The Risk of Postponing Fertility

Robert Stacy McCain takes a break from his insightful political reporting and commentary to make an important cultural observation:

[Regarding a woman of 33 who describes herself as "slightly old for prime procreating"...]“Slightly old for prime procreating”? As a matter of scientific fact, she’s far more than “slightly old,” as prime childbearing age is 18-24.

It is strange that secular moderns, who constantly lecture us religious traditionalists about our alleged aversion to science, are themselves often ignorant of (or hostile toward) the actual science they claim to revere. Fertility begins to decline after a woman passes her mid-20s and, by the time she is 33, she has a much higher risk of infertility than she would have faced 10 or 15 years earlier.

This is simply a fact and, while all statistics about health risks are based on averages that include exceptions — i.e., Rachel Birnbaum might experience no difficulty whatsoever becoming pregnant at a later age — she probably wouldn’t choose to defy the odds if she really thought carefully about it. But her reference to her “much younger state of mind” and her expressed dread of “the conveyer belt traveling toward adulthood” suggest that her ideas on the subject are not entirely rational.

God help her husband if he ever said something like that, huh? A man who accuses a woman of being irrational is inviting the counter-accusation that he is a sexist swine with a head full of ignorant stereotypes. And in a situation such as that involving Rachel Birnbaum, her husband’s desire to become a father is also at odds with the feminist dictum that reproductive choice is entirely a female prerogative. Men’s parental preferences are as nothing, when weighed against four decades of Women’s Movement rhetoric about female sovereignty in these matters.

McCain's insights are certainly worth reading in full.

Just When You Least Expect It

I've noticed two things about the abortion debate.

First: We're winning. More and more people identify as pro-life, more and more people report that they support legal restrictions on abortion, and more and more young people are pro-life.

Second (and counter-intuitively, considering the first point), the pro-life side doesn't usually drive the debate. Whenever abortion percolates to the top of our national discussions, it's most often because of something that the pro-abort side has said or done.

For example, what preceded the recent House vote to de-fund Planned Parenthood? A series of videos were released by LiveAction showing the eagerness of Planned Parenthood employees to provide their (government-funded) services to pimps running rings of (fictitious, as it turned out) illegal immigrant underage sex slaves.

This week the blogosphere is all over the recent post at the Wonkette blog that demonstrates liberals' visceral hatred of Trig Palin, the Down Syndrome baby of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Due to pre-natal testing, 90% of Down Syndrome babies are aborted in a fit of American Lebensunwertes Leben. Of course, liberals hate little Trig, who turned 3 this week, because his existence stands as a rebuke to their bankrupt philosophy and as a testament to the dignity and sanctity of human life. Such a famous Down Syndrome child provides unacceptably counter-cultural example of selflessness. Liberals believe that Trig should have been aborted, and they could not care less about anyone's "choice" in the matter. And a large number of people who last week were emphasizing the importance of fiscal policy in choosing our next president are now discussing how vile the pro-abortion tendencies of the left really are.

As you look back, it's the same story. What were the big abortion-related stories in 2008, during the last presidential campaigns? There were two: Barack Obama said that the question of when a baby gets human rights was "above my pay grade". And in a press conference, Obama said that if his girls, having reached their teen years, were to "make a mistake," that he wouldn't want them to be "punished with a baby."

So what do you think? What will the pro-aborts do next to draw unwanted and embarrassing attention to themselves?

Abortion Ensures Wisconsin Will Be Conservative

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal has done the math (H/T: The Other McCain):

There probably are many more like Tricia Willoughby, aren't there? After all, her parents are "pro-life activists," which means they have a tendency to follow the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. People on the other political side are more inclined toward subtraction (or as they call it, "choice"), as we explained in our 2005 paper "The Roe Effect."

Here are some Badger State numbers: Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. The Wisconsin Department of Health has statewide figures on the annual number of abortions going back to 1975. Tot up the numbers through 1992, and you come up with 316,457.

Scott Walker won the governorship last year by a margin of 124,638. That may not be within the margin of abortion; after all, some of the missing 316,457 would have voted Republican had they existed, and many would not have voted.

But JoAnne Kloppenburg, the left-liberal state Supreme Court candidate who was supposed to save Wisconsin's labor monopolies from Walker's reforms, lost by just 7,316 votes, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (this figure is pending a possible futile recount). It's almost inconceivable that the Roe effect alone is insufficient to account for Justice David Prosser's victory.

Oh, and in four years, Tricia Willoughby will be old enough to vote, while an additional 54,522 will not be.

Abortion; it's not an evolutionary survival technique.

Ellen McCormack RIP

1976 Pro-life Democratic Presidential Candidate passes on...

Michael J. New at National Review On-Line has the story:

This past Sunday, longtime pro-life activist Ellen McCormack passed away. Since the pro-life movement often devotes little attention to its own history, her name may be unfamiliar to many young pro-lifers.

However, pro-lifers of a slightly older generation will remember her as one of the most famous pro-life activists of the 1970s. McCormack was a wife, mother, homemaker, and a pro-life activist. She got her start in politics in New York, which was a hotbed of pro-life activism when it became among the first states to legalize abortion in 1970.

McCormack is most well known for running for the Democratic party’s nomination for president in 1976 on a pro-life platform. Her story is chronicled in Professor Jane Gilroy’s recent book A Shared Vision.

Throughout her campaign, McCormack had little money, name recognition, or media coverage. However, she still received more votes than better known, better funded Democratic presidential candidates in a number of primaries and caucuses.

McCormack became the first female presidential candidate to qualify for federal matching funds and her campaign commercials which focused on pro-life issues reached tens of millions of voters. She received three delegates and received a nominating speech and a seconding speech at the Democratic National Convention that summer. Her campaign educated many about abortion and demonstrated that there was a sizeable contingent of Democrats who were willing to support a single-issue pro-life candidate.

Pro-life pioneers like Ellen McCormack deserve credit for the gains the pro-life movement has made in recent years. In its early years, the pro-life movement was very short on resources and received precious little attention from the mainstream media. As such, it was up to articulate volunteers and single-issue candidates like EllenMcCormack to keep voters informed.

Furthermore, McCormack’s campaigns raised the salience of sanctity of life issues and gave countless campaign workers valuable experience. McCormack went on to run for lieutenant governor of New York in 1978 and for president as a single-issue pro-life candidate in 1980. Her steadfast devotion to the pro-life cause will be missed. RIP.

It's hard to imagine today that anyone might run for the Democratic nomination for President on a pro-life platform. I can only imagine the abuse they'd receive. Today, the Democrats are at least as wedded to abortion as they once were to slavery.

It Never Stops Getting Worse

A few hundred years ago, if you wanted a miracle cure for ailed you, or just a really nifty new hair tonic, you might buy something made from ground up ancient Egyptian mummies. Seriously:

From the 1100s until opinions changed in the 1700s, powdered or chopped up pieces of a mummy were considered a cure for many different health problems, including diseases, poisoning, open wounds, and even broken bones. Mixed with other ingredients or used straight, mummy medicine became a popular drug in the West. King Francis I of France even took powdered mummy with rhubarb daily.

When Egyptian mummies became hard to acquire, a new market for the dearly departed opened up. Merchants substituted the corpses of slaves and others, “embalming” the bodies themselves and marketing them as genuine mummies.

"Mummy Brown" or “Egyptian Brown” was a paint composed of powdered mummy. Most often used in watercolor and oil painting during the 1500s and 1600s, artists enjoyed its pleasing color and texture although it was prone to cracking. Mummy Brown abruptly fell out of use in the 1800s after its gruesome composition became known.

In Britain during the 1830s and 1840s, mummy “unwrapping” parties were popular. Tourists traveling to Egypt would bring back a mummy and invite friends over to witness the unwrapping of the mummy, followed by refreshments. Victorians also found it interesting to keep the hand or foot of a mummy as a display piece ... accounts include mummies used as firewood by travelers and the export of mummified cats to Europe as fertilizer in the 1800s.

Today, of course, we are too refined to use mummies for such mundane purposes. Instead, we use aborted fetuses to make flavor enhancers in our food:

A pro-life group that monitors the use of cells from babies victimized by abortions is today highlighting a biotech company, Senomyx, which it says produces artificial flavor enhancers using aborted fetal cell lines to test their products.

The group Children of God for Life is calling for a public boycott of major food companies partnering with Senomyx.

Debi Vinnedge, the director of the pro-life organization, tells LifeNews.com today that, in 2010, her group wrote to Senomyx CEO Kent Snyder and pointed out that moral options for testing their food additives could and should be used. But when Senomyx ignored her letter, the group wrote to the companies Senomyx listed on their website as “collaborators” warning them of public backlash and threatened boycott. They included food giants PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Campbell Soup, Solae and Nestlé. (See update below.)

“The company’s key flavor programs focus on the discovery and development of savory, sweet and salt flavor ingredients that are intended to allow for the reduction of MSG, sugar and salt in food and beverage products,” the Senomyx web site says. “Using isolated human taste receptors, we created proprietary taste receptor-based assay systems that provide a biochemical or electronic readout when a flavor ingredient interacts with the receptor.”

... “What they don’t tell the public is that they are using HEK 293 – human embryonic kidney cells taken from an electively aborted baby to produce those receptors,” she said. “They could have easily chosen animal, insect, or other morally obtained human cells expressing the G protein for taste receptors.”

Vinnedge says she has contacted the food companies working with Senomyx, but said it took three letters before one company, Nestlé, finally admitted its relationship with Senomyx and company officials claimed the line of cells from abortions was “well established in scientific research”.

Both PepsiCo and Campbell Soup also responded.

PepsiCo wrote: “We hope you are reassured to learn that our collaboration with Senomyx is strictly limited to creating lower-calorie, great-tasting beverages for consumers. This will help us achieve our commitment to reduce added sugar per serving by 25% in key brands in key markets over the next decade and ultimately help people live healthier lives.”

Campbell Soup officials told the pro-life group: “Every effort is made to use the finest ingredients and develop the greatest selection of products, all at a great value. With this in mind, it must be said that the trust we have cultivated and developed over the years with our consumers is not worth compromising to cut costs or increase profit margins.”

...

UPDATE: Within hours of its press statement to LifeNews.com, the pro-life group received notice from Campbell Soup that the company has severed its ties with Senomyx. Juli Mandel Sloves, Senior Manager of Nutrition & Wellness Communications at Campbell Soup Company, told Vinnedge, “We are no longer in partnership with Senomyx. This fact was discussed during the Senomyx conference call with its investors earlier this month.”

Don't mistake: now that abortion on demand is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, the goal is to involve you in abortion, directly or indirectly, with or with your knowledge or assent, and as deeply as possible.

"Epidemic" of Coerced Abortions in U.S.

LifeNews reports:

Women who refuse requests from their husbands or boyfriends to have abortions are often finding themselves subject to violent attacks that sometimes result in their deaths. That's the finding of a new report from the Elliot Institute, which calls the problem a "widespread epidemic."

The new report, Forced Abortion in America, is drawing attention to attacks on pregnant women and girls in order to prevent them from continuing their pregnancies.

It points out a "widespread epidemic of unwanted, coerced and forced abortions taking place in the United States."

The report notes how research suggests most abortions are likely unwanted or coerced, with one survey of women who had abortions finding that 64 percent said they felt pressured by others to abort.

The same survey found 80 percent of women said they did not receive the counseling they needed to make a decision -- even though more than half said they felt rushed or uncertain about the abortion.

The consequences for those who refuse abortion can be dangerous and even deadly, according to the report, which details cases of women and girls facing violent attacks or murder for resisting abortion.

Studies of death rates among pregnant women in the U.S. have found that homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women, the authors say.

I've often said that when pro-aborts talk about "choice," the only "choice" they mean is the choice to kill. It's only when you recognize this that the things they do and say make any sense.

It's only when you realize that "choice" just means "killing" that the actions of these "pro-choice" people make any sense:

* A Kansas man and his wife were convicted of sexual abuse after the man raped his stepdaughters over a several year period, resulting in four pregnancies and at least one abortion, performed on an 11-year-old. The case was reported to authorities by a pro-life organization after one of the girls visited their office seeking an abortion; the group says that the abortion business did the abortion without informing authorities of any suspected abuse.

* Two Ohio teenagers were convicted for kidnapping and assaulting a pregnant teen, killing her unborn child. Police said one of the boys thought he had fathered the child, and the two hit the teen and kicked her the abdomen to cause the death of her 8-month-old unborn child. One of them allegedly told her that she should have gotten an abortion, and that "now your baby is going to die." DNA tests showed the teen was not the father.

* A man was sentenced to 9 years in prison for secretly giving his wife an abortion-inducing drug after she refused to abort. The woman secretly taped him admitting to giving her the drug but trying to convince her that she really wanted to have an abortion.

* A high school junior was beaten to death by her 22-year-old boyfriend after she refused to have an abortion. According to police, the man hit the teen at least four times on the head with a bat and admitted he did not want her to have the baby. He pleaded guilty after leading police to the girl's body, which he had buried under leaves in the woods. The man was sentenced to 22 years to life in prison. [Emphasis added.]

We know, because the pro-aborts tell us, that (in the words of President Obama) "no one is 'pro-abortion.'" If that's true, then these people must simply be "pro-choice." Which only makes sense if by "choice" you mean, "killing unborn babies for any reason or no reason, and by the cruelest means imaginable."

The Revolution Will Not Be Live-Tweeted...

... After All!

It seems that in her desire to show people how safe, easy and comfortable legal abortions can really be, Angie Jackson decided to live-tweet her RU-486 abortion.

In the event, it turned out not to be the brief afternoon picnic she envisioned. Jill Stanek has the story:

Be careful what you attempt to demystify.

At 4:08 p.m. on Feb. 18 micro-blogger Angie Jackson began posting the blow-by-blows of her RU-486 abortion on Twitter. "I took the first pill a little under 2 hours ago," she tweeted.

The 27-year-old's intention, she later told ABC News, was to "demystify" RU-486 abortions.

Jackson had announced her pregnancy on Twitter Feb. 13, even before telling the boyfriend ("BF") she and her 4-year-old son have been living with since last December.

BF was on board with aborting his offspring, so when it came down to which type, four-weeks pregnant Jackson chose the RU-486 at-home medical abortion, which the FDA states can be prescribed up to 49 days, or seven weeks, after the first day of a mother's last period.

RU-486 abortions are the coming rage, much less hassle for abortion profiteers than surgical abortions. The mother takes an RU-486 pill (aka mifepristone or mifeprex) at the clinic, which kills the baby, and follows up at home with one or two doses of cytotec (aka misoprostol) pills to cause contractions to expel the baby. All for $480, as Angie tweeted.

The bonus for abortion clinics is if an RU-486 abortion doesn't work, which occurs 7.9 percent of the time according to RU-486's label, there is no guarantee, so mothers must then undergo and pay for surgical abortions – abortion double-dipping.

Notwithstanding that, along with serious, life-threatening complications that can lead to death, as has happened at least eight times in the U.S. since RU-486 was legalized in 2000, are RU-486 abortions generally less hassle for aborting moms?

Jackson thought so, basing her decision on the fact her abortion would "be over in 4-8 hrs," as she initially tweeted, and done in the comfort of her home, since she was frightened of surgery.

After visiting her local Planned Parenthood, Jackson again tweeted her abortion experience would be a "4 hour bleed-out," so this was apparently the official teaching Angie received.

But the first rule of demystifying is one must herself be demystified before attempting to demystify. If not, the demystifying process may not go as anticipated, which is what happened in Jackson's case.

Only because Angie decided to live tweet her RU-486 abortion did we learn in actuality it's a long, drawn out, painful process. For that reason I thought Angie's exposé was a worthwhile educational experience for us all.

Here are some common adverse reactions, according to the RU-486 packaging:

Nearly all of the women … will report adverse reactions, and many … report more than one. … 80 to 90 percent of women reported bleeding more heavily than they do during a heavy menstrual period. … Women also typically experience abdominal pain, including uterine cramping. Other commonly reported side effects were nausea, vomiting and diarrhea … pelvic pain, fainting, headache, dizziness... fatigue... back pain...

That's sobering enough on paper, but how does reality play out?

For nine days, from Feb. 19-27, Jackson tweeted about such severe cramps she had difficulty walking across the room. She went through 17 Vicodin in six days and at a point soon after requesting a prescription for another 20.

Jackson tweeted nausea, vomiting, backaches, headaches and bleeding. Five days into her abortion experience, Angie commented on another blog, "Honestly I had no idea this would go on so long. I thought the entire abortion would take a few hours, as I'd read in a few stories. ..."

At the bottom of this column you can read what Jackson's suffering looked like in real time, where I've synopsized nine days of her tweets.

Planned Parenthood obviously did not explain the reality of an RU-486 abortion to Jackson, nor did any of her other sources.

But Edouard Sakiz, former chairman of Roussel Uclaf, the company that developed RU-486, stated:

As abortifacient procedures go, RU-486 is not at all easy to use. ... True, no anesthetic is required. But a woman who wants to end her pregnancy has to "live" with her abortion for at least a week using this technique. It's an appalling psychological ordeal.

Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu, who invented RU-486, stated:

It's insulting to women to say that abortion now will be as easy as taking aspirins. It is always difficult, psychologically and physically, sometimes tragic.

Jackson stopped tweeting her symptoms on Feb. 27, when she realized I was reposting them on my blog. But she wrote the evening of March 2, "In real life, I had a terrible day & don't wanna talk about it."

So whatever the physical, emotional, psychological toll Jackson has endured up to this point, it's not over.

See the rest of the story here.

I still don't get it. If abortion is such a wonderful thing, why should it be "tragic" or a "psychological ordeal"? What other rights do we describe in such terms?

As for Miss Jackson, let's pray for her.

(Cross-posted from Thoughts of a Regular Guy.)