside the mother (or at least partially), when the child dies matters not a wink.