Obama

 

Obama’s Trifecta of terrible headlines

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-abortion President Barack Obama

Put yourself in President Obama’s shoes and you read these headlines:
“Pres. Obama’s Approval Rating Drops To All-time Low In New Jersey”
“Only 36 percent of Democratic candidates have expressed support for Obamacare”
“Obama’s Pass-the-Buck Presidency”
It’s enough to make you want to play 36 holes of golf, not just 18. Let’s fill in a few of the details.
The numbers in the Monmouth University/Asbury Park Press poll are bad enough among all adults in New Jersey, but even worse among registered voters. Of the latter, “[J]ust 41% approve compared to 54% who disapprove. That’s the president’s lowest rating since he took office in January 2009.”
And there is no gender gap. “Fifty-percent of the state’s women currently disapprove of the job Pres. Obama is doing, compared to 46% who didn’t approve back in June.”
What about ObamaCare and Democrats running for Congress this fall? The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake writes

“According to an extensive new research paper from the Brookings Institution’s Elaine C. Kamarck and Alexander R. Podkul, only 36 percent of Democrats running for Congress this year have expressed a position in support of Obamacare.

“Another quarter (25.5 percent) of Democrats have offered a nuanced position that wasn’t clearly in support of the law or against it, while 1 percent outright opposed it and 37 percent have offered no opinion.”

Blake concludes, “For Democrats on the campaign trail, though, supporting Obamacare isn’t really their deal.”

But it gets worse. The National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar just crushes the President. Start with the subhead: “The president has a pattern of deflecting blame and denying responsibility,” and then his opening paragraph:

“In attempting to downplay the political damage from a slew of second-term controversies, President Obama has counted on the American people having a very short memory span and a healthy suspension of disbelief. The time-tested strategy for Obama: Claim he’s in the dark about his own administration’s activities, blame the mess on subordinates, and hope that with the passage of time, all will be forgotten. Harry Truman, the president isn’t. He’s more likely to pass the buck.”

[President Truman is famous for having a sign on his White House desk which read, “The buck stops here.”]

Kraushaar then cites a partial list (a complete list would take pages) of instances where the President passed the buck/said he wasn’t informed/just learned about [whatever the crisis is] from press accounts.
To borrow from another Democratic President, John F. Kennedy, what Kraushaar calls “[T]he administration’s blame, deny, and wait-it-out communications strategy” is not exactly a profile in courage.

Source: NRLC News

Sex Selection Abortions

 

Debunking the debunkers: sex-selective abortions do happen in the United States

By Dave Andrusko
Two weeks ago NRL News Today posted a story derived from a fine column written by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders that thoroughly debunked the nonsense behind a proposal by Supervisor David Chiu to make San Francisco the first American city to oppose any ban on sex-selection abortions.
I talked briefly about the evidence Saunders adduced to show that there are sex-selection abortions in the United States (as I have done several times before in other stories). However I subsequently failed to talk about a brilliant piece written by Rachel Lu (“The United States Has A Femicide Problem”) that turned a brand-new study that purported to show sex-selective abortions don’t happen in the United States on its head. As Ms. Lu wrote, the study “instead confirms the opposite.”
It’s a very well thought out argument that should be read in its entirety. Here are a few of the highlights.

Lu reminds us that sex-selective abortions, while most commonly associated with China and (increasingly) India and Singapore, other nations, such as Great Britain, are admitting they have a similar dilemma. (Of late we’ve written about the situation in Great Britain many times, most recently here.]

There was evidence, even before the newest study which purported to prove there wasn’t sex-selective abortions in the U.S., that they are occurring. As NRLC discussed back in 2012

Dr. Sunita Puri and three other researchers at the University of California interviewed “65 immigrant Indian women in the United States who had pursued fetal sex selection.” They wrote: “We found that 40% of the women interviewed had terminated prior pregnancies with female fetuses and that 89% of women carrying female fetuses in their current pregnancy pursued an abortion.” This powerful study discusses in detail the multiple forms of pressure and outright coercion to which such women are often subjected: “Forty women (62%) described verbal abuse from their female in laws or husbands. . . . One-third of women described past physical abuse and neglect related specifically to their failing to produce a male child.” As a result, “women reported having multiple closely spaced pregnancies with terminations of female fetuses under pressure to have a male child.” (“‘There is such a thing as too many daughters, but not too many sons’,” Social Science & Medicine 72 (2011), 1169-1176)

Another study examined American-born offspring of foreign-born Chinese, Korean, and Indian parents. According to Lu

“the really significant finding concerned third births in families who already had two daughters. Among these children, there were 151 boys for every 100 girls. Almond and Edlund drew the obvious conclusion: when expecting for the third time, a significant number of Asian parents preferred an abortion to a third daughter.”

What about the new study–“Replacing Myths with Facts: Sex Selective Laws in the United States”? It’s been hailed as bigger and better and disproving (hence the “myths” language) that there are sex selective abortions here at home. That was the “takeaway” trumpeted by the usual suspects. Only it wasn’t true.

This was obscured because, as Lu writes, the authors “bur[ied] the single most important piece of information in a forest of far-less-relevant facts, graphs, and meanderings about methodology.”
She notes

“It’s got to be frustrating when you bring together a lot of important-sounding organizations to do a big, splashy study, and it ends up confirming the piece of data that most sticks in your craw. But now that we’ve descended to throwing around accusations of racism, I think the truth should be spoken. Asian-born American parents with two daughters are significantly more likely to have a son for their third child. Combined with Puri’s qualitative study, and ample data confirming the use of sex-selective abortion in some Asian cultures, that constitutes strong evidence that it also happens here in the United States.”

Lu adds (tongue in cheek?), “My compliments to the University of Chicago for confirming this with their new, comprehensive study.”
Of course, the last thing the authors of this study and others of a similar ilk will concede is what the evidence tells anyone willing to read it. But assuming they did, what do they do with it? The options are not promising.

“America is a big country and the relevant sub-cultures are fairly small. So pro-choicers could bite the bullet and suggest that even if sex-selective abortion happens and is sort of distasteful, maybe a few hundred or thousand aborted daughters either way just aren’t that big of a deal? Hey, I’m just laying out your options, if you happen to be a pro-choice feminist.”

But the one option, Lu write, which is not available for anyone interested in truth is to permit

“further deception about what the data is really saying. Even less should we permit disingenuous attempts to dismiss the struggle against femicide as racist or misogynistic.”

Source: NRLC News

Politics

 

Make your voice heard: Register to vote!

By Elizabeth Spillman, National Right to Life Political Assistant
Editor’s note. This excellent article appears in the September digital edition of National Right to Life News. The entire 38-page edition can be read at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsSeptember2014.pdf
As this fall’s elections rapidly approach, pro-lifers have reason to be optimistic. We have a real chance of making significant pro-life gains in the United States Senate, perhaps even win enough seats to put control of the Senate in pro-life hands.
But we can’t do it without you. We need your vote. We need every pro-life vote we can get—yours, your pro-life family members, friends, and neighbors.

Each day voter registration deadlines come closer. It seems elementary but if you are not registered, you cannot vote! At the end of this article, there is a link to a site that makes registration in your state very quick and easy.

Please take a moment and make sure you and your pro-life friends and neighbors are registered. The outcome of the election may depend on it.

We were reminded just this summer how important each and every vote is. Consider out of a total of over 70,000 votes cast last month in a congressional primary race in Tennessee, the contest was decided by just 38 votes. Never underestimate how important your vote is.
In Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate race, pro-abortion Al Franken defeated pro-life Senator Norm Coleman by a few hundred votes out of 2.8 million cast. That’s about seven thousandths of a percent or one voter in about every thirteen precincts in Minnesota.

Many races this year are expected to be extremely close. The balance of power in the United States Senate hangs in the balance. If every pro-lifer helped one friend or family member register to vote, we would have a tremendous pro-life impact on this election.
You would be surprised how many people you know are not registered to vote. One volunteer and dear friend of NRLC did a voter registration drive in her church a few years ago and signed 15 people up to vote, including the Pastor and his wife!

Be especially aware of people that are new to your area, maybe having just moved to your state, and young people who have just turned 18 or recently moved away to college. They may be excited to register but may not know how or where to do it—or even that they have to register.
We want to make the process as easy as possible for people so check out the following resource on our website: Click here to find out how to register in your state.

Source: NRLC News

Assisted Suicide

 

“Glazed eyes, glazed hearts, glazed souls”–the real slippery slope

By Dave Andrusko
Is there anything new to say about assisted suicide? Or is it, as Barbara Kay, a columnist for the National Post newspaper in Canada writes, just where “The slippery slopists square off against the sentimental humanitarians, and nobody changes anyone’s minds”?

Ms. Kay, from whom I always learn something important, believes there is a great deal more to be said, even though “now most people who have given the matter serious thought have settled their convictions and their mental hatches are firmly battened down.”
She cites a story that appeared at euthanasia.com that spoke volumes, the kind of true-life, soul-chilling story that perhaps can unbatten mental hatches that are not soldered in place.
First, a few words of background from her terrific op-ed, “Euthanasia’s damage to the human soul,” to put her argument in context.

Naturally, Kay pays a lot of attention to Belgium—not the only place where euthanasia is legal—“but it certainly seems the place, along with the Netherlands, where the envelope gets pushed the farthest.” The latest deadly iteration is joint suicide, where an elderly couple wishes to be “assisted” to die, not because either is terminally ill but because they fear being lonely if one of them dies first.
As Kay points out,

“Their 55-year old son John-Paul (one of three children who heartily approve of the idea, since none of them feels capable of caring for a survivor parent) approached their regular doctor to request their euthanasia, but was refused for lack of grounds. Undeterred, John-Paul found a willing doctor in more flexible Dutch-speaking Flanders, where more than 80% of Belgian euthanasias are performed (on average, five people in Belgium die by lethal injection every day).”

(In an interview, John Paul explained, “If one of them should die, who would remain would be so sad and totally dependent on us,” adding, “It would be impossible for us to come here every day, take care of our father or our mother.”)
This on the heels of the stories we have written about many times in this space. For example, twin brothers who feared going blind who were both euthanized at age 45. “A 44-year old transsexual was euthanized on the grounds of despair over an unsuccessful sex change operation,” Kay writes. “And just weeks ago, a rapist and murderer successfully petitioned for euthanasia on grounds of mental anguish.”

But in this opinion piece, Kay tells her readers, “I want to persuade you that the law changes the character of its citizens’ moral world” rather than talk about how these laws are wrong. She refers us to “Euthanasia in the Netherlands,” by Canadian Hermina Dykxhoorn, which can be found at euthanasia.com/netherlands.html. It is essential reading.

What is the conclusion Kay drew, and you will too, if you take a few minutes to read the essay about “a 1994 sojourn taken by the author in the company of her aged father to the Netherlands, his last visit there, so that he could say goodbye to his siblings”?

It came from the “disparate reactions” of the family to the report of a 50-year-old woman whose psychiatrist complied with her wish to be killed after her two sons had died.

“Ms Dykxhoorn was horrified. Her relatives didn’t even blink: ‘Their eyes were just as glazed over as if they had been watching a report of a minor traffic accident.’ When she probed them to discuss it, they were indifferent. Shouldn’t the psychiatrist have treated her for depression, she asked? ‘Well, her uncle replied, this was obviously what she wanted.’”

Euthanasia was not yet legal in the Netherlands and the doctor was charged and acquitted, “which moved the legal practice of euthanasia a giant step forward.” Kay’s conclusion is worth saving on your hard drive, it is that powerful:

“The essay goes on to describe each step – with copious facts and figures – along the way from euthanasia for ‘unbearable suffering’ to involuntary euthanasia (a distressing number over there) to, in bio-ethicist Margo Somerville’s words, ‘institutionalizing murder in the medical profession.’ It’s an excellent essay, but what haunts me most is the ‘glazed eyes’ of her uncle at learning that a sad 50-year old asked for and received death at the hands of a psychiatrist. Glazed eyes, glazed hearts, glazed souls. That’s the real slippery slope.”

Source: NRLC News

National Abortion Rights League (NARAL)

 

Pro-abortion to the hilt NARAL hammers pro-life governors for being “obsessed” with abortion

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-Life Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

Let me see if I get this straight. NARAL—which never saw an abortion so late in pregnancy (or wanted for so frivolous a reason) that it would it oppose the abortion—“launched a six-figure mail campaign on Monday targeting three Republican governors for their anti-abortion records,” the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett reported.

Promoting the deaths of millions of unborn babies is what NARAL (technically NARAL Pro-Choice America) does for a living. So, from their vantage point, naturally they want to defeat pro-life Govs. Scott Walker (R-Wis.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.)
But a pro-abortion organization that is obsessed with multiplying the number of abortion accusing the pro-life governors of being “obsessed” with reducing the number abortion seems a bit hard to swallow, wouldn’t you say?

 

Gov. Rick Scott

By Bassett description, the ads are that blend of subtlety and restraint that is the hallmark of the pro-abortion attack ad machine:

“NARAL’s materials describe the governors’ actions limiting reproductive rights, accompanied by photos of the governors’ heads with the word ‘abortion’ splashed across their brains.”

Two quick conclusions. First, pro-life governors are quite capable of both signing protective legislation and doing what NARAL insists they are not: giving sufficient “attention to the economic conditions in all three of these states.” Which, of course, anyone over the age of 10 can figure out.

Pro-Life Gov. Sam Brownback

Second, their pro-abortion Democratic opponents are supported by the usual suspects—such as EMILY’s List, which supports only female Democrats who signed the absolute-abortion-on-demand pledge. That’s fine, too.
What is not fine, or even marginally accurate, is for Bassett to describe them as “more moderate on the issue.”
More proof, as if any is needed, that pro-abortionists and their legion of media supporters do not place a premium on accurate or even a passing faithfulness to the truth.


Source: NRLC News

Supreme Court

 

Divided opinion over whether Justice Ginsburg should recuse herself from a challenge to Texas pro-life law

By Dave Andrusko

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

As pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg continues to hand out interviews like Halloween candy, it is/was/always will be utter predictable that Ginsburg will be lauded for her (fill in the blank—there are lots of possibilities). She is a media favorite and even though some pro-abortion scribes have joined the chorus that she step down in time for President Obama to nominee an equally militant pro-abortionist to the High Court, Ginsburg enjoys excellent publicity.
We’ve written about Justice Ginsburg four times in the last week. She deserved all this attention for all the wrong (from our vantage point) reasons. Suffice it to say, among other items, she reiterated yet again her loathing for the “Hobby Lobby” decision, Congress (one suspects for not enacting her policy preferences), her dislike for Justice Anthony Kennedy, and her hesitation about the ardor of younger feminists who find something else in their lives to worry about besides abortion.
Ed Whelan, who writes at National Review Online, got us to thinking about what Ginsburg told Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic. She talked about a case that could (actually almost certainly will) be heard by the justices: Texas’s omnibus pro-life bill, HB 2. 

Rosen lobbed this softball to Ginsburg:

“So how can advocates make sure that poor women’s access to reproductive choice is protected? Can legislatures be trusted or is it necessary for courts to remain vigilant?”

Ginsburg responded, “How could you trust legislatures in view of the restrictions states are imposing?” before specifically trashing the Texas law. For good measure she added, “The courts can’t be trusted either.“

(Why not the courts either? Because the Supreme Court had upheld a law banning partial-birth abortions, a “procedure” so gruesome that only pro-abortionists with iron-cast stomachs and hearts of stone could condone them.)

To his credit, the Legal Times’ Tony Mauro wrote today about criticism, including quoting us. What was wrong with Ginsburg speaking in the manner she had? Mauro gives the context.

“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is currently considering an appeal of an Aug. 29 district court ruling striking down a part of the Texas law that requires abortion clinics to meet the standards for ambulatory surgical centers. Judge Lee Yeakel of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas said the regulation was ‘intended to close existing licensed abortion clinics.’

“No matter how the Fifth Circuit rules, the decision could be appealed to the Supreme Court.”

He quotes Whelan, legal blogger Josh Blackmun, and two experts on legal ethics, Professors Amanda Frost and Jeffrey Shaman. The former two believe Ginsburg’s comments “should disqualify her from participating in any review of the Texas law,” Mauro writes.
While one of the latter two found her words “ill-advised,” both were able to split enough legal hairs to conclude her comments do not require her to recuse herself.

For my part, I was and remain confident what Ginsburg will do. Consider: Ginsburg has become, “an icon to the left, inspiring fanwear and Tumblr tributes,” to quote Rosen.
And such inspirational icons are not likely to be slowed down by a little thing such as prejudging a case that almost certainly will land in her lap.

Source: NRLC News

Assisted Suicide

 

Why are the British Home Secretary and Metropolitan Police allowing this man to operate in Britain?

By Peter Saunders
Editor’s note. Dr. Saunders is a former general surgeon and CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organization with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members.

Philip Nitschke

Notorious Australian euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has been in the news again.
Last week, it was reported that his organisation Exit International was establishing a London office to ‘cope with demand’ from UK citizens for assisted suicide.
The group, which charges members a fee to access online information and attend workshops to discuss ‘peaceful’ methods of suicide, has attracted fierce criticism in Australia, where it was originally set up.
Its activities include:

• Advising members on how to source a lethal Drug used to kill US Death Row prisoners;
• Selling test kits so members can check the purity and potency of this controlled Class B Drug in their own homes;
• Providing instructions on how people can gas themselves using a ‘DIY’ kit;
• Giving tips on how those assisting a suicide might avoid prosecution.

Monday it was further reported that Nitschke has enraged victims of crime groups by his suggestion that killers serving life sentences should be able to choose the timing of their own ‘peaceful’ deaths behind bars.
Sunday the Sydney Morning Herald reported that he is being investigated by police in every Australian state over his possible role in nearly 20 deaths in the past three years, all of them apparently suicides.

The latest investigation, by Victoria Police, concerns the death of a 55-year-old Geelong man who allegedly killed himself using a do-it-yourself kit bought though a company affiliated with Exit International, the pro-euthanasia organisation founded by Dr. Nitschke.
All of the deaths being investigated involved the use of the two suicide methods promoted by Dr. Nitschke, the lethal Dr.ug, Nembutal or a nitrogen inhalant device.
Nitschke currently faces expulsion by the Australian Medical Association when its Northern Territory branch Council meets in November, after a move to suspend him last month failed after an error in the paperwork.

The Medical Board of Australia suspended him in July. The decision which used the board’s emergency powers to ‘protect public health and safety’ came after he admitted in an interview with the ABC that he had supported a 45-year-old Perth man, Nigel Brayley, in his decision to commit suicide, despite knowing the man was not terminally ill.
The AMA has cited the same ‘adverse event’, saying Dr. Nitschke’s ‘professional behaviour … was not consistent with the high professional and ethical standards for the Australian medical profession promoted by the AMA’.

Documents obtained by The Sunday Age reveal there are currently five separate medical board investigations, one dating as far back as 2011, into Dr. Nitschke’s conduct.
Nitschke (aka Dr. Death) is an extremist and self-publicist whose presence in the UK puts the lives of vulnerable elderly, depressed and disabled people at grave risk.
The British Suicide Act, as amended in 2009, states that ‘an act capable of encouraging or assisting the suicide or an attempted suicide of another person’ is illegal, ‘whether or not a suicide, or an attempt at suicide, occurs’; the emphasis is on whether the accused ‘intended to encourage or assist suicide or an attempt at suicide’.

What Nitschke is doing must surely fall within the scope of these offences. The information shared by his organisation in his London seminars and on the internet is surely capable of encouraging or assisting people to commit suicide and his activities are clearly intended to encourage or assist people to commit suicide by offering them advice about the ‘best way’ of doing it.
Nitschke’s activities present a real and present risk to vulnerable members of the British public.
With the growing elderly population, failure of the care system and worsening economic situation a growing number of frail, disabled, ill and depressed people in Britain will be feeling under even greater pressure to end their lives, either for fear that they will not cope, or so as to be less of a burden to relatives.

They deserve better protection from suicide predators like Nitschke than they are currently getting.
Quite why the Home Secretary and Metropolitan Police allow him into the UK to conduct seminars and continue his activities remains a mystery but Britain deserves a full explanation.
Editor’s note. This appeared at pjsaunders.blogspot.com.

Source: NRLC News

Abortion Hurts

 

The suffering of abortion from a Grandmother’s perspective

By Dave Andrusko
Pro-lifers know that taking the life of an innocent unborn child can never be a “private” decision. The baby has—or ought to have—rights. There are fathers involved and far more often than we realize the child has siblings.
But there is another party involved that never gets their due: grandparents. Think about that for a second: your grandchild is about to be obliterated by the child you had hoped and prayed you’d raised to honor life, even—especially—in the tough times.
The headline is “Eyewitness to abortion,” and it is a story from an unnamed grandmother to Amanda Cable of the Daily Mail. We will call her “Gladys.” It can be read—and should be read—in its entirety here.

But in case you can’t, let me quote just a few passages. The story begins….

My first granddaughter would have been six by now. I often watch children in the local playground and wonder what she would have been like. Other times, at night, I dream about her vividly, and know the answer.

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed and with a shy smile. Time and time again, I dream that she has just been born, and as she is handed to me, I name her Katie. Just as my heart is about to burst with joy, I wake up and realise that she does not exist.

I shall never know my granddaughter because her life was extinguished before it even had a chance to begin.

The story is chilling, on many levels. Her daughter thought she could never get pregnant, did so, and decided she must—must—have an abortion, even though it turned out she was not 15 or so weeks along but 23 weeks pregnant—one week short of the limit in Great Britain.
Gladys becomes persuaded that in spite of everything she has done and said (including the willingness of her husband and she to raise the child), her daughter will have an abortion—by herself, at an abortion clinic, if necessary.

With a sad and heavy heart, she reluctantly accompanied her daughter. What followed was something out of Dante’s Inferno—or Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic. Young, very, very frightened girls who huddled around Gladys like chicks around a mother hen. (She refused to leave her daughter.)
Afterwards, her daughter was never the same. The memory of that baby never left her or her parents. That awful day came crashing back when last year when Gladys’ daughter in law went into premature labor at 26 weeks.

“I sat by Megan’s incubator alongside my son and family, and I happened to glance at the baby next to us. A tiny, red scrap lay fighting for life, her body a mass of tubes and wires.

“’How old was that baby when she was born?’ I asked a passing nurse. ‘Just 24 weeks but she’s a real fighter,’ was the reply.

“I stared at the baby’s chest moving in and out and realised that it was the same age as Susie’s baby. I felt physically sick. Outside, in the corridor, I burst into tears.

“My family assumed that I was worried about my premature grandchild. Only my husband knew that I was crying for the baby who had not survived.”

Unfortunately, after all this, Gladys concludes, “If my story persuades just one family to seek counselling – and to be prepared for the reality of abortion – than I feel I am right to have spoken out.” By “counselling” she means what the abortion clinic did not offer: some explanation of what was to come.
But counselling wouldn’t change “the reality of abortion.” It would still be brutal, unloving, and (in the case of this baby) inflicted on a baby capable of experiencing the excruciating pain of being torn apart.

Source: NRLC News

Choice/ Abortion

 

Advised to abort, mother and father celebrate son’s second birthday

By Dave Andrusko

Robyn and Adam Wilson were advised to abort their unborn son after a 12-week scan revealed there was a chance he would be born with a life-limiting illness. Doctors warned baby Harry was unlikely to survive pregnancy and an abortion was booked.

When Robyn Wilson went to Bassetlaw Royal Hospital in March 2012 for her 12-week scan, she and her husband Adam were bombarded with news about their unborn baby.
According to the Daily Mail’s Lizzie Parry

“they were told it was highly likely they had a Down’s Syndrome baby and emergency blood tests were carried out the same day.

“The results revealed a heightened risk of Edward Syndrome or Patau Syndrome – both serious genetic disorders that limit life expectancy.

“Wilson was referred to nearby Jessops Hospital, a maternity unit in Leeds, where she claims doctors advised her that her best option could be to terminate the pregnancy.”

As the couple prepared to celebrate their son Harry’s second birthday, Mrs. Wilson recounted the crescendo of news that would frighten any parent. 

First they were told their baby would very likely die before birth. “We were told if he did live to birth, he might die shortly after, or that if he survived, he would be seriously ill or have health defects,” Mrs. Wilson said. But through all this, the couple still had “a slither of hope.”

“When we were advised to abort, everything was just rushing through my mind – I just kept thinking ‘what would be worse having an abortion or having the baby in my arms for just a few minutes or days, maybe weeks?’”

By Mrs. Wilson’s account (the hospital, located in Nottinghamshire, England, declined to comment)

“The hospital decided to book me in for an abortion to get rid of the baby – though they said it wasn’t compulsory.

“The option was there and they advised that it could be for the best, as they were fairly certain something was going to be wrong with the baby.”

Doctors penciled in March 26 as the tentative date for the abortion. But there was still one more test–a CVS [Chorionic Villus Sampling]–to look for chromosomal abnormalities.
Three days before the scheduled abortion, the Wilsons were shocked to discover that the “results showed no problems with their unborn child,” Parry wrote.
And, sure enough, Harry was born healthy (“absolutely perfect”) on September 27, 2012, weighing 8lbs 5oz.

Given the diagnoses, it’s no surprise that Mrs. Wilson told Parry she spent Harry’s first year constantly worried that he would be diagnosed with something.
“Every time a doctor could come around I would be thinking “this is it, this is it, someone is going to tell me what is wrong now”, but still to this day that hasn’t come,” she told Parry. “The doctors and nurses couldn’t believe it, they all call him ‘the legend baby.’”
But all is good for the Wilson family.
“This year for his birthday we are going to go all out,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Everyone is coming around and there is going to be food and a bouncy castle.

“I feel now I can finally stop worrying and enjoy life with Harry.”

Source: NRLC News

Abortion Funding

 

The Hyde Amendment at 38

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-life champion, the late Rep. Henry Hyde

The Hyde Amendment sticks in the craw of abortion absolutists as much as any pro-life law ever enacted. And today marks the 38th anniversary of passage of the law (the “Hyde” is the late pro-life champion, Rep. Henry Hyde), a titanic struggle that represented a major success against federal funding of abortion.

Prior to its passage in 1976, the federal Medicaid program paid for 300,000 abortions a year. Conservative estimates are that there are well over one million people are alive today because of the Hyde Amendment.

On this anniversary, there are many things worth remembering. Here are just five.

#1. Pro-abortionists never gave up, and it was not until the Harris v. McRae case, settled in 1980, that the United States Supreme Court agreed the law was constitutional. And even then the Court was split 5-4. National Right to Life filed an important brief in that case.
#2. Pro-abortionists have made a concerted effort to pretend that somehow the Hyde Amendment would prevent ObamaCare from allowing federally-subsidized health plans to cover abortions. This was and is completely erroneous. 

#3. Polls consistently show strong majorities against federal funding of abortion. President Obama opposes the Hyde Amendment. No surprise, in either case.

#4. Speaking of never giving up, pro-abortionists still grind their teeth when they speak of the Hyde Amendment. For them the “right” to abortion never meant only the legal right to abort. It required that through Medicaid you and I and every other tax payer fund their abortions.
#5. Because the Hyde Amendment is a limitation provision within an annual appropriations bill, it is a fight pro-abortionists could take up every time the annual appropriations bill of the Department of Health and Human Services comes up. Fairly detailed information on the history of the Hyde Amendment, its demonstrated impact, and related issues is found in testimony presented by NRL at a House hearing in 2011, here: www.nrlc.org/uploads ahc/ProtectLifeActDouglasJohnsonTestimony.pdf

We have a lot to thank the late Rep. Hyde for. At the top is enactment of the Hyde Amendment


Source: NRLC News