Category Archives: Sanctity of Life

LifeNews: The last three late-term abortion clinics of what was once was a chain of six in Northern California is closing this week, reports Wynette Sills of 40 Days for Life Sacramento.

The Hill: Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) will offer a bill to ban late-term abortions in response to the gruesome case of Kermit Gosnell, an abortion provider recently convicted of killing three viable infants.

Samuel Aquila at National Review: The embryos killed are the first class of victims; the second class of victims will be the rest of us.

Liberty Counsel: Today the State of Arkansas defended the Human Heartbeat Protection Act against an ACLU motion for a preliminary injunction. Liberty Counsel is seeking to intervene on behalf of a crisis pregnancy center and also filed an amicus brief on behalf of the law.

PilotOnline.com: A bill banning private insurers from offering abortion coverage through future online marketplaces has cleared the North Carolina House.

Bangor Daily News: The thorny issue of abortion rights came to the forefront Thursday in Augusta with the introduction of three bills that sparked strong words even before they were introduced to lawmakers.

Jen Kuznicki at CNSNews: Byron York of the Washington Examiner wrote yesterday that the IRS scandal could lead to fears about the agency’s role in enforcing Obamacare: The IRS will also decide who is, and who is not, eligible for Obamacare’s subsidies. The law authorizes the IRS to share confidential taxpayer information with the Department of Health and Human Services for the purpose of determining those subsidies.”

Bloomberg: U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright in Little Rock in a ruling yesterday denied a request by the state’s attorney general to dismiss the lawsuit. The judge said the two doctors have standing to sue even though the law hasn’t gone into effect and they have sufficiently alleged the law infringes women’s constitutional rights.

AP: The 28-year-old son of a Florida fertility doctor has been charged by federal authorities with tricking his girlfriend into taking a pill used to induce labor and cause an abortion, killing the fetus she was carrying.

LifeNews: Planned Parenthood, over the years, has run some pretty shocking ad campaigns. Without a doubt, this one is the worst I’ve ever seen . . .

LifeNews: Attorney General Eric Holder told a Congressional committee yesterday he is unsure if a federal law stopping after-birth abortions has been enforced.

Wall Street Journal: Scientists have used cloning technology to transform human skin cells into embryonic stem cells, an experiment that may revive the controversy over human cloning.

Jeanneane Maxon at Washington Times: It is clear the time is now to protect women and children victimized by Big Abortion by enacting common-sense clinic regulations, informed consent requirements, mandated reporting of sexual abuse, parental involvement in young girl’s abortion decisions and legal protections for born-alive infants. Americans United for Life has been championing these laws for decades, providing model legislation and protecting women from unregulated Big Abortion.

EagNews: However the superintendent and board have declared that Planned Parenthood will continue to teach our children as long as its grant from the federal government lasts.

Center for Reproductive Rights: The Center for Reproductive Rights will soon file a lawsuit challenging both HB 1456 and HB 1305 on behalf the Red River Women’s Clinic before they are scheduled to take effect on August 1, 2013. The Center filed today’s proposed supplemental complaint, MKB Management Corp d/b/a Red River Women’s Clinic, Tammi Kromenaker, Kathryn Eggleston, M.D., v. Birch Burdick and Terry Dwelle, M.D., along with law firm Turman & Lang Ltd.

AP: It can’t meet the mandates of a 2012 state law and the governor wants to shut it down, but Mississippi’s only abortion clinic is not about to quietly retreat.

CNSNews: Over 86 years, the Ku Klux Klan lynched 3,446 blacks – a figure matched in less than four days if tallying the number of black babies who are aborted.

LifeNews: The three informants, Deborah Edge, Gigi Aguliar, and Krystal Rodriguez, have come forward to tell of their horrific experiences working for abortionist Douglas Karpen, at one of three of his Texas abortion clinics, the Aaron Women’s Clinic in Houston.

LifeSiteNews: An abortionist who is now facing a criminal investigation would regularly allow late-term babies to be born alive, then twist their heads off with his bare hands, according to a videotaped interview conducted by three of his employees.

LifeNews: The state of Virginia has adopted new pro-life laws ranging from a measure allowing women to see ultrasounds to one that cracks down on health and safety violations at abortion clinics to a law allowing Choose Life license plates.

Albert Mohler: But, in reality the whole nation was in trial, and we are all guilty. What the pro-abortion movement fears most is that Americans will pause to consider what this trial really means. It means that Dr. Gosnell would not be on trial for murder if he had killed those three babies while inside their mother’s body

LifeNews: The top Democrat in the Senate is now coming under fire for comments about the Kermit Gosnell murder trial and the verdict finding him guilty on three counts of killing babies sin gruesome abortion-infanticides.

LifeNews: Following the murder conviction of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell, the North Carolina health department has shut down an abortion clinic.

TribLive: State officials say they moved quickly to strengthen regulations for abortion clinics upon learning of a “house of horrors” in Philadelphia that performed gruesome late-term abortions. The stricter rules led several local clinics to close and are causing scheduling problems for at least one Pittsburgh clinic.

LifeNews: A new report indicates nine of the 12 jurors who convicted abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell of murder yesterday, take a “pro-choice” view of abortion.

Lyle Denniston as posted an updated at SCOTUS Blog.

Gallup: One-quarter of Americans say they have followed news of the case either very closely (7%) or somewhat closely (18%), but that is well below the 61% average level of attention Americans have paid to the more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured since 1991. An additional 20% of Americans say they are following it “not too closely” while 54% say “not at all.” This makes the Gosnell case one of the least followed news stories Gallup has measured.

AP: The Obama administration on Monday filed a last-minute appeal to delay the sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill to girls of any age without a prescription.

World Net Daily: At the time, attorney Harold J. Cassidy called the decision of the full 8th Circuit Court of Appeals “a fabulous victory for the women of the state of South Dakota.” . . . Commenting on the decision, Steven H. Aden of the Alliance Defending Freedom said “a woman’s right to make a fully informed choice is more important than Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.” “If Planned Parenthood truly cared about the well-being of women, it would not try to prevent them from being informed of the well-documented risk of suicide that accompanies abortion,” he said. “The 8th Circuit has done the right thing in upholding a reasonable law that protects the well-being of women by making sure that the truth is not hidden from them.”

LifeNews: Reports this morning indicate the jury in the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell is hung on two counts, but reports do not indicate which ones.

Hadley Arkes at Public Discourse: We don’t need a new resolution from Congress to address the wrongs of clinics like Kermit Gosnell’s—the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act already serves that purpose, and we should restore the civil penalties originally attached to it.

THV (AP): Opponents of Arkansas’ law banning most abortions 12 weeks into a pregnancy say a group that wants to help defend the restriction shouldn’t participate in a hearing next week.

Bloomberg: The case is Tummino v. Hamburg, 12-cv-00763, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn). The appeal is Tummino v. Hamburg, 13-1690, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Manhattan).

Live Action News has published this video.

LifeNews: An emotionally exhausted jury in the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell is going home for the weekend.

Kristan Hawkins at Townhall: The bottom-line is this: Kermit Gosnell is not unique. He is a product of the culture of death that Planned Parenthood’s hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars cultivates and encourages, beginning with our youth. While Students for Life’s Planned Parenthood Project will soon expose Planned Parenthood’s corrupt, dirty, and deadly practices on campuses nationwide, it’s time for Washington, starting with Republican House Leadership, to investigate and defund the abortion Goliath once and for all.

LifeNews: Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 2-7, find 58 percent of Americans want either all or almost all abortions illegal — with 20% saying it should be illegal in all circumstances and 38% favoring it in only in a few circumstances.

Christopher O. Tollefsen at Public Discourse: The Gosnell case shows us that a society’s laws teach, and if they teach a lesson of injustice they will corrupt its people over time. Indeed, contemporary abortion jurisprudence undermines the very notion of natural rights and constitutional government.

Think Progress: Since abortion procedures can range from around $300 dollars to more than $3,000 dollars, raising enough money to pay out-of-pocket represents a significant financial strain for the women who need this type of reproductive service. By the numbers, here’s a snapshot of what’s it like to pay for an abortion — the reality that’s forcing most U.S. women to struggle to scrape together the money they need to pay for their reproductive health care . . .

LifeNews: As more details emerge from the case of the Cleveland kidnapper who apprehended three teenage girls and forced them to live as sex slaves for a decade in his home, a leading pro-life attorney hopes more charges will be made.

LifeNews: Republicans in the House of Representatives have sent letters to public health officials in all 50 states asking them what they are doing to prevent “House of Horrors” abortion clinics like the one Kermit Gosnell ran in Pennsylvania.

WRAL.com: Senate Bill 132 says the state’s mandated health curriculum on reproductive health and safety “shall include information about the preventable causes of preterm birth, including induced abortion as a cause of preterm birth in subsequent pregnancies.”

Liberty Counsel filed a motion and a brief in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas seeking to intervene on behalf of a Concepts of Life crisis pregnancy center to defend against a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: But Myers is making a far broader claim. He is asserting that a woman’s seeking an abortion is sufficient to establish that she is not culpable for any consequences that proximately result from her “choice,” including the deliberate killing, after birth, of the baby she sought to abort. Myers is, in other words, positing that women who seek abortions are categorically free of culpability.
That is the sort of moral immunity we normally extend to persons who lack the capacity to understand . . .

The Dallas Morning News: The bill is stalled in the Senate and Thursday is the last day it can be added to the to-do list for the House.

AP: he Missouri Senate advanced legislation Monday that would require a doctor to be physically present when a drug causing an abortion is administered. The measure passed 23-7 along party lines . . .

National Review: For instance, the Guttmacher study finds that, among sexually active women not using contraception, only 12 percent cited either cost or lack of access as reason. This finding even holds among teens: A 2012 Centers for Disease Control study of 5,000 teenage girls who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies found that only a small percentage had difficulty accessing contraception.

Albany Times Union: Karen DeWitt of New York State Public Radio talks to state Senate Republican Conference Leader Dean Skelos about his resistance to the abortion plank of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s women’s agenda and many of the election reform proposals that have been floated.

The Hill: If you want to know how effective Cecile Richards is, just ask her opponents.
As the president of Planned Parenthood — both its clinical operations and its political advocacy arm — Richards, who recently sat down for an interview with The Hill, is no stranger to controversy.

LifeNews: With a national controversy swirling surrounding abortion as the Kermit Gosnell murder trial unfolds, several Senate Republicans are seeking hearings on the abortion practitioner and abortion in general.

Ruth Institute: Middle-school California kids, now you can be as sexually profligate as you want to be–and your parents don’t even have to know about it! The California Condom Access Project, run by the California Health Council, which is making condoms available for kids as young as 12 in an online, taxpayer-funded condom delivery service, has expanded their service to include San Diego and Fresno counties.

LifeSiteNews: Angele, a single mother in her thirties with two children, thought that abortion was the answer to her circumstances. At almost 23 weeks gestation, she entered the EPOC Clinic in Orlando, Florida. Little did she realize that the next day she would give birth to a live, perfectly healthy boy whom she named Rowan. Cradling Rowan’s moving body, her screams for help were ignored by abortion clinic workers while her son took his last breath.

LifeNews: Reports from the court now indicate none of the jurors saw the Fox News special so it appears that the issue will have no impact on the case.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS Blog: The Obama administration is making a sustained effort to keep the youngest girls who are sexually active from having easy access to the pregnancy-preventing drug known as “Plan B.” Taking another step toward what may be an ultimate test in the Supreme Court, the administration will ask a federal judge in New York at a hearing Tuesday to put on hold his decision to make Plan B available over the counter — without a prescription –to women of all ages.

AP: Reproductive rights advocates urged a judge Monday to let teenage girls buy morning-after birth control without a prescription beginning this week, saying to delay enforcement of his ruling while the government appeals would cause “certain, significant and irreparable” harm to women.

RTV6.com: A court battle between the state of Indiana and Planned Parenthood could be looming once again. The reproductive services group may sue to block a new state law that threatens to stop abortions at one of its clinics.

Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy: Yet as Ronald Bailey notes, the whole reason the Administration’s Plan-B rules ended up in court in the first place was that political officials overruled the FDA’s expert judgment. Further, as I noted here, drug approval decisions necessarily involve policy considerations, and cannot be resolved by science alone.

The Bell Towers: As the president of Secular Pro-Life, I have been asked to present the non-religious case against abortion.  But actually, you’ve probably heard it already.  Many people who hear the secular arguments against abortion simply fail to recognize them as secular, because they expect pro-life apologetics to have a religious source.  Expectations powerfully color the way we see reality.  Discard these expectations, however, and you will soon find that most arguments against abortion do not require the existence of a god.

LifeNews: The legislature approved Senate Bill 371, a pro-life bill which introduces oversight into the chemical abortion industry by including chemical abortions in the definition of abortion in Indiana law.

TimesUnion.org: Amid concerns that the abortion rights plank of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Women’s Equality Agenda hasn’t yet been nailed down as legislation, women’s groups will soon be able to show lawmakers bill language blessed by the Cuomo administration.

Connie Friedersdorf at The Atlantic: The Pennsylvania Department of Health doesn’t make it impossible to report a “horror clinic” on its website, but it isn’t easy either.

Denise Burke of AUL at Washington Times: Sadly, Big Abortion continues to equate women’s health and safety with mere access to abortion. Access to sanitary and appropriately regulated and inspected abortion facilities is simply not part of their political and self-interested calculus.

Marvin Olasky at Townhall: Today’s justices have a chance to do not only what’s right but what’s logical: If the Supreme Court affirms states rights on marriage, why not on abortion?

LifeSiteNews: In his weekly column for Catholic Philly, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput takes aim at the nation’s primary national media for their “failure” and “allergic disinterest” in covering the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell.

Miami Herald: The American Medical Association has written a letter to the Pentagon stating that “force feeding of detainees violates core ethical values of the medical profession.”

LifeNews: As the nation awaits the results of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial, a columnist who helped get some national coverage of the trial of the abortion practitioner is highlighting one woman’s tragic story. In a new column at USA Today, writer Kirsten Powers focuses on the story of Desiree Hawkins.

AP: The U.S. military’s highest court has reversed a Marine’s conviction for a suicide attempt. | U.S. v. Caldwell

Washington Times: New undercover videos of abortion professionals explaining late-term abortions, coupled with states passing strict abortion laws and a horror-show abortion criminal case, are keeping abortion at the top of the news — an unexpected development after the nation re-elected its most vocal pro-choice president.

LifeNews: That figure comes from a new Polling Company survey that the firm conducted for the National Right to Life Committee. It found that a substantial majority of registered voters say that they are familiar with Planned Parenthood and a majority has a favorable impression of the abortion giant

Elise Italiano at Public Discourse: President Obama’s recent address to Planned Parenthood’s National Conference sweepingly mischaracterized abortion restrictions and pro-life views as culturally inaccurate and outdated.

AP: The murder trial of a Philadelphia abortion provider has spawned courtroom debate over when life ends, as opposed to when it begins.

LifeNews: The House Judiciary Committee, after declining to hear from expert witnesses who asked to testify, rubber-stamped the House Human Services language to restore Oregon-Style doctor-prescribed suicide to, and then voted 8-3 to move, S.77 out for a full vote of the House of Representatives.

AP: A defense lawyer asked a jury Monday to transcend both the politics and unpleasant reality of abortion when it weighs murder charges against a doctor charged with killing a patient and four babies.

LifeNews: A Washington, D.C.-based abortion practitioner caught on video promoting infanticide has given an interview in which he backtracks from doing so and lashes out at pro-life advocates.

Nathaniel Peters at Public Discourse: Donna Freitas’s new book on the hookup culture rightly encourages students to see its harms, but fails to give them moral reasons for opting out of it.