As a woman in the United States, I do see a partly unintentional cultural war on my gender everywhere I turn. However, this isn’t one orchestrated by the Romney campaign. It’s one that’s deeply embedded in our culture and fueled by the media itself, the entity which often claims to champion “women’s rights.” I can’t walk through Target anymore without being bombarded with sleek magazine covers of airbrushed women who represent our cultural expression of beauty. Magazines and television shows subliminally say to women that we are not beautiful if we don’t meet the impossible standards set by our culture. They say, “You’re not pretty enough, buy this makeup,” or “you’re not thin enough, lose 20 pounds.” In short, they’re saying “you’re not perfect enough.”

I’m sick of hearing from Cosmopolitan that I’m not beautiful or thin enough. It’s insulting and degrading. Sure, the media also places standards upon men, but they are far less restrictive. In magazines and television everywhere, women face an onslaught of superficially-based warfare.

While there has been significant pushback against the plethora of airbrushing and superficial standards for women in our culture today, it’s still present. The long term effects of these standards still weigh heavily upon women. We are told by the shiny magazine covers that we must be perfect, thin, and beautiful to be “accepted” in society. As women everywhere try to achieve these standards, we constantly come short because we are seeking something we will never achieve. The “perfect” body, face, etc. is an impossible-to-attain social construct. As a result, thousands of women struggle daily with body issues, low self-esteem, and even eating disorders. Additionally, when the image of female perfection is so superficial, women are often not taken seriously because our worth is appearance-based.

In short, “beauty” is synonymous with “ability.” I can say for a fact that it is much easier to succeed as a woman if you are considered attractive. It should not be that way. This is a symbolic statement that says women should be judged based on appearance, not merit or character. America is supposed to be a meritocracy, not a nation where image is somehow a golden ticket for success.

iving as a conservative woman in the United States is even more difficult. While the National Organization for Women (NOW) will charge into battle for liberal women like Sandra Fluke or causes like abortion and birth control, they remain silent in the face of blatant attacks on conservative women. Recently, a video emerged of union members hitting a piñata with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s face on it because of her unease with the labor movement. NOW and other feminist groups had nothing to say on the issue. Talk about being warriors for women’s rights, huh? Then, a sexually explicit photoshopped image of conservative pundit S.E. Cupp appeared in Hustler Magazine, bashing her for her “dumb ideas” such as defunding Planned Parenthood. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt responded to the wave of complaints by defending the article and saying, “that’s satire.” Again, from feminist organizations: nothing. At least several liberal women such as Sandra Fluke have come out in S.E. Cupp’s defense. Conservative women like S.E. Cupp, Nikki Haley, and myself do not receive a defense from feminist organizations (not that we need it anyway) simply because of our political stances. It is an example of another liberal double standard. NOW and other liberal women’s groups are liberal ideologues who are pursuing a liberal agenda under the guise of gender equality.

For liberal women’s groups, the answer to the “War on Women” is taking legislative and political action to support Planned Parenthood, extend abortion, increase the distribution of birth control, etc. Once again, if that’s their weapon of choice, I don’t plan on carrying anytime soon. However, for all women, not just conservative women, there is another solution to the cultural assault on women’s images and the lack of a liberal defense. We need to be the women who are so often neglected in the media: real women. We need to be women of character who hold family values while still fighting for respect from the media. We need to be examples for our sisters, friends, and children. Gender should not determine our place in society.

Culture changes slowly, but it does change. That change begins with us. Our place should be determined not based upon the media’s impossible standards or a liberal feminist ideology. It should depend on merit. I am beautiful, but not because the media tells me I am. I’m beautiful because I value myself no matter who tells me otherwise. I’m a woman, I’m conservative, and I will not take this anymore.

Ten days after she was born, Bella came home from the hospital. As doctors explained to us how to best prepare for her death, we chose to celebrate her life. And we did, every, single day. I remember when we first brought Bella home; we hung a sign in our living room. It read, “Happy 1-Week Birthday Bella.” As the weeks went by, we changed the sign from 1 to 2 to 3 weeks. Eventually weeks turned into months and now, thanks be to God, years. We fought for her each step of the way, giving her every opportunity to do well. She beat the odds and has been doing so ever since.

As I reflect on this last year of her life, it has been amazing to see how many people Bella has touched and the issues that have been discussed in the public sphere as a result of her condition. In the middle of winter, when the world found out that Bella had been hospitalized, the response was overwhelming. Our inboxes and mailboxes were flooded with notes of encouragement, prayer, and support. People in all walks of life from around the country united around the witness of a three-year-old little girl. We even got notes that said, “I don’t agree with you politically, but thank you for being a voice for the special needs community.” She brought unity and refocused us on what was really important in the midst of a heated primary season.

When her hospitalization hit the news networks, commentators started discussing important issues surrounding the special needs world, such as the legal struggles that occur when special needs children aren’t given fair medical treatment or any treatment at all. A whole host of issues were brought to the forefront of the debate, dealing with families, the pro-life movement, the special needs community, and so much more. It was as though people realized that the pro-life movement doesn’t end at birth, but it continues at the bedsides of the disabled, the elderly, and the vulnerable. Bella put a face to the helpless, those whom society looks upon as “useless.” When did we become so utilitarian that we measured worth in terms of “ability?” Bella is able to do the most important thing in life more perfectly than I will ever be able to: love.

As people started to learn more about Bella, we discovered that more and more people were bringing their special needs kids to our campaign events. We even met several beautiful children with Trisomy 18. They talked to us about their struggles, and all were different, but there was a common thread in all of their experiences: the irreplaceable joy and love their child brought into their lives.  In a world too often focused on instant gratification and personal satisfaction, it is no wonder that these lives are considered “inconvenient.” Joe Klein talked about just that in an article he wrote for TIME several months ago: “I am haunted by the smiling photos I’ve seen of Isabella with her father and mother, brothers and sisters. No doubt she struggles through many of her days — she nearly died a few weeks ago — but she has also been granted three years of unconditional love and the ability to smile and bring joy. Her tenuous survival has given her family a deeper sense of how precious even the frailest of lives are. …. I also worry that we’ve become too averse to personal inconvenience as a society—that we’re less rigorous parents than we should be, that we’ve farmed out our responsibilities, especially for the disabled, to the state—and I’m grateful to Santorum for forcing on me the discomfort of having to think about the moral implications of his daughter’s smile.”

Bella has opened our eyes to many things: the importance of treasuring each day, how to hope even in the darkest of circumstances, that faith is our foundation, and most importantly, what pure, unselfish love looks like. So as we look back on another year of life, another year of miracles, we are filled with gratitude and hope. We are grateful for one more year of life with our precious girl. We are hopeful that through the witness of Bella’s spirit, people will continue to be inspired, challenged to think about the “moral implications” of my sister’s smile.

Happy 4th Birthday Bella

The media has covered a smorgasbord of articles ranging from birth control to women to gay marriage in 2012. Leftists have denounced the GOP’s supposed “War on Women” in recent months for their opposition to the birth control mandate and support of personhood laws in a growing number of states. Meanwhile, liberal groups throughout the county decried George Zimmerman’s “racial motives” for shooting Trayvon Martin before he got his day in court. Zimmerman might very well be guilty as sin but what happened to innocent until proven guilty? Then, in a “surprise” (and by surprise I mean, no surprise at all), President Obama came out in support of gay marriage just after North Carolina banned the practice and Gallup reported that just over 50% of Americans support the practice. How convenient.

Strangely, most of the biggest news stories in the US in the months leading up to the 2012 election have been social, not economic, issues. The Obama administration’s focus on these issues is not one of genuine concern. Rather, it is nothing but a political ploy. First, social issues tend to be the most contentious. Supporters and opponents of gay marriage, abortion, contraception, etc. tend to be far apart on the political spectrum and the interests groups are generally well-ensconced in their own opinions. Bringing up these issues ignites the numbed passions of Obama supporters, many of whom have resorted to lukewarm support in the face of the President’s less-than-stellar record. This is a far cry from the passionate obsession of the Obama Zombies during the 2008 election. The Administration is looking for any way to re-ignite theses passions and get their supporters to the polls.

Additionally, the focus on social issues places the spotlight back on the Obama Administration, a spotlight that has been solely focused on the GOP contenders in the last several months. Obama is unable to run on his actual record, considering his history of economic failures. Therefore, the President and his supporters have turned the spotlight on issues which can actually garner some support from his liberal allies (all while ostracizing the right of course). It’s as if Obama woke up last week, looked at his record, and said, “Hmmm rising unemployment, falling poll numbers…OH LOOK GAY MARRIAGE…I can use that.” These social issues are merely a distraction from Obama’s abysmal record. They are also a way to refocus the spotlight on the President and sooth his inflated ego.

What this political maneuver shows is the president’s complete lack of accountability. He’s unable to answer for his faults or stand up for his decisions, even when they have failed. When all else fails and Obama cannot ignore the glaring shortcomings of his administration, he simply blames his predecessor. The economy, partisanship, turbulent world situation…all Bush. (Note: Ignore the fact that the average unemployment rate under George W. Bush was about 5%) Joe Biden took this on last week, blaming Bush for our turbulent relations with Iran. There is certainly a high degree of character deficiency in the White House right now. The President and his blind supporters are unable to take responsibility for anything, evidence of political and personal weakness. It’s tough to stand by your decisions honestly and answer for your failures. Yet, for the President of the United States, it is part of his job description. The President is not supposed to “Pass the Buck.” Unfortunately for us, our current Commander-in-Chief is more than willing to “Pass the Buck…Over there.” Oh look, a political distraction!

The first rebuttal was made by Hot Air commenter Crosshugger, and it was probably the response that struck hardest since clearly I misstated my intention:

Crosshugger is correct, of course; nothing is bigger than God. I do believe God can convict people through His word, and I must rephrase one of my arguments from the original piece: I do not believe we should abandon religious arguments. I was making an unstated distinction, and that reference was to people who are not Christians. The Word of God has the power to convict them, but arguing from the Bible until they have those convictions is not effective.

The next point came from commenter Joe_Doufu at Hot Air. It is the most succinct and humorous of all the comments:

We’re winning!
We’d better change tactics!

In the piece at Crisis, I stated that while the pro-life movement is certainly winning, I believe emphasizing certain tactics would change the minds of the American public more quickly than others. The longer we take to convince the public to be pro-life, the more babies, mothers and families will suffer. Therefore, I think we should complement existing strategies in order to save the greatest number of lives possible. So while Joe Doufu would normally be correct, I think millions of lives could be saved by implementing certain strategies more often.

The third argument came most aggressively from my fellow Race42012 contributor Adam Graham. In short, Adam accused me of being an armchair quarterback. While I have admittedly only participated in one march and two prayer vigils in front of abortion clinics, this assessment is inaccurate. I have been writing regularly on the topic since college, and have been proactively engaging in discussions and debates to convince pro-abortion friends, acquaintances and strangers on a near-daily basis since before then to change their minds. While it’s a different kind of involvement than prayer vigils, or lobbying state or federal legislators, I don’t think it’s any less valuable.

My own father pointed out after reading my initial post that I denigrated people who try to affect positive change in different ways. For this I apologize; it was never intended in this way. I was trying to add to our movement, not take from the wonderful work done across the world by millions my fellow pro-life men and women.

[This piece was originally published at Race42012.com.]

Dustin Siggins is an associate producer with The Laura Ingraham Show and co-author with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation on a forthcoming book about the national debt. The opinions expressed are his own.

One such state is Mississippi. On April 16, the state’s new governor signed legislation that, in the words of Politico, “requires all physicians at abortion clinics in Mississippi to be board-certified OB-GYN and to have admitting privileges at a local hospital.”This is both a victory and a “teachable moment” for the pro-life movement.

What is this teachable moment? Most importantly, that pro-life legislation should emulate the principles around that which passed in Mississippi, and a similar law in Virginia before it, that is as foolproof as possible from the demonizing tactics of the left. In other words, ultrasound legislation can be deemed as guilting mothers into not aborting their children or invading personal privacy. However, it is more difficult to argue against raising the standards of medical clinics so that women have a more sterile, more professional environment in which to be treated. Yes, the left will still attack these standards, as the owner of the abortion clinic in Mississippi has, but the inherent controversy will be far less.

There are four other things I believe pro-lifers should keep in mind that are tangentially related to the lesson Mississippi has provided, and which are directly related to convincing a culture that is largely indifferent about abortion to become pro-life:

• First, stop using Biblical arguments to debate abortion. As I noted after attending the 2010 March for Life, I do not think using religious arguments will persuade either self-described Christians who agree with abortion or non-Christians who agree with abortion. The science of life is in our favor, and we should emphasize this. This is not meant as a denigration or repudiation of religious work or prayer done to protect life – I am a strong Catholic who has participated in prayer protests at two abortion clinics – but a practical recognition of living in a society with both a guaranteed freedom of religion and many people who do not possess a Christian-based belief in the sanctity of unborn life.

• Do a better job of educating people about responsible sexual activity prior to becoming pregnant and having an abortion. Related, explain better to both the public and individuals the help and care that can be provided so women will not feel as though abortion is their best – or only – way out of an irresponsible pregnancy. I believe the best way to prevent an abortion is to take away the alleged “need” for it, which is why I wanted Indiana governor Mitch Daniels to run for President – reforming and shrinking the federal welfare state is critical to taking away incentives to act in certain irresponsible ways, and if people act more responsibly when it comes to sex, the number of abortions will drop.

• Get people like Randall Terry out of the movement. Shock and awe have their place, as does presenting difficult truths, but indiscriminately throwing up images of dead babies will cause most people to simply turn and look in the other direction. Again, the majority of Americans are pro-choice, pro-abortion, or indifferent to the debate and just want it to go away. Used correctly, the shock and awe strategy can be effective… but often less so than engaging in a strong, purposeful, respectful discussion.

• Stop making abortion about women vs. children. Both are victims when it comes to abortion. First, every time a pro-life activist blames a woman for having an abortion, that activist should in the same breath blame the men who get women pregnant and then either abandon them or encourage them to abort the child. Second, we should make the battle about protecting women and unborn children from the abortion centers whose livelihood depends on the murder of their fellow man. The unfortunate fact is that we live in a nation where abortion is legal, and much of the public either favors it or is neutral on the debate. Focusing solely on the women involved makes it even easier for supporters of abortion to successfully claim a false “war on women,” which makes creating a culture of life that much harder.

The pro-life movement is gaining ground, and the desperation of the pro-abortion left after the temporary decision by Komen to defund Planned Parenthood is indicative of this. However, if we continue to make the kinds of tactical errors I describe above, millions of babies will die before America becomes a culture of life instead of a culture of death. The pro-life movement must adapt its strategies appropriately, and soon, in order to protect as many mothers and unborn children as possible.

[This post was published in its original form by Crisis Magazine.]

Dustin Siggins is an associate producer with The Laura Ingraham Show and co-author with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation on a forthcoming book about the national debt. The opinions expressed are his own.

Even though it’s been weeks since conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh called a reproductive rights activist a “slut” and then apologized, the “war on women” has not subsided.

Good. It’s high time that women on the right side of the political aisle joined the battle. And because conservative women’s long-simmering outrage was ignited by the left’s double standard in the Rush kerfuffle, liberals have been in the uncomfortable position of playing defense.

Sure, they’ve turned to an even more aggressive offensive stance (more on that in a bit), but at the outset, they were whipsawed by the reaction of conservative women who, after suffering through years of grotesque, highly misogynistic comments from liberal celebrity pundits, finally had the opportunity to present a litany of these offensive louts’ language for all to see, saying, “Yeah, these filth-spewing commentators deserve the world’s opprobrium–we’re so glad you agree with us at last.” Ahem.

(A quick aside: Politics ain’t beanbag, and when I, and other women I know, speak of “offensive language,” we’re not talking about strong metaphors. We’re talking about language that diminishes women to their sexual natures alone, language that is a variation on either “forget her ideas, she’s one hot fox,” or, “she’s no more than a c***, so why take her seriously?”)

The reaction to conservative women’s pushback during L’Affaire Limbaugh has been amusing, to say the least. The standard liberal meme has been resurrected: liberal commentators, regardless of their offenses, aren’t equal to Rush because of his huge audience and, oh, yeah, he is the titular head of the Republican Party anyway, you know. (Tell that to the various GOP presidential candidates who won the party’s nomination despite harsh criticism from Rush.)

The audience measurement argument puts liberals in the embarrassing position of showcasing “their guys’” low audience numbers, though. Beyond what Nielsen statistics say about the appeal of liberal ideas on the airwaves, however, the question then becomes: exactly where is the cutoff that gives a commentator a pass in the use of offensive language? Is it 900,001 (Keith Olbermann could draw close to 900,000, after all.) How about 1,000,001? (Bill Maher can draw a million.) Even if liberal fellows don’t understand the absurdity of that argument, most women, who’ve ever walked past a construction site to catcalls and whistles, do.

So, now that the hypocrisy has been exposed in the Rush brouhaha, the left has loaded other missiles in their Outrage Artillery to keep the “War on Women” battle alive to their benefit. They’ve been firing off shots about how conservative men want to control women’s bodies (abortion, contraception, etc.). They are dragging out a list of state bills sponsored by conservatives that seek to either limit access to contraception or force women to undergo “invasive” testing before having abortions.

As to the contraception bills, from my knowledge these are a reaction to the HHS mandate dictating that all health plans must cover contraception and abortifacients, regardless whether the coverage violates the religious beliefs of the employers. So they are attempts, perhaps clumsy and (pardon the pun) ill-conceived, to protect First Amendment rights of free conscience. If the White House made a real accommodation with religious entities concerning these mandates, the reactionary bills would probably disappear in a snap. (And, no, the WH has made no accommodation–the same mandate language HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius advanced prior to announcing accommodations is still in the law.)

On to the ultrasound bills–there’s been one in Virginia, but they’re popping up elsewhere–proposed laws to force women seeking abortions to have ultrasounds first. I’m not keen on legislating medical practice, but I am sympathetic to the pro-life point of view, even if I don’t entirely share it.

Pro-life advocates believe that abortion is murder. And just as activists such as George Clooney can’t stand idly by while watching people be massacred in Africa, pro-life champions believe they, too, must do everything in their power to stop what they see as the slaughter of innocents.

I admire George Clooney, even without agreeing with him on all his stances, and would never disparage his well-intentioned efforts. Similarly, I admire pro-life activists, even if I don’t agree with all their approaches. Can most liberals say the same?

In fact, the left’s barrage of attacks on ultrasound bills has incensed at least one pro-choice supporter, who argues, quite persuasively, that using inflammatory language (such as “rape”) to describe pre-abortion ultrasounds is harmful to women. Since the vast majority of abortion providers do these ultrasounds anyway prior to abortions, liberals are unnecessarily alarming women about their invasiveness and diminishing their value.

But that’s the real problem with this whole “war on women” the left is using to try to score points against the right. It ignores the reality of women’s opinions and lives just to trounce political opponents. It hides behind the skirts of women, in other words, to fire shots at adversaries, seeking to damage them in women’s eyes.
The reality is that women are not of one mind on reproductive issues. Gallup polls show women fairly evenly divided on abortion, in fact, with 48 percent identifying themselves as “pro-life” and large majorities supporting some restrictions on abortions that liberals traditionally fight tooth and nail– things like parental consent laws for abortions for minor girls, for example. Ironically, I’m sure mothers who hold these beliefs would look at liberal opposition as something of a “war” on them.

But you rarely hear of these divided opinions when the High Dudgeon Industry has fired its first shots. In my cynical view, that’s because those fueling the battle aren’t really all that interested in listening to what women have to say after all…unless it can be used to defeat political opponents.

So, David Axelrod can blithely criticize Rush Limbaugh in one breath, while stammering sophistry about why Bill Maher’s one-million-dollar donation to the president’s SuperPac is okay because….well, because it’s just too darn silly to even repeat here.

Don’t be fooled, sisters. There might be a “war on women” out there, but it’s coming as much from the left who want to silence the half of American women who don’t agree with liberals on abortion policy. According to their “rules of engagement,” these women–pro-lifers or their admirers– deserve to be called any name in the misogynist’s lexicon.
______

Libby Sternberg is a novelist living in Pennsylvania. She is a past member of the Vermont Commission on Women. She runs a blog titled Center Right Side. This post originally appeared there.

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

Perhaps that’s the reason many on the Left attacked Sarah Palin for giving birth to her son Trig: Progressivist “ethicists” must have wondered why she didn’t just procure an “after-birth abortion.”

The idea that we should allow post-natal killing of babies is, of course, both monstrous and insane; it’s so bizarre that only a card-carrying “ethicist” could hawk it. John Hinderaker naturally rejects such an atavistic, I would say satanic ethic, which flies in the face of thousands of years of Western thought. He’s not one to accept a lunatic assertion just because it’s asserted by a guy who publishes in the Journal of Medical Ethics!

Alas, he then immediately accepts the lunatic assertion next door — because it’s asserted by a guy who publishes in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Hinderaker buys the same ethicists’ corrolary proposition:

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus.” [Emphasis added -- DaH]

Logically, then, Hinderaker (and nearly all right-to-lifers) would have to agree with the following syllogism:

1. Since said ethicists admit that the moral status of a foetus is the same as that of a newborn;
2. And since all decent and moral Westerners believe that the moral status of a newborn is the same as that of an adult (i.e., that killing a newborn is morally the same as killing an adult);
3. Thus the moral status of a foetus is the same as that of an adult;
4. And therefore, medical ethicists have “proven” that abortion is murder. Quod Erat Demonstrandum!

And thereby hangs the tail.

In the pro-lifers’ effort to prove that abortion is akin to actual murder, as well as in the ethicists’ effort to prove that murder is akin to mere abortion, both sides begin from the very same premise: That there is no moral distinction between a zygote, an embryo, a foetus, and a newborn baby. That is, they accept Premise 1 in the syllogism above.

Contrariwise, I demonstrate the philosophical vacuity of that claim by noting that it goes to prove both that killing a newborn is murder, and also that killing a newborn is not murder.

In general, a premise the leads to a logical contradiction suggests that the premise itself is faulty; that’s the generic structure of what’s called Reductio ad Absurdum: To prove proposition X, you assume its opposite (which can be written ~X) then demonstrate that ~X leads to a contradiction, that is, both conclusions A and ~A at the same time.

This isn’t exactly that situation; for one, there is more than one flaw in both syllogisms. Also, it’s certainly possible that one side is right and the other simply wrong, which eliminates the contradiction. Still, it’s a good bet that Premise (1) is just wrong. As further evidence, most pro-lifers reject it viscerally, even while championing it rhetorically. “Do as we say, not as we do!”

For instance, if (1) above were true, then pro-lifers would treat every early-term miscarriage as a death, and they would hold a funeral for the fertilized egg and mourn for months. Which obviously the vast majority do not. There is certainly sadness; but it’s more the sadness of lost opportunity, what might have been, than the kind of long-term grief that accompanies the utterly tragic death of a newborn baby. To be utterly blunt and Spockian about it, I cannot imagine even Sen. Santorum showing his kids a heavy menstrual flow containing a miscarried fertilized egg. It’s just not the same thing.

And on the flip side, many, many pro-choicers who support abortion nevertheless utterly reject infanticide; and they don’t think of it as “after-birth abortion.” I would guess that more than 99% of Americans — and probably more than 95% of pro-life conservatives — do not de facto treat a miscarriage as they would the death of a newborn; even more telling, the same ultramajorities would not even treat abortion the same as they treat infanticide.

If a mother who engages a physician to murder her newborn, nearly everyone in America would demand that not only the doctor but the mother herself be sentenced to life in prison or even the death penalty. But how many demand life (or death) for women who obtain an abortion?

There is no way to spin it: Even right-to-lifers by and large treat early-term abortions very differently than they would treat infanticide or late-term abortions. Except for a tiny, easily dismissed subgroup, we all discriminate between those two very different acts. Even those who condemn abortion do not call for the same punishment as they rightly demand for infanticides.

Right-to-lifers often argue, against their own actions, that there is no logical place for humanness to begin other than conception (and, as a hidden assumption, they generally equate humanness with moral personhood). But of course, there are many other points that folks can and historically have believed constitute the beginning of moral personhood, e.g.:

1. At conception (week two — remember that you begin counting from the last menstruation, typically two weeks before pregnancy).
2. When the fertilized egg implants itself to the uterine wall, indicating that it’s now a pregnancy (fourth week).
3. When it first begins to divide, indicating that it’s growing (shortly after implantation).
4. At the “Gummy Bear” stage, when it takes on the basic mammalian (quadruped) shape, as seen via ultrasound (sixth week).
5. When the foetus first begins to move, still only detectable via medical equipment (eighth week).
6. When a doctor can first detect a heartbeat (week 10 to 12).
7. At “quickening,” when the mother can first feel the foetus move (about halfway through gestation, week 20-21).
8. When the cerebral cortex becomes “human,” in the sense of developing the brain structures that will allow the eventual baby to use language and think in a human way, as opposed to merely a mammalian or even primate way (eighth month, roughly half-way through the third trimester).
9. At birth.

And on beyond zebra…

10. When the baby draws its first breath (traditional Jewish teaching is that the soul enters the body at that point).
11. At the severing of the umbilical cord, indicating complete autonomy from the mother’s body.
12. After some months or years following the birth, when the liberal “ethicist” finally decides he likes the baby enough not to kill and eat it.

Any one of these points can logically be chosen as the beginning of moral personhood — the point at which the developing foetus or baby should be considered a person and be afforded the moral rights of all other persons. Most of them have, at one time or other in history, been chosen by some society, primitive or sophisticated; for an extreme example, a number of societies have considered children expendable until they reached a certain age.

In fact, I would say that societies are largely defined by who they consider to be “persons.” The more savage a society, the more it tends to restrict personhood to a smaller and smaller subset of the population; they exclude members of non-allied tribes, children under some set age, often women in general, those of insufficient status (especially slaves), those who violate the law, those with mental or physical deformities, those with afflictions or conditions, those thought to be witches or sorcerers, and so forth.

We Americans must choose at what stage of development personhood obtains, as must every society. But we must choose on the basis of a real consensus — based upon how folks act in real life, not some theoretical construct divorced from day to day life. And since real people in the real world do not treat, and never in our history have treated miscarriage the same as the death of a newborn, I think it prudent to find a consensus somewhere north of conception but south of birth.

This doesn’t require that everyone believe that the consensus point marks the place that Nature and Nature’s God give us our souls… the consensus point marks only the point at which our society confers legal personhood, pledging to protect, thenceforth, the rights and liberties of the new legal person.

Therefore, pace, John Hinderaker, but… a right-to-lifer can no more call it “proven” that abortion is as morally bad as infanticide — than can a heartless secularist call it “proven” that infanticide is no morally worse than abortion. Many rational and logical points in foetal development other than either conception or birth can demarcate potential persons, which as yet have no moral rights, from actual persons who certainly do.

I said “north of conception but south of birth”: When any pre-natal point other than conception is chosen, then necessarily, during some of the earliest weeks of gestation, the entity is not a legal person, and abortion is legally allowable. On the other hand, during the later weeks of gestation, the foetus becomes a child and is legally a person; after that point, not only would abortion only be allowed if required to save the mother’s life (not merely her “health”), but every effort must be made to save the child; removing a baby from the womb without attempting to save its life would constitute negligent homicide at the least.

As you can see, logically, we cannot even begin to proceed deciding what to do about abortion until we first establish a national consensus on where we shall define legal personhood to begin. This national consensus cannot be too close to either extreme (conception or birth), because a forced “consensus” is not a concensus at all but a diktat… and experience teaches that a law that is utterly rejected by a large portion of ordinary members of society is a prescription for disaster, perhaps even leading to national suicide. (Cf. same-sex marriage/polygamy in America.)

Alas, we have never grappled, as a society and in a meaningful way, with the definition of personhood; in particular, when it’s conferred and whether there are entities that are biologically human but will never be accorded personhood — an anencephalic baby, for example, or a human being so severely retarded that he or she has none of the most basic attributes we associate with persons.

Of course, nothing stops a society from choosing to confer “created rights” upon non-persons, pre-persons, former persons, or even animals, protecting both those who are expected to develop human-like consciousness, those who never had human-like consciousness, and those who had it at one time, but through disease or misadventure, no longer retain it; note laws protecting those in an irreversible coma, laws prohibiting cruelty to animals, and laws against desecrating the dead. But such laws are actually to preserve the sacred dignity of the persons who love such non-persons.

A state should thus be allowed to choose to protect the rights and liberty of pre-natal life even if it’s not yet legally a person. But all states should be mandated to protect the rights and liberties (including the right to life) of anyone already a person via the national consensus.

My personal choice for the national personhood consensus is Point 8, the humanization of the cerebellum; I believe in a soul, but I believe it can only live in a human, not animal brain; until the brain develops human-like functions, I cannot see that a soul would find a place to fit. But this is likely too far along in the pregnancy to be generally accepted.

Among those who don’t believe in ensoulment, I’m sure you would still find much disagreement about when the entity becomes a person, from conception to deciding the kid is cute enough to live (assuming that doesn’t disrupt the Progressivists’ lifestyle). But we seem to have settled upon a de-facto consensus as somewhere within the second trimester.

For a number of reasons, therefore, I nominate quickening (Point 7) as the logical national consensus for when our society confers legal personhood:

• It’s about halfway through the second trimester, hence halfway through the pregnancy; it’s a nice, round number, and we all tend to like round numbers.
• It’s easily detectable by routine doctor’s examination; hence, such an examination would be determinative for legal purposes.
• It marks the first time the expectant mother can actually feel that the thing inside her is a living being, moving of its own volition; she cannot deny that she has another life growing inside her.
• In Western history, It’s one of the points during gestation that has been frequently chosen by societies for the moment of ensoulment.

(Notice none of these reasons depends upon the specious Roe v. Wade criterion of “viability,” which of course varies depending on the current state of medical technology.)

But whichever point we as a society finally choose, we need to get started on that conversation. Without it, the only principled action we can take regarding abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights is the Monkey Moot: screech hysterically and fling poo at each other.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Time will tell if he’s got a point.

Here’s the deal:  Obama’s poll numbers aren’t good.  Oh, the media is doing its best to spin it (with measures that seem desperate and slapdash), but the economy is still miserable (especially if you’re not too big to fail), the unemployment rate is “Down” to where the Administration said it wouldn’t go above if we passed Porkulus, and that’s through the grace of the fact that no Mullah in Iran has yet walked to the shore at the Strait of Hormuz and skipped a rock across the water, sending tankers scurrying for cover and pushing oil over $200 a barrel.  Yet.  And even so, this is the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression - largely because of Obama’s policies.

People have been cooling on “The One” pretty much since inauguration day.

And The One needs to get that enthusiasm going again.

And so what better to take peoples’ minds off their miseries and rile the (female) troops?

“Republicans want to take away your contraceptives!”

Notwithstanding the fact that, as Romney noted in December when George Stephanopoulos incongruously broached the subject in a debate, the subject has never come up in GOP circles.  Period.  It’s a non-issue to the GOP.

No matter.  The media is in lock-step behind the Administration’s meme that the GOP wants to outlaw contraception.  The theatrical “walk-out” of Democrats from Darrel Issa’s hearings was a classic bit of Goebbelsian theatre; while the useful idiots in the media (in this case, the gleefully dim Amanda Terkel at Huffpo) called the hearings “about contraception” they were in fact hearings on the constitutionality of mandating that religious groups offer contraception against their beliefs.

Catch that?  The Democrats don’t even need to hijack Republicans’ meetings themselves.  The mainstream media will do it for them, after the fact.

At any rate, that’s Obama’s message to female voters:  ”Never mind the economy; never mind the unemployment rate; never mind the fiscal catastrophe waiting for you, your kids, and their kids; and above all, don’t believe your lying ears when the GOP mentions that they’ve never said word one about taking anyone’s contraceptives away.  Look!  Boogeyman!”

Women, in Barack Obama’s world, are not just dim little dolts; they seem to think that women are intellectual slaves to their reproductive systems.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark

But the National Park Service’s threat to end “camping” (which doesn’t include the removal of tents, because who ever connected tents with camping?) has inspired the non-campers to erect a huge “tent of dreams” over the General McPherson statue. So there’s that.

“Let us sleep so we can dream,” they chanted.

Lachlan Markay reports on the non-event, in which some occupiers packed up their camping equipment and sent it off to storage generously donated by the AFL-CIO. Others continued to, well, camp in the park.

Park police and campers alike seemed pleased with the way things went:

Park police to reporter…we’re not kicking anyone out…are you disappointed? Were you expecting fireworks?

Also from Charlie Spiering’s Twitter feed:

Smiling NPS officer standing outside the park says “This is overtime man!”

So there’s that, too.

Meanwhile, McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza have yet to be liberated from the squatters (and the rats) who prevent people from enjoying the formerly public spaces.

And Michelle Malkin was right: the “eviction” got more coverage from the Washington Post (pdf of front page here) than did the hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers on Jan. 23rd, who, as usual, were buried in the Metro section, their numbers under-reported, and equal time given to the barely detectable handful of counter-protesters present. A letter from marcher Elizabeth Plumb:

The sun also rises, and The Post’s coverage of the March for Life is equally predictable. On Monday, I marched with my children, and we took in the usual sight of tens of thousands of people braving miserable weather to defend life.

There were a few differences from past years: calls for defunding Planned Parenthood and signs noting the pain suffered by men who regret the deaths of their children. I told my son what we would see in the paper Tuesday morning: one small photo showing a handful of those marching with us, and a second photo showing a similar number of  counter-protesters, even though we had seen none that day.

The Post came through. Two small photos on page B1 showed one protester from each side, and page B6 included a larger picture of a pro-life marcher in front of a banner showing an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Presumably, this photo was chosen to illustrate the accompanying article’s false contention that the march is “hosted by the Archdiocese of Washington.”

So, I was right, but I would much rather be wrong.

Update from David Freddoso: “How big a joke is the national park service? This big. Just taken. pic.twitter.com/A08YTvGi”

Cross-posted at P&P.

Authorities are investigating whether a woman whose fetus was found among trash illegally ended her pregnancy by drinking an herbal concoction billed as an abortion-causing tea, a person familiar with the case told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss details not made public. The woman, Yaribely Almonte, 20, was arrested Wednesday on a charge of self-abortion after police said her fetus was discovered in a yellow bucket near her Manhattan apartment building. She was released with an order to appear in court in January.

Several questions beg to be asked:

First, by virtue of the fact that the “fetus” was (a) beyond 24 weeks and (b) labor was induced, isn’t it reasonable to infer that this was no longer a fetus but quite possibly a live birth?  The headline from the  NY Daily News’ story would, at the very least, seem to acknowledge that possibility (even if the story reverts to form).

Second, shouldn’t we wait for the M.E. to determine cause of death before rushing to charge Ms. Almonte with operating as an Unlicensed Reproductive Health Practitioner?  I’m also curious to see the toxicology findings here.  I am fairly certain that we will find that labor was induced by something other than this Magical Hispanic Abortion Tea.  Which, by the way, WaPo is quick to endorse and explain away as some sort of  “otherness” that is beyond our troglodyte comprehension.

If so, I want to know who spiked the tea.  See, these are the kinds of questions that we once expected responsible media to ask, before they resorted to building templates and framing narratives…which, in this case, consists of copy/pasting Planned Parenthood jargon and talking points.

If the ME determines that this child was, in fact, born alive; will the Southern District of New York press charges under the Born Alive Act?  Will the New York County District Attorney amend the charges to murder?  If this, in fact, proves to be the murder of an abortion survivor, then it is no different than the atrocities in Philly.

I held your same hopes, Captain.  I sure did.

A Spanish-language version of this post is available at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

That being said, I am beginning to have nagging doubts, none of which are related to the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him last Sunday. Rather, the more television exposure Cain receives—and as GOP frontrunner in many polls, he is on the small screen often—the more skeptical I become about his readiness for primetime. Increasingly, his answers to questions seem poorly thought out and disjointed, making his position on key policy issues unclear.

Take, for example, his position on abortion, which he was asked to clarify on FOX News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier last night. Here is the exchange between the candidate and panelist A. B. Stoddard of The Hill (cue 11:52 in the video, which is here):

CAIN: I believe that abortion should be illegal. I’ve always thought that way. I believe that life begins at conception—life begins at conception—and I do not believe in abortion. The point I was trying to make is that legally I don’t think abortion should be allowed, but the point I was trying to make, if a situation exists where they may consider some other alternative, then how will the law prevent that? That was the only point I was trying to make.

STODDARD: You [previously] said that it was best left to the woman and her family. What are you describing? A situation that they would—

CAIN: An extreme situation, a very extreme situation—

STODDARD: Involving abortion?

CAIN: And I can’t describe all of the— First of all, these extreme situations, we can never say never relative to these extreme situations. I go back to—

STODDARD: Do you have any exceptions for rape and incest?

CAIN: No, I do not.

Got that? Putting aside the troubling notion that a rape victim would be forced to carry to term the child of the man who violated her, the response conjures up disquieting visions of dirty knives and dark alleys. Was this really the best Cain or his handlers could do in a friendly environment?

Earlier in the same session, Cain was asked by Charles Krauthammer to enlarge upon his signature 9-9-9 plan. Cain’s defense of criticisms that his 9% federal sales tax would duplicate state sales taxes was on point. He correctly noted that the cost of goods and services already reflects multiple systems of taxation, federal and otherwise.

Where Cain ran astray, however, was when Krauthammer asked him whether the nation under his plan would experience a deflation (video cue 11:39).

CAIN: We’re saying that the price of goods are gonna go down.

KRAUTHAMMER: That’s deflation.

CAIN: Yes, the price of goods are gonna go down.

If Cain genuinely believes that his economic plan will precipitate a cataclysmic change in the economy of the type he claims to anticipate, then he needs to explain the long-term implications to the American people. In particular, he needs to elaborate on how the deflation he envisions will be different from the one some economists claim fueled the current recession.

Early in the debates, Cain largely ducked questions on foreign policy, claiming he would surround himself with savvy advisers to provide needed council. If he is to remain a serious contender, he needs those advisers now, and not just to tell him the name of the president of Uzbekistan.

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A first-term North Carolina Republican, Ellmers will be joined by fellow GOP freshman Rep. Rep. Randy Hultgren of Illinois and Rep. Bill Huizenga of Michigan, as well as third-term Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado) at a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday to express their concerns about evidence of wrongdoing contained in The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood, a new 181-page report by Americans United for Life.

In a letter to fellow Congress members, Ellmers wrote:

“I invite my colleagues to review the findings of this Report and to join us on Thursday as we voice our concerns about the issues raised by AUL’s Report and express our renewed commitment to seeking accountability for taxpayers and for investigating whether taxpayers are funding an organization that misuses government funding and violates state laws.
“I will be hosting a press conference on Thursday, July 14, 2011 together with Rep. Randy Hultgren to discuss the AUL Report’s extensive documentation of the systemic fraud and abuse inherent within Planned Parenthood and the need for Congress to investigate how Planned Parenthood is using federal money.”

Thursday’s noon press conference in room 2360 of the Rayburn House Office Building is expected to be the first step toward congressional hearings into taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.

• Ellmers to Host News Conference on Investigation of Planned Parenthood — Press Release, Rep. Renee Ellmers, July 13
• Freshmen Congressmen Call Thursday News Conference to Discuss Hearings and Investigations of Planned Parenthood Based on Americans United for Life Report — Media Advisory, Americans United for Life, July 13
• “Members of Congress Press for Planned Parenthood Investigation” — July 13, LifeNews.com
• The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood (PDF) — Americans United for Life.
• “Pro-Lifers Tell Congress: Investigate Planned Parenthood!” — July 7, The American Spectator

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

Is Ohio becoming the most pro-life state in the union?

According to this report it seems darned certain to be trying. Reuters reports that the ban goes into place once a fetal heartbeat is detectable.

Fetal heartbeats have been detected as early as five weeks into a pregnancy, though most are consistently screened for at six weeks. In essence this ban eliminates any partial birth abortions, and of course that Satanic practice that President Obama voted in favor of FOUR TIMES in his home state called “Born Alive Abortions.” (In essence infanticide caused by neglect. You know babies dying in soiled utility closets and all…)

Compare the pro-life environment (all stemming from Ohio’s legislature actions) as opposed to the Planned Parenthood issues of Indiana and it might just be the new mid-west capital and champion for the lives of unborn children.

Critics point out that the Ohio legislation doesn’t include exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother.

And why should they?

Is it the child’s fault that he/she was created out of such horrific circumstances?

The bottom line is always about the HUMANNESS of the child, which always seem to somehow go unnoticed. We’re pretty good at understanding or stressing the “rights of the mother.”

And that always leaves me scratching my head wondering, who does protect the most innocent and vulnerable amongst us?

And as a conservative it pains me to admit that in this instance, it appears to be, the government… in the state of Ohio at least.

I’m Kevin McCullough, and that’s how I “Binge Think.”

In response to a YouTube video of a 6-year-old girl receiving a pat-down from a Transportation Security Administration officer, Congressman Jason Chaffetz is drafting legislation that will require parental supervision during the pat-down of a child.

“They claim there is a modified pat-down for 12-year-olds and younger, but when you see those videos, you realize that just isn’t true,” Chaffetz said.

The proposed legislation would require that a parent must give their consent before a child receives a pat-down, and that the child must remain with the parent while the pat-down is performed.  emphasis mine

While the outrage continues over the pat-downs of minor Americans for “security” purposes, what is ironic about this new concern is that the parental consent/notification issues are completely dismissed and ignored when dealing with abortions.  Most recently, LifeNews reported that a 16-year old girl was sent to the hospital after a botched abortion at a Planned Parenthood facility in Everett, Washington:

The Planned Parenthood caller, in the 911 phone transcript, says, “We have a patient bleeding. She’s 16. We just did an abortion on her.”

Hubert is very concerned about the impact this revelation has on concerns about young girls getting abortions without any parental involvement.

“This is extremely important because of a massive loophole in Washington state law which means that a minor of any age who is pregnant may get an abortion without any parental or adult protections or involvement. It could be your daughter,” he explained. “There is no need for anyone to be there with a girl while an intimidating adult at Planned Parenthood bullies them, lies to them, and manipulates them into getting an abortion that will kill their baby and, as we see here, put them in hospital, possibly rendering them permanently infertile.”

It is important to note that Planned Parenthood has not come forward to say that the girl was escorted by anyone and has not been cooperative in providing that information.

The point here is to question whether Americans have become so desensitized to girls having abortions that we direct our outrage at other more “fresh” instances–like the TSA pat-downs?  Would these same people be just as outraged if a 12- or 13-year old girl had abortion without parental consent?  Planned Parenthood has been under fire for some time, but the laws in place protect their business under the guise of health care and choice.  We all know that.  But, when do parents stand up in the states that have no laws on the books for parental consent/notification and say enough with this ruse.  Or, are they only to foot the ambulance and hospital bill after the fact?

States with no parental consent or notification laws include:  CA, CT, IL, ME, MT, NH, NJ, NY, OR, VT, WA, and Washington DC. While I am not suggesting legislation at the federal level (I’m all about states’ rights) but, it is disturbing that so much emphasis is placed on the TSA (and rightly so), and the issue of minor girls having abortions and their parents’ right to know are repeatedly ignored and challenged.

Crossposted at TMR

Early screening through mammograms and education is critical to end the suffering from this disease: 98 percent of women treated for early stage breast cancer, before it spreads, are alive five years later. The widespread use of mammography and heightened public awareness of breast cancer both contribute to these favorable statistics.

And while Komen Affiliates provide funds to pay for screening, education and treatment programs in dozens of communities, in some areas, the only place that poor, uninsured or under-insured women can receive these services are through programs run by Planned Parenthood.  emphasis mine

Now that Live Action has proved that PP does NOT provide mammography services to its clients, what is the money being used for, because clearly is not for mammography screenings?  Education, treatment?

Update:  More information provided on the PP homepage shows they clearly refer out for these mammography services:

Where Can I Get a Mammogram?

Ask your health care provider, health department, or staff at your local Planned Parenthood health center about where you can get a mammogram in your area.

Additionally, it appears that PP does provide breast exams only.  However, the Komen memo links mammography, screenings, education, and treatment of breast cancer as their list of reasons it contributes to PP.

The Komen Foundation needs to come clean on specifically what those PP contributions are designated.  I’ve added the video below.

Crossposted at The Minority Report

“Barefoot Contessa” Ina Garten has a new nickname — “Heartless Contessa” — in the wake of news that she repeatedly refused to meet with a 6-year-old boy named Enzo who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

According to the reports:

The boy, who would watch Garten from his sick bed, told the Make-A-Wish Foundation that he wanted to meet the Food Network celebrity. When told that her schedule was too busy, Enzo opted to wait. When the request was made once more, Garten’s representatives replied with a “definite no,” according to the online blog that the family kept about the boy’s illness.

Now, I have been a fan of Garten’s for a while now; I like the way her show is produced and frankly, her recipes are good (minus all the butter).  I can understand that her schedule is demanding; however, I also know that celebrities will go out of their way for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.  So who dropped the ball on Garten’s part?  And an even better question is:  why hasn’t she publicly denounced or fired the person(s).

Additionally, as the article states, Garten’s rep and Make-A-Wish noted:

In response to the controversy, Make-A-Wish stressed to TMZthat Garten is a “good friend” of the foundation. A representative for Garten told the site: “Despite her demanding schedule, [Ina] participates and helps as many organizations as she can throughout the year, helping children and adults like Enzo with life threatening and compromising illnesses. … Unfortunately, as much as she would like to, it’s absolutely impossible for her to grant every request she receives.”

However, the Make-A-Wish website (link above) doesn’t include Garten in the list.  Addtionally, the Look to the Stars website documents very well celebrities an their affiliated charities.  Garten doesn’t even come up in the search.  Searches Garten does come up in–which she donates her valuable time–include, hosting a political fund-raiser and the 16th Annual Hudson Peconic benefit for Planned Parenthood.

Futhermore, you are probably asking why I mention The Home Depot.  I’ll tell you.  I reached out to them this week and not only did the entire local store management team coordinate an effort for me, they offered to provide all of the design services, supplies, and labor–for FREE.  An entire team.  No charge.  Above and beyond what I originally asked.  Garten should take note as to what charity looks like and follow the lead of The Home Depot team.

So, brava, Ina.  As The Home Depot staff recognizes, sometimes it really is for the sake of the children and bringing a simple smile to someone suffering.  Couldn’t you have just made some homemade mac-n-cheese with little Enzo and saved yourself the public’s scorn?

Update:  ABC is reporting that Garten will cook with Enzo after all:

The “Barefoot Contessa” has time to star in her Food Network show, pen cookbooks, and cook at charity luncheons for her well-to-do fans. But apparently, her schedule was too packed to meet a 6-year-old boy stricken with leukemia who requested a cooking session with her through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. She turned him down, twice.

Now, after multiple blogs and news outlets criticized her decision, Garten is inviting Enzo Pereda to the set of “The Barefoot Contessa.”

“Ina became aware of Enzo’s story this weekend and will be calling him today,” a spokesperson for Garten said in a statement to ABCNews.com. “She looks forward to inviting him to spend some time with her at the Food Network studios.”

I was hoping that would be the outcome. I can only hope that Garten holds her reps accountable for how they handled this. I also understand she is busy and her time is her own–I get it.   While there were some feverish comments, which I always expect (and love about HA readers), for the record, I never suggested a boycott of her show, her books, or her sponsors.  I like her show and recipes and, frankly, I think the Ina-Enzo episode (if produced) would/will have record ratings for her.

Revealed: The Group Behind the Bills that
Could Legalize Killing Abortion Providers

“Revealed,” really? In fact, Americans United for Life has made no secret of promoting the ”Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act,” versions of which have already passed in two states and are under consideration in three others. And AUL’s vice president of legal affairs Denise Burke says the law doesn’t do what Mother Jones claims:

AUL’s “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” expressly provides that a pregnant woman may use force to protect her unborn child when she reasonably believes that unlawful force is threatening her unborn child and that her use of force is immediately necessary to protect her unborn child. The language explicitly limits the permitted use of force to a pregnant woman and does not expand it to third parties. Thus, under the express terms of AUL’s carefully crafted and narrow language, the “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” could not be used to justify criminal violence against abortion providers or anyone else.

There is nothing at all secretive — nothing to be “revealed” – about AUL promoting pro-life legislation, which is a service they describe on their Web site:

AUL attorneys are highly-regarded experts on pro-life legal language and the Constitution, consulting on bills and amendments across the country. In addition, our model legislation enables legislators to easily introduce bills without needing to research and write the bills themselves, helping ensure that their efforts will have the desired impact and withstand judicial scrutiny. . . .
We are continually working to help legislators enact new pro-life laws that will go into effect and not be unnecessarily tied up in court . . . . To do that, we educate legislators on the issues and provide them with model legislation and legal advice on legislative language. We work hand-in-hand with legislators to minimize avoidable problems . . .

So the Mother Jones article not only mischaracterizes the legislation AUL is promoting, the article also falsely claims to be “revealing” a fact that was already entirely public.

Here’s what bothers me. The article focuses almost exclusively on the admittedly unpleasant experience of the adult victims. For instance:

• The women who emerged from it — often poor blacks and Hispanics — appeared dazed and in pain, and sometimes left in ambulances.
• Two women died while under his care.
• the dangerous practices went unnoticed, except by the women who experienced them.
• The clinic…stands as a grim reminder of how degrading it was for the women who went there

All of this is of course true, but it seems like an unusual way to frame the story given that 7 of the 8 murder charges against Dr. Gosnell involve the murder of babies who did not leave the clinic at all. As the grand jury report explains, that number was just the tip of the iceberg. “Snipping” the neck of live, fully born babies has been Gosnell’s regular practice for decades. The assistant he employed between 2002-2008 has admitted to killing 100 babies this way. Gosnell himself likely killed many times this number.

The real number of victims will probably never be known but the grand jury testimony supports the idea that Dr. Gosnell is one the most prolific serial killers in US history. So why so much attention given to the filthy conditions of his clinic and so little to the victims. It’s almost as if the Times had published a story titled Serial Killer a Bad Housekeeper. Um, yeah, but isn’t that missing the point? Do we really expect the den of a murderer to be neat and odor free?

To be fair, the Times does quote one line from the grand jury report which mentions the deaths of the babies, but then we’re right back to the story about conditions in the facility, as if the filth of the place is what made it objectionable, not the ongoing murder of helpless infants.

Thus far, the Times has published just two stories on the case, the initial one Thursday and this current one by Tavernise. Maybe the editors are planning a companion piece that focuses on the majority of Dr. Gosnell’s victims, i.e. the hundreds of babies whose spinal cords he severed. As a standalone piece, today’s article gives new meaning to the phrase burying the lede.

One of the biggest news stories this week has been the exposure of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors masquerading as an abortion clinic in Philadelphia, PA. Since the grisly reality of what was happening behind those closed doors came to light, there was an immediate firestorm of outrage and controversy surrounding the issue. Pro-life activists have argued that legislators were willing to overlook the massive issues that repeatedly came to light because they are afraid of the backlash from the abortion lobby. Pro-abortion activists among the feminist left, most notably Amanda Marcotte, have given only the tiniest condemnation while excusing the abortion atrocities in the name of choice. But is a murderous butcher posing as an abortionist really the best argument for choice, and how entrenched in an abortion agenda must one be to make excuses for these abuses?

Operation Rescue published heart-wrenching photographs from Gosnell’s butcher shop. Looking at them was immensely difficult for me — these children were barely older than my son is now.

I had a 4D ultrasound this week, and posted some of the videos on my Facebook page. Last night, I got an e-mail from Kate at Blatherings Blog asking if she could post one of them on her blog. I told her yes, and here is the video she chose to post:

That’s my son, Ben, at 29 weeks yawning. I have other videos of him sucking his thumb and moving around. On other ultrasounds I’ve seen him kick his little feet and wave his little arms. I’ve not only heard his heart beating, I’ve seen it. I look at those images and wonder what he’ll look like when he’s born, I wonder if he’ll want to play soccer and hockey like his dad did, if he’ll follow his dad’s footsteps and join the Marine Corps, if he’ll get married, what his children will look like. I look at those images and see an entire future, a lifetime of hope and promise, spread out in front of me. I could never look at those images, hear that heartbeat, and feel him moving inside me, and consider killing him. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could make that choice. I’ve always been pro-life, but I can’t understand how someone who has carried a child can remain pro-abortion.

I caused a firestorm of controversy back in October when I pondered this, daring to ask how pro-abortion extremist Jessica Valenti felt about abortion now that she’s carried and birthed a child of her own.

When Valenti heard her baby’s heart beating, did she think it was just an abortable clump of cells? When she saw her daughter moving in her uterus, was it a fetus or a baby? When she felt her baby kicking, did she have any doubt about what she was carrying? If she had miscarried (and thank goodness she didn’t), would she have thought she lost some fetal tissue or would she have thought she lost her baby? A pregnant woman knows the truth. It’s why so many women feel they need to lie to themselves or avoid an ultrasound before an abortion. If they were to admit the truth to themselves, they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.

These are questions she’ll probably never answer. (She blogged about her pregnancy only once.) To answer truthfully would be to undermine what she’s spent years fighting for. After all, when you see the little baby squirming and moving on that ultrasound screen, there’s no doubt about what it is. But to admit that a pregnant woman is carrying a baby, and not a meaningless clump of cells, would be to open Pandora’s Box for pro-abortion radicals like Valenti. If it’s a baby, then to abort it is murder. Quite a sticky situation for a femisogynist to get herself into, isn’t it?

It’s the same situation pro-aborts like Amanda Marcotte, Jill Filipovic, and Vanessa Valenti find themselves in now as they struggle to defend abortion rights in the wake of the Gosnell controversy. To let themselves be as outraged as the rest of decent society is would undermine everything they’ve been fighting for. And who cares if a few infants and one woman died for abortion rights? They’ve got an agenda to push.

Interestingly, NARAL celebrated Blogs for Choice Day yesterday. Is this an example of the choice we’re supposed to fight for as women? To pretend that this is some kind of an aberration is a joke. How many other hospitals, medical departments, health boards, and DAs are looking the other way in the name of protecting abortion rights? Abortion advocates refuse to even address the possibility. This is a one-time problem, one wackjob who has nothing to do with abortion and all other abortion clinics are “safe”. The question is, if this really has anything to do with women’s rights and freedom of choice, then why can’t we ask these questions? Why the lack of regulations for abortion clinics? If this was really a question of choice and women’s rights, abortion extremists like Amanda Marcotte would be outraged and demanding to know the answers to these questions. After all, it is women who are suffering, and it is women who extremists like Marcotte claim to be fighting for.

If you want to know how soulless the abortion movement really is, then just look at their response to Gosnell’s House of Horrors. What kind of person must you be to see the atrocities that took place at this clinic and argue for more abortions? It says a lot about abortion advocates, that they would brush the murder and abuses of women and children under the rug to protect the right to have an abortion. But before we can understand the depths of the pro-abortion feminist left’s depravity in their reaction to the Gosnell case, we need to understand just what went on behind those closed doors.

The grand jury report is ghastly. Dr. Gosnell is charged with eight counts of murder, seven of which were infants. These infants were delivered alive and viable, before Gosnell murdered them by snipping their spinal cords. In addition to letting mothers give birth to their babies and then murdering those babies, the grand jury report shows that Gosnell had no concern for the health of the mothers, either. The introduction of the report shows that this man is a sadistic monster.

This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.

… One woman, for example, was left lying in place for hours after Gosnell tore her cervix and colon while trying, unsuccessfully, to extract the fetus. Relatives who came to pick her up were refused entry into the building; they had to threaten to call the police. They eventually found her inside, bleeding and incoherent, and transported her to the hospital, where doctors had to remove almost half a foot of her intestines.

On another occasion, Gosnell simply sent a patient home, after keeping her mother waiting for hours, without telling either of them that she still had fetal parts inside her. Gosnell insisted she was fine, even after signs of serious infection set in over the next several days. By the time her mother got her to the emergency room, she was unconscious and near death.

A nineteen-year-old girl was held for several hours after Gosnell punctured her uterus. As a result of the delay, she fell into shock from blood loss, and had to undergo a hysterectomy.

One patient went into convulsions during an abortion, fell off the procedure table, and hit her head on the floor. Gosnell wouldn’t call an ambulance, and wouldn’t let the woman’s companion leave the building so that he could call an ambulance.

Why did no one at the hospital report these incidents? As Michelle Malkin pointed out, it likely wouldn’t have mattered if they had reported him. The Pennsylvania Department of Health knew of clinic violations for decades, and did nothing. The Pennsylvania Department of State was repeatedly given evidence of the horrible conditions at Gosnell’s clinic and did nothing. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health inspected Gosnell’s clinic multiple times and did nothing. There was decades worth of oversight on multiple levels where officials willingly closed their eyes to the abuses and violations going on at the Gosnell House of Horrors.

Even an evaluator from The National Abortion Federation visited Gosnell’s clinic and called it “the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected”. Gosnell even told her about the death of Karnamaya Mongar. Was any action taken? No. The goal of NAF is allegedly “to ensure safe, legal, and acceptable abortion care, and to promote health and justice for women”, yet they turned a blind eye to Gosnell’s clinic, just like Pennsylvania authorities. They were more concerned about protecting their agenda than they were concerned with protecting the lives of women.

While pro-lifers have rightfully demanded to know why it is state officials let these atrocities continue on for decades, pro-abortion extremists have somehow decided that this case has nothing to do with abortion — and demands less regulation in the abortion industry. If only pro-lifers didn’t make abortions so difficult to obtain, then none of this would have ever happened, or something.

The lack of outrage from the political left and from pro-abortion activists is disturbing. As The Anchoress noted, the hypocrisy is overwhelming.

While many pro-aborts claim that this has nothing to do with abortion, to truly believe that boggles the mind. After all, how different is partial birth abortion from what Dr. Gosnell was doing? The only difference is that part of the baby remains inside the mother’s body — and that abortion extremists defend the “right” to perform late-term, partial birth abortions on babies that are viable and able to survive outside the womb. It’s also worth pointing out that, if Barack Obama had his way, what Dr. Gosnell did would be considered legal.

Meanwhile, femisogynists (rather than being outraged at the abuses women were forced to endure at Gosnell’s hands) are scurrying to excuse this. They pay lip service to the outrage of the situation, and then quickly go right into abortion-defense mode.

Amanda Marcotte begins by quickly contorting herself into an intellectual pretzel trying to blame the pro-life movement for this madman.

That shady abortion providers get patients at all is something we can safely blame the anti-choice movement for. Most doctors in this country are pro-choice, and many would like to provide abortion, but as Slate’s Emily Bazelon demonstrated in the New York Times, the stigma of doing so makes it that much harder to do. Good medical care costs money, but very few women seeking abortion can get coverage, in no small part because of anti-choice initiatives like the Hyde Amendment. If you’re seeking an abortion but can’t afford it, going to a doctor who provides substandard care on the cheap is certainly going to be an attractive option.

These particular charges involve late-term abortion, and all I could think upon reading the news story was, “I wish these women could have gone to Dr. George Tiller,” because he was renowned for the quality of care provided at his Kansas clinic. But sadly, that wasn’t even an option, even for those who could afford it, as Dr. Tiller’s life was taken by an anti-choice extremist in 2009. When vacuums are created, we shouldn’t be surprised when they suck in a bunch of junk.

Amanda’s premise is flawed on virtually every level. First, Dr. Tiller was murdered in 2009. The violations at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic go back decades, so many of the women violated at his clinic could have gone to Dr. Tiller. Also, this wasn’t a case of women choosing to go to an abortion butcher like Dr. Gosnell because it was cheap, or because better options weren’t available. As Rachael Larimore pointed out in her rebuttal, Philadelphia houses several abortion clinics, one of which offers financial assistance. Pennsylvania offers no-cost birth control and emergency contraception to women who qualify. And while Planned Parenthood charges less than $1,000 for first trimester abortions, Dr. Gosnell was charging his patients $2,500 or more for his late-term abortions.

Jill at Feministe tried to pretend that he was just a murderer and not an abortionist, and therefore this has nothing to do with abortion.

Contrary to what Great Moral Authority On Abortion William Saletan has to say about the matter, I think we’re all pretty well agreed that if the charges against Kermit Gosnell are true, then dude is a criminal and needs to go to jail. Killing a baby after it’s born and has taken breaths? Is not abortion. It should be, and is, a crime punishable by law. And Kermit Gosnell is being criminally prosecuted.

Also, women don’t get late-term abortions for fun. Seriously. No one is like, “I think I will continue this pregnancy for as long as legally possible before I undergo an invasive medical procedure that is rendered longer, more expensive, and more complicated because I waited six months to have it.” No. It’s actually more like, “I really wanted this baby but now it turns out that there’s a fetal abnormality incompatible with life, and if I continue this pregnancy I risk my own health and/or life to give birth to a baby that either will not live or will only live in extreme pain for a very short while.” Fun stuff like that.

That’s a falsehood, of course. Most late-term abortions are actually not done to save the life of the mother or because the baby won’t survive. There have been virtually no studies done on late-term abortions, with the exception of the Guttmacher Institute over 20 years ago. In a survey of 1,900 women who had abortions, 420 had late-term abortions. Of those 420, only 2% had a late-term abortion due to a fetal abnormality. Most women just claimed they didn’t know they were pregnant or misjudged their gestation. And what is Jill’s point? That killing a baby when he is delivered is murder, but doing it moments beforehand when he’s still partially in his mother’s birth canal is A-OK? To someone like her, there’s no difference. And it wasn’t as if Dr. Gosnell was only killing babies in the “bad” way. He performed many, many, many “acceptable” late-term abortions. He’s being charged with 33 illegal late-term abortions, but killed hundreds in this manner.

Vanessa Valenti at Feministing basically regurgitates Jill Filipovic and Amanda Marcotte’s nonsensical arguments. It’s not about abortion, but even if it was, this never would have happened if women had better access to abortion clinics anyways. Nevermind the 33 counts of felony abortion and exorbitant prices patients were charged. Gotta tread carefully here, because if they express too much condemnation, then it could infringe on abortion rights!

The pro-abortion feminist left is going to great lengths to brush this controversy underneath the rug in order to protect abortion rights. They claim to be fighting for women, but are willing to overlook instances where women are abused and injured, and even killed. Yet somehow, we’re supposed to believe that these are today’s champions of women’s rights — women who can barely muster more than a shrug of the shoulders over the murder of one woman, the murders of seven infants, and the butchering of countless other women who were fortunate enough to survive a visit to Gosnell’s clinic. If one ever needed an example of just how far these women who call themselves feminists are willing to go to protect their sacred cow, you would need only look at their reaction to Kermit Gosnell butcher shop.

–

Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

Baby Boy A:

After an ultrasound was performed on Sue, Gosnell told the aunt that the girl’s pregnancy was further along than she had originally told him, and that, therefore, the procedure would cost more than the $1,500 that had been agreed upon; it would now cost $2,500. (Gosnell normally charged $1,625 for 23-24 week abortions.) The aunt paid Gosnell in cash at the Delaware clinic. He inserted laminaria, gave Sue pills to begin labor, and instructed her to be at the Women’s Medical Center in Philadelphia at 9:00 the next morning.

Sue arrived with her aunt at 9:00 a.m. and did not leave the clinic until almost 11:00 that night. An ultrasound conducted by Kareema Cross recorded a gestational age of 29.4 weeks. Cross testified that the girl appeared to be seven or eight months pregnant. Cross said that, during 13-plus hours, the girl was given a large amount of Cytotec to induce labor and delivery. Sue complained of pain and was heavily sedated. According to Cross, the girl was left to labor for hours and hours. Eventually, she gave birth to a large baby boy. Cross estimated that the baby was 18 to 19 inches long.  She said he was nearly the size of her own six pound, six ounce, newborn daughter.

After the baby was expelled, Cross noticed that he was breathing, though not for long. After about 10 to 20 seconds, while the mother was asleep, “the doctor just slit the neck,” said Cross. Gosnell put the boy’s body in a shoebox. Cross described the baby as so big that his feet and arms hung out over the sides of the container. Cross said that she saw the baby move after his neck was cut, and after the doctor placed it in the shoebox. Gosnell told her, “it’s the baby’s reflexes. It’s not really moving.”

The neonatologist testified that what Gosnell told his people was absolutely false. If a baby moves, it is alive. Equally troubling, it feels a “tremendous amount of pain” when its spinal cord is severed. So, the fact that Baby Boy A. continued to move after his spinal cord was cut with scissors means that he did not die instantly. Maybe the cord was not completely severed. In any case, his few moments of life were spent in excruciating pain.

Cross was not the only one startled by the size and maturity of Baby Boy A. Adrienne Moton and Ashley Baldwin, along with Cross, took photographs because they knew this was a baby that could and should have lived. Cross explained:

Q. Why did you all take a photograph of this baby?
A. Because it was big and it was wrong and we knew it. We knew something was wrong.
* * *
I’m not sure who took the picture first, but when we seen this baby, it was – it was a shock to us because I never seen a baby that big that he had done. So it was – I knew something was wrong because everything, like you can see everything, the hair, eyes, everything. And I never seen for any other procedure that he did, I never seen any like that. [. . .]

Gosnell simply noted the baby boy’s size by joking, as he often did after delivering a large baby. According to Cross, the doctor said: “This baby is big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus stop.” (p. 103-5)

Gosnell

Baby Boy A’s only portrait can be found on p. 105.

Baby C:

When Massof left the clinic in 2008, Lynda Williams took over the job of cutting baby’s necks when Gosnell was not there. Cross saw Williams slit the neck of a baby (“Baby C”) who had been moving and breathing for approximately twenty minutes. Gosnell had delivered the baby and put it on a counter while he suctioned the placenta from the mother. Williams called Cross over to look at the baby because it was breathing and moving its arms when Williams pulled on them. After playing with the baby, Williams slit its neck.

Lynda Williams

When asked why Williams had killed the baby, Cross answered:
Because the baby, I guess, because the baby was moving and breathing. And she see Dr. Gosnell do it so many times, I guess she felt, you know, she can do it. It’s okay. (p. 107)

This baby doesn’t even have a letter. Let’s call him Baby X:

Adrienne Moton also killed at least one baby by cutting its spinal cord. Cross testified that a woman had delivered a large baby into the toilet before Gosnell arrived at work for the night. Cross said that the baby was moving and looked like it was swimming. Moton reached into the toilet, got the baby out and cut its neck. (p. 107)

Adrienne Moton

To sum up the babies’ lifetime experiences (aside from the pain): Baby A got his picture taken, Baby C had a playmate, and Baby X got to go for a swim.

(Page numbers refer to the PDF document page numbers, not those typed on the report.)

Cross-posted at P&P.

One week later, Amanda Marcotte is right back to the playbook, this time blaming the murders committed by pro-choice abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell on conservative pro-lifers:

That shady abortion providers get patients at all is something we can safely blame the anti-choice movement for. Most doctors in this country are pro-choice, and many would like to provide abortion, but as Slate‘s Emily Bazelon demonstrated in the New York Times, the stigma of doing so makes it that much harder to do.  Good medical care costs money, but very few women seeking abortion can get coverage, in no small part because of anti-choice initiatives like the Hyde Amendment.  If you’re seeking an abortion but can’t afford it, going to a doctor who provides substandard care on the cheap is certainly going to be an attractive option.

But she goes a step farther, suggesting that women were forced to go to Dr. Gosnell because a pro-lifer killed Dr. Tiller:

These particular charges involve late-term abortion, and all I could think upon reading the news story was, “I wish these women could have gone to Dr. George Tiller,” because he was renowned for the quality of care provided at his Kansas clinic.  But sadly, that wasn’t even an option, even for those who could afford it, as Dr. Tiller’s life was taken by an anti-choice extremist in 2009.

This obviously isn’t meant to be a logical response. Dr. Tiller has been dead a year. What about the other 30+ years Dr. Gosnell ran his clinic? What about the dozens of other clinics within half an hour of his site? What about the fact that many of the abortions he performed were illegal? Here’s her final line:

When vacuums are created, we shouldn’t be surprised when they suck in a bunch of junk.

Or in the case of an abortion center, a bunch of baby body parts.

Yesterday it was reported that Kermit Gosnell, an abortionist, was arrested and charged with eight counts of murder. He was charged with the murder of babies who were fully delivered; he induced labor, delivered the babies and then stuck a scissors in the back of their necks and mercilessly killed them. Their first breath, was also their last.  Lacking even the dignity of a human touch; no one holding their tiny, innocent hand coursing with life’s blood, as that life left their tiny bodies. Eyes opening, trying to focus for the first time and trustingly seek out the security of the face belonging to the voice they’d heard for many months inside the womb. Struggling to survive, as the will to live is strong, even in the most tiny and vulnerable.

He was not charged with the murders of babies he killed the same way – earning $1.8 million in one year alone for doing so – only inside the womb.

Gosnell’s abortion mill was a gruesome house of evil. When police searched Gosnell’s facilities, they found that “bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses were scattered throughout the building.  Jars containing the severed feet of babies lined a shelf.” This grotesque cretin kept severed feet as some sort of macabre serial killer trophy.

The State of Pennsylvania knew this. And ignored it. Allowing him to commit murder, time and time again, for decades. Their reasoning? Inspecting abortion mills clinics and requiring that they have basic safety standards would result in “putting up a barrier to women” and their ‘choice’. The ‘choice’ is never explicitly said because by choice they, of course, mean the purposeful killing of a baby. Barbara Boxer and even our own President would have believed the same. Barbara Boxer believes that a right to life does not exist until a mother ‘chooses’ to take her baby home, alive, from the hospital. President Obama, when a state senator in Illinois, had more concern for abortionists than for the babies whose lives they snuff out. He cared more about protecting the vile excuses for human beings like Kermit Gosnell than the babies they were attempting to kill. He believes that babies who are born alive during an abortion attempt should legally be left to die.  As a Senator in Illinois, debating a Born Alive bill, he said this:

As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead..

Not just coming out limp and dead. Like the babies born in Gosnell’s facilities. Poor Gosnell would have too much of a burden, what with pesky babies not cooperating and insisting on having the human will to live and the strong spirit to survive.

The extensive grand jury report also said the following:

But even this total abdication by the Department of Health might not have been fatal.

Here they are wrong. That the abortion clinic existed at all, by definition means there were fatalities there. Likely thousands of them. That is the sole purpose of an abortion clinic. Already the pro-abortionist left like Amanda Marcotte, is trying to blame “anti-choicers” for “crappy abortionists“. She is, in effect, saying “Too bad a better ‘doctor’ didn’t kill the babies by stabbing in neck with scissors in a cleaner way.”  If only he’d hidden the evidence, you see. So people weren’t forced into realizing that lives, not balls of cells, are snuffed out. She cares naught for actual safety. If she did, why would she have adamantly opposed Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s conclusion that state agencies in Virginia could legally regulate abortion clinics? Do you know why she, and other pro-abortionists objected? Because some clinics wouldn’t be able to afford meeting basic safety standards and would have to close down. See, they don’t give a hoot about safety. It’s all about blood money and a sickening agenda.

Furthermore, the difference between this gruesome killing machine and a “safe” clinic is aesthetics, really.  There is no denying the horror of what was found in this “doctor’s” office. But it happens in every abortion clinic across the land. Sticking a scalpel in a baby’s neck in utero has the same result as sticking it in the neck with scissors outside the womb: Death.

In this case, people can visualize the actual babies, as they were horrifically kept in jars and bottles. In “safe” clinics, they are hidden away in haz-mat disposals or chopped up into tiny pieces before being sucked out of their mother’s womb and disposed of like trash. Hidden away, allowing people to blind themselves to what is actually happening. It is easier to remain blissfully ignorant and ignore the fact that a baby is a baby, in utero or out. It is easier to believe that a life taken inside the womb is somehow different than a life taken outside of one. It is easier to believe that ‘viability’ is a valid argument, otherwise one would have to come to the appalling realization that Roe v. Wade actually sanctions infanticide.

Here is what is actually happening, to the babies who are aborted without being fully delivered:

My eyes shot back to the screen again. The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor, and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment the baby looked as if it were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then it crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then it was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty.

The only difference is that some of the babies Gosnell killed took a first, and last, breath. Others never even get a first, and only, breath. Their lives are snuffed out inside what should be a safe harbor. Never having a chance to breathe, never feeling a single human and loving touch. Never having a chance to see the grace and beauty of life. Never feeling the sun warming the tops of their sweet-smelling heads. Never lifting their faces into the rain to catch drops on their cheeks and tongue. Never chortling with innocence and wonder. Never giggling in the way that children do; a way that touches you so deeply and fills you with joy to your very core. Never growing up to fall in love, to marry and to have children of their own.

This is the slippery slope of Roe v. Wade and the evil it has wrought. Fifty million babies have been killed since it became law. Babies are killed every hour of every day, only more often with a vacuum or a D&C than with scissors, which makes it easier for people to choose to believe the ‘ball of cells’ lie. What happened in Gosnell’s office should hit home as an atrocity, even to people who purport to be pro-choice. To some people, being pro-choice really means they are making the choice to believe the ‘ball of cells’ or non-viable lies, because they want to be enlightened and For The Women. Because, empowerment. Feminists even seek to celebrate abortion as something that gives them their twisted idea of equality. But it is not enlightened nor high-minded; it, like Roe v. Wade, is condoning, for whatever reason, the killing of innocent life.

My rights as a woman are not predicated on a legal ability to kill my own children. To suggest otherwise does not empower women. To the contrary; it degrades and demeans women and all of society. Our hands are stained with the blood of the 50 million lives lost and we must put an end to the lie that it is a Women’s Rights issue. The pro-abortionist Left has odiously, yet effectively, made that the issue. It’s not. The issue is that we are sanctioning infanticide and it must end.

Their voices, 50 million voices, were silenced. The screams of those innocent babies are unheard. Ours cannot be.

——

Originally posted at RedState

Follow Lori on Twitter and read more of her stuff here

Archbishop Dolan cuts through the blather:

My Lord, what have we done the last thirty years? There’s candy bowls on people’s desks with condoms, they’re dropping ‘em from airplanes, and yet nothing seems to improve. So maybe we’re on the wrong track here.

One of the biggest questions: Where is the outrage in the black community? For blacks, almost 60% of NYC pregnancies end in abortion. Jill Stanek reports:

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, also president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, will join Alveda King and other African-American leaders on January 10 for a rally spotlighting New York City’s ghastly abortion rate, particularly among blacks. The group will also speak out against a NYC Council bill that seeks to harass pregnancy care centers.

RTR.

I have a dream. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more respected black leaders and celebrities would join the fight against this suicidal/genocidal nightmare? Imagine the good that might be done by President Obama if he believed in the sanctity of life. Imagine a pro-life Michelle Obama, fighting for the survival of black babies and promoting the black family instead of haranguing us about childhood obesity. Imagine the all-powerful Oprah taking on this cause.

Back to reality. Archbishop Dolan also said:

The Statue of Liberty should be the symbol of this city, not the grim reaper.

Hat tip to Cubachi, who notes that 30% of the aborted babies were scraped and suctioned from the wombs of women in their 30′s and 40′s. Are these the same wanna-be mommies who later portray themselves as martyrs because they can’t have children the old fashioned way, whether because of their advanced age or because of the abuse their reproductive systems have suffered from abortions, contraceptives, and STDs? Babies are viewed by a heck of a lot of women as a commodity. Don’t want one right now? Toss it. Feel entitled to one later? Pursue brave new procedures and discard the inconvenient extras.

In other abortion news, Rep. Mike Pence has introduced the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act. His statement:

It is morally wrong to end an unborn human life by abortion.  It is also morally wrong to take the taxpayer dollars of millions of pro-life Americans and use them to promote abortion at home or abroad.

Last year, Planned Parenthood received more than $363 million in revenue from government grants and contracts.  During that same time, they performed an unprecedented 324,008 abortions.

The largest abortion provider in America should not also be the largest recipient of federal funding under Title X.

The Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act will prevent any family planning funds under Title X from going to Planned Parenthood or other organizations that perform abortions.  It will ensure that abortion providers are not being subsidized with federal tax dollars.

Jill Stanek has more.

Cross-posted.

In July of this year, leftist Feminists were openly, and proudly, rooting for an abortion to be portrayed on prime-time television. And in April of this year, leftist Feminists like Jessica Valenti of Feministing were grossly bemoaning the fact that Mtv’s show, 16 and Pregnant, did not portray any teenage girls having abortions. They wanted sixteen year old girls to have abortions. On television.  Way to be pro-woman and For The Children ™, faux feminists! By For The Children, I of course mean totally not at all for the children – unless they can be used and exploited to further an agenda, natch. You see, it’s never actually about women nor children to them; it’s always about an agenda and an ideology that treats motherhood as a yoke around a woman’s neck. Motherhood is so old school and oppressive and stuff! What with those pesky children wanting to be nurtured and loved, while providing a joy that fills one’s heart so full that it cannot be adequately put into words. Well, and wanting to, you know, live. Who do they think they are?

On Tuesday night, they got their wish. Mtv ran a special called “No Easy Decision”, in which Markai, a girl who had previously appeared on 16 and Pregnant, learned that she was pregnant again.

And she terminated the pregnancy baby’s life.

I watched the “special”, even though I didn’t think that I needed to do so in order to point out how wrong such a show is on so many levels. But, unlike Ana Marie Cox, I don’t like to talk about things that I have neither read nor watched, nor do I like to do things half-assedly. And, it turns out, the show was even worse than I suspected it would be. It was infuriating and horrifying, almost beyond words. It was also heartbreaking beyond belief. My heart aches for Markai, and for the other girls (Natalia and Katie) who appeared in the discussion portion of the show.

The pro-abortion rah-rah sisterhood, of course, praised it immediately, which should indicate just how strong the show’s bias was. If you needed any further proof than the fact that the show was aired commercial-free, in partnership with Exhale, a group who says that they wish to raise awareness that abortion “is normal in the reproductive lives of women and girls.” Yes, every woman’s “reproductive life” (love the fancy-pants euphemism) includes the killing of an unborn child. You women who don’t have abortions? Total abnormal freaks! Just look at Sarah Palin, for cripes sake. Wingnuts!

The show was entirely agenda-driven and these young girls were sickly used and exploited for that purpose only. The token nod to a pro-life position was a quick question in the discussion panel: “Did you consider adoption?” One of the girls said that wouldn’t have been an option because it wasn’t the baby part that was scary; it was that pregnancy is icky. She had an abortion to avoid pregnancy symptoms. Another one spoke of the sacrifices (her word) that she had to make to pay the $750.00 abortion fee. Her prom ticket, for one.

Sacrifice was a running theme, except it appears that the word has lost any real meaning. The girls spoke of not wanting to sacrifice their college plans. Or of not wanting their partners to sacrifice by having to work two jobs to support another child. And  Markai spoke of not wanting her living infant child to “sacrifice for my mistake.” Such rationales were among the most heartbreaking because it’s what we’ve been teaching our youth with society’s insidious entitlement mentality. There is no right to life, but there is a right to college and a right to not be poor. We can’t put a child through going without food or losing electricity for a few days; losing one’s LIFE is far preferable.

It’s also another example of how leftist feminists actually think very little of women and how pervasive their disturbing mindset has become. To them, a woman is incapable of having it all. A pregnant woman or a mother is incapacitated to the point where she can’t even read a book or attend classes, apparently. They’ve turned college into a need; one can’t meet their twisted ideas of equality without it. They’ve placed a higher value on an increasingly meaningless piece of paper than on life itself and are trying to teach our daughters the same. Plus, why is college a make or break situation? Is a woman somehow lesser if she doesn’t get a college degree? They must think I’m a third class citizen!

The incredibly harmful lies propagated during “No Easy Decision” were matched only by the awful truths about the pro-abortion agenda that the show unintentionally unmasked. Pro-abortionist Lynn Harris, at Salon, exposed one such awful truth and, worse, actually praised it:

Here’s Dr. Drew opening the show — and racking up stunned “FTW!”s (For The Win!) on Twitter right out of the gate: “About 750,000 girls in the U.S. get pregnant every year. And although nearly a third of these teen pregnancies result in abortion, we’ve never shown this choice on ’16 and Pregnant’ up until now. It can be a polarizing topic, and there’s quite frankly no way to talk about this and please everyone. Although controversial to some, abortion is one of the three viable options, and it’s among the safest, most common medical procedures in the U.S., so we thought it was important for us to discuss.”

Among the most common “medical procedures” in the United States. So much for that safe, legal and rare thing, huh? That lie has been completely exposed already and there are over 50 million dead fetuses that attest to that fact.  They don’t want it to be rare; they want it to be the default option as No Easy Decision, and the glee-ridden leftist feminist response to it, clearly shows. In fact, they want it to be “normal” and common. And will outright lie in order to accomplish this. Markai was told by the abortion clinic counselor as she was being prepped for the abortion, “do not think of ‘it’ as ten fingers and ten toes or anything like that or you will get too depressed. Think of ‘it’ as what ‘it’ is: a ball of cells.” I suppose that’s why children are not even allowed in the waiting room of the clinic; don’t want any of those pesky balls of cells running around confusing people.

A ball of cells. Also,wait a minute? Why would one ever risk feeling depressed? According to pro-abortionists, it’s no big whoop and there is nothing sad about it. It’s a relief, you see! Dr. Drew himself told the girls that they may be confused and stuff, but no big whoop. In two years most women realize it was the right decision. There’s a time frame and everything! In two years, all will be hunky-dory. That didn’t appear to be the case with the girls on the show, particularly Markai. Her confusion, and her pain, were palpable. Her boyfriend, the father of her living child as well, took her out to dinner after the abortion and referred to the unborn baby that was aborted as “a thing.” Markai became extremely upset and said “that thing could have turned out to be her” and pointed to their living infant child. I guess the lie about the “ball of cells” didn’t work for her. I don’t think it ever will; I ache for Markai.

Much was also made about how terrible it is that sometimes an abortion is made slightly more difficult to obtain. During the panel discussion, Natalia complained about how hard it is to have to “beg a judge for permission to make your own decision”, due to parental consent laws. She did receive a judicial bypass. The reason? She didn’t want to tell her parents and disappoint them. How on earth does that constitute a reason for a judicial bypass of parental consent? How does it supersede parental rights? That judge should be thrown off the bench. Worse, Natalia went without the love and support of her family in a time when she needed it most. Where is the compassion there? Where is the “informed” choice? Salon jumped right on the parental consent laws, calling them cruel. They also went onto say this:

(In an extended interview available online, Natalia also describes the cruelty of being legally forced to view the pre-procedure ultrasound.)

Cruelty? If actual informed choice, instead of lip service informed choice, is cruel. See, that whole ball of cells lie won’t work if a woman sees the actual baby. Of course, to Lynn Harris at Salon and pro-abortionists like her, that is cruel, yet there’s nothing cruel about making life expendable nor about disposing of a life before he or she even had a chance at A life. That matters naught to leftists. The only people who think the fear of being grounded by their parents is more important than a life itself are people who remain immature and child-like their entire lives. To wit, leftists. They never grew up, they never stopped rebelling against their parents. And they are attempting to teach the same to each subsequent generation. Don’t tell your parents! A super awesome nanny state judge will let you do whatever you want, decency be damned. It’s funny how much they dislike mommies and daddies, but they love them some Nannies.

They also love to give lip service without actually doing anything. Exhale set up a site called 16 and Loved. It was set-up to allegedly shield the girls from those wingnutty people who, you know, don’t rejoice over abortion. How cuckoo pants! Meanwhile, the whole 16 and loved website is all about praising the girls for “outing” their abortions. Because, empowerment.

What the girls really need is actual support.  They’ve been lied to and now, on top of that, they’ve been used and exploited, even if with their consent, to push an agenda. I don’t wish to do them further harm. My heart breaks for them. When they realize what they have done, and they will, the pain of their regret, remorse and guilt will be compounded by the knowledge that they did this all publicly and on display. This is the mentality the girls have been taught. In a way, they are actually victims themselves and now that they’ve served their purpose to the left, they’ll just be tossed aside.

You see, it’s pro-life people who don’t judge and who provide meaningful support. It’s pro-life people who acknowledge the pain and harm abortion also causes to women and who seek ways to embrace them and help them. Pro-abortionists deny their very existence. They deny, always, the trauma that abortion may also cause to the woman. They deny the life-long guilt and pain those women bear. They deny the very fact that a life was sucked from his or her mother’s womb, mercilessly. Never once feeling a loving touch. Never once gazing into his mother’s eyes. Never once raising a tiny hand to touch his mommy’s cheek with a love that cannot even truly be expressed.

That’s your legacy, Gloria Steinem, and that of your fellow travelers. A legacy that is a stain on the heart and soul of our country. A legacy that we must not let continue onto yet another generation. You do not “empower” girls by telling them the life they create can be tossed aside for college. You do not empower girls by telling them a sacrifice is giving up a prom ticket to pay for the aborting of the life they created. You do not empower girls by turning motherhood into a burden to be avoided at all costs; even at the cost of that life itself. You do not empower girls by exploiting them to further your agendas.

Abortion will not, and should not, ever be “normal.” Because, Motherhood is normal to humans and so is nurturing. Rejoicing in the miracle of giving life yourself and then nurturing that life once given. That is within us; it’s instinct and female human nature. It is something of which to be proud and it should be honored, not diminished. It is an attribute and a gift, not a punishment.

If Markai, Natalia and Katie realize this one day, I fear that their pain and guilt will be nearly unbearable. Not only were lives lost, but other lives were potentially traumatized forever. Somehow, I don’t think MTv, nor 16 and Loved will be there for them then. And that’s yet another horrifying aspect of No Easy Decision.

——————————

crossed at RedState

Follow Lori on Twitter and read more of her stuff at Newsreal, Redstate, Big Journalism and Human Events

Pro-abortionists love to give lip service to the “right” to privacy, especially when it concerns fancy wombs. Except for when they wish to take to Twitter and boast about their abortions publicly, apparently. This week, they did just that using the hashtag #ihadanabortion. The alleged reasoning behind such a campaign was to promote empowerment and to take the “stigma” out of, you know, the killing of unborn children. Because, wing nuts won the elections. And The Patriarchy ™. Or something. Never mind that elections themselves are, by definition, all about choice. Facts are hard.

Facts are hard for the press, too, who are ever ready to toe the pro-abortion lefty line. The Washington Post furthered the “OMG, radical extremists who hate lady bits were elected!!!111″ narrative with their article “#Ihadanabortion: Tweeting abortion after the election.” Their bias was clear from the first two paragraphs:

With Tuesday’s sweep of antiabortion candidates into Congress (including a handful of ‘hardliners‘ who say they would outlaw the procedure in all circumstances), some pro-abortion rights activists took to Twitter under the hashtag #Ihadanabortion.

Salon reported that the campaign began with a tweet Wednesday morning by @IAmDrTiller: ‘Time for us to come out. Who’s had an abortion? Show antis we’re not intimidated by scare tactics. Use: #ihadanabortion.’

Oh, yes, people were forced to boast about their abortions due to a sweep of hardliners threatening them. Apparently super scarily threatening them with the fact that abortion is legal in this country. Sigh. Hey, what about the hardliner who started this “campaign”? What kind of extremist does one have to be to choose Dr. Tiller as their idol? A man who killed thousands and thousands of unborn babies and harmed thousands and thousands of women.

Salon‘s Broadsheet also made mention of the elections in their article “Tweeting your abortion.” Tracy Clark-Flory wrote “Political slogans are not about nuance, and after Tuesday’s election we’re especially in need of some bold rhetoric.”  This is typical of Tracy Clark-Flory, of course. When Angie Jackson disgustingly live-tweeted her abortion, Tracy Clark-Flory not only applauded it, but said that women should thank her. Thank her. First, she quoted Angie Jackson’s vile “It’s not that bad… It’s basically like a miscarriage”. Um. Except you are killing the baby on purpose. And, by the way, a miscarriage isn’t such a cavalier thing to most people who are neither heartless nor soulless. It hurts. You grieve for the life lost. You never, ever forget it. She went on to grossly say:

there is something reassuring about how she matter-of-factly walks us, and herself, through the whole process. It’s as though she’s live-tweeting the aftermath of a routine medical procedure, like a wisdom tooth extraction.

That exemplifies the second absurd narrative they are trying to promote with this campaign. Abortion needs to be out in the open and not stigmatized. Abortion should be no big whoop! It’s just like eating a cheeseburger. Wait, bad example. Eating cheeseburgers should be stigmatized, according to the Left. But not killing the unborn – hence the need for “bold rhetoric.” Here is some of the “bold rhetoric” Clark-Flory, for one, rejoices in:

Almost half my life ago, #ihadanabortion. I’m not sorry. I’ve never been sorry. I will never be sorry. Just very, very grateful.

Those who are ANTI-choice shd B glad #ihadanabortion. I went on to finish college, support myself, marry … have 2 honor students. Nice, huh?

Pregnancy or a child doesn’t stop you from being able to attend class or, you know, read.  Unless these “empowered” feminists are claiming that a pregnant woman is somehow non-functional, incapable of thought and disabled to the point where she can’t attend college while pregnant – or even after having a child.

bgiacomazzo: I’m GLAD that most people are coming out in SUPPORT of #ihadanabortion — I guess there’s hope after all. You women are so brave. Godspeed.

AmandaMarcotte: Good on the folks at the #ihadanabortion hashtag. I haven’t, but it’s incredibly common. No need to feel alone.

Too bad that they wish women who have been harmed by abortion, who have been traumatized by it, remain feeling alone. They deny their very existence.

EmilyWherever: Sometimes twitter is so inspiring. The #ihadanabortion hashtag is beautiful to see. Yeah ladies!

“Yeah ladies! Good on you for killing your unborn children! w00t! You totally pwnd that baby!”

JenGStarr: @Quod_Erat More selfish and damaging to bring a child into the world without the means to care for or provide for them.

Of course, a baby is better off dead than being poor! I mean, what if that baby won’t have its own swanky pants and oh-so-hip iPod? What if it, egads, has to eat store brand food? The Left is constantly talking about welfare and food stamps and “free” health care for all, yet they evidently don’t think anyone actually avails themselves of such things. Instead, just kill the baby.

What never enters their empty heads and heartless bodies either is the fact that no baby is unwanted. We have this thing called adoption. Perhaps that is too complex an idea for the soulless.

AmandaMarcotte: Also, screw the people who tell you you’re wrong at #ihadanabortion. Most of them would be pissed if the thread was #ihadsexoncewhilefemale

JenGStarr: @AmandaMarcotte It’s not so much about life with them, more about punishing female sexuality.

Typical narrative from modern day feminists; try to paint anyone who doesn’t share your beliefs — about anything — as some sort of puritanical prude. Bring it around to sex, as always, natch. Because, prudes. You see, that’s the reason we don’t want babies to be killed: Because we hate sex. Or something.

This vile campaign promotes only one thing to me. It proves that the Left uses women only. They are preying on them and convincing them that they should brag shamelessly about the killing of unborn children. They want abortion not safe, legal and not rare. Not only not rare, but something to boast about and rejoice over.

They seek to encourage abortion for convenience, they seek to encourage the killing of an unborn child who isn’t timely. They deny the very real trauma that abortion causes women. They deny the deep pain and guilt these women suffer from. But they encourage its celebration.

It is not “empowering.” It is heinous.

—–

Cross-posted from David Horowitz’s NewsReal

Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her work at Snark and Boobs,  Red State and Human Events.

A traditional-values group is jubilant at the renewed likelihood that Mississippi voters — among the most pro-life in the nation — will have a “personhood” measure on their 2011 ballots….

Measure 26 would amend the Mississippi Constitution to say that “the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

I think the theory is that, at whatever point the entity becomes a legal person (fertilization or later, as the state initiative specifies), aborting it is killing a person and can only be justified on grounds that would justify killing someone who had already been born (perhaps only to save the life of the mother). One presumes a determination that the entity was a person would also turn an assault that led to miscarriage into a homicide.

The flip side, of course, is that before reaching the personhood-point, the entity is not a legal person; it does not have a “right” to life; and it can be legally aborted for much lesser cause, perhaps even for convenience.

Of course, Misisipi (is that too few?) notwithstanding, a “personhood” initiative need not specify fertilization as the point at which personhood obtains. A state initiative could specify some other point of gestation instead; some other, not quite so anti-abortion group could put a measure on the ballot to declare that personhood began at the beginning of the third trimester, or when it reached some particular developmental stage. (My personal preference is that the foetus becomes a person when the cerebral cortex activates, which should be detectable in each individual case, if absolutely necessary, via a PET scan.)

In Colorado, for example, abortion prohibitionists tried a similar initiative two years ago, Colorado Amendment 48; it was crushed at the polls by 46 points, 73 Nay to 27 Yea. But an initiative that set personhood to begin at some defined later point in the pregnancy might have a much better chance of passing in a less-conservative state like Colorado or California, Florida or Washington, New York or New Mexico. I suspect most folks are more comfortable defining personhood as occuring later than conception — but long before the eighth or ninth month, possibly even before the third trimester.

My point for decades — ever since Roe v. Wade, actually — has been that both sides are fighting the abortion wars bass-ackwards; instead of pushing for laws banning abortion or court cases declaring abortion a sacrament, we should begin with first principles:

1. You first must decide at what point of gestation, between conception to birth, the growing entity becomes a legal person.
2. The personhood decision can only be made via a vote by the peoples’ representatives in the legislature or by the people directly by referendum.
3. The personhood point must be written into the state constitution, not merely the state code, to prevent state judges from simply throwing it out at whim.
4. It must pass muster with the U.S. Supreme Court, so that local federal district and circus courts cannot throw it out, either.
5. After which, abortion and every other related question will simply fall out without tears from the personhood determination.

But wait… If each state can pass its own personhood amendment setting a unique point where the entity becomes a legal person, and if some states can decline to pass any personhood initiative or bill at all, then won’t a disparity exist from state to state on the legality of abortion? You might have a case where a girl could get a abortion in one state but not in another.

Why yes, Poindexter, it will; but that’s a feature, not a bug: It’s the essence of federalism. If somebody doesn’t like the personhood declaration in his state and the abortion and assault laws it yields, then he can move. Just as he can move if he doesn’t like the taxes in his state, or the way the state and local law-enforcement authorities handle drug cases, or the policy of his state on health insurance, energy, water, welfare, banking, business licences, or having to use a “jug handle” to make a bleeping left turn (hello, Garden Staters!)

There are no internal passports required; if you don’t like your local laws, move to a different locality. And if you are a sexually active female under the age of consent, and you live in a state like Mxyzptlki that declares a zygote to be a legal person, thus banning abortion — then perhaps you should rethink your social relationships, at least until you’re old enough to move to Colorado, or somesuch.

So even though I would personally vote against Mrs. Hippie’s Measure 26, since I don’t believe one fertilized cell constitutes a legal person, I applaud the fact that the state is trying to define personhood first, before embarking on a campaign to end abortion. On one of the great moral arguments of our society, the rest of the United States should look to Mississippi. (There, see? We may veer back and forth; but we always comes our right in the end.)

Everything is back to norbal.

Cross-posted to Big Lizards…

Pro-abortion radicals will try to use any tool in their arsenal to dehumanize the unborn. They have to, if they want to be able to convince women to keep abortion common. After all, the pro-abortion line has never truly been about choice. There’s only one acceptable choice, and that choice is abortion. But if women continue to think that what they’re growing inside them when they’re pregnant is an actual human being, then pro-abortion fanatics have a problem. Choice USA decided that there was a simple way to fix this problem: show how ridiculous the idea that an unborn baby is an actual person is by pointing out that, erm, unborn babies can’t play tennis … and, um, therefore can’t be a real person. Makes sense, huh?

Of course, it’s not just tennis. In what is supposed to be a “humorous” video, a pregnant woman is told that she must split a bill between two people three ways (because her unborn child is a person), must play doubles tennis instead of singles (because her unborn child is a person), and must buy two tickets to a movie (because her unborn child is a person).

Gee, weren’t you just rolling on the floor laughing? The femisogynists have truly astounded us with their wit and sharp sense of humor. I guess they really proved that whole humorless feminazi stereotype wrong, huh?

All joking aside (literally), this video is utterly ridiculous. Yeah, yeah — the premise is simple. None of the scenarios in the video make sense, and calling a fetus a person doesn’t make sense, either. But a person’s worth is not measured by any of the idiotic things this video lamely tried to joke about. Quadriplegics can’t play tennis. Are they not people? A two-year-old out for a lunch date with Mommy can’t pay for his share of the bill. Does the two-year-old not count, either? The idea that personhood has anything whatsoever to do with the activities a person can take part in is ludicrous, and Choice USA knows it. They also know that most pregnant women instinctively know that what is growing inside of them is a person, and not a clump of cells or a bit of tissue or a fetus. It’s a baby.

A baby can’t play tennis or go to a movie or pay for a bill, but we don’t allow babies to be murdered after they’re born, do we? Of course, what’s really curious is how an actual radical pro-abortion feminist would feel if they were to actually carry a child. What about an abortion extremist like, say, Feministing founder and feminazi extraordinaire Jessica Valenti?

Radical femisogynist Jessica Valenti recently gave birth to a little girl. And while I doubt this subject is one she’ll ever broach, I have to say, I would love to know her thoughts. See, I’m pregnant right now. I’ve heard my baby’s heartbeat. I’ve seen the heart beating on an ultrasound. I’ve seen my baby kick its little legs and suck its thumb. I felt my baby move for the first time just a few days ago. I know exactly what I’m carrying, and yes, it’s a person. I could see the eyes and the smile, I could make out a profile with a forehead, nose, and lips. I could see the little fingers and toes. It isn’t some kind of meaningless bunch of tissue inside of me, it’s a person. A little person, yes, but a person.

When Valenti heard her baby’s heart beating, did she think it was just an abortable clump of cells? When she saw her daughter moving in her uterus, was it a fetus or a baby? When she felt her baby kicking, did she have any doubt about what she was carrying? If she had miscarried (and thank goodness she didn’t), would she have thought she lost some fetal tissue or would she have thought she lost her baby? A pregnant woman knows the truth. It’s why so many women feel they need to lie to themselves or avoid an ultrasound before an abortion. If they were to admit the truth to themselves, they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.

These are questions she’ll probably never answer. (She blogged about her pregnancy only once.) To answer truthfully would be to undermine what she’s spent years fighting for. After all, when you see the little baby squirming and moving on that ultrasound screen, there’s no doubt about what it is. But to admit that a pregnant woman is carrying a baby, and not a meaningless clump of cells, would be to open Pandora’s Box for pro-abortion radicals like Valenti. If it’s a baby, then to abort it is murder. Quite a sticky situation for a femisogynist to get herself into, isn’t it?

An unborn baby may not be able to play tennis, but it has a beating heart and a life growing inside its mother’s uterus. That truth is indisputable, no matter how many bad jokey videos pro-abortion radicals make trying to convince you otherwise.

–

Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

According to author and columnist Virginia Ironside, most adopted kids would be better off dead. As would most children she considers “unfit”. In fact, she says, a “loving” mother would smother a sickly child with a pillow, because the “suffering” of being ill makes that life meaningless and not worth living. She made these vile assertions in defense of abortion while appearing on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live during a discussion grossly entitled “Can abortion be a kindness?” First, her odious attempt to argue that abortion is a “loving choice” because some kids, in her mind, are unwanted. Her tunnel-visioned, sad excuse for a mind can’t seem to fathom the fact that the children are always wanted, by someone. You know, like people with hearts and compassion.

Not having an abortion can amount to selfishness…

Abortion can often be seen as something wicked or irresponsible but in fact it can be a moral and unselfish act. If a baby is to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely abortion is the act of a loving mother.

I was rendered speechless when I first watched this. Killing a child for being inconvenient to someone is “loving, moral and unselfish”?  So, having a baby is, therefore, selfish? Besides her utter lack of a soul, she is completely morally bankrupt. And I think she has some explaining to do to very happy and loved children who have been adopted as well as to the mothers who, according to her, were so selfish as to give that child life.  My friend, Rick Sheridan, can teach her a thing or two about what an actual unselfish act is. His adopted baby girl can also teach her what a loving mother actually does. Her mama gave her life and gave her A life. She didn’t kill her. She unselfishly bore her and gifted Rick and his wife with a beautiful baby girl. I suggest Virginia look at a picture of Rick and his beautiful daughter and try to explain to her why she would have been better off dead.

Virginia Ironside then followed up her insane arguments for eugenics due to “unwantedness” (it’s so crazy, it needs its own word) by being a proponent of killing children, unborn or born, whose health isn’t up to snuff  for her standards.

And I think that if I were a mother of a suffering child, I would be the first to want I mean a deeply suffering child I would be the first one to put a pillow over its head. I would with any suffering thing and I think the difference is that my feeling of horror suffering is many greater than my feeling of getting rid of a couple of cells because suffering can go on for years.

Hey, you know what else can go on for years, Virginia? Someone’s life. You should know. You authored a book called The Virginia Monologues – 20 Reasons Why Growing Old is Great.  Yet, you’d willingly kill a child and not give him or her that chance to grow old. Growing old is only great for you and whomever you deem fit enough, huh?

In ancient Sparta, babies who were considered handicapped or in any way not perfectly healthy were exposed to the elements, left on a mountainside to die.  Have to “purify” society and all! That was a long time ago and thankfully modern civilization has come a long way.

Now we use pillows.

Gee, it’s too bad we don’t have a fancy, new-fangled thing called medicine. To pro-abortionists, an illness is a reason to kill a baby. In fact, they believe that life is expendable for any reason if it doesn’t fit into your personal plans. This includes life that is outside of the woman’s body. Ms. Ironside, like most pro-abortionists, also fails to mention those pesky babies who won’t cooperate and who survive abortion attempts. Much like our President, who gives them so little thought that he, as a Senator in Illinois debating a Born Alive bill, said this:

As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead..

However you want to describe “it”. Sort of like the suffering “things” Ms. Ironside referred to above. And, not coming out limp and dead. How dare they insist on having the human will to live and the strong spirit to survive.

Lest you think Ms. Ironside is just some lone loon, The Guardian helpfully pointed out what monsters Leftists are by running an “article” by one of Ms. Ironside’s fellow travelers:

The decision is always portrayed as being inherently irresponsible and destructive – Ironside argued that, if it prevented an unwanted child or a child being born profoundly disabled, then it was a good decision that a woman could be proud of. It wasn’t the most tactful pro-choice argument you’ve ever heard (at one point, she alludes to “fatherless” children in the same bracket as the unwanted: that will enrage a few single mothers), but it wasn’t a radical new shift in pro-choice thinking.

Yeah, that’s the problem: It might be offensive to some single mothers. The moral bankruptcy is staggering. However, at least she’s honest. It is NOT a new shift in pro-abortion thinking. This is what they believe and it always has been.

The reason it’s controversial is twofold: first, pro-choicers have totally backed out of the abortion conversation, which has in consequence become dominated by anti-abortionists; second, because Ironside collapses “disabled” and “unwanted” into the same category. This is pretty insulting to disabled people..

Oh, we wouldn’t want to be insulting! Killing is okay, but insulting? That’s taboo! Unless of course, you are one of the “unwanteds”. No one cares what you feel.

Of course Ironside is not waging a war against the disabled: she simply said “life isn’t a gift per se”. There are plenty of circumstances that make it more burdensome than joyful.

They have taken the miracle of life and have made it expendable and burdensome. On purpose. There’s the difference between Ms. Ironside and I, and others like me, right there. We know that life is a priceless gift. A child’s life has infinite value that cannot ever be fully measured. No alleged burden can take away from that fact, nor from the multitude of moments of love and joy, of human touch and loving arms, of beauty and grace, of happiness and wonder.

—–

cross-posted from NewsReal

Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her stuff at Snark and Boobs,  Red State and Human Events.

In 1984, the documentary The Silent Scream opened the eyes of many to the absolute horror of abortion. 26 years later, the documentary Blood Money now strives to help hammer the final nail into the coffin of the state-sanctioned killing of our unborn children. This documentary uncovers the pro-abortion industry for what it is: a killing machine for profit, based on an agenda filled with outright lies and an utter lack of humanity.  Finally, the voices of those lost lives, who have died at the hands of an industry devoted solely to killing, can be heard. Blood Money also exposes something frequently overlooked; the harm that abortion does to women. Often, there are two lives lost in an abortion. The life of the unborn baby is literally, and unmercilessly, snuffed out. The woman’s life is often figuratively lost; her life from then on is one full of guilt, regret and deep pain.

Narrated by Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, this film exposes the truth behind an industry that has harmed untold numbers of people and taken the lives of 50 million innocent children. In the film Dr. King speaks not only from the perspective of a post abortive woman, but as a civil rights leader about the injustice of abortion.

“Bloodmoney brings startling revelation to the forefront of the pro-life battle and exposes the true agenda behind the abortion industry. This film is truly part of the plan to set the captives free,” – Dr. Alveda King, director of African American Outreach, Priests for Life.

For too long, the pro-abortion regime has been able to use strawmen arguments, lies and fear tactics. No more. With medical advancements and with more and more people once enshrined in the pro-abortion industry speaking out, the truth is coming forth. The truth will set us free. And will save the lives of countless babies and the women who bear them. The mantra of safe, legal and rare is now known for the lie it has always been. Firstly, safe? There is not one whit of concern for safety. This has been proven time and time again, most recently by the outrageous outrage over the Attorney General of Virginia fighting for at least some safety regulations for abortion clinics. Why the outrage? Because some would have to close. It dips too far into their profits to actually, you know, meet the same safety standards that are afforded animals at a veterinary clinic. It’s just women and their “punishing” babies, right? No big whoop.

Hey, it’s easier for their blood money to stain their hands when they don’t have to worry about lives at all; neither the woman’s life nor the baby’s. They mean so little to them, that it’s standard operating procedure to toss unborn babies, nearly full-term, into a freezer:

BALTIMORE — Maryland health officials have ordered two doctors, one of whom is licensed and has several offices in New Jersey, to stop performing abortions after a woman was critically injured during a procedure last month.

The Maryland Board of Physicians ordered Dr. Steven Brigham to stop practicing medicine without a license in Maryland and suspended the license of Dr. Nicola Riley. Police raided one of Brigham’s offices in Elkton looking for medical records, and found dozens of late-term fetuses in a freezer at a clinic.

Safe. Meaning, of course, not safe at all. What about that whole rare deal? That has also been proven time and time again to be a lie. In fact, the pro-abortion regime actively promulgates blatant fallacies in order to ensure that abortion is not rare at all. They deny the very existence of post-abortion syndrome, thereby further harming women simply in order to further their own agenda. They promote abortions of convenience, under the guise of empowerment. You see, it’s supposed to be “empowering” to have the legal ability to kill your own child.

The lies have grown more and more heinous, as medical advancements have improved and as more and more people are identifying as pro-life. Desperate to keep their industry of death alive, they even attempt to lie about the babies themselves. The Rosa Acuna Project has uncovered numerous instances where women are blatantly lied to by alleged doctors. These “doctors”, caught on video, falsely telling  women that “it’s not a baby.”  One such instance, exposed by The Rosa Acuna Project;  a video showing a counselor, with corroboration by a Doctor, telling a woman that the baby growing inside her womb isn’t really a baby:

“That is not a baby.” Dr. Polhaska, the abortion doctor, insists, “It’s not a baby at this stage or anything like that.” Polhaska also states that having an abortion will be “much safer than having a baby,” warning, “You know, women die having babies.”

To those who express qualms over obtaining a standard medical abortion, they now offer false promises in the form of the RU-486 pill. As always, not caring about the life they are snuffing out, nor the woman who will suffer from the same, they fill them with propoganda and send them on their way with a pill. This is what happens, as chronicled by a feminist who was given the RU-486 pill. She was indoctrinated for years by the feminist agenda, wherein one is taught that a baby is a detriment to any success and happiness that one may achieve. Career comes first, life be damned. These excerpts are hard to read, but information is power. And abortion is barbaric:

I didn’t realize the horrible truth of that statement until I lay awake at night in fits of unbearable pain, bleeding through sanitary napkins by the hour. When I was in the bathroom one night, clumps of bloody tissue and embryonic remains fell into the toilet. I was overcome with tremors, my body shaking with a burst of heat resembling fever. My cheeks flushed as sweat bled into my hairline. Dragging my feet on the cold alabaster floor, I went back to bed and hid under the covers. Eyes open and bloodshot, knees to my chest, I felt tears sting my swollen cheeks. After hours of pure exhaustion, I finally fell asleep.

Returning to the clinic several days later for a scheduled follow-up, I learned that the gestational sac was still intact. I was given another dose of Mifeprex and Misoprostol. That night, I stared in horror as a clump of tissue the size of a baseball escaped from my body. I held this bloody mass in my hand, feeling the watery red liquid drip from my fingers. The tissue was soft and pliable. Poking at the flesh, I imagined the life that it embodied. The sac looked like a bleeding pig’s heart. For several months after, I was unable to look at blood without vomiting. (p.46)

It didn’t end there. Like many women who are used by the abortion industry and then tossed to the side, her trauma continued. And I believe it will haunt her for the rest of her life:

Even for those who can afford to get an abortion, in my experience there has been a serious lack of education about procedures and proper emotional and physical aftercare. While some women have had positive experiences with RU-486, mine was not one of them. Almost a year after the abortion, the pain still visited me from time to time. For so long, I tried to deny that I had undergone a traumatic experience, and I entered a period of self-punishment. I pretended to be recovered, but the pain pushed itself outward. Regret and guilt caused severe anxiety attacks that left me breathless, convulsing, and faint. (p.51).

Safe and rare? Not so much. It is well past time for the full truth to be told. It is well past time for us to end the sanctioning of the killing of our unborn – 50 million lives have already been lost. Countless women have been harmed and used by an industry that profits off of their pain.

Blood Money is one step towards finally washing the blood off of our collective national hands.

—-

Originally posted at RedState

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This should just be common sense and shouldn’t raise the ire of even the most vociferously pro-abortion, right? I mean, it does not make abortion illegal, but it does make it safer – and hopefully rarer. Safe, legal and rare is the mantra, no? Apparently, by safe, legal and rare, pro-abortionists really only mean one out of the three. They actually want it to be unsafe, legal, and not rare at all. As is indicated by their fierce opposition to such simple, decent and potentially life-saving measures.

Governor Sanford had this to say when he signed the new South Carolina law:

“I believe life is sacred, and in the debate over when life begins, I think we as a society should always err on the side of life,” Gov. Sanford said. “Given current federal law, I think it’s imperative that a decision of this magnitude only be made with the fullest and most accurate knowledge available. It’s our hope and expectation that this new law results in a substantial decrease in the number of abortions carried out in South Carolina.

How draconian, huh? I thought knowledge was power? Not so for pro-abortionists. They are infuriated over a mere 24 hour waiting period. In most states, the waiting period to simply obtain a marriage license is longer than that. Ideally, a marriage lasts a lifetime, but an abortion always does – there is no going back. Once a life is taken, it is gone. Forever. Is it too much to ensure that a woman take ONE DAY to contemplate it? A woman who may be scared and make a rash decision due to said fear – a decision that not only takes a life, but will haunt her for the rest of hers. Taking just those 24 hours of contemplation may save both those lives.

In Virginia’s case, it is clearly a measure of safety. Abortion clinics, often functioning as mills, are not regulated in Virginia as medical establishments. As such, they have no standards of safety to meet.  Says a spokesman for AG Cuccinelli:

“The state has long regulated outpatient surgical facilities and personnel to ensure a certain level of protection for patients. There is no reason to hold facilities providing abortion services to any lesser standard for their patients,” said Brian J. Gottstein, a spokesman for Mr. Cuccinelli.

“Even pharmacies, funeral homes and veterinary clinics are regulated by the state,” he said.

Right. How is it safe – at all – to have no standards for abortion clinics? According to NARAL, safety is no big whoop. What concerns them is that some clinics may not meet those standards and will have to close.

Abortion-rights advocates said they are not surprised by Cuccinelli’s decision and predicted that if the Board of Health acts on his opinion, the regulations could prompt the shutdown of 17 of the state’s 21 clinics performing abortions.

“We’ve been waiting for the attorney general to take on abortion providers, and it looks like this is his first pitch,” said Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia. “These so-called regulations are only an attempt to shut down abortion clinics in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Good. That should help with both the whole safe and rare idea. Plus, maybe it’s just me, but even if you are pro-abortion wouldn’t you think that if a facility can’t meet minimal safety standards, then they should be forced to close? Excuse me, what am I thinking. That requires common sense, decency and actual concern for women, which is utterly lacking in the pro-abortion agenda. Susan B. Anthony List’s President Marjorie Dannenfelser’s debate with NARAL’s Tarina Keene about AG Cuccinelli’s decision proves it:

By the way, the Democrat nominee for Governor in South Carolina, Sheheen, declined to answer any questions about South Carolina’s new law. Again – there is no such thing as a pro-life Democrat.

Polling indicates that more and more Americans are identifying as Pro-Life and that changing hearts and minds is working. Now, so is changing laws.

May it continue.

For the children.

—-

Originally posted at RedState

Follow Lori on Twitter and read more of her stuff at RedState here

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has concluded that the state can impose stricter oversight over clinics that perform abortions, a move immediately decried by abortion-rights organizations and others as an attempt to circumvent the General Assembly, which has repeatedly rejected similar measures.
Cuccinelli’s legal opinion empowers the Board of Health, if it chooses, to require the clinics to meet hospital-type standards. Abortion-rights advocates say that could force some clinics to close because they would be unable to afford to meet the new requirements.

Can’t afford it? Really? Shedding no tears here for the truly obscene profits of the abortion industry.

Cuccinelli’s opinion:

“It is my opinion that the Commonwealth has the authority to promulgate regulations for facilities in which first trimester abortions are performed as well as providers of first trimester abortions, so long as the regulations adhere to constitutional limitations,” Cuccinelli (R) wrote in his opinion, released Monday.Cuccinelli declined to be interviewed, but his spokesman said in a statement that the regulations must comply with Roe. v. Wade.

Abortion-rights advocates said they are not surprised by Cuccinelli’s decision and predicted that if the Board of Health acts on his opinion, the regulations could prompt the shutdown of 17 of the state’s 21 clinics performing abortions.

I hope that’s true. But it sounds like the abortion industry trying to scare its very large customer base into political reaction.

That Cuccinelli must be demonized should go without saying:

“It is frightening to think of what Cuccinelli will do next,” said Del. Adam P. Ebbin (D-Alexandria), House minority whip. “The public needs to understand how reckless he is. He is not working on what is important to Virginia consumers. Instead, he is focusing on his own extreme ideology.”

Ah yes, that “extreme ideology” which maintains that 1) unborn children ought not be scraped or suctioned from the womb, and 2) abortion outlets out to be held to rigorous safety standards. The Post provides a shocking summary of Cuccinelli’s crimes thus far:

In his seven months in office, Cuccinelli has sued the federal government over new health-care rules; waded into the national immigration debate, saying law enforcement can ask about immigration status; and launched an investigation into whether a former University of Virginia professor and climate scientist manipulated data to reach his conclusions about global warming.

Yeah, baby. That’s what we’re talking about. Let me be the first to say it: Ken Cuccinelli for President in 20-whatever. He’s only 42 so there’s plenty of time.

Back to reality. It will be up to the Board of Health to take action:

It’s unlikely that any changes would occur soon. The 15-member board is appointed by the governor. Eleven board members were named by former governor Timothy M. Kaine (D), and there are four vacancies. [. . .]

In his legal opinion, Cuccinelli concluded that the Board of Health, which regulates hospitals and nursing homes, has the authority to write new regulations requiring that doctors who perform abortions at the clinics hold hospital privileges, counselors have professional training and buildings undergo structural changes. The legal opinion is not binding, and the board must decide how to proceed.

Whatever happened to “safe and legal”?

“The state has long regulated outpatient surgical facilities and personnel to ensure a certain level of protection for patients,” Cuccinelli spokesman Brian Gottstein said. “There is no reason to hold facilities providing abortion services to any lesser standard for their patients. Even pharmacies, funeral homes and veterinary clinics are regulated by the state.”

So there’s a chance that Virginia’s abortion shops will someday be forced to raise their safety standards to the level you find when you take your cat to the vet to be spayed.

Because the abortion industry really cares about the welfare of women. See Cassy Fiano for more on that.

Cross-posted here and here.

It’s long been predicted by the pro-abortion extremists that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, women will have to go back to being butchered by seedy abortions in back alleys. There are hysterical stories consisting of coat hangers and women bleeding out because evil right-wingers wouldn’t let the kindly abortionists practice out in the open. The truth, of course, is much less hysterical. But what pro-abortion feminazi with an agenda to push would ever admit to that? Well, Amanda Marcotte, femisogynist extraordinaire, let the truth slip in a recent column written for pro-abortion website RH Reality Check.

Marcotte was applauding the television series Mad Men for featuring a character, Joan, who had gotten two abortions in the 1960s. These abortions were illegal at the time. And, says Marcotte, this is historically accurate, because the back alley abortionist myth is just not true.

In your usual overly dramatic Hollywood fare, this would have been an occasion for raising the stakes by implying that Joan was subject to a mythical back alley butcher who left her infertile for life. But instead, the doctor shrugs and suggests that the odds are that the midwife did a good job, and certainly everything that he could see was in good working order. He points out that she got pregnant after the first abortion, and so he has every reason to believe she’s fine.

Believe it or not, this was historically accurate. In the sixties, many doctors performed abortions for their regular patients and charted them as something else. If you got an abortion from someone who wasn’t your regular doctor, odds are that it was still a safe abortion. And, as I’ve written about before, the myth of the back alley butcher is mostly inaccurate. It’s tempting for pro-choicers to invoke it in an attempt to remind people of the high human cost of banning abortion, but in the end, portraying abortion providers as “butchers” mostly helps the anti-choice cause by stigmatizing the compassionate, hard-working people who have helped women in need, whether or not that help was legal.

So pro-abortion fanatics are twisting the truth to push their pro-abortion agenda? Not so fast, says Marcotte. She quickly reverts back to the typical pro-abortion hysteria, assuring us that before abortion was legal, women were indeed mutilated from botched abortions.

Which isn’t to deny that illegal abortion meant the mutilation and often death of countless women. It’s both true that when abortion was a crime most providers were professional and that hospitals had an overwhelming number of septic abortion cases. As historian Rickie Solinger points out in her book Beggars and Choosers, this is because women who didn’t know where to find a black-market abortion provider often resorted to trying to abort themselves, causing injury or even death. The coathanger is the symbol of women’s desperation when they have no access to abortion.

And Marcotte is not alone in pushing the hysteria.

Salon’s resident feminazi, Tracy Clark-Flory, was pushing the same story earlier this week about pre-Roe abortion butchery. Apparently, LAPD found the remains of some dead babies in a basement in Los Angeles. This, of course, must be evidence of back alley abortions gone wrong! (Even though organizations like NARAL insist that they aren’t babies, just clusters of cells.)

So which is it? Pre-Roe abortions were safely performed by kindly law-breaking abortionists or women were dying from botched, self-induced abortions? Funny how she can’t quite keep her story straight. Of course, it’s not like it really matters. Either way you slice it, abortions must be kept legal, according to the pro-abortion radicals like Amanda Marcotte. Whatever the narrative, whatever the facts, the agenda is the same: abortion must be legal and widespread. Femisogynists will argue up and down that pre-Roe abortions were just so dangerous, but now that it’s legal, abortion is somehow “safe”. Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. Even today, with abortion legalized, there is no such thing as a “safe” abortion.

It’s interesting that pro-abortion advocates decided to call themselves pro-choice. If it was really about choice, and not about being specifically pro-abortion, then the feminazis wouldn’t be OK with the blatant lies and manipulation that are so commonplace in the abortion movement. If it was about being pro-woman, then one might think that the femisogynists would want women to be completely informed about the risks associated and where they were with the pregnancy. Planned Parenthood, for example, has been caught multiple times lying to women about whether or not the heart has started beating yet and how developed the baby is. Even worse is the evidence of Planned Parenthood’s willingness to cover up the statutory rape and sexual abuse of minors in order to sell abortions. Does this bother the femisogynists? Nope — there’s been not a peep about it. They don’t care as long as women are getting abortions. It isn’t about choice, because for them there’s only one choice, and that’s abortion. Any amount of lies and manipulation is allowable for them if it leads to more abortions.

Yet pro-lifers are the ones labeled anti-woman.

OK, you might be thinking. So women are sometimes tricked into abortions. Surely abortion isn’t harmful to women who know the facts and aren’t lied to, right? Not so much. There are myriads of risks associated with abortions that femisogynists just don’t want women to know about. It triples the risk of breast cancer, and increases the risk of future miscarriages. Women who have abortions have higher rates of depression and substance abuse, and are also more likely to commit suicide. One organization, Operation Rescue, launched a program called Abortion Whistleblower to document botched abortions and abortion abuses. They’ve found that botched abortions have become an epidemic. They also were able to compile a list of what they call abortion’s bad boys, abortionists convicted of crimes ranging from rape and sexual abuse to murder, manslaughter, fraud, and corruption. There were filthy clinics, falsified medical records, and even one instance of cannibalism.

Safe, legal, and rare, huh? It doesn’t exactly seem like we’ve come all that far from the pre-Roe days that the abortion extremists warn us about. And it doesn’t seem like being pro-abortion equals being pro-woman. In fact, the truth seems clear: you’d be hard-pressed to find something more harmful to women than abortion, but what does an abortion extremist like Amanda Marcotte care about that? There’s an agenda to push. Abortions were either perfectly safe pre-Roe or they left women butchered out of desperation, depending on what works better to sell abortion. It’s pathetic how far the femisogynists will go to further the cause of abortion. It’s even more pathetic how they claim to be doing it in the name of women — the very people who end up getting hurt the most.

—–

Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

Barbara Boxer was recently up in arms over some words. No,  this time it wasn’t the oh-so horrifying word ma’am. She was up in arms over her own words or, more to the point, the fact that George Will was holding her to her own words – words that expressed a pro-abortion position so extreme, it can only be described, no matter one’s position on abortion, as outright infanticide. So, she pulled the handy old “out of context” card. Only, it was totally in context, with full video documentation.George Will quoted Barbara Boxer’s own words – in context – in a Newsweek article last month. Here is one of the relevant sections:

In the 1999 colloquy, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said: Suppose during this procedure the baby slips entirely from the mother’s birth canal. “You agree, once a child is born, is separated from the mother, that that child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed? Do you agree with that?” Boxer: “I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.” Santorum persisted: “Obviously, you don’t mean they have to take the baby out of the hospital for it to be protected by the Constitution. Once the baby is separated from the mother, you would agree—completely separated from the mother—you would agree that the baby is entitled to constitutional protection?” She would not say “yes.” Instead, she said, understandably: “I don’t want to engage in this.”

She didn’t want to engage in it. I wouldn’t want to engage in it either, if I was flagrantly sanctioning infanticide and depriving human beings of Constitutional rights, as Barbara Boxer was. Boxer then tried to back-pedal a bit, as you can see in the video of the C-SPAN recording below:

Her back-pedaling, however, only served to show how delusional her comments are. Her, and other pro-abortionists’, alleged arguments are nowhere near based in sanity. If a toe is still inside the mother, then, says Boxer, you can’t kill the baby. But, if a whole foot? She chose not to answer. Yet, in a partial birth abortion, only the top of the baby’s head remains inside the mother – the entire body and part of the head is fully delivered. Then, in the part of the skull that is outside of the mother’s body, an instrument is used to stab the skull, creating a puncture from which the baby’s brain is then sucked out. And the baby is left to die.

Barbara Boxer, horrifyingly, is not alone in these beliefs. Our own president not only would not ban partial birth abortion, but when a senator in Illinois, he wouldn’t even protect babies who miraculously survived abortion attempts. He was more concerned with the feelings of the mothers, protecting abortion itself, and with protecting doctors, who shouldn’t be required to save those pesky babies – human lives, with the strong survival instinct therein and the will to live. He felt so little for the babies, he phrased his questioning during the debate over the Born Alive bill as such:

As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead..

Not just coming out limp and dead. And not brought home from the hospital, as Boxer argues. How dare these babies live!

In 1973, seven black-robed men gave these pro-abortionists cover for their irrational and, frankly, inhumane rationales by not only creating a right to abortion, but by also inventing some sort of “viability” out. Which is being pushed further and further to now include babies that are fully born. Babies – human lives – who could survive outside of the womb, but who are, instead, pierced in the skull and left to die. Alone. Never once receiving sustenance, nor even feeling a human touch nor the love of cradling arms.

Worse, most pro-abortionists actually know this is the taking of a life. They just don’t care.

Ann Rice was recently interviewed by the useless bint known as Joy Behar. Behar asked her if she believes that abortion is the pre-meditated taking of a human life. Rice answered Yes. And then went on to say that it shouldn’t be illegal. It’s murder, she admits, yet it should be condoned. Why? The answer lies in a recent London Times article by Antonia Senior – an answer that exposes pro-abortionists as a type of fanatical zealot:

What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a foetus is a life by any subjective measure.

She clearly states an unborn baby is life. She goes onto say that abortion is, in fact, the taking of that life. So, why is she, and others like her, still pro-abortion? Because life matters little to ideological zealots:

But you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women’s liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology.

The belief that nature itself is some stealth patriarchal evil plot to subjugate women. Women cannot be “liberated” unless freed of their biology and anatomy. Therefore, killing is acceptable. It’s for a good cause, you see:

As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.

The lesser evil. The killing of the innocent – for a cause – is a lesser evil. Barbara Boxer, President Obama and those who hold unconditional, pro-abortion positions are willingly complicit in what they actually know is the taking of a life, all to further dogmatic ideology and political agendas. Babies, be damned.

They know it’s the taking of a life. They just don’t care. Because the ends justify the means. In this instance, horrifically, the means is the mass killing of innocent babies.

50 million in the United States alone. And counting.

—–

(cross-posted from NewsReal)

Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her Newsreal posts here and at Snark and Boobs

This was the situation my maternal grandmother found herself in at 14. Instead of having an abortion, she gave my mother up for adoption, and my mother was adopted by wonderful, loving parents and got a great family. Had my biological grandmother chosen to have an abortion, my mother would not be here — and neither would I. We do not have a relationship with her, but she chose to give my mother a life. I’m proud of her for that.

Apparently, rapper/actor Nick Cannon’s mother was in this exact situation. She got pregnant at 17, and was going to have an abortion. She ultimately changed her mind, giving birth to her son, Nick. He wrote a song thanking her for her decision and the sacrifices she made entitled “Can I Live?” (lyrics here). Here is the touching music video:

Chloe at Feministing found this video, and proceeded to blast it as “anti-woman”… and cruelly mocked it, sneering that his mother chose life and ended up with a “C-grade celebrity”. I guess if babies don’t grow up to become A-list celebrities, then they aren’t worth the hassle — in Chloe’s world, anyways.

Adult-with-the-voice-of-a-fetus Cannon’s argument is that not would his mother be killing someone were she to get an abortion, but she’d be killing him, Nick Cannon, the “Oprah-bound” “star” of Drumline. Drumline, guys.

It’s interesting that this is part of her argument. If he had been the star of, oh, Avatar, would she still be mocking him? Is it about the level of celebrity for her? I’m pretty sure that Cannon’s mother doesn’t love her son just because he’s a celebrity, and the point Cannon makes is a good one, whether a parent is considering an abortion or not. All parents wonder what their child will grow up to be, and how far they might go in life. And while Nick Cannon might indeed be a C-grade celebrity, he’s still more well-known than Chloe is, so does she really have much room to be sneering at him for his lack of fame?

And, believe it or not, even babies destined to grow up to be C-grade celebrities deserve a chance to live. I wonder if Chloe would be willing to tell her mother that she wished she had been aborted, if it was what was best for her at the time. And if Nick Cannon is such an inconsequential celebrity, then why is she getting so upset about him professing his pro-life views?

If this were just a rap to thank his mother for the sacrifices she made for him, it would be really sweet. And I understand that the knowledge that your mother very nearly aborted the pregnancy from which you resulted might color your view of abortion, but Cannon’s not just thanking his mother here. He’s calling on women, all women, who find themselves in a similar situation, to make the same decision she did. There is no other possible way to interpret the message “if your baby could speak, it would beg you not to have an abortion.”

… This video isn’t just about “telling the story of his life,” it’s about encouraging other women to make the same decision his mother did. It’s about telling people that no matter what sacrifices it requires of her, a seventeen-year-old woman who gets pregnant should keep the pregnancy, even if she has to drop out of high school, go to night school and depend on government welfare programs. Even if she has dreams other than the ones in which she sees her baby (“you see me in your sleep, so you can’t kill your dreams”? Really, Nick?). And what’s his reasoning? Because that baby might end up being a C-grade celebrity who will thank you for your strength and sacrifice years later, in the form of a poorly-written rap with a barely-concealed political agenda!

It’s quite clever, really, to focus on what the baby might become, on what the world might have missed out on if someone’s life had never come to pass, whether that person is Nick Cannon or Tim Tebow or you, the person watching this video. It’s clever because it forces us to acknowledge that even if we don’t believe a fetus is a person, it undeniably has the potential to become one. That might feel like a victory for anti-abortion forces, but in fact, it reveals a crucial weakness in the approach of those who argue for restrictions on abortion.

The focus on the baby’s potential life lays bare exactly where pro-life priorities lie, and it’s not with women. Women don’t matter here. Babies, fetuses and the potential they represent are all that matters. What women want, what women need, none of those things are important compared to the potential future life of the fetus. And if a woman has goals that would be impossible to achieve if she had a baby, or if she doesn’t want to make the enormous sacrifices that might be required of her, she’s weak. The admirable women are the ones who are “strong” enough to “make the right decision” even if it’s completely against their interests.

The focus on what the baby might grow up to be reveals just how anti-woman the anti-choice stance really is, despite the lauding of women like Cannon’s mother as strong and admirable. Because, as Cannon’s video demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, we’re meant to care more about the potential for the fetus’ life than the woman’s. We’re expected to care more about a being that merely possesses the potential to become a fully-fledged person with thoughts, hopes, dreams and accomplishments, than we do about the woman who has already fulfilled that potential.

So just remember, ladies, even though it’s your body and your life, it’s not about you. You don’t matter. What matters is that the next generation of human life not be denied the glory, the greatness and the genius that will be Drumline 2.

The overall theme of this post is common for the pro-abortion fanatics. They love to claim that if women cannot have abortions, it means that they have to give up their entire lives — and call this anti-woman. Is it not, though, anti-woman to assume that women are such victims, incapable of living and working while pregnant? While mothers? Feminists look at pregnancy as something crippling, as if being pregnant somehow means that you aren’t able to function. It’s as if in their world, pregnancy turns women into blind-deaf crippled retards who somehow cannot continue to go to school (you can’t learn when you’re pregnant or something), you cannot keep working (it’s too rough on your fragile pregnant body), and your life is completely over (because obviously you’ll have no future if you have a baby). And, as usual, the idea of adoption is never mentioned. I just can’t quite understand how making women out to be these fragile, weak little victims who can’t handle sacrifices or hardship somehow makes women more empowered.

And while the pro-abortion crowd likes to pretend they only care about the life of the woman, it’s simply not true. Pro-abortion feminists like Chloe don’t care about women at all. They care about abortion. It’s why they are against pre-abortion ultrasounds and laws requiring clinics to give medically accurate information. (They know that if a woman sees an image of her child, or knows that the baby already has a heartbeat, they’ll be much less likely to go through with the abortion.) It’s why they try to drown out the post-abortion trauma women face — from increased health risks (like breast cancer) to higher incidences of miscarriage, they don’t want women to know about it. They also don’t want women to know about the emotional trauma many women face. Post abortion, many, many women are stricken with feelings of guilt, regret, and sorrow. Pro-abortion radicals do not want women to know about any of these things, yet they trumpet themselves as pro-woman. What they actually are is pro-abortion.

I don’t think Nick Cannon’s song is genius or even that good. The video has touching moments, though, especially the scenes of mother and son together at the end. While feminists might like to pretend that women who choose life over abortion will regret it their entire lives (remember, pregnancy is a life-ruiner), I’d suspect the opposite. Many, many parents struggle when they’re first starting out, and especially teenage parents. There will be many, many sacrifices to make, and life will inevitably be harder. But I’d be willing to bet that most of the parents who make these sacrifices for their children ultimately say it was worth it in the long run. They love their children enough that they are willing to sacrifice, willing to work harder, to give their children the chance to have a better life. And it’s because they love their children. Feminists like Chloe, though, would have parents miss out on that love just because the road might be a little bit harder. Because, you know, Heaven forbid life be anything but easy. If you can’t do what you want, when you want to, as much as you want, then it’s not fair! They can’t seem to understand that hard work pays off in the end, and a little sacrifice can be very rewarding in the long run. A life of sacrificing for your children does not mean you somehow love your children less, but pro-abortion feminists can’t understand that, can they?

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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

Zombie starts out praising the moral consistency of Sharron Angle’s position on abortion, which is that it’s always wrong, even in the case of rape or incest.  If abortion is murder, then nothing can make it not-murder, in a moral sense. (Even the extremely rare case of the baby being a threat to the mother’s life would also, presumably, be covered by this principle.)  Life is life, and a baby in the womb is, by definition, innocent life.  The position of many Americans that abortion should be prohibited except in the case of rape or incest is, in Zombie’s formulation, “full of crap.”

MadisonConservative, struck by Zombie’s argument, admits to having once held that “cookie-cutter,” full-of-crap view himself.  His ultimate thesis, however, is that “pro-choice” is a term that has been hijacked:  it really means “pro-abortion,” in terms of actual political positions today, and it needs to be reclaimed for those who favor overturning Roe v. Wade and sending the whole issue back to the states.  (Something I agree with, incidentally.)  Some states may permit abortion, and presumably others may prohibit it; but the point about the expression “pro-choice” is that it should refer to a political perspective held by voting citizens in a contest they decide, rather than signifying an a priori principle – like Roe v. Wade’s appeal to a “privacy” right – that is actually anti-choice, in that it preempts the citizens’ political prerogatives altogether.

Of the two energetic and interesting posts, I think MadisonConservative’s gets closer to treating abortion as an issue of law, in the classical Western sense.  But it starts out accepting Zombie’s premise that it is inconsistent for a citizen to consider abortion absolutely wrong, and yet be willing to live with exceptions in law.  That concept is at the heart of our modern problems with an overweening state and a disadvantaged citizen, and it bears calling out.

One of the West’s signature achievements, embodied most successfully in the framing of the U.S. Constitution, is the premise that law is a pragmatic tool for governance, but it is not a set of rituals or expressions of belief that have a transformative power for the citizenry.  The Western idea asserts that law should have moral motivation – we shouldn’t write it with evil intent – but that it is not expected to transform outcomes in human society to the specifications of a moral code.

The reason it’s not expected to is that law is a human system, administered by humans, and therefore is inherently limited and subject to error.  One of the chief limitations of law is that it cannot make us good.  A corresponding limitation of law is that it is a blunt and negative tool:  it can punish, deter, and bribe us, but it cannot inspire or console us.  Law is enforceable only as a lowest-common-denominator statement of public intent:  a set of thou-shalt-nots, with a few material thou-shalts thrown in (e.g., thou shalt be insured if thou wishest to drive).  It cannot be enforced – it cannot produce the desired result – as a tool of moral self-improvement or community enhancement; when we try to use it that way, we fail.

Law is, again, a tool, not an embodiment of moral aspirations.  In this Western, classical liberal concept, its most important practical characteristic is being executable.  Law isn’t used to proclaim what we believe, what we wish, or what we’re annoyed by; it’s used to produce order and regularity in community life, through processes that can be replicably administered over and over again.

When we want to discourage murder, we don’t write a law that says “Murder is bad” or “We hate murder” or even “Thou shalt not murder.”  We write a law that defines murder for the purposes of law, and sets punishments for those found guilty of it.  We hope the threat of punishment will deter murder, but we also understand that it sometimes won’t, which is why we prepare in advance to punish it.  We go into the process of law knowing that what we hate, hope to discourage, and want to prevent is likely to happen anyway, but that administering our system of law is the imperfect best we can do to minimize its occurrence.

That has been the understanding of law that has made the Judeo-Christian West uniquely hospitable to liberty.  Since the late 19th century, however, modern philosophical movements – of which Marxism has been the granddaddy, in the realms of politics and economics – have reverted to the historically common practice of treating law as a means of implementing various secular “Kingdoms of God” on earth.  For those movements, law is precisely a method of proclaiming an aspirational morality; it’s just that in their modern case, the aspirational morality derives from collectivist ideology.

One of the most fundamental ideas of Western classical liberalism is that the state’s central government can’t pretend to adjudicate, as if for the ages, all the questions of right and wrong that arise in the consciences of men.  This is why America’s Framers were so careful to place checks on the incorrigible tendency of a central government to take on that heroic project.  But collectivist movements see it the opposite way.  As far as they’re concerned, central governments that are out crusading with laundry lists of hortatory moral law are doing exactly what central governments exist for.

Americans have largely lost sight of how deeply collectivist and anti-libertarian it is to talk about public issues as if writing detailed laws – laws intended to coerce everyone to a single solution – is the only way to address them.  And that brings me back to Zombie’s discussion of Sharron Angle and abortion.  I suspect that Angle’s morally consistent position doesn’t mean that she wants to rewrite the law – either in Nevada or at the federal level – to punish a 13-year-old who has an abortion after being raped by her father.  I’m not just pulling this out of my hat, either; Angle’s words quoted here suggest as much (and suggest, indeed, that she might not even insist that the 13-year-old carry her child to term).

It’s one thing to state what you believe about the morality of abortion.  It’s another to formulate what laws you either think are best for your community, or at least would be willing to live with.  And these latter are the terms in which we have to talk about this as a political issue.  What matters to the prospects of our laws is translating moral positions through the methods of law.  To be meaningful – to qualify as the foundation for the “rule of law” – law must first of all be executable in a practical sense.  Proclaiming that abortion is wrong in all cases is not an outline of executable law, any more than proclaiming murder to be wrong will produce a concrete result unless you define acts of murder, hire police, elect yourself a district attorney, set up a jury system and some courts, build a prison, and decide whether you want to incarcerate or execute.

We need to be clear in our minds that in her discussions of abortion, Sharron Angle has not, as far as I can tell, enunciated a specific position on executable law.  That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one.  But it does mean that her moral position on abortion isn’t the equivalent of one.  Stating what your moral beliefs are isn’t the same thing as outlining the laws you’d like to see adopted and enforced.

Americans used to be raised to understand that.  John Adams’ famous statement – “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” – is a profound reflection of that concept:  something unique to the Western classical-liberal idea of law.  Law has its inherent methods and limitations, and is in its proper place when it is a servant of a moral people, not their master – and certainly not their moral measuring stick.

We need to get back to that understanding, and away from the collectivist mindset we too often adopt today about law’s meaning in community or national life.  We should not expect more of human law than it can deliver, or talk about it as if all our moral positions must be perfectly reflected in it, lest we be hypocrites.  Those who understand that law will inherently be an imperfect translation of the moral precept – e.g., that unborn life is sacred – are not being inconsistent, they are being classical Western liberals in their understanding of law.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

This weekend is the one-year anniversary of George Tiller’s horrible murder, and of course, this means that the pro-abortion fanatics are out in force. This time, they’re complaining about states that require women to view ultrasounds before having an abortion. That complaint isn’t particularly new, but now, it’s being called emotional torture.

Staff members interviewed at three of the seven abortion clinics in the state estimated that 30 percent to 70 percent of women chose to see ultrasound images. But they said it was uncommon for women to be dissuaded.

It had happened occasionally, they said, when a sonogram revealed a multiple pregnancy or when a woman was already deeply unsure about her choice.

But a number of women at the Birmingham clinic, which was the site of a fatal bombing in 1998, said they simply did not want to subject themselves to images that might haunt them. “You almost have to think of it as an alien,” said Carmen, 28, who was there for her second abortion in three years.

Like other patients, Laura, who has a 17-year-old son, said she took offense at the state’s implicit suggestion that she had not fully considered her choice.

“You don’t just walk into one of these places like you’re getting your nails done,” she said. “I think we’re armed with enough information to make adult decisions without being emotionally tortured.”

This makes the assumption that all women take the time to think an abortion through, that they all know week-by-week how the baby is growing in their uterus, that they have received medically accurate information. This is suspect at best.

Take Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. Approximately one third of Planned Parenthood’s clients are girls under the age of 18. Just how informed are they expected to be? Not only do these girls usually have no clue whatsoever about what they are about to go through, they don’t usually have medically accurate information. Pro-life activist group Live Action gained fame from investigating Planned Parenthood’s willingness to cover up the sexual abuse of minors with their Mona Lisa Project. They’ve now started a new undercover investigation, The Rosa Acuna Project, to find out if Planned Parenthood is giving medically accurate information to their clients.

They have not done so.

The counselors give manipulative information filled with lies to clients who are scared or confused or unsure. Why? Because they don’t want women choosing to not have an abortion. Abortions are lucrative. Planned Parenthood doesn’t benefit if a woman decides to keep her baby.

And why would seeing an ultrasound before an abortion be emotional torture to a woman? Well, because most women aren’t prepared for the emotional roller coaster ride they’re about to go through with an abortion, for the anguish, regret, and guilt that many women feel. Many women aren’t prepared to confront the life they’ve just destroyed. An ultrasound forces them to confront that reality. Is it perhaps emotional torture because women are killing their children? Because women cannot bear to look at an ultrasound and see the life they are about to take away?

Bernard Nathanson is a prime example of this. Nathanson was once a pro-abortion activist who helped to found the National Abortion Rights Action League. NARAL was originally created to repeal abortion laws, and succeeded with the Roe v. Wade decision. Nathanson says he has performed over 75,000 abortions in his lifetime. However, with the advent of the ultrasound, he found that he couldn’t ignore the barbarity of abortions anymore, and became a staunch pro-life activist.

Ultrasound images are so powerful that Nathanson made two documentaries, The Silent Scream and Eclipse of Reason. The Silent Scream shows an ultrasound of an abortion being performed on a baby eleven weeks after conception. Eclipse of Reason shows a late-term abortion being performed, and is even more horrifying. These ultrasound images were strong enough to convert Dr. Nathanson, the father of the pro-abortion movement still in action today. How would viewing an ultrasound be to an expectant mother who is confused, scared, and probably already feeling slightly guilty? Of course it would be emotional torture. She would look at that ultrasound and it would be like a knife going through her heart. It’s emotional torture because deep down, they know that they’re killing their child, and it’s heartbreaking.

Why would abortion advocates have such a problem with women being forced to view the ultrasound? Apparently, during first trimester abortions, women weren’t much dissuaded from the abortion because an unborn baby at, say, five weeks kind of looks like a little tadpole or something, and not like a baby. Once you start looking at second and third trimester abortions, however, the images are much harder for women to see. And regardless of when in the pregnancy the abortion takes place, women who are unsure about their choice are definitely swayed by viewing the ultrasound. The abortion lobby doesn’t want fewer women to have abortions, so making women view the child they’re about to kill doesn’t sit well with them — not because they care about the welfare of women, but because they don’t want to lose a potential sale. A woman who is already confused and scared and unsure about the choice to have an abortion who views the ultrasound is much more likely to change her mind than the woman who doesn’t see her baby first.

Deep down, their conscience will tell them that this is wrong, but they don’t want to admit that to themselves. That is what brings on the feelings of emotional torture. And it’s what pro-abortion activists don’t want women to know. The abortion lobby does not want women to be fully informed about the realities of abortion, because if women were, a much greater number of them would walk away. So pro-abortion activists try to keep women in the dark, while screeching that they’re only fighting for women’s rights.

But is it really pro-woman to keep women in the dark?

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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

Wait, what?

It’s a little difficult for people who were victims of abortion to purchase their mother a gift for Mother’s Day this weekend. But Planned Parenthood apparently thinks moms want donations made to the abortion business in their name from those lucky enough to not have been aborted themselves.

Cecile Richards, the president of the largest abortion business in the nation, sent out Planned Parenthood’s annual Mother’s Day fundraising missive today.

“It’s almost Mother’s Day … and if you have a mother in your life who’s anything like me or my mom (the late Texas Governor Ann Richards), then you know nothing would make her happier than a gift that represents bold and compassionate values. Like a gift in her honor to Planned Parenthood Federation of America,” she writes.

“We’ve made it quick and easy — and we’ve even made it pretty,” Richards adds. “Honor a mother in your life with a gift to Planned Parenthood. [It's] a gift your loved one will appreciate — and remember.”

You can see an image of the “pretty” card and the e-mail here. This isn’t the first time Planned Parenthood has exploited Mother’s Day. I’m sure it won’t be the last. Still, it’s grotesque. Thanks, Mom, for not aborting me — now I’m going to donate to Planned Parenthood in your name now so that thousands upon thousands of mothers can butcher their children! Celebrate the life your mother gave you by giving a donation in her name so that some other woman can deny her child life!

It really is astounding that an organization that profits off of robbing women of motherhood would actually try to use Mother’s Day as a fundraising tool. It’s not surprising, but it’s offensive and ridiculous nonetheless. Donating to Planned Parenthood in honor of Mother’s Day is like celebrating Martin Luther King Day by donating to the KKK.

Abortion is an awful, terrible tragedy, and giving donations to help fund them honors no one, and especially not mothers.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

Female Sterilization is the method used by 17.8% of American women 15-44. . . . Oral Contraceptives are second at 17.3%.

Well, having cleared up that little misconception about contraception, how about the idea that The Pill, by erasing worries about pregnancy, enhances women’s sexuality? Also not true:

Researchers found a link between using hormonal contraception and female sexual dysfunction, a condition most often caused by a lack of desire.
The findings back up previous anecdotal evidence that the pill reduces libido and also calls into question the long term use of the contraception especially in ever younger women. . . .
The researchers found that the women who took hormonal contraception suffered the most sexual dysfunction . . .
Dr Irwin Goldstein, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, said this had huge implications for women at the beginning of their sexual lives.
“The irony is that these women are provided a medication that enables freedom from reproductive worries but these same women are not provided information that there are significant adverse sexual effects that may ensue,” he said.
“Agents that interfere with the hormonal milieu of women may adversely affect their sexual lives.”

To anyone with a basic knowledge of biology, isn’t it just common sense that there would be serious side effects from administering artificial hormones to an otherwise healthy person? And yet the Contraceptive Culture has become so pervasive that this common-sense skepticism is seldom even voiced, let alone taken seriously — until people start dying. Let’s hear from the tort bar about that little problem:

Regarding pregnancy, [a recent Time magazine] article says that “63 percent say they know little or nothing about birth control pills, and much of what they think they know is wrong.” I would venture a guess that over 63 percent are unaware of more than 1,100 lawsuits filed by women who were injured after using Yaz or Yasmin, and that women taking these fourth-generation pills containing the hormone drospirenone face a risk twice as high as other oral contraceptives. Research has shown that 35 to 40 women out of 100,000 experience thromboembolic effects (formation in a blood vessel of a clot that breaks loose and is carried by the blood stream to plug another vessel) each year.
Nowhere did this in-depth article mention the risks involved in fourth-generation birth control pills, nor did it mention countless women who have suffered — and some have died — from Yasmin and Yaz.

The recent Time magazine article on the 50th anniversary of The Pill included this heavily freighted sentence:

“Its supporters hoped it would strengthen marriage by easing the strain of unwanted children; its critics still charge that the Pill gave rise to promiscuity, adultery, and the breakdown of the family.”

Well, the critics were right, of course. And what is seldom comprehended — even by most people who consider themselves pro-life — is this: Contraception causes abortion.

The Arithmetic of Death

I don’t mean merely that methods like The Pill and so called “emergency contraception” can act as abortifacients, although that is certainly true. What I mean is that all contraceptive methods, except abstinence or surgical sterilization, have a failure rate. And when contraception fails, abortion is a likely consequence of the unexpected pregnancy that results.

Let us stipulate, arguendo, that The Pill is 98% effective. Sounds “safe,” huh? But what that means is that The Pill fails in 1 out of 50 uses. Now apply The Law of Large Numbers to that statistic: With hundreds of thousands of American women relying on The Pill to keep them “safe,” there are then many thousands of women each year who are surprised to find themselves pregnant anyway.

Given that they wouldn’t have been taking The Pill if they felt they were ready for motherhood, and quite justified in feeling that their pregnancy is unfair — they were doing what they had been told was the “responsible” thing, and this unintended outcome was not due to their failure — these women easily convince themselves that abortion is now necessary.

Therefore, it was hardly surprising that the decade after The Pill was introduced, there was an alarming rise in abortion. It is true that illegal back-alley abortionists — as well as more “respectable” doctors who sometimes performed abortions privately and illegally — had existed for decades. But after the advent of The Pill in 1960 (just as the first Baby Boomers were becoming teenagers), hospitals experienced a horrifying influx of bleeding and infected victims of botched abortions. If you go back and read contemporary accounts of the abortion debate in the late ’60s, you discover that the pressure for legalization came not so much from radical feminists or sexual revolutionaries as from doctors and nurses who were simply exhausted by this dreadful problem.

The Pill — and the accompanying media hype about how this scientific miracle would free women of sexual worries — was therefore a major paving stone on the road to Roe v. Wade.

Unnatural Ideas Have Natural Consequences

More generally, The Pill fostered a prevalence of the belief that sex without pregnancy is normal. This utterly unnatural idea is the foundation of the Contraceptive Culture.

Throughout human history, recognition of the natural connection between sex and procreation was fundamental to society’s laws, customs, attitudes and behaviors in regard to relationships between men and women. These traditions had varied from place to place, and shifted slowly from time to time, but in all times and all places, social norms had been founded on the understanding that sex and pregnancy were intrinsically linked. Indeed, from a strictly biological perspective, reproduction is the sole purpose of sex.

The Contraceptive Culture, by contrast, is based on the negation of what we may rightly call natural sexuality. As previously mentioned, The Pill was launched in 1960 with a blitzkrieg of media hype, much of it sponsored by non-profit foundations. Historian Donald L. Critchlow chronicled this phenomenon in his excellent 2001 book, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America, and as I explained last July:

The population control movement . . . was largely the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Rockefeller funded much of the movement himself and through a number of family trusts and foundations, and he encouraged other foundations (Ford, Scaife, Carnegie) to do the same. . . .
[B]etween 1959 and 1964 one organization alone, the Population Council, got more than $5 million from the Rockefellers, $8.4 million from the Ford Foundation and $2.1 million from Scaife. So that’s $15 million in five years, back when a million dollars was a lot of money.

The Population Council was among a number of groups that helped promote positive publicity for The Pill, a P.R. campaign orchestrated by some of the best marketing strategists in the business. Among the ideas central to that public-relations blitz were (a) that unwanted pregnancy was a horrible burden on families, as well as on society at large, and (b) that The Pill, by exempting women from the dreaded prospect of becoming pregnant, would usher in a carefree new era of sexual fulfillment.

What actually happened, of course, was something quite different. The 1960s were a decade of unprecedented increases in divorce, drug abuse and teen suicide. Most especially, the ’60s saw skyrocketing rates of sexually-transmitted diseases, an ugly reality that Tom Wolfe described after visiting San Francisco in 1968, the year after the famous “Summer of Love”:

At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

So if the Contraceptive Culture failed to deliver on its propaganda promises of sexual bliss, does this mean that The Pill has failed? Not in the least.

What ‘Success’ Looks Like

Remember that the promoters of The Pill weren’t really interested in their product’s alleged emotional benefits or personal convenience to women. Both the development of The Pill and its marketing campaign were funded by wealthy donors who could fairly be described as fanatical advocates of population control.

In this regard, it is important to note that by the time The Pill was introduced in 1960, the Baby Boom peak of the U.S. birth rate had already passed. From 1952 to ’57, the rate had exceed 25 births per 1,000 population, with the total fertility rate (TFR, i.e., projected lifetime births per woman, based on current annual rate) peaking at 3.77 in 1957. The birth rate declined 6.3 percent (from 25.3 to 23.7 births per 1,000) from 1957 to ’60, a 2.1 percent average annual decrease which if extrapolated forward would have amounted to a decline of more than 30 percent (to about 17.5 births per 1,000) by 1972.

What this means is that the propaganda push which accompanied the introduction of The Pill — ushering in the Contraceptive Culture — came at a time when birth rates were already beginning to trend downward. The result was what can only be described as demographic overkill:

Year Birth Rate Total Fertility Rate
1957 . . . 25.3 . . . . . . . 3.77
1958 . . . 24.5 . . . . . . . 3.71
1959 . . . 24.3 . . . . . . . 3.69
1960 . . . 23.7 . . . . . . . 3.65
1961 . . . 23.3 . . . . . . . 3.62
1962 . . . 22.4 . . . . . . . 3.46
1963 . . . 21.7 . . . . . . . 3.31
1964 . . . 21.0 . . . . . . . 3.19
1965 . . . 19.4 . . . . . . . 2.91
1966 . . . 18.4 . . . . . . . 2.72
1967 . . . 17.8 . . . . . . . 2.55
1968 . . . 17.5 . . . . . . . 2.46
1969 . . . 17.8 . . . . . . . 2.46
1970 . . . 18.4 . . . . . . . 2.48
1971 . . . 17.2 . . . . . . . 2.27
1972 . . . 15.6 . . . . . . . 2.01
1973 . . . 14.9 . . . . . . . 1.87
1974 . . . 14.9 . . . . . . . 1.83
1975 . . . 14.8 . . . . . . . 1.77
1976 . . . 14.8 . . . . . . . 1.74

In the decade 1957-67, the birth rate declined 23.3 percent, and TFR declined 27.8 percent. Demographers refer to a TFR of 2.1 as the “replacement rate,” at which births are sufficient to replace the existing population (2 parents, 2 babies, with a 0.1 allowance for infant mortality, etc.) in modern industrial nations. The U.S. fell below 2.1 TFR in 1972 — the year before the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

By 1976, the U.S. birth rate declined still further to 14.8 (41 percent below the 1957 rate) while TFR declined to 1.74 — 54 percent below 1957 TFR and, significantly, 17 percent below “replacement rate.” It was not until 1987 that the total fertility rate again reached as high as 1.9. Not until 2006 did TFR again reach the replacement level of 2.1; the United States experienced sub-replacement fertility for 34 consecutive years.

The social, economic and political consequences of this demographic decline — the “graying of America” — have been widely discussed (see, for example Mark Steyn’s America Alone.) Whatever those consequences might be, we might shrug with indifference if it were the case that all this was the result of people acting independently and voluntarily in accordance with their own wishes, based upon a more or less rational assessment of their own needs and interests. This is not the case, however, because Americans were deliberately misinformed, their opinions actively influenced and, in some cases, their choices directly controlled, by the population-control advocates who popularized The Pill.

False ‘Crisis,’ Real Results

In 1967, by which time birth rates were already declining rapidly, an influential article in Science magazine was published by Kingsley Davis, a University of California professor who had been a leading population-control advocate for 20 years. Davis complained about colleagues who believed that “something they vaguely call population control can be achieved by making better contraceptives available,” a belief he declared to be dangerously mistaken:

“By sanctifying the doctrine that each woman should have the number of children she wants, and by assuming that if she has only that number this will automatically curb population growth to the necessary degree, the leaders of current policies escape the necessity of asking why women desire so many children and how this desire can be influenced.”

Davis advocated not merely greater efforts to influence women’s desires, but also coercive government measures to achieve the sort of “drastic” reductions he believed necessary. Keep in mind that the American public was already being bombarded by anti-baby propaganda, as Critchlow chronicles in Intended Consequences:

[T]o raise the public’s consciousness about the threat of overpopulation . . . the population movement undertook a concerted public relations campaign through a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper articles. This campaign was aided by the involvement of key publishers and editors who were actively involved in the movement, including George Hecht, editor of Parents Magazine. The drumbeat around the population crisis reached crescendo by the early 1960s. Readers of popular magazines were faced with a barrage of articles warning of an impending population crisis . . . Women readers were inundated with articles like “Are We Overworking the Stork?” (Parents Magazine, 1961), “Why Americans Must Limit Their Families” (Redbook, 1963), “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to the Population Explosion” (McCall’s, February 1965), “Overpopulation: Threat to Survival” (Parents Magazine, 1967) and “Population Increase: A Grave Threat to Every American Family” (Parents Magazine, 1969).

This incessant output of birth-control propaganda reached its apex with the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, which went through 13 printings in two years with the help of a massive publicity campaign that included Ehrlich’s multiple appearances on “The Tonight Show.”

Having fomented a false sense of crisis — issuing dire warnings about overpopulation even while U.S. birth rates were declining precipitously — the population-controllers then pushed through Congress the “Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970,” known as Title X. From the official federal description:

The Title X program is designed to provide access to contraceptive services, supplies and information to all who want and need them. By law, priority is given to persons from low-income families. . . .
In fiscal year 2006, 88 Title X grantees provided family planning services to approximately five million women and men through a network of more than 4,400 community-based clinics. . . . In approximately 75% of U.S. counties, there is at least one clinic that receives Title X funds and provides services as required under the Title X statute. . . .
The Title X program also supports three key functions . . . (1) training for family planning clinic personnel through ten regional general training programs and three national training programs that focus on clinical training, enhancing quality family planning services for males, and/or coordination of training activities on the national level; (2) data collection and family planning research aimed at improving the delivery of family planning services; and, (3) information dissemination and community based education and outreach activities.

Title X resulted from a 1969 request by Richard Nixon (not exactly a progressive hero) to create a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future and, in signing Title X into law, Nixon said:

This measure provides for expanded research, training of manpower, and increased family planning services. In addition, it provides for the development of family planning and population growth information and education.

Note that word “education.” Few appreciate the degree to which the population-control message was embraced by textbook publishers and the public school system, and promoted with the assistance of federal grants under Title X. This was in addition, of course, to the cooperation between Title X clinics and school officials to refer teenagers for “family planning services,” with or without parental consent. It would be worth the effort and expense, I think, for some pro-life organization to commission scholarly research into the content of the “information and education” disseminated with Title X funding, especially during the 1970s when — as Nixon noted in his signing statement — such programs enjoyed “strong bipartisan support.” (The pro-life “family values” movement did not become an influential force in GOP politics until the 1980s.)

Research into Title X’s education element might examine whether there was adequate emphasis on the health risks and failure rates of various contraceptive methods, the potential complications of abortion, and the dangers of sexually-transmitted disease. It would seem obvious that these risks were inadequately emphasized, when you consider the prevalence of abortion and STDs among the “persons from low-income families” toward whom Title X was targeted. (Does anyone familiar with the political climate of 1970 doubt that “low-income families” was a euphemism for “ghetto blacks”? And does anyone doubt that this accounted for the “strong bipartisan support” of which Nixon boasted? Is anyone surprised to learn that, 40 years into the Title X program, blacks account for 36 percent of all abortions in the U.S.?)

Across the Barren Plain

What is at issue is whether, given the “crisis” atmosphere incited by population-control advocates, women were properly informed about the consequences of the choices they were being encouraged to make. Because as we approach Mother’s Day 2010, half a century past the advent of The Pill, more American women than ever are childless:

About 18 percent of women ages 40 to 44 in 2002 had never had a child, compared with 10 percent in 1976. Women in the same age group, on average, had 1.9 children in 2002, considerably fewer than the 1976 average of 3.1 children . . .

In case you flunked statistics, that’s a 90 percent increase in childlessness (and a 39 percent decline in the number of children borne by the average woman) in the span of a single generation. It would be one thing if all these childless women were “childless by choice,” but they aren’t. The mainstream media has given insufficient notice to America’s silent plague of infertility, a direct consequence of the Contraceptive Culture.

“Fertility delayed is fertility denied,” as demographers say, and a major effect of the Contraceptive Culture has been to encourage women to delay motherhood. The average age of U.S. first-time mothers is now over 25 — four years later than in the 1970s — and this trend has consequences, including an increase in the number of women who will never become mothers:

Marcelle Cedars, a reproductive specialist at the University of California-San Francisco, said that fertility in women peaks around age 22 and that pregnancy becomes much more difficult to achieve after age 35. After age 35, “[e]ach egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal. And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize,” Cedars said, adding, “It’s less likely to develop. It’s less likely to implant. If it implants, it’s more likely to miscarry.”

Beyond this inescapable fact of age-related infertility, there is the damage to women’s reproductive systems wrought by STDs. A half-century ago, nearly all public-health efforts to control “veneral diseases” (as they were once known) focused on syphilis and gonorrhea, infections that were readily diagnosed and treated with antibiotics.

Ah, but that was before The Pill unleashed that pathological avalanche of “the mange, the grunge . . . the scroff, the rot” which Tom Wolfe saw doctors confronting in Haight-Ashbury clinics in ’68. These exotic disorders were eventually disagnosed with appropriate Latin terminology, by which time they were far less exotic than had been true in the immediate aftermath of the Summer of Love.

Nowadays, once-rare STDs like herpes, chlamydia and human papillomavirus (HPV) are quite widespread, resulting in an increased number of severe obstetric complications. As a recent Los Angeles Times article reported:

Chlamydia infections in the United States now top 1.1 million, the most since record-keeping for the disease began . . .
Women bear the brunt of both chlamydia and gonorrhea, especially their long-term consequences, CDC officials said.
Untreated, both can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease – an infection of the uterus and fallopian tubes that can cause chronic pain, infertility and life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, or pregnancy outside the uterus. . . .
The report found that chlamydia infections occurred at a rate of about 370 per 100,000 people in 2007. That’s a 7.5% increase from 2006. . . .
[M]any people with the disease are not identified, and public health officials believe that the true number of chlamydia infections is closer to 3 million.

In a nation of 300 million people, it may seem inconsequential that 1% are infected with chlamydia, except that (a) the infection rate is certainly much higher among sexually-active young people, with children and the elderly being largely exempt from the pandemic, and (b) the infection rate appears to be increasing rapidly. And here’s a news story for which an appropriate headline might be, “Sexual revolution triumphs; women, minorities hardest hit”:

About 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 are infected with genital herpes, making it one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.
Black women had the highest rate of infection at 48 percent and women were nearly twice likely as men to be infected, according to an analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 21 percent of women were infected with genital herpes, compared to only 11.5 percent of men, while 39 percent of blacks were infected compared to about 12 percent for whites, the CDC said.

Let’s not forget about the carcinogenic virus HPV:

Data from a national study suggests that about one in four U.S. females between the ages of 14 and 59 years may have the sexually transmitted infection human papillomarivus . . .

And there’s more:

A groundbreaking study . . .found more than half (56 per cent) of young adults in a new sexual relationship were infected with human papillomavirus (HPV).

Given the increasing prevalence of STDs, what about the reproductive consequences? The American Fertility Association:

Every year, people trying to create families make the awful discovery that their ability to achieve or sustain a pregnancy is compromised by the effects of an STD . . .
[O]ne in ten U. S. couples are affected [by STD-related infertility] . . .

These are the unintended medical consequences, then, of those promises of consequence-free sex that accompanied the introduction of The Pill. The population-control fanatics inadvertantly got what they wanted — a drastic decline in fertility — by ensuring that many thousands of women never got the children they might have wanted.

An Expert Prediction

If these specific consequences were entirely unintended, however, not all consequences of the Contraceptive Culture were entirely unforseen, and one expert made a few remarkable predictions in 1968:

[C]onsider how easily [the widespread acceptance of artificial contraception] could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. . . .
Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Not all experts are recognized as scientific, of course, but a recent analysis by economist Timothy Reichert largely confirmed that prediction:

According to Reichert . . . contraception separates the traditional mating “market” into two separate markets: a market for marriage, and a market for free sex, created thanks to the significant cost reduction of sex uncoupled from pregnancy. . . . .
As it turns out, Reichert maintains, women end up entering the marriage market in greater numbers than men . . . Meanwhile, the economist notes that men . . face far fewer incentives to move from one market to the next.
“The result is easy to see,” writes Reichert. While women have higher bargaining power in the sex market as the “scarce commodity,” he writes, “the picture is very different once these same women make the switch to the marriage market”: “The relative scarcity of marriageable men means that the competition among women for marriageable men is far fiercer than that faced by prior generations of women.
“Over time, this means that the ‘deals they cut’ become worse for them and better for men.”

Ain’t that a kick in the head, ladies? The Pill has not only increased your potential for STDs and infertility, but also increased the chances you’ll marry a loser. Similar findings are cited by author Mary Eberstadt:

Eberstadt provides numerous examples of secular researchers who have followed the data, vindicating each and every one of Paul VI’s four primary predictions about the consequences of contraception: “a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.”

Such are the unhappy consequences of the unnatural ideas of the Contraceptive Culture. A half-century after The Pill was introduced, there are more women than ever who will spend Mother’s Day hopelessly and inconsolably alone. No tiny arms will embrace them, no childish smiles will greet them, no little hands will scrawl their love for “mommy” on a card, nor will these lonely women ever know a mother’s incomparable pleasure in hearing the sweet music of her children’s laughter.

I heard Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died.

What an unhappy “birthday” this is.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

The clinic Rose went undercover in is the EMW Women’s Surgical Center, a National Abortion Federation (NAF) center. The National Abortion Federation lobbies in Washington for abortion “rights”, and has branched out into Canada, Europe, and Australia.

In the first video, Rose gives her name as “Brianna”, her age as 14, and tells the counselor that her boyfriend is 31. The counselor assures Rose that she will not report the boyfriend, that she can keep it a secret, and advises her on how to get around parental notification via a judicial bypass.

Here, we see the counselor giving extremely false and misleading medical information. She determines that Rose is 14-15 weeks pregnant, and tells Rose that there is no brain activity, and that it doesn’t even occur until 18-19 weeks into the pregnancy.

As the video shows, the reality is somewhat different.

As per usual, this is breaking the law.

In the video, the EMW counselor named “Wendy” determines that Rose is “14 to 15-weeks pregnant” and Rose expresses that she wants to keep the situation secret from her parents. Though Rose gave no indication that she would face abusive parents, the clinic directs Rose to call Louisville attorney Mickey Adams so that she can obtain a judicial bypass around Kentucky’s parental consent law and avoid parental knowledge of the abortion or sexually abusive relationship.

In the state of Kentucky, sex between a 14-year-old and a 31-year-old is rape in the third degree and would reasonably be considered sexual abuse of a child which must be reported to law enforcement immediately. The clinic failed to ask the questions necessary to file a child sexual abuse report and did not communicate to Rose about the illegal or dangerous nature of her sexual relationship.

Rose, a UCLA student, says this sort of disregard for the law is typical at abortion centers. “In abortion clinics across the country, our undercover videos document the widespread cover up of sexual abuse. Abortion clinics like EMW in Louisville center attempt to fast track underage abortions on vulnerable girls, shut out parents, and blatantly ignore their legal obligation to report the sex predator to police.” says Rose.

Live Action has previously released videos of statutory rape cover-up at Planned Parenthood abortion clinics in Bloomington, IN, Indianapolis, IN, Memphis, TN, Birmingham, AL, Los Angeles, CA, Tucson, AZ, Phoenix, AZ, and Milwaukee, WI. Prompted by a Live Action video, the Alabama Health Department placed the Birmingham clinic on probation after conducting its own investigation which found 9 legal violations. Rose urges officials in Kentucky to follow suit: “State authorities need to investigate this Louisville abortion clinic and hold them accountable to the law,” Rose insists. “Until they do, young girls will be put at risk of continued sexual abuse.”

This clinic is the only abortion clinic in the state of Kentucky. NARAL bemoans the strict oversight of abortions in Kentucky.

• Abortion Ban
  Kentucky has an unconstitutional and unenforceable criminal ban on abortion.

• Biased Counseling & Mandatory Delay
  Kentucky has a partially unenforceable law that subjects women seeking abortion services to biased-counseling requirements and mandatory delays.

• Counseling Ban/Gag Rule
  Kentucky prohibits certain state employees and organizations receiving state funds from counseling or referring women for abortion services.

• Insurance Prohibition for Abortion
  Kentucky restricts insurance coverage of abortion.

• Other Anti-Choice Law
  Kentucky law includes a strongly anti-choice policy statement.

• Public Facilities Restriction
  Kentucky prohibits the use of all public facilities for abortion services.

• Refusal to Provide Medical Services
  Kentucky allows certain individuals or entities to refuse to provide women specific reproductive-health services, information, or referrals.

• Restrictions on Low-Income Women’s Access to Abortion
  Kentucky restricts low-income women’s access to abortion.

• Restrictions on Young Women’s Access to Abortion
  Kentucky law restricts young women’s access to abortion services by mandating parental consent.

• Spousal Notice
  Kentucky has an unconstitutional and unenforceable law mandating spousal notice before a married woman may obtain abortion care.

• Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP)
  Kentucky subjects abortion providers to burdensome restrictions not applied to other medical professionals.

The NARAL caterwauling just goes to show that feminists and abortion lobbyists do not want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. They want women to have abortions. Any kind of restrictions on abortion, even something as harmless as medical counseling prior to the abortion, sends them into a frenzy. They know that if a woman gets medically accurate information about her unborn child, she will be much less likely to go through with the abortion. They don’t want spouses to be involved — even if the child is half the father’s, they don’t want him to be able to have a say in whether or not his child lives or dies. They don’t want any kind of restrictions whatsoever — no medical counseling, no parental or spousal notification, nothing. Abortions should not only be legal, but they should be commonplace and taxpayer subsidized. It’s sick. It’s as if these feminists and lobbyists want there to be little abortion mills, with women just coming in and getting abortions over and over again.

And so we see that it is not just Planned Parenthood that is the problem, but the massively powerful abortion lobby as a whole. Abortionists are willing to break the law and manipulate and lie to young girls time and time again. These two videos in particular show why they’re willing to do so: money. Had Rose not been pretending, had this been a real girl and they were successful in selling an abortion to her, then they would have collected a cool $1,075. After all, there’s a lot of money to be made performing abortions — not so much encouraging the girls to keep their babies or put them up for adoption.

To all of you pro-choicers reading this: are you OK with this? Is this the kind of pro-choice America you celebrate, one where abortion clinics prey on confused, scared young girls and manipulate them into getting abortions? Where clinics routinely break the law and offer medically inaccurate information? Where the truth about the unborn is kept secret?

I would think that anyone who had any kind of morals would be outraged at what is happening in abortion clinics across the country — whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice. This is something we should all be able to agree on.

The lies, the abuse, the manipulation… it all has to stop.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

Here is what the ad looks like:

Considering feminists cannot abide anything that might paint abortion in a negative light, this made Lori VERY angry. She explained that somehow, this ignores the experiences and reactions women have had with and from abortion.

I’m all for validating and honoring the experience of women who have had an abortion. But there are already TONS of really great support systems for women who have had abortions that are equipped to address a RANGE of post-abortion emotions and outcomes- glee, relief, guilt, sadness, loss, pride, no reaction at all, or a million other possibilities. When an ad campaign chooses to ignore these very real experiences of women who have had abortions, you have to assume that they have an agenda other than helping real women.

Perhaps Lori was blinded by her “ZOMG SOMEONE IS ATTACKING ABORTION YEAAAAARRRGHHHHH!” rage, but the whole point of this ad campaign is to point out how abortion can affect a woman. I know — all things negative relating to abortion must be kept super-secret. But here in the real world, when it comes to medical procedures, most normal women like to know exactly what will be done to them and what the possible risks and repercussions could be. Normal women, even pro-abortion women, don’t see abortion as something to be taken lightly. They don’t look at it the way radical feminists do. Impossible for feminists to understand, I know.

Well, this week, Jessica found out that someone had committed vandalism and defaced the ad. Of course, this just made her day.

Here is what it looked like after it was defaced:

Jessica’s response was to call the vandal a “pro-choice hero” and “Love. It.”

And this is where Lori got involved. She wrote a great post about the whole controversy.

A very mild ad, indeed. And an accurate one; abortion does change you. While feminists sneer at the idea of post-abortion syndrome, it does exist. And if they actually cared about women, they’d admit that fact and would stop encouraging women to have abortions without disclosing the trauma that can occur to the woman.

It’s clear that they don’t care about the dead babies, but they also need to stop insisting that they are For Women ™ , when they most obviously are not. You see, feminists, an unborn baby is not just a clump of cells. Many women who abort their babies, therefore, suffer intense pain and immense guilt. Their entire lives.

They may just be nutty wing nuts to you, but they are real people with true feelings. Because you do nothing but sneer at those feelings, in fact lie about their very existence, your For The Women card is hereby pulled. You are more concerned with one Supreme Court case, that you constantly use as a wedge and a pawn, than you are with actual women.

Jessica has now responded by attacking Lori Ziganto. And while I’m sure she and her fellow feminist zombies thought their responses were just so super intelligent and better than Lori’s post, all they really did was prove Lori’s point.

Going to college is a matter of “convenience”? Really? Women want higher education for “co-ed fun”?

I always wondered what anti-choicers meant when they said women get abortions “for convenience.” Did they think that women were procuring lunchtime abortions so they could go out and booze it up that night? That women didn’t feel like gaining weight and that ending the pregnancy would be so much easier? I figured that they had this bizarre fictitious woman in their minds and that they didn’t recognize the complex, personal, and often selfless reasons women decide to get abortions. But I was wrong.

It isn’t that anti-choicers don’t understand why women get abortions – it’s that they care so little about women’s lives that any reason given to obtain an abortion is seen as “convenient.”

Some things that are convenient: Providing for your existing children. Going to college. Having enough money to eat, pay rent, keep the electricity on. Not dying.

So yeah, I guess I would “rejoice” over women obtaining abortions when it’s convenient. (The inaccessibility of abortion for too many women makes actual rejoicing impossible.) Whether it’s for health, financial, and educational reasons – or simply not wanting to have a child yet – it would absolutely thrill me if women’s life decisions were respected, accepted and supported. But instead, we live in a world where a woman’s desire for something as basic as education is mocked as selfish. And we’re the ones who are “anti-woman”? I think not.

Reproductive health and justice is one of my strongest passions (I work with Planned Parenthood). When people try to block abortion access, I start crying and it’s hard for me to stop. I am still shocked at the huge disregard anti-choicers have for womens lives. They really do have no regard for human life, because, guess what? women are human. This: “Some things that are convenient: Providing for your existing children. Going to college. Having enough money to eat, pay rent, keep the electricity on. Not dying.” made me tear up. And honestly, if I were to become pregnant right now, I would get an abortion because I need to finish college and have enough money to eat, pay rent, and keep the electricity on. I am also bipolar, and I would have to stop taking my medication if I were to have a baby, which would be downright dangerous. Thanks for the post, Jessica.

But the point is that 4 years of college means a completely different life than a life w/o 4 years of college and anyone who doesn’t recognize that is either living in a dreamworld or is being deliberately obtuse. There is nothing “everyday” about going to college – it’s an incredible privilege that changes people’s lives.

And here we go, with feminists making women perpetual victims yet again, rather than empowering them. Jessica and her fellow zombies cannot seem to wrap their minds around the idea of a woman having a child and going to college at the same time. I know, I know — insanity, right? But somehow, my mother was able to work full-time, raise two children, have a loving marriage, and get her college degree. Somehow, several of my friends are raising children and getting their degrees. Where are the feminists encouraging women to do both? Heck, they don’t even have to raise the baby. There’s always adoption, the option that you’ll never hear someone like Jessica Valenti champion. If the college-aged girl wasn’t ready for a kid, all she’d have to do was carry the baby for nine months while she went to school and then she could help a couple who can’t have children make a family. But if a girl gets pregnant and it’s “inconvenient”, all feminists like Jessica Valenti can do is scream at the girl to HAVE AN ABORTION! HAVE AN ABORTION! Sometimes, you don’t get pregnant at a convenient time. I get that. It doesn’t mean that you have to choose between going to college or having a baby. But that’s the only option given to women if they listen to feminists. They have to choose either college or their child, because presumably, having a child at an inconvenient time would be the WORST THING EVER!!!

Look, I know all about not wanting to have a baby at a certain time. I’m engaged, but my fiance is a Marine with an upcoming deployment. If I got pregnant now, the baby would be born while Matt was in Afghanistan. I do not want to go through a pregnancy by myself, and I do not want Matt to miss the birth of his first child. I don’t want him to come home to the son or daughter he’s never met. We also don’t have a lot of money to be raising a child right now. A baby just is not in our plans at the moment.

But it could happen. And if it did, you can bet your ass that abortion would never be an option for us. We would find a way to make it work. Why do feminists never present that as a viable option for women?

It’s like they practically salivate over the thought of another woman getting an abortion. I don’t know why, but it’s sickening how much feminists try to actively convince women to have abortions. And of course, never mentioned is the option of not getting pregnant if you absolutely cannot handle a baby at the moment. There’s birth control, and if you can’t afford that, the solution is simple: don’t have sex. But of course, telling a feminist that women shouldn’t have sex if they aren’t ready for a baby might make their head explode. I mean, really, dare you tell women that they should keep their legs shut if they aren’t ready to get pregnant?! Believe it or not, there is an element of personal responsibility at play here. The whole feminist philosophy is disgusting. They tell women to sleep around like men do. When women then get unintentionally pregnant (usually while unmarried), they tell the women to just kill the damn burden growing inside of you and throw it out like refuse. And NO, don’t you dare do any research about abortion, what your baby looks like, or the effect having an abortion can have on you. Just kill the damn thing and get back to your Womyn’s Studies classes because college is the MOST. IMPORTANT. THING. EVER! And no, you cannot do both, you must choose between being a pregnant, barefoot housewife in a kitchen or being a smart, single, feminist womyn with a degree in Gender Studies. If you have the baby you are contributing to the partiarchy! And you will be a victim! Do what we say! Don’t think for yourself!

It’s sickening, truly sickening.

All of this just goes to show how far feminism has fallen. Feminists were once made up of smart, strong women (who, incidentally, despised abortion and rightfully saw it as evil) who were fighting for real gender equality — the right to vote, to get an education.

Now, feminists crusade for abortion. It’s their number one cause. And they don’t even want women to be informed. They don’t want women seeing ultrasounds first because they know it’ll influence them to have the baby. They don’t want women learning that abortion can have devastating physical and emotional repercussions. They don’t want abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare”. Lori’s post showcased another example of a feminist accidentally exposing that trust, and it pissed Jessica Valenti off. Feminists don’t want women to be able to choose what’s best for them; they want women choosing abortion. I can only assume it’s because if women stop choosing abortion, then feminists will lose their last grip on relevance in today’s society. Getting the truth out about abortion and its possible effects, as the “Abortion Changes You” campaign does, terrifies and angers feminists.

It’s pathetic and disgusting, that someone would actually encourage abortion — the murder of the unborn — solely to help maintain their own grip on power and relevance in the world. Anything that harms the pro-abortion movement really is just harming modern feminism. And this ad is just another crack in the feminist “we help womyn” facade.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!