Democrats and Abortion

 

The Unasked Question during the Democratic Debate: “Is there an abortion you would not allow?”

By Karen Cross, National Right to Life Political Director
Editor’s note. This appears in the October digital edition of National Right to Life News at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsOct2015.pdf. The story has been changed to reflect that since it first ran, former Virginia Senator Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee have dropped out.
In a nutshell, while the recent Democratic debate was rather boring, I watched on the chance that the biased, pro-abortion media who panders to candidates on the left would ask a challenging question, exposing the extreme position of each of the Democratic presidential candidates on abortion.
It didn’t happen. The word “abortion” never left the lips of CNN moderator Anderson Cooper nor the five Democratic presidential candidates.

In light of the recent undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s complete and utter disregard for the lives of preborn babies in which the sale of their body parts was discussed over dinner, Republican presidential candidates were grilled about their abortion positions. But even when they weren’t asked specifically, they brought up their support for life.
Because the abortion question was not asked during the Democratic debate, we must look at past records and statements .
Following is an overview of the abortion positions of the current Democratic presidential candidates who participated in the October 13 debate (in alphabetical order).
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

As a U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton maintained a 0% pro-life record, voting against the pro-life position on every vote.
In 2003, Clinton voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and voted to endorse Roe v. Wade, which allows abortion for any reason.
When the U.S. House passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act on May 13, 2015, Clinton issued a statement opposing the bill, referring to it as part of a “dangerous” trend.
In 2009, Clinton was awarded Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award.
Clinton, following the revelation of the undercover videos, reiterated her support for Planned Parenthood. She remarked:

“I think it is regrettable that Republicans are once again trying to undermine, even end those services that so many women have needed and taken advantage of. I think that it’s another effort by the Republicans to try to limit the health care options of women and we should not let them succeed once again.”

Here are 10 times so far in the 2016 campaign that Hillary Clinton has showed her extremism on abortion.
Former Governor Martin O’Malley
O’Malley supports the current policy of abortion on demand, which allows abortion for any reason.
In April 2014, O’Malley received Planned Parenthood of Maryland’s Betty Tyler Award “for advancing reproductive rights in Maryland.”
In July, while admitting he had not seen the videos, O’Malley dismissed them, saying:

“… I don’t generally make a habit of responding to right-wing videos.”

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders

Sanders (I-Vt.) has maintained a solid pro-abortion voting record, voting against the pro-life position more than 100 times in his federal legislative career (U.S. House of Representatives 1991-2007, U.S. Senate 2007 to date).

Sanders voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban every opportunity he had. More recently, Sanders voted against advancing H.R. 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
Sanders voted against S. 1881, the bill to ban federal funding of Planned Parenthood. His vote would allow federal funding of the abortion giant to continue.
Sanders admitted he had not seen the video, but had read accounts of it in the news. Referring to Planned Parenthood’s president, he said:

“Obviously, I think Cecile Richards apologized for the tone of that video. I think her apology was exactly right. I think that the staffer, the tone was terribly wrong.”

Why wasn’t the abortion question asked at the October 13 debate?

Perhaps the pro-abortion media recognizes the disadvantage for pro-abort
ion candidates? (For an overview of the National Right to Life Advantage for Pro-life Candidates go here.) Perhaps they know that most Americans do not support abortion for any reason.
All of the Democratic candidates support a policy which allows abortion for any reason.
For National Right to Life’s downloadable flyer “Where Do the Candidates Stand on Life?” click here.

Are your friends unsure where the presidential candidates stand on life? If so, be sure to share it with them as well.
Look for updates in future National Right to Life News and National Right to Life News Today.

Source: NRLC News

China Changes Policy?

 

According to China’s official news service run by the Communist government, China is reportedly abolishing the draconian pro-abortion one child policy that only allows families in urban areas to have one child and rural families to have two children. The new policy will reportedly allow two children per family.

Started in 1980, the policy, which is the most severe in the world, has resulted in severe human rights abuses. Family planning officials frequently jail couples who refuse to comply, sentence them to house arrest or labor camps, revoke jobs or governmental support, use physical harassment or violence and often target other family members.
There are more than 13 million abortions a year, or 1,500 an hour, in China, according to government researchers. That’s thanks in large part to the one-child policy — which encourages abortions and results in forced abortions and sex-selection abortions.
However, according to multiple news reports, China has announced the policy is changing. As AP reports, based on China’s official news service:

Xinhua said on its microblog that the decision to allow all couples to have two children was “to improve the balanced development of population” and to deal with an aging population.
The decision does away with an unpopular policy that was long considered one of the party’s most onerous intrusions into family life.
The decision was contained in a Communist Party communique that followed a meeting of the party’s Central Committee on planning the country’s economic and social development through 2020. In recent years, it has been unusual for such plenary sessions to result in major decisions. They generally focus on economic topics and there was no indication that this one would take action on the one-child policy.
The decision announced Thursday removes all remaining restrictions limiting couples to only one child.

Before the announced policy change today, Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, one of the leading pro-life and human rights advocates in Congress, puts the one-child policy in perspective.
“In 1980 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party sent an open letter to party members setting forth its plan to embark on a national one-child policy,” Smith said. “What came out of that letter? A cruel and inhumane policy, a human rights violation that is, in scope and seriousness, the worst human rights abuse in the world today. No other government policy anywhere else in the world systematically punishes, abuses, and violates women so grossly as this.”
Smith said the policy has made it so brothers and sisters are illegal and children are growing up in a society with no aunts and uncle because the one-child policy has now been around for a generation.
The policy is unlike any other in the world in that it requires all women to obtain a birth permit before becoming pregnant and children of unwed mothers are subjected to abortions. And it monitors the reproductive cycles of all women of childbearing age through a system of mandatory, regular, and crudely invasive physical check-ups.
He says the policy has created an “atmosphere of fear” where anonymous pregnancy informants spy on citizens.
“The brave pregnant woman who refuses to give in is usually detained and beaten – or, if she goes into hiding, her relatives are detained and beaten. Families that succeed in hiding an “out-of-plan” pregnancy are punished with fines up to ten times the average annual income,” he explained.
Smith said the abortions have resulted in a policy of “gendercide” where more than 120 boys are born for every 100 girls. This has created a bachelor society of men who will be unable to marry and has given rise to more crime, sex trafficking, prostitution, and other problems.
He said the policy has resulted in a sky-high suicide rate for Chinese women who face such a brutal and terrorizing regime.
Smith said those who don’t believe the one-child policy is resulting in forced abortions need only look at the numerous media reports, reports from Chinese people who have fled the country, and human rights activists monitoring the situation.
“The violence of the one-child policy is absolutely ongoing. This year there are reliable reports of large scale and violent abortion enforcement campaigns in Guangdong, Fujian, Yunnan, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi provinces,” he said.

  Source: LifeSite News

 

 

 

Abortion and Celebrities

 

Pro-abortion Gloria Steinem: still crazy after all these years

By Dave Andrusko

Gloria Steinem being interviewed by Katie Couric.

After 50+ years of abortion advocacy, no one would expect Gloria Steinem to suddenly see the light. She is as firm in her commitment to abortion and you and I are to finding life-affirming solutions.
So I mention the “exclusive interview” she gave to Yahoo Global Anchor Katie Couric for two reasons. In reverse order of significance…
First, her new book is titled “My Life on the Road.” In the promotional blurb on Amazon, we read, “My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria’s growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality—and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both.”
Living “on the road” is apparently a solo act: that “growth” included aborting a child. Perhaps that’s why she “dedicates the book to the doctor who helped her get an abortion in 1957.”
Second, the teaser quote is the sentiment that baffles me to this day: “Every child has a right to be born loved and wanted. And a woman who decides that this is not the moment when she can provide that for a child is making, to me, a profoundly moral decision.”
It is the ultimate self-exculpatory excuse. The child is better off dead if not “born loved and wanted.” In short when a woman vacuums out the life within her or has her baby torn limb from limb using metal instruments she is really doing him or her a favor.
Some of the zanier breed of pro-abortion feminist would find this a complete cop out, which, of course, it is. To them it is irrelevant– literally beside the point–whether the child is wanted and/or loved.
Taking their baby’s life is an expression of autonomy, an exercise of brute force over someone who is utterly defenseless, a rather stark contradiction for a “feminist.” It will be done because it can be done.
Steinem never entertains the possibility that our capacity for love can and will emerge when we hold that baby in our arms. And that, whether the baby was “wanted” or not, she often becomes the very center of our lives.

Source: NRLC News

Post Abortion

 

“Memorial for Unborn Children” comforts post-abortive women and men

By Dave Andrusko
Elsewhere today we post about an interview Gloria Steinem gave to Yahoo Global Anchor Katie Couric in which she insists to the former CBS News anchor that abortion is “a profoundly moral decision.” Indeed, we learn that Steinem dedicated her most recent book–My Life On The Road— “to John Sharpe, the doctor who helped her get an abortion in 1957.”
I thought of that interview when I read a post whose understanding of abortion is as far from Steinem’s as the east is from the west.
The headline to the story is “With a child’s touch, sculpture seeks to comfort those who mourn abortion.” And where Steinem celebrates the “liberating” power of abortion, polish sculptor Martin Hudacek understands the need that so many post-women (and men) have for forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation.
Several years ago we wrote about Hudacek’s “Memorial for Unborn Children” and what an amazing impact the sculpture has had on so many women. In a story published this week by the Catholic News Agency, we are updated about the piece that Hudacek hopes “will help to heal men and women suffering after an abortion.”
Hudacek, who lives in a small village in Poland, says the project was inspired by a friend.

“It all began when on my way back home from my friend’s place who prays and meditates a lot, (and) he told me I have to carve a statue” that depicts the effects of post-abortion syndrome, “a big problem and there is no such statue regarding this issue.”

Hudacek said that he was “touched in such way that I wanted to make a monument for the unborn children,” but he had no idea where to start. He asked people to pray.

“I was praying and many people came to me and said I need a picture of forgiveness,” he said. As time passed, the image became clearer and clearer in his mind: “it looked like a crying mother and a child who forgives her.”

And that is what we see. A suffering post-abortive mother, her face buried in her hands.

She is approached by her aborted baby, depicted in a young child’s transparent form. The child reaches up to touch the woman’s head in a tender gesture of forgiveness and healing.

Hudacek completed a third version of the “Memorial for Unborn Children” statue two weeks ago. It is located inside a cemetery in Wroclaw, Poland, According to CNA, it is seven feet tall.
We learn there is a significant (and necessary)addition: “it shows a father alongside the grieving mother and their aborted child.”
Hudacek wants everyone to understand that “Memorial for Unborn Children” is really not his work–he is merely the instrument–but God’s and that only Jesus can forgive. But he said he hopes the sculpture can provide “a small healing” for post-abortive women, who, after they look at the sculpture, might be more likely to think about forgiveness . The story ends with this beautiful conclusion:

“It is interesting to see my statue on the internet or in many places being presented in diverse ways,” Hudacek said, explaining that he can tell the sculpture is bearing fruit in reports from around the world.

“I see it is a world issue, thus I am personally impressed and I am glad I can participate in God’s work,” he said.

Source: NRLC News

Planned Parenthood and New Video

 

The 11th undercover Planned Parenthood Video: still striving to extract an intact baby brain

By Dave Andrusko
We are now into Video #11 in the ongoing undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood and so-called Tissue Procurement Companies–the ones that are the middlemen between the abortion clinics and the researchers eager to experiment on intact baby body parts.
Yet even so when I watched the latest video released by the Center for Medical Progress this morning I was still stunned by the way two women–one from Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas at Austin, the other from Whole Woman’s Health– talked about the bodies of aborted babies.
I shouldn’t by now–not after listening to many discussions about using less “crunchy” abortion techniques and women on the verge of delivering their babies (“Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the vaginal canal whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out”), and much more–but I am.
In the video, Amna Dermish, MD, is described as a 2nd-Trimester Abortion Provider, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas. In the discussion with an actor posing as a Fetal Tissue Procurement Company she is asked how many 20 week abortions her clinic does:

It varies, like last week I think we only had 2, and I think this week we have 4 on this coming week we have 4 on the schedule, plus I’ll be doing ultrasounds, so we might get more.

Buyer: You might get more.

PP: Yeah, we usually have at least 2, sometimes we’ll do 6 in a week, but again our second trimester volume has been slowly increasing, they’re showing up later,

Dermish explains that on babies 18 weeks and older she uses laminaria to soften and dilate the cervix. “But leaving them in for 24 hours, I can usually get 3 to 4 centimeters of dilation, which usually allows me to get, to extract it more intact.”
“It” refers to the baby’s body.
So the buyer asks what was the condition–the “intactness”– of the “specimen.” (By way of explanation, a “breech presentation” means the baby’s feet or bottom comes out first rather than the normal head first–a “cephalic presentation.” “Calvarium” refers to the baby’s skull.)

PP: It was trunk intact, so usually what I do, if it’s a breech presentation, I’ll remove the extremities first, the lower extremities, and then go for the spine and sort of bring it down that way, and then—

Buyer: You said if that’s a breech presentation?

PP: If it’s a breech presentation, yeah, yeah. And if it’s cephalic I’ll try and get the cal[varium] first, but if I’m struggling getting the cal, usually it’s a function of how good my dilation is, often times it’s hard to get around the cal. Especially the 20 weekers are a lot harder versus the 18-weekers, so at that point I’ll switch to breech, so.

Buyer: Good. I was just curious what we might be working with.

PP: I always try and keep the trunk intact just by function of always trying to aim for the spine to bring it down.

Finally, the actor asks what does Dermish do when there is a request for a fetal brain. She responds, “Yeah, I haven’t been able to do that yet. The intact calvarium [skull].”
A second later, Dermish adds, “Well this will give me something to strive for.”
And then she laughs.

Source: NRLC News

RU 486

 

This Abortionist Will Never Kill Babies Again After Selling Abortion Drugs to Non-Pregnant Women

  Cheryl Sullenger 

 

Oklahoma abortionist Naresh Patel pled guilty on Friday to charges he committed fraud when he sold abortion pills to three non-pregnant undercover officers after Operation Rescue filed a complaint against his that resulted eventually in his arrest in December, 2014.

Patel was ordered to serve 18 days in a private correctional facility, pay a $20,000 fine, and serve 10 years of probation.
Patel surrendered his medical license and can never practice medicine again, according to his plea agreement. His abortion clinic has permanently closed.
Patel must also pay court costs, $2,000 in restitution and a victim’s compensation assessment of $100.
“We are excited to announce that is reign of terror has now come to an end because of our complaint that brought him to the attention of the Attorney General’s office,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “This predatory abortionist will never again be able to operate an abortion clinic, exploit another woman, or kill another baby. We are proud to have been a part of bringing his reign of terror to an end.”
Operation Rescue had filed complaints with the Attorney General’s Office and the Oklahoma Medical Board against Patel in the spring of 2014 after discovering evidence of abortion abuses in trash from his office supplied by a confidential informant. Cooperation between those two agencies led to Patel’s arrest.
“Patel has managed to escape justice before, and this time, he must be held accountable for his crimes,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “His greedy exploitation of vulnerable women must come to an end. If anyone belongs behind bars, it is Naresh Patel.”
In 1993, Patel was charged with one count of “forcible oral sodomy” and one count of sexual battery after a patient alleged that he had sexually assaulted her on an examination table prior to an abortion. She then recorded two phone conversations with him in which she alleged that he asked if she was angry about the assault and apologized for it.
Three victims came forward and told of their horrific encounters with Patel, but somehow the jury failed to convict him.
Patel was also previously disciplined by the Oklahoma Medical Board for Unprofessional Conduct for “failing to maintain dispensing records for dangerous drugs and keep complete and accurate records of purchase and dispensing of controlled drugs” and for injuring a woman during a botched abortion.
In 1993, Patel admitted that he dumped the remains of nearly 60 babies that had been aborted at his clinic in a field near Shawnee, Oklahoma, and had attempted to burn them but only the plastic bags around the remains caught on fire. The bodies were discovered by two passers-by. Patel’s excuse that he could not find a service to take away the remains lacked credibility. Because at that time there were no laws in Oklahoma regarding the disposal of aborted baby remains, Patel was never charged.
Patel was also recently sued for sexual harassment after an employee claimed that he repeatedly asked her for sexual favors. She alleges he forced her to conduct grisly tasks at his abortion facility after she refused her advances and that she quit after he attempted to rape her at his home.
Read Operation Rescue’s original Patel investigation report with a link to the complaint that brought this criminal to justice!

This Abortionist Will Never Kill Babies Again After Selling Abortion Drugs to Non-Pregnant Women

    Cheryl Sullenger   

Oklahoma abortionist Naresh Patel pled guilty on Friday to charges he committed fraud when he sold abortion pills to three non-pregnant undercover officers after Operation Rescue filed a complaint against his that resulted eventually in his arrest in December, 2014.

Patel was ordered to serve 18 days in a private correctional facility, pay a $20,000 fine, and serve 10 years of probation.
Patel surrendered his medical license and can never practice medicine again, according to his plea agreement. His abortion clinic has permanently closed.
Patel must also pay court costs, $2,000 in restitution and a victim’s compensation assessment of $100.
“We are excited to announce that is reign of terror has now come to an end because of our complaint that brought him to the attention of the Attorney General’s office,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “This predatory abortionist will never again be able to operate an abortion clinic, exploit another woman, or kill another baby. We are proud to have been a part of bringing his reign of terror to an end.”
Operation Rescue had filed complaints with the Attorney General’s Office and the Oklahoma Medical Board against Patel in the spring of 2014 after discovering evidence of abortion abuses in trash from his office supplied by a confidential informant. Cooperation between those two agencies led to Patel’s arrest.
“Patel has managed to escape justice before, and this time, he must be held accountable for his crimes,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “His greedy exploitation of vulnerable women must come to an end. If anyone belongs behind bars, it is Naresh Patel.”
In 1993, Patel was charged with one count of “forcible oral sodomy” and one count of sexual battery after a patient alleged that he had sexually assaulted her on an examination table prior to an abortion. She then recorded two phone conversations with him in which she alleged that he asked if she was angry about the assault and apologized for it.
Three victims came forward and told of their horrific encounters with Patel, but somehow the jury failed to convict him.
Patel was also previously disciplined by the Oklahoma Medical Board for Unprofessional Conduct for “failing to maintain dispensing records for dangerous drugs and keep complete and accurate records of purchase and dispensing of controlled drugs” and for injuring a woman during a botched abortion.
In 1993, Patel admitted that he dumped the remains of nearly 60 babies that had been aborted at his clinic in a field near Shawnee, Oklahoma, and had attempted to burn them but only the plastic bags around the remains caught on fire. The bodies were discovered by two passers-by. Patel’s excuse that he could not find a service to take away the remains lacked credibility. Because at that time there were no laws in Oklahoma regarding the disposal of aborted baby remains, Patel was never charged.
Patel was also recently sued for sexual harassment after an employee claimed that he repeatedly asked her for sexual favors. She alleges he forced her to conduct grisly tasks at his abortion facility after she refused her advances and that she quit after he attempted to rape her at his home.
Read Operation Rescue’s original Patel investigation report with a link to the complaint that brought this criminal to justice!

Source: LifeSite News

Sick

Garbage disposal or incinerator? Abortion providers debate how to dispose of babies

  Susan Michelle 

According to Renee Chelian, the owner of abortion facilities in Michigan, the abortion industry has a fetal disposal problem. It just can’t figure out how to get rid of its leftover baby parts.
In undercover videos presumably leaked by a Washington staffer to Got News, the Center for Medical Progress team records the horrifying discussions taking place in the abortion industry when abortionists, staff, and clinic owners gather at a national conference. The videos show abortion providers sharing ideas on how to dispose of dead babies.
Starting in July with the first CMP undercover video, we saw babies picked apart for their organs in pie pans, and now we find out even more stomach-churning information about what happens to the babies who aren’t harvested.

As Live Action reported last week, abortion providers believed to be attending the National Abortion Federation (NAF) convention admitted that in Detroit, “many” of the nearly 45 abortion facilities routinely flushed baby parts into garbage disposals and out into the sewer system because it was cheap and legal, according to an archaic law. (See video below starting at 25:10.)
Abortion clinic owner, Renee Chelian, tells the crowd that Michigan has “some of the worst laws and the loosest laws in the country on medical waste, ” allowing practically anyone to handle medical waste. Upon investigation, Chelian found that funeral homes and crematoriums charged $150 per patient. “So who was gonna pay for this?” she asks.

The garbage disposal was the completely legal option, which made me sick to my stomach, because there were about 45 clinics in the Detroit metropolitan area, and many of them were using garbage disposals, so I was busy contacting everybody that I could, that, “You have to stop. This cannot be–if this cannot be on the front page of the New York Times, you shouldn’t be doing it. Any of you.” And they consistently showed me like a 40-year-old law in Michigan that said pathological waste was fine to go in the sewer system. I couldn’t really argue with them.”

So because flushing babies into the sewer system is technically legal, it’s okay – at least to abortion industry workers where money is the bottom line. The entire discussion over disposal has two common denominators: cost and public relations. Nowhere do these workers express concern for women traumatized by abortion or for the babies themselves.
Instead, the goal is to seek out the cheapest and easiest way to get rid of dead human baby parts. The funeral home option, Chelian says, didn’t work out for a few reasons. For one, the funeral homes wanted her to leave:

I started visiting funeral homes, who ultimately started talking about how much a body weighs, before they could figure out how much it was gonna cost, and then we had to go from pounds to ounces, and they were like, “We don’t even know how to charge for this.” And they showed me a body bag, and I was like, “Dude, we need to go to like, a Tupperware container.” [audience laughter] In which case, we started talking about the freezer jars we use, which really freaked them out, because all the fetal tissue was mixed together, after we do a POC (Product of Conception) check, and they were, they just wanted me to leave.

And when a funeral home wants you to leave, it says a lot about the population you’re handling.

So abhorrent is the abortion business that even those licensed to deal with the dead could not handle them. Jokes about babies in Tupperware containers may float with a bunch of people who earn their living off killing them, but even a mortician finds it despicable and intolerable. If anything shows how out-of-mainstream the abortion business is, it’s this comment.
Not to be deterred, Chelian considered, instead, opening a crematorium to do her own disposals. She thought her clinics could perhaps buy a plot in Detroit for incinerators and just burn up the remains of the dead babies personally:

So we tried to figure out, if we tried to put an incinerator in on our property, would the city let us? Or would they just assume the abortion clinic was gonna be burning fetal tissue and there’s no way in hell they would have given it to us. Were we gonna have to go into inner-city Detroit and get a lot, and put an incinerator there? …

Another fun thing, we could have a bunch of clinics buy an incinerator, and then we could just go pick up for each other, if we all got a license, I mean talk about working with the competition. What kind of permits do you need? How do you keep an incinerator? How do you clean it? …how big? How much? I  mean, there’s a difference between, do we have to do one D&E, or a whole jar of 1st trimester patients?

I mean, I’m serious, there is, when you look at incinerators, for cremation, the website descriptions are, small cat, small dog, larger dog. So we were looking, trying to compare our jars to larger animals you might incinerate. We don’t think we need one big enough for a horse [audience laughter].

As we’ve seen for months now, these babies’ body parts can earn money for abortion facilities when they sell to companies like Stem Express and Advanced Biomedical Research, turning a profit from the bloodshed. But once that’s done – or if a clinic isn’t connected to baby body part harvesters – they have to somehow get rid of what’s left. Thus, their brainstorming for new ideas on how burn or dispose of the remains of a baby.

The abhorrent, despicable nature of the abortion business – so deeply focused on death at all costs – has been revealed to a deeper degree than ever with the inside footage from the NAF convention.
Of course, the NAF knew how their own words would be perceived, which is why they sued to keep the footage from being released in the first place. The fact that this full footage may have been leaked illegally by a Washington staffer doesn’t make the information untrue, as some would assert. In fact, these videos can’t even be subject to the abortion industry’s favorite claim of “highly deceptive editing” since the videos are raw footage.

The truth is that the abortion industry knows they are killing babies for money, but their biggest concern is how to get rid of the unnecessary parts of children while maximizing their own profit.
Sometimes that means dumping bodies down a garbage disposal  and feeding them into the city sewer system – ensuring that the city’s very undercurrent is the innocent blood of babies.

Source: LiveAction News

Planned Parenthood

 

More than ever Planned Parenthood is on the defensive

By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. This editorial appears in the October digital edition of National Right to Life News at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsOct2015.pdf. Please be sure to share this, and the other stories and commentaries, using your social media contacts.
My, how things can change, how life (and the fate of the purveyors of death) can turn on a dime.
You recall PPFA President Cecile Richards’ September 29 testimony before the House Oversight Committee which extended almost five hours . While we punctured the myths and bogus analogies and feigned ignorance, plenty of media outlets tripped over their tongues in panting admiration for Richards.

If you believed their stories, which could have come off the PPFA website, Richards so carried the day that the only question remaining was would the House Oversight Committee have the good sense to pack up its bags.
But that was then….
Since that performance (and Richards was slick), PPFA’s president, who makes over a half-million dollars a year, decided that the largest abortion provider in the world would no longer accept reimbursement for the fetal tissue (a term which includes whole body parts) it provides to medical researchers.
Not you understand that Planned Parenthood was operating from a position of weakness or was conceding by its change in policy that it had done anything wrong. No, not at all, we were assured.
In her letter to the NIH, Richards doubled down on her claims that PPFA “adheres to the highest legal, medical, and ethical standards” as it scavenges tissue and body parts from aborted babies.
Okay, then why the change?

“[I]n order to completely debunk the disingenuous argument that our opponents have been using.” Once that “smokescreen” is removed, Richards wrote, PPFA will be able to push “forward with our important work on behalf of millions of women, men, and young people.”
Media outlets dutifully parroted the line that this was a brilliant stroke which would put PPFA (so to speak) on the high moral ground. Of course, it did nothing of the sort.

PPFA will still harvest organs out of the goodness of its institutional heart, supplying a “service” that women want–aka “preserving the ability of our patients to donate tissue.”
Of course that is hokum as well. As we have written before, look at the consent form and listen to what various PPFA officials said on the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress.
Women aren’t beating the walls down to “donate” their baby’s remains. They are at their most vulnerable and the staff preys on that weakness to convince them that their baby’s organs can cure everything from Alzheimer’s to the common cold.

Also, as we reported in NRL News Today, while Richards keeps talking about how few PPFA clinics are currently involved, at least prior to the videos, affiliates were being given the green light to join in.

All this is taking place while carefully constructed myths are being exposed, one by one. As we have written, even the Washington Post recognizes that PPFA’s assertion that “Three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services” is “misleading.”
PPFA’s claim was given “three Pinocchios.
”Pinocchios refer to how deceptive an assertion is, with four Pinocchios representing the highest degree of distortion. Three Pinocchios means (according to the Post) that a statement has “ Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”
Likewise on Richards’ previous assertion that PPFA provided mammograms (which more recently she admitted was not the case). That doesn’t stop supporters from recycling the myth that PPFA “provides” mammograms.
In explaining how this also received Three Pinocchios, Erin Aitcheson wrote that the Post factchecker

Ye Hee Lee suggested using a more “accurate term” such as access. All together now, “…women have ‘access’ to mammograms via Planned Parenthood.” Ye Hee Lee admitted, though, that “access” is still “slippery language.”

What’s more, Ye Hee Lee admitted that mammograms aren’t even a core service that Planned Parenthood provides [BTW, abortion is a “core” service]. “So, when people talk about Planned Parenthood clients who need mammography referrals the most,” she wrote, “they are referring to a small percentage of total patients.”

So only a fraction of Planned Parenthood’s clientele need the mammograms it doesn’t provide. Got it.

Because of the slippery language of “access.” Planned Parenthood supporters were awarded three Pinocchios.

On top of all this there is (from their perspective) the worrisome declining support for PPFA, as measured by public opinion polls. A NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll in late September found that PPFA is viewed favorably by 47% of Americans and unfavorably by 31%.
As National Review Online’s Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us, “In 1989, Gallup found that 82 percent of Americans had a favorable impression” of Planned Parenthood. That is the benchmark against which all recent numbers can be measured.
As Carol Tobias notes in her President’s column on page three,

Are Planned Parenthood affiliates making money from the sale of body parts from these babies? Are they manipulating the abortion procedure so as to keep the baby’s body in better condition for harvesting organs and tissue? Are they getting “consent” from the women whose babies are being killed and harvested for parts? Several congressional committees are investigating these questions and more. I look forward to their official findings.

There is all this, and much more to come. Far from “turning the corner” or “turning the tables,” PPFA is in more hot water than ever before.

Source: NRLC News

The Good Wife and ...

 

The good and the bad of “The Good Wife” episode on physician-assisted suicide

By Dave Andrusko

Diane Lockhart and Irving Carver, characters on “The Good Wife.”

First, the confession. I haven’t watched “The Good Wife” (it’s in its seventh season) this year and just stumbled across Episode Four last night. Although the show often parrots the anti-life line, on occasion the pro-life perspective can be presented in a very thoughtful way, sometimes downright brilliantly.
Like always, the show operated on multiple levels with rings inside of rings inside of rings. You really do need a scorecard to keep the actors and the plot lines straight. (For sake of brevity I will not add the real names of the characters.)
Forgive me for coming late, but there is a wrongful death case – brought by the parents of a young woman with cancer who committed suicide with the “assistance” of two Oregon physicians– which overlaps with vice-presidential ambitions of the husband (Peter Florrick) of “The Good Wife”–attorney Alicia Florrick. Peter, who is the governor of Illinois, is being lobbied to veto an imminent Physician-Assisted suicide bill in his state.
Okay. Why do I bother to bring up last night’s episode? For two reasons, one good and one not so good.
“The Good Wife” is always adding (and subtracting) characters. A new one this year is attorney Irving Carver. He comes to Diane Lockhart, another attorney in the television show, is passionately pro-abortion to ask her to represent the parents.
For reasons too complicated to get into, Diane eventually agrees to represent the parents in this case even though assisted suicide to Diane is but another example of “choice.”
But the debate back and forth between Irving and Diane is terrific. Diane’s bag on one-liners is ripped from the pro-abortion script (but offered with passion) while Irving’s thoughtful, low-key rebuttal offers a synopsis not of what might happen once the assisted suicide genii is let out of the bottle, but what already has happened. Diane’s response–that the United States isn’t Belgium–is weak.
Irving reminds us of the price that the medical profession pays when it allows itself to get into the death-dealing business. We also see glimpses of the devastating societal-wide impact when we make death a “solution” to a myriad of problems.
The bad part is reducing the objections of Grace (Peter and Alicia’s daughter) to physician-assisted suicide to youthful idealism, hint, hint religion. But even as I type these words, I’m having second thoughts.
Sure Peter’s campaign manager Ruth treats her as just another chess piece to move around the board, but she does so to Peter’s mother as well. (Coming late I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m guessing since she is older, Peter’s mother will be portrayed as “wiser” and thus agree assisted suicide is a “rights” issue.)
The episode with Diane in court shows her considerable skills at work. The husband of the woman who committed assisted suicide is not the paragon of virtue (shades of Terri Schiavo). However it ends (at least for this episode) with what is suppose to be a huge setback for Diane and her clients. More next week.
The bad guys always get the majority of the good lines. But to see the case for life presented with two wings–adult respect for the slippery slope implications of assisted suicide and the intrinsic adolescent respect for vulnerable life–was welcomed indeed.

Source: NRLC News

Hillary and Late Term Abortion

 

“No hard numbers back up Clinton’s comment that late-term abortions ‘are because of medical necessity’” Factchecker concludes

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-abortion Hillary Clinton and “Face the Nation” moderator, John Dickerson

Back in September we wrote about the evasive response pro-abortion former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave to John Dickerson, moderator of Face the Nation.”  I wrote

Host John Dickerson asked the frontrunner for her party’s presidential nomination, “Do you support a federal limit on abortion at any stage of pregnancy?”

I watched her feint, duck, avoid the question, and filibuster. Conclusion? No, Clinton doesn’t believe in placing any limitation, whether “federal” or otherwise, on the unfettered right to abort at any time or any reason.

Well the Florida Times Union’s Carole Fader has fact-checked on a specific part of Clinton’s meandering answer: “Did Hillary Clinton say late-term abortions ‘are because of medical necessity’”?
Here’s the setting, as described by Fader, the Clinton campaign’s repositioning of her answer, and Fader’s tentative conclusion:

Clinton answered that this was a painful question, then went on to discuss the medical need for late-term abortions, FactCheck.org reported.

Clinton responded: “I think that the kind of late-term abortions that take place are because of medical necessity. And, therefore, I would hate to see the government interfering with that decision.”

When FactCheck.org asked her campaign about her statement, a spokesman said that she meant that many late-term abortions — not all or even most — are because of medical reasons.

But her statement sounded as if most, if not all, late-term abortions are medically necessary. And the available evidence does not support that, FactCheck.org found.

Here are just a few of many considerations. (You can read the complete analysis at here.)
First, by way of preface, do you think Clinton has ever given an answer on “late-term abortions” that did not have the same kind of sweeping language? I cannot answer that definitely, but my strong suspicion is that Clinton has faithfully hued to the line that suggests that virtually all “late-term” abortions are performed because of “medical necessity.” This presumably refers (as Fader suggests) to “either a severe fetal anomaly or a threat to the life of the mother.”
But as NRLC has demonstrated, this is not true. Any guesses if Clinton will go out of her way to “clarify” her comment to Dickerson?

Second, Fader goes to a pro-abortion source for an answer to why women have late-term abortions–“the Guttmacher Institute’s peer-reviewed journal, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.”

She notes that a study published there in 2013 concluded that “[i]n many ways, women who had later abortions [after 20 weeks] were similar to those who obtained first-trimester procedures.” (Which have to do with such considerations as finances, stability of the relationship with the father, compounded, in this case, by an extended denial that she is pregnant.)
Fader says that while the study “did not include women who sought later-term abortions due to fetal anomaly or maternal life endangerment,” the study “did at least illustrate that there are women getting abortions after 20 weeks who do so for non-medical reasons.”
Third, Fader questioned one of the authors of that paper–Prof. Diana Greene Foster, who responded by email. Foster works at what NRLC’s Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon calls “the nation’s abortion training academy”–the University of California, San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health–and would be loathe to admit the real reasons for late-term abortion. Fader writes that Foster

told FactCheck.org in an email that “[t]here aren’t good data on how often later abortions are for medical reasons.” She said based on limited research and discussions with researchers in the field that abortions for fetal anomaly “make up a small minority of later abortions,” and that those for life endangerment are even harder to characterize.

Her “explanation” for the latter was these women would be treated in hospitals, not abortion clinics, making the numbers “harder to obtain.”
So what does Fader conclude? “No hard numbers back up Clinton’s comment that late-term abortions ‘are because of medical necessity.’”
A thought. If you read any of the four or five stories I wrote based on interviews given by abortionist Susan Robinson (one of a handful of abortionists who publicly admit to performing abortions 30 weeks and later), it’s clear that (a) the “criteria” for abortion this late in pregnancy is very ambiguous; (b) there is a considerable “margin of error” in dating babies this advanced; and (c) “Some are having their first abortion, some are having their second or third. You can’t categorise them.” [See, for example, here and here.]
Which brings you full circle to the conclusion drawn by Foster et al.: “[i]n many ways, women who had later abortions [over 20 weeks] were similar to those who obtained first-trimester procedures.”
Editor’s note. If you want to peruse stories all day long, either go directly to nationalrighttolifenews.org and/or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/daveha

Source: NRLC News