Last
week, Harmony Daws, newly appointed president of the Oregon Right to
Life board of directors, was fired from her job due to her political
beliefs. Daws was working as operations manager for a Portland-area
cleaning company.
Daws told TheBlaze that
her boss, after hearing of Daws’ position with Oregon Right to Life,
ordered her to remain silent at work about her pro-life views, as well
as her faith.
“She told me that she didn’t want me sharing my faith, that I
couldn’t tell other employees that I’m praying for them,” Daws said.
“She said I couldn’t discuss my political beliefs.”
Daws complied, and avoided discussing politics in the workplace.
However, days later, she was fired without warning. The reason given was
that Daws had discriminated against other employees due to her faith
and political views.
Oregon Right to Life reports
that Daws worked with people of all backgrounds and beliefs, including a
Satanist, a Wiccan, a lesbian, and atheists – and after her firing,
several of them argued that they had never been discriminated against,
and that Daws “loved everyone.”
“What my employer did was illegal,” said Daws. “Firing someone based
on their religious or political beliefs is a civil rights violation. I’m
a libertarian and I support my former employer’s right to hire and fire
as she chooses. However, she could have asked for a resignation over
our difference of beliefs.
“To have been mistreated as I was by being fired, after my exemplary
record as an employee, was unconscionable. Regardless, had I known then
what the price to accept the presidency would be, I would still have
accepted the position. Fifty-eight million children have lost their
lives since 1973. Losing a job in my stand for their right to life was a
small price to pay.”
According to The Blaze, Daws plans to start her own business, and does not intend to hide her faith or pro-life beliefs.
On
September 7, 2015, police sergeant Troy Snedeker responded to an
emergency call from a home in Andover, KS. When he entered the
residence, he found a tiny newborn infant lying face down on the couch.
She was not breathing.
Twenty-three days later, a young couple in Indiana received an e-mail
from their adoption agency: “Urgent. Baby girl born on September 7th at
26 weeks gestation. Baby girl has a level 4 brain bleed and withdrawal
symptoms from heroin. If interested please email ASAP.”
Jon and Krista Agler had been dreaming of adoption for years, but
they were not expecting this – a premature baby addicted to heroin. As
Mrs. Agler explained on her blog:
Jon and I began a heavy, emotional, five
day process of asking for prayer, inviting others to speak into this
situation, sitting with really hard questions, and trying to see if we
could fully surrender to the weight of unknowns that would come with
saying yes to this situation. […]
Every scripture we read spoke to the
situation… (Rescue the weak and needy…) Every song we listened to
offered peace… (You drown my fears in perfect love, you rescue me so I
can stand and say ‘I am a child of God’…) Everything we read about
Jesus… (I came not for the healthy, but for the sick…) As we sought and
prayed and listened, it was clear. We were to go to this girl.
After replying to the adoption agency, the couple packed their bags
and flew to Kansas to meet their new daughter, whom they named Eden. In a
video posted by their church, the new parents explained that the name
“Eden” means “delight.”
We’re praying for miraculous healing and
also just knowing that if [God] does not heal in that way that she is
going to be our delight.
The following months in the hospital were long and difficult, but
finally on December 2, the Aglers were able to return to Indiana with
their daughter. On December 11, Eden’s due date, Mrs. Agler posted on
Facebook, “She truly is our delight, our Eden. Can’t believe I get to be
her mother.”
BBC to air documentary of man killing himself at Swizz suicide clinic
By Dave Andrusko The
BBC, whose support for euthanasia and assisted suicide knows no bounds,
has announced that it will air a documentary that shows businessman
Simon Binner talking his own life last October.
“How to Die: Simon’s Choice” shows Binner lying on a bed before
opening a valve that allows a lethal drug to enter his body. “It will be
the first time footage from inside Switzerland’s second largest
assisted suicide clinic will be shown on British television,” the Christian Institute reported. “Pro-life campaigners have criticised the BBC for being a ‘cheerleader for suicide.’” From the Daily Telegraph, the BBC announced
that it is to air scenes showing a British businessman taking his own life at a Swiss suicide clinic.
The corporation said yesterday
that it will screen a 90-minute documentary following the declining
health of Simon Binner, a Cambridge graduate who suffered from motor
neurone disease, and his eventual decision to kill himself, on October
19 last year.
Mr. Binner, who was diagnosed
with the degenerative disease in January 2015, made headlines after he
announced on LinkedIn that he planned to end his life at the Eternal
Spirit clinic, in Basel [Switzerland].
Apparently, according to media correspondent Patrick Foster, while
the BBC drew the line at actually showing the 57-year-old Binner at the
moment of his death, “there is a fleeting glimpse of Mr. Binner’s dead
body, as his friends and family sit weeping. The camera then cuts to the
lid of his coffin being screwed down.”
The BBC bills the documentary as a “sensitive observational documentary following one family’s experience of assisted death”.
But Alistair Thompson, a spokesman for Care Not Killing, said: “We
are deeply disturbed by this. This has the capacity to encourage others
to take their own lives.”
The criticisms are based on a preview version of the 90 minute BBC documentary, which will air on February 10.
The backdrop for “How to Die: Simon’s Choice” was last year’s House
of Commons debate in which Members of Parliament overwhelmingly rejected
a bill to legalize assisted suicide.
According to the Christian Institute
In 2014, the BBC was criticised
for ‘gradually normalising’ assisted suicide, after it broadcast a
television drama featuring the story of a pregnant woman who agreed to
prepare lethal drugs for her ill mother.
A critic said that it was never
once mentioned that assisted suicide is against the law, and the
programme failed to consider the consequences of helping someone to kill
themselves.
The BBC was previously accused of
cheerleading for assisted suicide in 2011, by airing a documentary
showing another person with motor neurone disease getting help to kill
themselves.
Driving back from the March for Life, Nebraska pro-lifers overcome terrible weather and a frightful highway accident
By Marilyn M. Synek, Vice President, University of Nebraska Students for Life Editor’s note. This is the third and concluding story from
pro-lifers describing the terrible weather they encountered after
leaving Washington, DC, last Friday, having attended the annual March
for Life commemorating the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Each account
is a story of faithfulness and good cheer, despite being caught for up
to a day on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Photo credit: Drew Joe Miller
We left DC early Friday afternoon at 3 PM instead of staying until
Saturday night. Our plan was to try to outrun the storm. Our leaders
were concerned we wouldn’t get out of the city until Monday if we
stayed, and that would cause us to miss another day of school.
Three hours into our trip, we were diverted off the interstate. Two
semi-trucks jackknifed, blocking west-bound traffic, causing the
Pennsylvania Turnpike to be closed. We waited at a gas station for 2-1/2
hours until they gave us the all clear and reopened the highway.
We were driving along 1-76 when traffic came to a complete
standstill. We buckled down for the night and woke up the next morning
to find ourselves buried in 2 feet of snow!
To pass the time on Saturday, we played cards, watched movies, and
did homework. We were told to carefully ration our food and toilet
paper, and we filled up our empty water bottles with snow. In the early
afternoon, the volunteer fire department came by with 18 bottles of
water for us and a bobcat. They scooped out the car in front of us and
told us the plan was to come back for the buses and semis after they
finished scooping out all the cars. Some of our members went out and
played in the snow to burn off their energy.
At 9 PM Saturday night, 24 hours after being trapped on the bus at
mile marker 133.6, a group of men came and began digging us out. A
snowplow came and cleared a path in front of us.
We turned around and drove east towards Bedford, PA. A local
elementary school had graciously opened up its cafeteria for us to sleep
in.
The town was fairly small, so unfortunately there weren’t that many
places still open to buy food at 11 at night. Several members in our
group volunteered to walk to a gas station 2-1/2 miles away and bring
back food.
On our way back to the elementary school, a very nice gentleman
stopped and offered us a ride back to the school. We ate, cleaned up the
best we could without showers, and went to sleep. We left that morning
at 7 AM, took an alternative route to avoid the turnpike, and were
finally Nebraska bound again.
Our group received enormous support for our pro-life elected
officials. Both of our senators, Senator Sasse and Senator Fischer, and
Congressman Smith Tweeted out their prayers and encouragement while we
trapped. Governor Ricketts even went so far as to FaceTime our group to
make sure that we were warm and fed, and thanked us for our pro-life
advocacy. I am proud to have so many pro-life officials representing our
state.
We finally returned home at 7 AM Monday morning. We were able to take
much needed showers and stretch out. There is no time for resting in
the pro-life movement though. Our group is looking forward to attending
the Nebraska Walk for Life this weekend at the State Capitol.
How media stars and media conglomerates soften resistance to physician-assisted suicide
By Dave Andrusko
Diane Rehm
Life has such an interesting way of lobbing coincidences at you. I had just finished writing “BBC to air documentary of man killing himself at Swizz suicide clinic,”
which is exactly what the story is about. The BBC not only promotes
physician- assisted suicide, it romanticizes killing oneself with
assistance and makes it seem the only truly brave decision when someone
is critically ill.
In this instance, next month the BBC is airing a 90-minute
documentary about a man who flies to Switzerland to inject himself with a
poisonous concoction. Apparently we will see everything, save the
moment he actually dies.
The coincidence? When I finished I went upstairs and while a pot of
coffee brewed, I read “Diane Rehm, loud and clear on life, love and
death,” the latest in a never-ending series of puff pieces about talk
show host Diane Rehm running in the Washington Post. (Rehm is located in Washington, DC. Her show airs on WAMU and is nationally syndicated on nearly 200 stations.)
It’s my experience that headlines online are often not only punchier
than the ones in newsprint but also capture the author’s real intent. So
the online headline is “Diane Rehm’s next act: Using her famed voice to fight for the good death.”
We’ve also written about Rehm before, not in uncritical adulation but
to explain and analyze her consistently pro-death agenda. (There is a
spot in Karen Heller’s profile where she says Rehm doesn’t like to talk
about abortion anymore. If true, it would only be because Rehm’s in-kind
contribution to the pro-abortion movement has reached some sort of
statutory limitation.)
Already sympathetic to the “right to die” movement, Rehm was
radicalized (I believe this is a fair characterization) by the death of
her husband who starved himself to death over the course of ten days.
That is now her crusade which she says she will take up full-throttle
when she retires in 11 months.
We properly understand that Brittany Maynard’s assisted suicide was
and is instrumental in changing—or at least softening—public resistance.
But it is simply impossible to exaggerate the impact of the likes of
Rehm and the BCC and artists such as novelist Sir Terry Pratchett in
tilting the conversation in a pro-death direction.
Those of us who’ve been around for decades remember how that same
dynamic helped to undermine abortion statutes in the 1960s and paved the
way for the shoddy reasoning on display in Roe v. Wade and Doe v.
Bolton.
If you haven’t already, please read “BBC to air documentary of man killing himself at Swizz suicide clinic.”
Source: NRLC News
By Paul Russell, Founder, HOPE Australia A few days ago I reported on two articles that appeared in the pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide Melbourne newspaper, The Age that attempted to ‘rationalise’ suicide.
In short, it was a sales pitch.
There’s nothing redeeming at all in suicide or self-killing.
Certainly, we should grieve for the lives lost and remember the person
and comfort the family. But there’s no sense at all in glossing over
what took place. As bleak and as painful as it is and without any sense
of judging the motives or state of mind of the person concerned and,
while we may even come to understand something of what lead to that
death, we must not make it seem that it is all somehow okay.
But that’s precisely what The Age article on the death of the
Victorian couple Pat and Peter Shaw focussed upon. While the vaulted
ideal of ‘choice’ in one sense demands that we accept what they did, to
condone it from that same ideal and then justify it with a false appeal
to supposed rationality is something entirely different and inherently
dangerous.
Author Julia Medew doesn’t seem to understand. This became all the more evident in a follow up article
published yesterday. Perhaps that’s a little harsh because this new
article could also be understood as an attempt to justify the earlier
piece following significant criticism.
Medew seems to take great pleasure in reporting that her article had
generated significant interest. What begins in a self-congratulatory
back-pat then develops into a predictable litany of supportive comments.
The claim that the article has probably been read by ‘a million
Australians’ is impossible to prove or disprove but is clearly intended
to not only justify the indefensible but also to push the death agenda.
It gets worse.
After creating a clear impression that those congratulating her on
the story and those sharing ‘hard cases’ were amongst ‘hundreds more in a
similar vein’ we find the obligatory yet entirely unconvincing attempt
at ‘balance’, because, as we are told, ‘Not everybody agreed that the
Shaws’ story should have been told.’
‘One person on Facebook accused The Age of glamorising
suicide; another tweeted that it would encourage people to take their
own lives…One man with a history of depression wrote…’ There you have
it. Medew doesn’t even attempt to suggest that these three are a sample
of those who dissented as she did with those that represented the
‘hundreds’.
There are but three. One is quoted: “Knowing how suicidal people
think, I can guarantee your articles have and will lead to people in
this frame of mind… taking their own lives.” Precisely so. I received
emails in response to my last article on this matter along very similar
lines.
But even this acknowledgement by Medew is simply a segue to
self-justification: ‘We were mindful of this before the story was
published. In an effort to minimise the risk for vulnerable people, we
decided not to detail the methods that Peter and Pat used. We also
included help lines for people to call if they were troubled by the
story.”
Spare us! Withholding information about ‘methods’ is a bare minimum
of consideration, as is the obligatory inclusion of ‘help lines’.
Perversely, Medew’s comments can be read as an acknowledgement that The
Age knows that this article has the potential to do harm. Then why
publish? Answer: because an ideology has trumped common sense.
There is so much that is dead wrong with this approach. I hope that
suicide prevention organisations speak out and join the chorus here; but
I’m not holding my breath in anticipation. Why? Simply because the
false association of this double suicide with a push for legal
euthanasia and assisted suicide compromises many in the suicide
prevention organisations who either actively support legal change or who
have yet to come to terms with how the euthanasia agenda affects those
who are vulnerable to suicidal depression and ideation.
The Shaw’s may have been entirely comfortable with their suicides being used to further this and The Age’s
agenda. Pat and Peter Shaw should be remembered for the amazing lives
that they lead and not the manner of their death as now seems more
likely.
When the answer to pain and suffering or to the inevitable effects of
aging is to endorse and support suicide, something radical will have
taken hold in our society. This push for euthanasia and assisted suicide
suggests that perhaps it is already here.
That drive for what is seen as the ultimate in autonomy, to wrestle
control over death itself, releases each of us from a solemn duty that
we hold in equal measure simply because of our common humanity. A debt
of love each to the other that includes obligations that we accept and
undertake gladly because of that love.
Difficult as these duties may be they are not a burden, just as those
whom we love and who are the focus of these duties are not burdens.
When someone suffers from aging or from illness or from any disability
or disabling injury, to abandon them or to even create the spectre of
abandonment is inhuman.
It is a precise reversal of John Dunne’s observation that ‘no man is
an island’. It is denying our very humanity and is an egregious offence
against the most basic of human needs and expression, nay; our very
essence. Editor’s note. This appeared at noeuthanasia.org.au and is reprinted with permission.
By Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D., NRL Director of Education & Research Editor’s note. This appears in the current digital edition of
National Right to Life News. Like all of the exciting content, it can be
accessed at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJan2016.pdf. Please forward to your social media contacts. Thank you! To
say that 2015 was not the year Planned Parenthood dreamed of would be
putting it mildly. The release of a series of undercover videos that
showed high-level executives haggling over the price of intact fetal
livers, kidneys, and lungs brought a firestorm of outrage and launched
congressional investigations. It required a presidential veto to prevent
a redirection of most of PPFA’s funding to community health centers. In
a word 2015 was more like a nightmare for the nation biggest abortion
performer and promoter.
Planned Parenthood showed, though, that however impacted by the
publicity it might be, it was still adroit at evading the truth and
rallying its supporters in the media and on Capitol Hill. PPFA muddied
the waters with bogus claims that the videos were “heavily edited,”
defending their callous cruelty by trying to argue that no laws were
broken.
But that misses the point. The videos shed light on the barbarity of
legal abortion itself, and the subsequent callous attitudes toward human
life and practices that dehumanize the unborn that are part and parcel
of the abortion culture in the United States.
What ultimate effect this debacle will have on the group’s reputation
and revenues has yet to be determined. Abortion clinics stayed open
even where undercover videos exposed some of Planned Parenthood’s most
horrific practices and, as noted, President Obama vetoed legislation
that would have put a halt on most of the organization’s federal funding
for a year. But with a national election ahead and the issue fresh on
voters’ minds, a new administration may chart a different course.
Planned Parenthood is already preparing for the future. It recently
endorsed staunchly pro-abortion Democrat Hillary Clinton and can be
counted on to spend tens of millions to elect other pro-abortion
candidates this year, just as it has in the past.
Planned Parenthood’s annual report revealing
The latest annual report of the Planned Parenthood Federation of
America came out around the turn of the year. Officially it covered only
the period through June 30, 2015, before the undercover videos from the
Center for Medical Progress were released. But one finds in those pages
not only what really matters to Planned Parenthood, but also where they
concentrate their energy and efforts, particularly when things get
tough.
Unsurprisingly, the one constant at Planned Parenthood is an
unyielding commitment to abortion. Even as the number of abortions has
fallen substantially nationwide, abortions at Planned Parenthood have
remained steady. This was true as Planned Parenthood’s total delivered
services, such as contraceptives and its vaunted “cancer screenings”
dropped, and even as many of its clinics closed and its smaller
affiliates disappeared in mergers.
Revenues stayed up too, despite the drop in services and the economic
downturn. Planned Parenthood can thank the taxpayers for that, with
governments kicking in about half a billion dollars a year, just to keep
a “non-profit” afloat that has tens of millions of dollars of “excess
of revenues over expenses” left over each year. Maintaining its position as nation’s top abortion chain
Clinics affiliated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America
performed 323,999 abortions in 2014. That’s just over three thousand
fewer than it performed in 2013 (327,633) but right about what it did in
2008 (324,008).
After first breaking the 300,000 barrier in 2007 (305,310), Planned
Parenthood’s abortion numbers hovered between 320,000 and 330,000 for
the past eight annual reports, peaking at 333,964 in 2011.
Though we don’t have national abortion figures for the past couple of
years yet, these steady abortion totals from Planned Parenthood are all
the more remarkable, given that they come during the time from 2008 to
2011, when abortions nationally fell by nearly 13%–from 1,212,230 to
1,058,490, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
As discussed elsewhere in the December digital edition of National
Right to Life News, for 2012, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
showed a continued decline, although the CDC’s national totals are
missing data from several states. This means Planned Parenthood not only
maintained its business, but gained market share.
Other services decline
All this while the rest of Planned Parenthood’s services, including
its oft-cited “cancer screenings,” were in a steep decline. And, it’s
important to remember, these “services” never included mammograms.
Planned Parenthood said it delivered 11,238,414 patient “services,”
just five years earlier, in 2009. But by 2014, the number was down to
9,455,582, according to this latest annual report.
“Cancer screenings” fell from 1,830,811 to just 682,208 in that same
period of time. “Breast exams/breast care” fell by more than half, from
830,312 in 2009 to 363,803 in 2014 and Pap smear tests dropped nearly
two-thirds, from 904,820 to 271,539.
The surprise is not the overall drop off in the number of services –
many businesses were struggling in America during that time – but that
Planned Parenthood was able to keep its abortion business humming when
everything else was in decline.
Another year, another billion in revenues
Annual revenues in 2015 (measured through June 30, 2015) dipped only
ever so slightly from their all-time high of $1.3 billion
($1,303,400,000) last year, to $1,296,100,000. When you’re dealing with
figures that large, a dip that size is essentially a rounding error
Planned Parenthood has managed to keep revenues above $1billion in
the last few years, even with the declining services and clinic
closings. A steady stream of abortion income has helped immensely, as
has about a half billion dollars every year from U.S. taxpayers. This
comes in the form of what Planned Parenthood terms “Government Health
Services Grants and Reimbursements.”
This is why Planned Parenthood is so heavily invested in the success
of ObamaCare, which they hope offers them a steady stream of new
customers and cash.
It also makes obvious why Planned Parenthood protests so loudly
whenever there is talk of rerouting its government funding to community
health centers. Though PPFA is delivering fewer and fewer services to
clients, they depend on that revenue to keep salaries paid and the doors
open. They could give up abortion in hopes of muting the opposition,
but that is the one commitment that is non-negotiable for Planned
Parenthood.
More mergers and megaclinics
Planned Parenthood has been merging a few affiliates and closing
several clinics over the past several years. Planned Parenthood said it
had 88 affiliates and 840 “health centers” in its 2009-2010 report; the
latest report for 2014-2015 indicates just 59 affiliates and 661
clinics. This alone should account for some of the decline in services.
But, with abortion numbers remaining virtually stable, what is clear
is either that most of the clinics that closed were not abortion
performing clinics or that Planned Parenthood has built giant new
mega-clinics built to take their place. The new centers do not appear to
have picked up the lost cancer screenings, but they do appear to have
kept the lucrative abortion business humming.
For the past dozen years or so, while it was closing smaller clinics,
Planned Parenthood affiliates embarked on a major building program.
They constructed more than 25 modern, high capacity
mega-clinics of 10,000 square feet or more in cities all across the
U.S. High profile projects built or underway in Houston, Texas;
Portland, Ore.; Aurora, Ill.; Fayetteville, N.C.; New Orleans, La.; St.
Paul, Minn; and others were joined by new facilities being built in
San Antonio, Texas; Spokane, Wash.; and Queens in New York City.
These are high volume regional abortion clinics where patients from
smaller Planned Parenthood satellite offices can be referred. They also
function as high profile corporate headquarters and centers for
political organizing, and mobilizing pro-abortion activists.
Planned Parenthood is more than just a “reproductive health care
provider” with a sizable and profitable abortion sideline. Their latest
annual report not only shows how abortion is a huge profit center for
their business, but is also a chief focus of Planned Parenthood’s public
and political advocacy campaigns.
Challenging pro-life, pro-woman laws
Planned Parenthood lists its advocacy on behalf of “safe and legal
abortion” as one of its top achievements in 2015 and headlines early in
the 2014-2015 annual report state that “We protected and expanded access
to abortion.”
Planned Parenthood trumpets court victories against clinic
regulations and physician requirements in Indiana, Louisiana, and
Wisconsin. These laws were designed to make sure (a) that facilities
were safe, sterile, and capable of accommodating emergency equipment or
personnel in the event of a medical emergency; and (b) to ensure that
the abortionist handling those cases could accompany his patients to
area hospitals if needed, by having admitting privileges.
In mentioning these laws, Planned Parenthood expresses no concerns
for the health and safety of women having abortions at its clinics.
Instead the report complained about how such laws “would have severely
limited the practices of abortion providers as well as abortion
facilities and made it much harder for women to access safe and legal
abortion care.”
What about that whole “pro-choice” mantra where women are supposed to
be presented with all their options? Planned Parenthood proudly
mentions that its attorneys were able to block an ultrasound law in
North Carolina that would have made sure that women visiting its clinics
were able to see an ultrasound of their unborn baby before having an
abortion.
Despite statements elsewhere that ultrasounds before abortions are
“the medical standard” to confirm gestational age (Commentary, 2/22/12),
Planned Parenthood says in the annual report that these ultrasounds
“had no medical purpose and would have only served to shame women
accessing basic health care.” If Planned Parenthood was already
performing an ultrasound, it seems the only real “danger” was that women
might change their minds, depriving Planned Parenthood of an abortion
fee.
Doing abortions without doctors
In the annual report, Planned Parenthood embraces the concept of
“webcam abortions,” celebrating a victory in the Iowa Supreme Court
which struck down regulations put in place by the Iowa Board of Medicine
that essentially banned the dangerous procedure.
Planned Parenthood protests that were such a law in effect, women in
rural areas would have to make multiple trips hundreds of miles from
home to get chemical abortions.
But Planned Parenthood chooses not to draw attention to the fact that
the women would never be physically examined by a doctor; that their
case might be managed by only a certified medical assistant with a
couple of years of community college; and that the only help they might
be able to access if they encountered problems was a visit to the local
emergency room, however far away that might be.
You also won’t find mention in the report that women taking these
chemical abortifacients have bled to death, experienced dangerous
ruptures from ectopic pregnancies, or contracted rare fatal infections.
Planned Parenthood’s California affiliates were instrumental in
helping pass a law there authorizing nurse practitioners, certified
nurse-midwives, and physician assistants to perform first trimester
surgical abortions. Planned Parenthood said this raised “abortion access
to a gold standard” and increased the number of “providers.”
Though there is no indication that new legislation expanding the
ranks of potential abortionists in California made abortion any safer
(data actually indicate it made things worse; see NRL News Today,
2/20/13), this does not stop Planned Parenthood from praising the
“advocacy work” of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California in
getting the law passed.
The truth is that abortionists are harder and harder to come by, even
in states with high abortion rates such as California. It is simply
inconsistent with medicine’s healing mandate, and good doctors don’t
want to be associated with it.
But Planned Parenthood is nothing if not adept at improvising — even
if that lowers medical standards so that they can find more (and lesser
skilled) personnel to keep their profitable abortion clinics open. No limit to the killing
For Planned Parenthood, even a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, when
medical science has demonstrated that unborn babies can feel pain, is
too much. Planned Parenthood says that “women should not have to justify
their personal medical decisions,” and that these are “complex,”
“complicated” decisions that women need to work out with their doctors,
implying these are primarily medical determinations.
But newspaper factcheckers have noted that women’s reasons for later
abortions are similar to their reasons for earlier ones, thus exposing
the special medical justification as the red herring that it is (Florida Times-Union, 10/23/15).
Planned Parenthood neglects to mention in its annual report that it
has a business interest in keeping late abortions legal. A recent count
showed at least a dozen of its clinics performing abortions at 20 weeks
or more (NRL News Today, 5/15/13).
Creating a pro-abortion culture
Planned Parenthood’s advocacy is not confined to Congress, the
courts, or clinics. Sprinkled throughout the latest annual report are
spunky references to various music, film, or rock stars, trying to make
it clear that Planned Parenthood is popular with the “in crowd.”
Various well-known celebrities tweeted messages with Planned
Parenthood’s #IStandWithPP hashtag. Planned Parenthood proudly notes
when Hollywood consults with them on films “to ensure they handled
issues related to unintended pregnancy and pregnancy options, including
abortion” accurately and sensitively.”
That “sensitivity” does not include due consideration of the sentience, the rights, and the humanity of the unborn.
The report observes that Planned Parenthood arranged for MTV’s Virgin
Territory to film at one of their clinics and that they were able to
get the very political actress, Lena Dunham, to feature a story line
“destigmatizing abortion” on her HBO show, Girls. They also partnered
with Dunham, who called those working at Planned Parenthood her
“heroes,” on her nine-city book tour.
Part of the abortion industry’s new campaign to “fight abortion
stigma” is to insist that there is nothing problematic, morally or
otherwise, about abortion. With the “1 in 3 Campaign” (so-called for a
claim that one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetimes),
Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards “led the way by sharing
her own abortion story,” thereby “amplif[ying] the voices of Planned
Parenthood patients and supporters who have had an abortion.” A more efficient killing machine
Elsewhere in the annual report, Planned Parenthood talks about how it
has streamlined patient access, making it easier to get appointments
on-line, increased clinic productivity by reducing patient wait times,
trained new affiliate CEO’s to help them “build and leverage leadership
skills,” and “helped several affiliates return to financial health to
ensure patients continued to receive the services they need.”
Though these may seem like minor administrative tweaks and technology
upgrades, these are the sorts of adjustments that help Planned
Parenthood stay economically viable as it maintains and expands its
market share.
Efforts to reach out to Latino and African American communities, on
which the organization depends for a lot of its business, are also a
critical part of Planned Parenthood’s expansion plan.
Failing to understand their opposition
Again, though this latest annual report covers the period before the
release of the videos from the Center for Medical Progress revealing
Planned Parenthood’s connection to harvesting intact fetal organs, it is
clear that this exposure has unnerved the organization.
In the opening letter, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards
and chair Jill Lafer say that Planned Parenthood has been “tested in
every way imaginable – and have emerged stronger than ever.”
They say “no one would bother attacking Planned Parenthood if we
didn’t matter. Planned Parenthood’s resilient staff and clinicians are
making a huge difference in the field of reproductive and sexual health
care and in the cultural landscape as well.”
What they fail to consider is that the problem people have with
Planned Parenthood is that they kill babies, for money, with a cavalier
indifference to unborn human life–and they have in mind to do more of
it.
Their place as the nation’s top abortion performer and promoter, and
the fact that they do what they do not only with the official blessing
of the U.S. government, but with hundreds of millions of our taxpayer
dollars, is why they have been “tested in every way.”
As the undercover videos clearly show, this commitment to abortion
not only destroys human beings, but destroys our humanity. But Planned
Parenthood is apparently committed to this cause, no matter how far down
it drags America.
Clinton warm to suggestion of nominating Barack Obama to the Supreme Court
By Dave Andrusko
President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
As I read that Hillary Clinton responded with a “wow” when a Iowan
asked if she’d consider Barack Obama for the Supreme Court, I couldn’t
help thinking back to the opening of an “exclusive” interview Mr. Obama gave POLITICO. Glenn Thrush began
Barack Obama, that prematurely gray elder statesman, is laboring
mightily to remain neutral during Hillary Clinton’s battle with Bernie
Sanders in Iowa, the state that cemented his political legend and
secured his path to the presidency.
But in a candid 40-minute interview for POLITICO’s Off Message
podcast as the first flakes of the blizzard fell outside the Oval
Office, he couldn’t hide his obvious affection for Clinton or his
implicit feeling that she, not Sanders, best understands the unpalatably
pragmatic demands of a presidency.
Quid pro quo? The former Secretary of State is probably more or less
sincere. Or, alternatively, having embraced the Obama legacy for her own
in her campaign for President, it would look rather ungrateful if she
didn’t gush at the chance to possibly reward Mr. Obama, should she
become president.
The Democratic presidential
candidate was responding to a question from a voter, who noted that the
next president probably will have several Supreme Court appointments to
make. The man wondered aloud if Obama might be one of them if Clinton
moves into the White House.
“Wow! What a great idea!” Clinton exclaimed as the crowd of 450 people roared approval and applauded.
“I’ll be sure to take that under
advisement,” she said. “I mean, he’s brilliant. He can set forth an
argument, and he was a law professor, so he’s got all the credentials.
Now, we do have to get a Democratic Senate to get him confirmed.”
She laughingly added that she wasn’t sure if he would be interested. “He may have other things to do.”
Leys then refers to an interview Obama gave to Jeffrey Toobin that appeared in 2014 in the New Yorker.
Toobin asked Obama “if, like William Howard Taft, he entertained
thoughts of serving as a judge later in his career.” [Mr. Taft, after
serving as President, later became the tenth Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court.]
Leys observes “Obama didn’t rule it out, though he voiced doubts.”
Toobin put it differently: Obama “sounded tempted by the idea.”
The New York Times put a different spin on Clinton’s remarks, noting that there was a second “wow”:
She then repeated “wow” again, as
if giving herself an extra second to think of a good answer,
considering that she has been praising Mr. Obama’s agenda and leadership
repeatedly on the campaign trail recently.
“He may have a few other things
to do, but I tell you, that’s a great idea,” Mrs. Clinton said — not
quite committing but certainly not dismissing the notion.
She then turned to the current
court, saying that “we need new justices who actually understand the
challenges we face” and wondering if some justices made decisions based
on “naïveté.”
Just guessing but I suspect none of the “some justices” was appointed by a pro-abortion Democrat.
Two challenges to ruling that sets the stage for undermining Northern Ireland’s protective abortion law
By Dave Andrusko
Northern Ireland’s attorney general, John Larkin Photograph: Press Association
When last we posted on abortion in Northern Ireland, Mr. Justice Mark
Horner had largely agreed with The Northern Ireland Human Rights
Commission that Northern Ireland’s abortion legislation breached Article
8 of the European Convention on Human Rights by not allowing for
abortions in cases of fatal fetal anomaly, rape, and incest.
However, even though Justice Horner’s decision was a blistering
denunciation of current law, delivered over the course of two hours,
when he subsequently read his final conclusion in December, Justice
Horner told a packed hearing at Belfast High Court it would be “a step
too far” for him to interpret sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against
the Person Act of 1861 to allow for abortion in these three instances.
Thus, Northern Ireland’s Parliament is not obliged to pass new
legislation on abortion, although all agreed the decision laid the
foundation for what pro-abortionists like to call a “relaxation” of the
law. The very pro-abortion BBC argued the decision “placed an onus on
the Northern Ireland Assembly to legislate on the issue.”
Northern Ireland’s Minister of Justice David Ford
Which brings us to two different but related appeals of Judge Horner’s decision.
On Monday Northern Ireland Attorney General John Larkin confirmed
that his office has launched an appeal to overturn Justice Horner’s
ruling. Back in November Larkin said he was “profoundly disappointed” by
the decision and was considering the grounds for appeal. According to
the Irish Times he is challenging the entirety of the decision.
He’s been joined by Northern Ireland’s justice minister, David Ford,
whom, according to the Irish Times is challenging specific elements of
the decision.
Ford told BBC’s Good Morning Ulster programme that “The real
danger is that the way the judgement read human rights law.” The BBC
reported, “Mr. Ford said this potentially goes ‘beyond the 1967 act as
it applies in the rest of the United Kingdom.’” (Unlike other parts of
the United Kingdom, the 1967 Abortion Act does not extend to Northern
Ireland which has a very protective abortion law.)
“David Ford said he was concerned that a lack of ‘legal certainty’
could lead inadvertently to abortion on demand,” the BBC reported.
Networks Cover Panda Cub’s Debut 26x More than March for Life
By Katie Yoder Contrary
to popular media belief, the blizzard didn’t scare pro-life marchers
away. It scared reporters away. Either that, or their allegiance to the
liberal agenda did the job.
Tens of thousands of Americans filled Washington, D.C., Friday for
the annual March for Life commemorating the nearly 60 million babies
snuffed out since 1973’s Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.
During their nationally broadcast news shows following the march (Friday
night to Monday morning) ABC, CBS and NBC totally ignored the event –
except as a casual reference to a group stranded in the snow.
At the same time, the three networks dedicated more than
nine-and-a-half minutes – 26 times more than the march – on the debut of
the National Zoo’s cub last weekend. Journalists don’t care about the
unborn, but they care about the newly born if they happen to be adorable
animals.
How dare they. There’s no denying that panda cubs are cute and
attention-worthy. But there’s something terribly wrong when the networks
devote minutes to animals, while only sparing seconds to human beings.
This year’s march was particularly relevant in light of the Center
for Medical Progress videos released last summer exposing Planned
Parenthood’s harvesting of aborted baby parts. These videos resulted in
nationwide protests, congressional hearings, state investigations as
well as a heated GOP presidential debate.
But of the networks, only ABC had anything to say about the march.
Good Morning America reported Sunday on a “group of high schoolers
trying to get back to Kentucky after visiting D.C. for the March for
Life.” That one mention amounted to 22 seconds. During
the same time period, last week (Friday evening to Monday morning),
ABC, CBS and NBC combined spent nine minutes and 36 seconds on the
public debut of the National Zoo’s new panda cub, Bei Bei.
ABC World News Saturday on Jan. 16 hyped “panda-monium” while CBS’
Sunday Morning on Jan. 17 highlighted the “dozens” that came to see Bei
Bei.
ABC and NBC also mentioned a Mass celebrated by groups stranded on
the Pennsylvania turnpike, by the way. But they couldn’t bring
themselves to say why those Catholics were on the road: for the March
for Life. NBC’s Today called them a “church group.” March for Life Media History
The broadcast networks and news outlets have long misrepresented the March for Life.
This year was no exception. The Washington Post called the 2016 March for Life “small” while The New York Times estimated “hundreds.”
There were fewer participants than years past, but tens of thousands
still attended the march, according to March for Life organizers.
“We were extremely pleased with what appeared to be tens of thousands
of Americans who came together to celebrate life today despite the
weather conditions,” said Jeanne Mancini, President of the March for
Life Education and Defense Fund, in a statement to MRC Culture. “Today
we proved our commitment to this cause, and protecting all life,
especially for the unborn.”
MRC Culture, reporting at the scene, captured those marchers on camera.
Last year, 200,000 people marched in Washington, D.C., but only CBS
mentioned the march, allotting just 15 seconds. To put that in
perspective, that was only one second for every 13,000 people who put
work, school and other obligations aside to travel from as far away as
the West Coast. That was only one second for every 3.8 million babies
aborted in the last four decades.
In 2014, the networks spent 46 seconds on the hundreds of thousands
marching in Washington, D.C. Yet, ABC, NBC and CBS spent four-and-a-half
times that on the Climate March.
Since 2013, the networks have devoted just 78 seconds to the March for Life.
Spanish-Speaking Media
According to MRC Latino, which monitors media reporting in Spanish,
Univision’s national evening newscast, Noticiero Univision, spent a mere
10 seconds covering the 2016 March for Life Friday evening.
Predictably, the mention came from within a report about the incoming
blizzard.
“The report, by correspondent Lourdes Meluzá, explicitly mentioned
the march, included images of the march, highlighted the brave souls who
marched despite the weather and interviewed a marcher whose return
travel plans are complicated because of the storm,” MRC Latino told MRC
Culture. …
Telemundo failed to mention the march.
MRC research analyst Mike Ciandella, MRC Culture staff writer Mairead
McArdle and MRC Latino director Ken Oliver-Mendez contributed to this
report. Editor’s Note: This appeared at newsbusters.org
NPR says a few kind words about CPCs before lowering the hammer
By Dave Andrusko When
a story about a crisis pregnancy center begins on a high note, you
might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief: no hit job. But, if where
the story runs is NPR, you know what they giveth with one
pinky, they’ll taketh back with a mailed fist. (Of course, the headline
kind of spills the beans–“States Fund Pregnancy Centers That Discourage Abortion” — but more about that in a second.)
NPR’s Jennifer Ludden begins by painting a very encouraging
story built around a young woman who came to a CPC when she thought she
was pregnant:
She walked into PDHC [Pregnancy
Decision Health Center] feeling ashamed of “my dirty little secret.” But
when the test came back positive, she says she felt a rush of relief
when the women at the center were happy for her.
“I remember Rita, one of the nurses, came in and she was like, ‘Oh,
congratulations, Mommy-to-be!’ And I just got on my knees and started
bawling,” she says. “And for some reason at that point it felt like
maybe this wasn’t just about me, maybe there’s another person that I
need to think about.”
The counselors at PDHC helped her to tell her parents and assisted
her to arrange for an adoption. “She says she can’t know for sure
whether she would have gone ahead with an abortion had she gone to
Planned Parenthood,” Ludden explains, “but ‘I never, ever regret the
decision I made.’”
But, having told this “happy story,” Ludden goes into overdrive to
make up for lost ground. All the recyclable arguments NARAL has tossed
out in state after state are resurrected. Since we’ve rebutted them all
innumerable times before, just two quick points.
To be fair, Ludden ends by explaining that (the best efforts of NARAL
and its allies to the contrary notwithstanding) most of the local laws
passed that treat CPCs with one standard and abortion clinics with
another have gone down in flames.
The other point is that bone in the throat for the Abortion Industry
which is the beneficiary of hundreds of millions of public and private
dollars: that some states provide some monies for CPCs or sell “Choose
Life” specialty license plates and give CPCs a small share of the
proceeds.
How can this be! NARAL et al. thunder. CPCs oughtn’t to get a penny when they (and then the list of phony baloney allegations).
When it comes to talking to women in crisis pregnancies, the Abortion
Industry wants a monopoly. And like all monopoly wannabes, they’ll do
anything to crush the competition.
By Carol Tobias, President, National Right to Life In
recent days, much of the country experienced millions of billions of
trillions of snowflakes, and more on top of that. In other words, a
countless number of snowflakes. Each snowflake is different from the
other snowflakes, never to be duplicated again. Once those snowflakes
melt, that particular design, that special creation, will never be seen
again.
In their uniqueness, human beings are like those snowflakes.
Specially designed and uniquely created. There have been billions of
human beings on this earth yet no two people are alike. You are
one-of-a-kind. You are unique. Or as some dear friends at my church
recently reminded us: you are YOU-nique.
As members of the right-to-life movement, we work against abortion
and euthanasia and assisted suicide. We do so in the service of
celebrating Life in all its beauty and uniqueness. We celebrate the
lives of our family and friends; we celebrate the lives of the elderly
and disabled who may need our help in special ways; we celebrate the new
life of each baby, born and unborn, bringing new smiles and laughter
into the world.
True, as we go about our usual routines, we can sometimes be tempted
to be discouraged by the seemingly insurmountable task ahead of us. We
know that each time a life is ended by abortion or euthanasia, a unique
and irreplaceable creation is gone.
But we continue to fight the good fight, the noble fight, the just
fight. We know that as we add more and more people to our Movement, we
have proof positive that we are changing hearts and minds.
One day the time will come when our country will look at every human
being, born or unborn, and say, “YOU are you-nique.” And why? Because
each and every unique pro-lifer never wavered.
More evidence pro-abortion Hillary Clinton is very nervous about Iowa
By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortion Sen. Bernie Sanders and pro-abortion former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Let’s see if one set of facts explains the latest hysteria from
Hillary Clinton and her sisterhood of pro-abortion advocacy groups. The
following is from today’s Des Moines Register, the leading newspaper in Iowa, seven days away from the first presidential caucuses. Tony Leys writes
A recent Iowa Poll found that
Clinton and [rival Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie] Sanders were
splitting the support of Democrats who backed Obama in 2008. Of those
who supported Obama then and intend to caucus Feb. 1, 41 percent
supported Sanders and 39 percent supported Clinton, the poll found. The
same poll showed Clinton’s once-commanding lead among likely Democratic
caucus participants had almost evaporated. She was at 42 percent to
Sanders’ 40 percent.
As many (okay all) have noted, this has that deja vu all over again
feeling about it. Just as was the case in 2008, Clinton’s seemingly
insurmountable lead is melting away. What to do?
Ratchet up their attack on Sanders, whose voting record (he says) is
100% pro-abortion. On what grounds? As best I can tell, the attack is
two-fold.
To call the NARALs and the EMILY Lists part of the dreaded
“Establishment” is a kind of subtle sexism—a lament that is as familiar
as it is tiresome.
But given that imaginary opening, Clinton’s allies argue that Sanders
isn’t as true-blue a “progressive” as Clinton is. “It was a real
wake-up call for folks that he probably wasn’t where he needed to be in
this fight,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
So, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Hogue and the heads of the five
families, aka like-minded pro-abortion feminist organizations backing
Clinton to the hilt, announced that Sanders wasn’t as aggressive as
Clinton was in calling for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.
In response, Sanders dutifully chimed in with a statement Friday,
saying “Women must have full control over their reproductive health in
order to have full control over their lives.”
Leys notes
In Iowa, NARAL’s average member
is a young woman in her 30s — the very demographic that tends to support
Sanders, despite Clinton’s strength with older women.
Leys ends with the unsurprising observing that Clinton’s final weeks in Iowa
have been punctuated by events
tailored at reaching younger women. Over the past week, she visited two
college campuses, including one event with pop singer Demi Lovato. And
after speaking at an event with NARAL in New Hampshire, she will
campaign with Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s president, on
Sunday.
The question, obviously, is could anyone be so naïve as to think that
Clinton’s flailing about is evidence of a genuine disagreement between
pro-abortionists instead of what it is–desperation
On Friday, on the 43rd anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade
decision, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) filed a
friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Texas
against a challenge to the state’s quality standards for abortion
providers–Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole. Texas requires, as do
many states, that abortionists have hospital admitting privileges and
that abortion clinics meet the same standards as other ambulatory
surgery clinics.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas laws.
Key to the case is the level of scrutiny federal courts should apply
to decide if such laws are constitutional. The NRLC brief addressed the
Court’s “undue burden” scrutiny, explaining that the Fifth Circuit
correctly followed that applicable test.
The brief put the undue-burden test in the context of the Supreme
Court’s early adoption of the role of national medical board, in which
it substituted its judgment for that of legislatures in striking
quality-control regulations of abortion providers. It did this though it
originally said, in Roe v. Wade (1973), that states could enact such regulation.
The brief then explained how Justice O’Connor argued in her dissent
in Akron (1983) that the Court should adopt a more deferential
undue-burden test. The brief noted that NRLC submitted a
friend-of-the-court brief in Casey (1992), stating what would be
necessary to make an undue-burden test workable.
In Casey, the Court adopted key aspects of that approach, in a
decision that Justice O’Connor co-authored. Casey’s lower-scrutiny, more
deferential, undue-burden test got the Court out of the medical-board
role.
The NRLC brief explained that the nature of the undue-burden test from Casey must be understood in light of Justice O’Connor’s understanding of it in her Akron dissent. The brief showed that Casey’s
undue-burden test, properly understood, supports the Fifth Circuit’s
analysis. And it explained that the concerns that caused the Court to
reaffirm Roe generally in Casey while abandoning the
medical-board role by greater deference require the Court to not abandon
the proper understanding of the undue-burden test (unless the Court
wants to overrule Roe).
James Bopp, Jr., NRLC’s General Counsel and co-author of NRLC’s brief here and in Casey, comments: “After striking many reasonable medical regulations, the Supreme Court decided to abandon the medical-board role in Casey.
It did so with a lower-scrutiny, undue-burden test. The Texas
challengers want the Court to again be the national medical board by
reviving strict scrutiny. That would damage the rule of law and the
Court’s legitimacy.”
The case is Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole (15-274). Briefs are available here and here.
Remember
when being a feminist required nothing more than believing in equality
between the sexes? Oh, wait — no, feminism over the past half century or
so has revolved around much more than that. These days, you have to
pass a litmus test before you’re allowed in the feminism cool kids club,
and the biggest requirement is that you must be a fanatical,
diehard supporter of abortion. The latest example is Dr. Jen Gunter, who
is furious at Vox for publishing a post titled “Why I’m a pro-life feminist,” by Claire Swinarski.
Obviously, it’s horrible for any outlet, anywhere, to publish an
op-ed that Gunter doesn’t personally agree with, so there’s that major
offense. And on top of that, according to Gunter, you can’t be a feminist and be pro-life.
Given the ever increasing erosion of
abortion rights and the fact that 2015 brought a banner year of
criminalizing pregnant women one would have thought that focusing on
facts instead of propaganda would be the ethical thing to do. Claire
Swinarski, the writer, is allowed to have her opinion (no matter how
ill-informed, patronizing, or steeped in the swill of patriarchy it may
be), but Vox certainly doesn’t have to publish it on the anniversary of
Roe v. Wade. And yes Vox also published a piece on post Roe
restrictions, but here’s the thing, it’s the lies and half-truths and
propaganda wrapped up in the illusion of “helping to keep women safe”
that have contributed to this erosion of Roe so it’s a bit ironic to see
the two side by side.
With that in mind I want to take a minute
or two to explain why being *cough* pro-life means you are anything but
a feminist. When I say pro-life I don’t mean what you would do when
faced with the decision about your own pregnancy, I mean imposing your
view on others. Like the author on Vox thinks is the right thing to do.
For feminism.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Hey, you know who would be really, really surprised to find out that
you can’t be a feminist and also be pro-life? Every first-wave feminist
ever. You know, the women who believed in equality and fought for the
right to vote? Yeah, them. Women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B.
Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (pictured), Louisa May Alcott… they abhorred abortion. Susan B. Anthony famously said of abortion:
Guilty? Yes no matter what the motive,
love of ease, or desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the
woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her
conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh! Thrice
guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers,
indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her
to the crime.
The number of pro-life feminists
is truly staggering. But thank goodness we have Jen Gunter to tell us
that all of these feminists were wrong for being pro-life, and because
they didn’t totally love abortion, they weren’t really feminists either.
Who needs silly things like the right to vote or the ability to own
property? All women need is abortion! That’s what really matters.
Funnily enough, the feminist movement’s approval of abortion can be
traced back to men, not women. As Feminists for Life president Serrin
Foster pointed out in an interview with Live Action News,
Larry Later and Bernard Nathanson were key players in pushing abortion
onto second-wave feminists. Women willingly went along, and we now have
the bastardized movement that we all know and loathe today, which calls
itself feminist.
Today, feminists insist that women walk in lockstep.
They insist women must think the same way and support the same things.
Feminism isn’t about equality anymore; if it was, then pro-life
feminists would be eagerly welcomed. Instead, being pro-abortion is
required, despite the fact that a majority of women are pro-life. Susan B. Anthony
It’s men who are more pro-abortion than pro-life, and why not? First,
it allows them to have sex without consequences. They can sleep with a
woman, get her pregnant, and have no responsibility whatsoever. They
don’t have to deal with raising a baby or paying child support, and they
also don’t have to be faced with going through the trauma of having an
abortion, with all of its risks.
Everything is pushed onto the woman to endure, while men can, if they
so choose, get off virtually scot-free, thanks to abortion. Second, men
who may otherwise dislike abortion feel obligated to support it, because
being openly pro-life can lead to demonization from today’s so-called
“feminists,” who deride these pro-life men as anti-woman. (Remember what
Susan B. Anthony said about men driving women into abortions? Imagine
how she’d react to this.)
Yet again, we see that the pro-choice movement is anything but. For
them, there is only one choice, and that is abortion. Women do not have
the choice to become pro-life, according to modern feminists. They don’t
have the choice to look at a complex issue such as abortion and come to
their own conclusions — no, women like Jen Gunter evidently feel that
they should be allowed to dictate women’s opinions for them. And in the
process, they’ve turned their backs on what so many of the original
feminists believed in and fought for. What exactly is feminist about
that?
Pro-abortion outlets including Gawker, Jezebel, Raw Story, and ThinkProgress
are ganging up on Carly Fiorina for a mix-up at the Iowa Right to Life
Presidential Forum, which was held at the Greater Des Moines Botanical
Garden. A preschool field trip was going on there at the same time, and
it seems Fiorina invited several of the children to sit on stage while
the rally was going on. Some parents have expressed anger at Fiorina for
allegedly pressuring their kids, who were as young as four and five, to
take part in the event and be exposed to the heavy, disturbing subject
of abortion.
For the record, Fiorina’s campaign disputes that version of events. A
spokesperson first said simply, “We were happy that these children
chose to come to Carly’s event with their adult supervisor,” then on
Thursday deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores released an extended
explanation (which only ThinkProgress has bothered to update their
story with)…
In Des Moines yesterday, a group of
preschoolers along with their parents and teachers followed Carly right
into the event she was speaking at for Iowa Right to Life. Earlier,
she’d run into the kids in the Botanical Gardens and watched the koi
with them for a while. I guess the kids must have thought she was pretty
neat because then their teachers and parents and the kids all followed
Carly into the event complete with Carly stickers.
Considering that Live Action routinely catches all four of these
sites peddling egregious falsehoods and Fiorina turned out to be telling
the truth the last time pro-aborts accused her of lying, it’s pretty safe to guess which side has more credibility.
It’s certainly possible that there was a communication breakdown in
terms of where the school group thought they were headed, and the
chaperones erred in deciding to follow a political candidate to a
political event without getting the permission of parents that weren’t
present, but a certain degree of confusion is to be expected when
political events happen at public venues where people are present for
other purposes—regrettable, but hardly the end of the world.
But for the sake of argument, let’s temporarily suppose Carly’s
attackers are right, that she saw a random group of children passing by
and pounced to pressure them into a photo op, without the slightest
regard for the kids’ peace of mind or the parents’ decision. Such a move
would be an encroachment on parental rights that no pro-lifer should
defend.
Abortion is an ugly, horrifying subject, and as important as it is
for everyone to understand it eventually, we can’t presume to know when
and whether other people’s children are ready to handle that level of
darkness. It is ultimately up to every parent to decide when and how to
broach the subject with their children.
Indeed, our side is the champion of parental rights in this debate,
so it’s more than a little ludicrous to see pro-aborts lecturing Fiorina
about this alleged offense while they routinely defend far more
egregious interference in how parents raise their kids.
After all, they’re the ones who vigorously oppose
laws requiring parents to have a say in—or even to know about—their
teenage daughter having an abortion. They’re the ones who support health
programs intentionally hiding teens’ sexual activity from their parents. They’re the ones who aren’t bothered to see Planned Parenthood explicitly tell kids
that “despite what your parents and teachers say,” knowing about sex is
way more important than understanding math or chemistry, or teach teens
and younger a whole array
of pro-promiscuity lessons about “sex play,” “embracing the slut
label,” and even deliberately hiding one’s HIV status from a sex
partner.
But no, none of that is worth an uproar. The real crime is that some
kids at a botanical garden saw what a developing preborn baby looks
like. The horror.
Parental rights are under attack, but not by Carly Fiorina. It is the
abortion lobby and its fans who want to cut Mom and Dad out of the
equation and force their demented values on America’s kids. Big Choice
is a menace to children outside of the womb as well as within.
(IAmUntold)
A single mom with no support system and faced with a second pregnancy.
As I walked through the doors of a place that I thought would help me
find the solution to my “problem,” I found a much different answer, but
one that brought joy to more than just me.
I had a very difficult and unloving childhood. I was the victim of
sexual assault and I did not finish high school. I was unemployed and
struggled with mental health issues. I had a child I was determined to
raise, but parenting was challenging for me. I was a loving and
attentive parent to my son, but I was a single mother with no support
from anyone.
Marcy’s birth daughter
When my son was only five months old, I became pregnant again.
My first thought was to have an abortion. I didn’t see any possible
way I could parent another child. I went to a local Care Net crisis
pregnancy center thinking about getting an abortion. At Care Net I was
reassured that terminating the pregnancy was not my only option. I did
not fully realize what happened during an abortion. Once I was educated
on what it meant to have an abortion, I knew I couldn’t go through with
it. I decided that adoption was the best option for both me and my baby
and I was referred to Bethany Christian Services.
I looked through profiles of prospective adoptive families and one
stood out to me. I prayed and asked God to guide me and He kept
directing me to one particular family. When we met for the first time, I
shared with the family that I wanted my daughter’s middle name to be
“Faith.” I told them, “I need to have faith to give her up and trust
you.” The couple then shared that if they had a daughter someday, they
were already planning to give her the middle name of “Faith.” That was
the sign to me that God was bonding us together.
I received on-going support during the adoption process. My Bethany
caseworker took me to all of my prenatal appointments and watched my
young son while I saw the doctor. I joined a women’s Bible study and my
faith grew.
When my daughter was born, I spent time early on caring for her and
invited the adoptive parents to stay at the hospital and spend time with
her as well. While it was not an easy process, I followed through with
the adoption plan. A month after the baby was born, I got a job. A few
months later, I moved to an apartment in a safer neighborhood. As a
result, I was better able to care for my son.
Today, I have a positive, open relationship with the adoptive family
and it brings me joy to see how well my birth daughter is doing. I
believe adoption is the best of both worlds. I gave my daughter a better
life than I could give her and I gave this gift to two people who can’t
have children. I still see her and she’s always going to know me. She
has a mom and dad who love her to death.
She’s always smiling and I can tell she’s very happy. I have peace with my decision, and I consider her a blessing.
“But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.” 2 CHRONICLES 15:7 Editor’s Note: Original story shared on IAMUNTOLD.ORG
– please visit the site to view the music video of UNTOLD, by Matthew
West, along with other stories and resources. Story is reprinted here
with permission.
It would be a very
sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction
which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his
hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by
his arrangement of their weight and quantity.
Those are some of the most sobering words I’ve ever read. A month
ago, I could not have known their depth nor their weight. Now I can.
Here is the story of how we lost a daughter, and gained so much more.
The question people love to ask when you tell them (or they see) that the woman you’re with is pregnant is almost universally, what are you having?
It’s a reasonable question, of course, because what you’re having
(girl, boy, twins or more) affects the trajectory of your life almost as
much as the fact you’re having a child to begin with.
My wife, Jen, and I like to be surprised by what we’re having. It
adds a little punch to the birth itself (not that Jen would agree births
need any extra “punch”). It was something we were certainly looking
forward to this time around. We already have one boy and one girl so
(for me anyway) there wasn’t the twinge of wanting a boy like there was
during our first biological birth.
Both our boy and our girl are special to me in different ways. Boys
are tumultuous and uninhibited. Girls are unfailingly sweet and equally
dramatic. I love them both deeply. I was simply thrilled about finding
out which we were adding to our family of (soon-to-be) five. The closer
we got to the due date, the more excited I realized I was.
The last thing I wrote in my journal before our unborn baby died three weeks ago was this:
I’m getting really
excited about baby No. 3. Really excited. I finally read the birth book
and I realized how curious I am to find out the gender. I could not be
more enthralled with that right now. I’m also hopeful Jen’s labor will
be swift and steady.
That was on a Monday morning. Two hours later, Jen told me she hadn’t felt the baby move all morning. She was 36 weeks pregnant.
* * * * *
Our pastor, Matt Chandler, always says: “Your life can change with
one phone call. You’re not exempt.” The problem is that I always thought
I was. I thought my friends were, too. This is an illusion, of course,
and about 100 minutes later I got that phone call from my wife, who said
the midwife wanted her to get a sonogram because she couldn’t find the
baby’s heart.
If we’re being honest, we didn’t need the sonogram. It was a
formality. We both already knew. We both knew as we drove to the
hospital. We both knew as they put her in a wheelchair. We both knew as
they went through two sonogram machines thinking one was broken. The
doctor didn’t even need to say it, but she did anyway. Two words that
change the rest of your life. There might not be two more devastating
words. No heartbeat.
All of the emotions.
* * * * *
Our friends, family, and church were spectacularly gracious in the
days that followed. It’s impossible for me to stress that enough. They
were unbelievable. The weight was not ours alone to shoulder, which made
tasting the unfolding nightmare at least palatable.
John Piper once wrote that he “loves the ready tears of strong men.” I
now have some old T-shirts that would agree with him. My friends came
and held me, and we wept. Their wives came and held my wife, too. It was
a spectacular outpouring of God’s grace in giving us deep and enduring
friendships.
These friends with whom we had built up 1,000 or 3,000 common days
bore a part of our burden. I’m not sure how we would’ve moved forward
without them, and without their prayer. The Lord sustained us
throughout. We certainly did not sustain ourselves.
* * * * *
The morning after we got the news, we sat in our car at the hospital
with our friend (and labor and delivery nurse) Andrea, about to go talk
to the doctor about how to get our baby out. All three of us wept softly
as she prayed over us.
That day felt like a thousand days condensed into 24 hours. So much
of it is blurry, and yet so many moments are etched into a layer of my
mind and heart reserved for the handful of days in our lives which are
not mundane.
Filling out paperwork in the doctor’s office that felt like taking
the SAT. A long walk with a great friend around the medical center.
Weeping with our pastors. Lunch with Jen and Andrea (who stayed with us
all day) while balancing on the massive bouncy birth balls littered
about the delivery room.
The anesthesiologist coming in like Mike from Breaking Bad. No words,
just business. Jen asking if she had elephantiasis after getting the
epidural. It was the slowest fastest day I’ve ever had.
It was also the most emotional. Before leaving for the hospital early
that morning, Jen said, “God willing, this is the hardest day we’ll
ever go through.” You always feel like you’ve emptied yourself of the
emotion, and it just keeps coming. It is exhausting.
Jen was monumental, though. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how
wonderful she was the entire week. I was (mostly) a disaster. A mess of
tears and emotions and intense pain. She was calm and confident. In the
Lord. In herself. And in me. Our marriage may have been pronounced five
years ago, but it was seared into my heart during this week.
She eventually gave birth to our not-breathing child. The doctor
showed me the gender. I looked down at my wife and told her. We had a
girl. We named her Kate Noelle. Jen grabbed her out of the doctor’s
hands.
“Oh, my baby, my baby. She’s beautiful.”
* * * * *
Stillborn births are not necessarily unique. That doesn’t dull the
sting or erase the pain, but it at least reminds you many parents have
walked this path. My mom had a stillborn child. Some of our friends’
parents did too. One out of every 115 pregnancies ends with a stillborn.
We don’t want to cry out “Why us?” when this is so common to so many.
Instead, we want to say “Yes, us—and thank you to everyone else before
us for walking this path with grace.”
There is a couple from our church, Ben and Ashley Barr, whose son
Thomas died in a similar fashion in the exact same hospital room, just
one week before. They had literally walked the path we walked, and they walked it well. We took great hope in such great faithfulness.
* * * * *
Jen asked what my lasting memory from the day of Kate’s birth was.
There are many. One that sticks out is walking with Andrea from the
delivery room to the hospital waiting room after Kate was born to face
our friends, families, and kids.
“You married a great woman,” she said. “I know,” I replied.
We walked in silence. A thousand-yard stare and a million-mile walk.
We finally rounded the corner. I looked for my kids, but found my
parents. The background was a myriad of people and tears. I think I saw
our pastor on his knees. “We had a girl.” I could barely get the words
out. “She’s so pretty.”
We got to introduce Kate to her brother and sister. We got to read as
a family and had Hannah sing our EFGs (in lieu of our ABCs). Hannah and
Jude got to pray for baby. We told them baby was going to live with
Jesus.
Hannah could not have been prouder. Jude gave some questionable
pat-pats to Kate, as he is prone to do. They loved her as much as they
love each other. Of all the griefs we had, the toughest is probably not
being able to give them something they had been looking forward to for
months.
They didn’t understand, but someday they will, and we wanted to have
photos and moments to point to to remind them. I told my friend Josh I
don’t want to protect my kids from difficult things. I don’t want them
to only know good moments. I don’t want them to only see our good side,
because they will be mightily disappointed when they leave home. Both in
us and by how the world actually works.
One of our greatest joys the entire week was sharing these fleeting minutes with our momentary family of five.
Jen and I also got to spend a night in the hospital with our child.
The juxtaposition of desperately needing to sleep and not wanting to
waste the minutes you have left before you never see your kid again is a
strong one. I slept fitfully. Everyone in hospitals does. I held Kate
close while her mom rested. It was a good time. One I’m thankful we had.
It was also a bittersweet night, knowing we’d never physically lay eyes on our daughter again. But Psalm 139:16 says the Lord has already numbered all our days.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every
one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was
none of them.
I’ve received about 11,500 of them thus far. Kate only received about
250. That seems unfair. But the Lord wasn’t surprised when she passed
away, and we take comfort in knowing that.
* * * * *
As we prepared to go home the next day, more friends visited and held
our girl. More tears. But also a joyful farewell knowing we would see
her again someday.
I asked Andrea to come back to the hospital. I’ve known Andrea off
and on since we were in elementary school. She is a terrific friend. I
never thought I would be texting her as an adult to come help us say
goodbye to our baby. Jen wanted to put Kate in Andrea’s arms. Nobody
else.
I told Jen her job was done and that she had done it well. It was
finished. That brought peace. We kissed her face and whispered, “See you
soon, sweet girl.”
* * * * *
Driving home from the hospital without a child is not a trek I hope
anyone else reading this ever has to take. It is a sad and brutal thing.
All you want is to hear the thing you’ve found yourself trying to
escape the last few years: a screaming child.
We rested for a day and went to the funeral home on Thursday. There
are only a couple of reasons 30-year-olds walk into funeral homes. None
of them are good. This one least of all.
We ripped through the minutia. It was surreal. Picking flowers for your baby’s casket. Picking a casket for your baby. My
gosh. We chose four white roses representing each member of our family
to lay around Kate’s casket for the memorial. We picked a burial plot.
That destroyed me.
She would be buried next to Thomas. She shared a delivery room with
him. Now she shares a resting place. Jen found great joy in this.
* * * * *
The memorial was on a Saturday morning. I read a letter I had written
about the week. I didn’t think I could get through it. The Lord
continued to sustain, though. I looked out over 50 or 75 of our dearest
friends and family, and tried my best to preach what we had learned from
the week. Here’s part of what I read: Hebrews 5:8
reminds us that Jesus learned obedience from suffering. We have felt
the weight of that verse this week, and testify that it is good. We lost
Kate, but we got more of God, and it is a sweet thing.
There is no bitterness among us. How could there be? We aren’t even
promised tomorrow. We are sustained here on Earth in the expanse of the
universe only by God’s words. We are owed nothing.
We are instead grateful to have met Kate. To have shared half a day
with her. For Jen to have shared eight months with her. That is a gift!
It is nothing else. And while Jen wanted Kate to meet her and see her
face and feel her embrace, we rejoice that she saw Jesus first.
* * * * *
I’ve always enjoyed the spotlight to a degree. I think everyone does
in some way. That feels like a pretty personal thing to admit, but I’m
also writing about the loss of a child, so I guess we’re beyond that.
This was a week when I both embraced and loathed the spotlight.
I embraced it because I was glad to shine a light on our Lord, and I
loathed it because I really, really wish I didn’t need to in this way.
The last of these spotlight moments was carrying my child’s casket
from the hearse to the grave. I spoke with our pastor a few hours before
that. He stared me in the eyes and told me that, as her father, I
wouldn’t regret putting her casket in the ground.
I shook as I stood in the road 25 yards from her resting place and
stared at a casket the size of a wastebasket, with 15 sets of eyes
staring at the back of my head. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to
disappear. I wanted to wake up.
Eventually, I lowered my six-pound child six feet in the ground with a
pair of straps that looked like they should have been corralling boxes
in the bed of our truck when we moved to our next house.
I had to get down on my knees and then lay on my chest to reach far
enough in to release the casket. We buried Kate with some of our
favorite things. Books, pictures and drawings from the kids. We wept
over the grave and laid four roses on her buried casket (even the one
Hannah destroyed at the memorial).
* * * * *
Putting a baby in the ground changes you. I don’t know how it
couldn’t. We went back to the church, and I found one of those strong
men I mentioned earlier. He held me again and told me things would never
be the same for any of us. He’s right.
A 19th-century hymnist named Horatio Spafford knew the feelings we
felt that day. Spafford and his wife lost four daughters when their ship
crossing the Atlantic sank. He then wrote what might be the most famous
hymn of all time. We sang it at the memorial. The first verse crushes.
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
On our way home from the memorial and burial, Jen told me she felt
like she’d never worshiped like she did at Kate’s memorial. She’d never
had this much on the table.
In our 30-plus years on Earth, we have almost exclusively known great
gifts and a rich life. I said this at the memorial, but we have a good life. We have tremendous friends, enjoy our work, and delight in our children.
For a lot of us (myself included), Christianity has come easy.
There’s been no suffering. There’s been no pain. There have been few
questions. There’s been no reason to not trust God and to not call
ourselves Christians.
And now there is.
Now we have known unimaginable depths. The sorrow that flowed that
week is an unspeakable thing. And we can truthfully say the Lord is good
in both the joy and the sorrow, if not greater in the sorrow. That was
what we tried to point to all week.
That we do not hope in our children. That we do not hope in each
other. That we do not hope in our friends or our families or in anything
outside the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. That is all. In
Christ alone. This was a wild reminder of that. One we didn’t want, but
always need.
My friend Nathan said that until that week, loving the Lord amid
sorrow this deep was only a theory for many of us. Putting a baby in the
ground makes it real. And not just for us. Our friends mourned deeply
with us, which was as rich a reminder as I’ve ever had of God’s purpose
in ordaining a deep community of friends.
Peter would call all of this sanctification:
In this you rejoice,
though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by
various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more
precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be
found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus
Christ. (1 Pet. 1:6–8)
If I’m honest with myself, this is a good thing for me. Would I
choose this path? Never. Would I choose any part of it for myself or
anyone I’ve ever met in my life? No. But it is ultimately good for me
and for my family, and that’s a really difficult thing to admit.
* * * * *
This is why I say we lost a child (a baby!), and gained everything.
Christ is everything, or he is nothing. We lost so much, but gained so
much more. We got so much more of the Lord than we ever had before. We
got more of the Lord than I knew was possible for a human to get.
It’s hard to describe what I mean when I say we got more of God. That
is an ambiguous thing, I realize. We all saw it on each other’s faces,
though. The Lord was near. We all shared a lot of joy and peace that
week that wasn’t man-made. It was sweet. It was a deeply spiritual week.
Probably the most spiritual of our lives.
Life that week was so thick and so rich that it barely resembled all
the other weeks I’ve experienced. And the goodness in all of this (and a
sign of God’s spectacular grace to us) is that the only constant we
knew that week is that God is still good and his grace and love roll
deeper than we will ever know. He is sufficient, but he is also beyond
sufficient. He is good enough to give us more of himself, no matter the
circumstance. James 1:17 says this:
Every good gift and
every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights
with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
Jen says that means our faith must not waver because God didn’t
change. He didn’t waver. The only thing that has changed is how much of
him we carry with us. We lost sweet Kate, but we got so much of the
Lord. Not in spite of, but because of her.
Don’t mistake what I’m saying here. We lost a lot. We lost a child. It
is every parent’s deepest fear and greatest nightmare. I honestly
can’t, off the top of my head, think of anything worse in terms of sheer
traumatic force applied to two married adults. But we gained even more
than we lost. This is a bittersweet reality. One too complex for me to
understand in full.
A pastor named Dave Zuleger once observed this about suffering:
Suffering is one of
the great instruments in God’s hands to continue to reveal to us our
dependence on him and our hope in him. God is good to give us the
greatest gift he can give us, which is more of himself, and he’s good
however he chooses to deliver that gift.
We can now testify to the truth in these words.
We have two healthy kids and one on the way. God is good. We have two
healthy kids and the one on the way has died. And God is even greater
than we thought he was.
* * * * *
So now we move on. But we move on as vastly different people than we
were before. All of us. Not just Jen and me. Our friends, our families,
everyone who was involved. We have been grateful for that. Not only
that could our burden be divvied up, but that the Lord would mature us
and those around us because of this.
My friend Josh sat with us in the delivery room a few hours after
Kate was born and confessed amid many tears that he’d never longed for
heaven like he had on that day. I thought that was a compelling and
honest confession. One I tearfully agreed with and tucked away.
I’ve always found heaven to be a strange thing. Or rather my
relationship with heaven. It seems like a place we should long for more
than we do given how twisted and disturbing the planet we live on is.
And yet, I like it here. I really do. C. S. Lewis would say I prefer mud
pies.
That’s not something I’m proud of. It’s also something I’m hopeful
will change as I continue to accept the reality that sweet Kate is there
(and not here) forever. And it’s already started. Heaven is more at the
forefront of my life because of that week. We’ve talked about it more.
It’s a place I think about. It’s a place I want to be.
Not to see the girl I lost, although that will be a good thing. But
it is a pale and pathetic thing compared to seeing in full the God who
willingly chose that which I would never dream of choosing. I want to
meet my daughter, yes, but what I really long for is to meet the Father
who gave his Son. Editor’s Note: Permission to print granted by the author and The Gospel Coalition, where this article appeared on January 7, 2016.
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say that 2015 was not the year Planned Parenthood dreamed of would be
putting it mildly. The release of a series of undercover videos that
showed high-level executives haggling over the price of intact fetal
livers, kidneys, and lungs brought a firestorm of outrage and launched
congressional investigations. It required a presidential veto to prevent
a redirection of most of PPFA’s funding to community health centers. In
a word 2015 was more like a nightmare for the nation biggest abortion
performer and promoter.
Contrary
to popular media belief, the blizzard didn’t scare pro-life marchers
away. It scared reporters away. Either that, or their allegiance to the
liberal agenda did the job.
During
the same time period, last week (Friday evening to Monday morning),
ABC, CBS and NBC combined spent nine minutes and 36 seconds on the
public debut of the National Zoo’s new panda cub, Bei Bei.
March for Life Media History
When
a story about a crisis pregnancy center begins on a high note, you
might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief: no hit job. But, if where
the story runs is NPR, you know what they giveth with one
pinky, they’ll taketh back with a mailed fist. (Of course, the headline
kind of spills the beans–“
In
recent days, much of the country experienced millions of billions of
trillions of snowflakes, and more on top of that. In other words, a
countless number of snowflakes. Each snowflake is different from the
other snowflakes, never to be duplicated again. Once those snowflakes
melt, that particular design, that special creation, will never be seen
again.
On Friday, on the 43rd anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade
decision, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) filed a
friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Texas
against a challenge to the state’s quality standards for abortion
providers–Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole. Texas requires, as do
many states, that abortionists have hospital admitting privileges and
that abortion clinics meet the same standards as other ambulatory
surgery clinics.
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