Tag Archives: Category: Sanctity of Life

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.

May 2013, Volume 39, Issue 5 of the Journal of Medical Ethics can be accessed here.

Ed Whelan at NRO: The Obama administration’s argument can’t withstand scrutiny. For starters, RFRA itself makes no distinction between “for-profit, secular companies” and “non-profit, religious organizations.”

Times Online: The lawsuit filed last year by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of Geneva was dismissed. That’s because a judge agreed with the Justice Department that the school wasn’t suffering immediate harm because federal officials were working to exempt such institutions from the law.

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 . . .

The mandate forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs and devices, sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties. Currently, the administration is losing in court nationwide with 19 out of 25 court rulings going against the mandate.

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.

CNSNews: All Americans, including job creators and providers, should be free to live according to their faith rather than be forced into violating their own consciences,” said Gregory S. Baylor, a senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing Geneva. “The court has done the right thing in allowing Geneva College to remain in this lawsuit…to ensure that the government doesn’t punish people of faith for making decisions consistent with that faith.”

Womensenews.org: “Nonprofit centers like ours that depend on donations are representing these small businesses pro bono because in addition to the fines, the cost of lawyers, travel and other expenses in pursuing these cases would wipe out the assets that took generations for the owners of these small businesses to accumulate,” said Matt Bowman, senior legal counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom, in a phone interview. His group has 44 in-house attorneys and more than 2,400 volunteer attorneys.

LifeNews: “Public schools should encourage, not shut down, the free exchange of ideas,” said Legal Counsel Jon Scruggs. “We commend Griggs County Central High School for believing in this principle and promptly allowing the pro-life poster to be redisplayed.”

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.

All Americans, including job creators and providers, should be free to live according to their faith rather than be forced into violating their own consciences. That’s no different for Geneva College, a Christian-run college that simply wants to abide by the very faith it espouses and teaches. T

USA Today (includes video): Castro, facing rape and kidnapping charges, could be charged with murder in the deaths of one victim’s unborn children.

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.”

Matt Sharp at Alliance Defending Freedom: I’m often surprised by the number of school administrators under the mistaken belief that the First Amendment has an age limit. They think that while a kid is in elementary or middle school, they can stop them from expressing their views and that kids have to wait until high school to have constitutional rights.

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.

One day after receiving a letter from Alliance Defending Freedom, a North Dakota high school and its district agreed to allow a student’s pro-life poster that was part of a class assignment to be placed back on the walls of the school.

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 . . .

Matt Sharp on the Zeb Bell Show to discuss this: Minn. School Says It Has ‘every Right To Prohibit Student Speech’ | MP3 audio 11:05 mins

CNA at DFW Catholic: Matthew Bowman, senior legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which is defending the publisher, told CNA that the move indicates “that the government knows it is taking an extremist view against religious freedom, and it is afraid to defend that in court.”

LifeNews: The lawsuit was brought on behalf four brothers, Terrence, John, James and Christopher Nagle and their family-owned business, M&N Plastics, Inc. The case has been assigned to Federal District Judge Victoria A. Roberts.

AP: A federal judge, asked by the government on Tuesday to freeze his plan giving teenage girls broader access to morning-after birth control, instead seized the chance to accuse health officials of taking steps that would end up hurting poor people and improve their chances of prevailing in a protracted legal fight with reproductive rights advocates.

FRC Blog: Revealing the truth about the practices of Planned Parenthood is the goal of a new campaign by Alliance Defending Freedom. The campaign, “Pretty Ugly, Planned Parenthood’s deception of the American Public,” is focused around four little-known truths about Planned Parenthood: that they 1) promote sexual promiscuity to children to create a customer; 2) promote abortion and enforce abortion quotas to drive funding; 3) keep health standards and overhead low, putting women at risk, and 4) they commit fraud by wasting and abusing taxpayer dollars.

Charisma: Suffering patients need understanding and sound medical treatment, not encouragement to kill themselves,” says Litigation Counsel Catherine Glenn Foster. “Even in Oregon, where doctor-prescribed death is already legal, studies show that depressed patients often don’t end up killing themselves when they get counseling and good pain management.”

LifeNews: Cahart’s testimony is shocking and disturbing. He compares the child in the womb to “meat in a Crock-Pot” and then jokes about his abortion toolkit, complete with a “pickaxe” and “drill bit.” “It’s like putting meat in a Crock-Pot, OK?” he tells the woman considering an abortion.

Bob Smietana of The Tennessean at the ShrevePort Times: The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer,” said Matt Bowman, senior legal council for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group that represents Tyndale.

AP on KSFY.com: A conservative legal group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, claimed when it filed the lawsuit last November that the state Department of Human Services is paying for abortions that aren’t medically necessary, without the legal authority to do so.

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.

MySanAntonio.com: The lawsuit says that the Affordable Care Act was held to be a tax for purposes of the U.S. Constitution, but that it was enacted in violation of a constitutional provision that requires revenue-raising bills to originate in the U.S. House . . . Hotze’s lawsuit also says the federal law violates the Fifth Amendment “by requiring Plaintiffs to transfer their wealth directly to others without a ‘public use,’” and that it “violates federalism by compelling a massive transfer in wealth away from Texans without complying with constitutional requirements.

Ed Whelan at NRO: Back in 2011 when I was the first to highlight the extraordinary position against religious liberty that the Obama administration adopted in the Hosanna-Tabor case, I elicited a tizzy on the Left when I raised the possibility that the administration’s hostility to the ministerial exception to federal antidiscrimination laws was part and parcel of a broader ideological agenda that would have gay causes trump religious liberty. The particular case of Hosanna-Tabor had nothing to do with issues of homosexuality, the critics observed, so they claimed not to see the connection.

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.

Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter Friday to all Vermont legislators to explain the negative consequences of a bill that would allow doctor-prescribed death.

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.

Warren Richey of Christian Science Monitor at MinnPost: Matt Bowman, lead counsel for Tyndale House, claimed victory on Monday when word of the court’s action circulated. “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” he said in a statement. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer.”

Michael Foust of BP on Christian Examiner: The legal group Alliance Defending Freedom says the government’s desire to withdraw its own appeal is a good sign for religious liberty. ADF is representing Tyndale. “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” said ADF senior legal counsel Matt Bowman. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer. For the government to say that a Bible publisher isn’t religious is outrageous, and now the Obama administration has had to retreat in court.”

One News Now: The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds to argue that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer,” says Bowman. “For the government to say that a Bible publisher isn’t religious is outrageous – and now the Obama administration had to retreat in court.”

Baptist Press on Patheos: “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” said ADF senior legal counsel Matt Bowman. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer. For the government to say that a Bible publisher isn’t religious is outrageous, and now the Obama administration has had to retreat in court.”

Christian Post: “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” Bowman said. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer. For the government to say that a Bible publisher isn’t religious is outrageous, and now the Obama administration has had to retreat in court.”

InForum: A conservative legal group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, claimed when it filed the lawsuit last November that the state Department of Human Services is paying for abortions that aren’t medically necessary, without the legal authority to do so.

Examiner.com: “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” said Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer.”

Breitbart: “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” Senior Legal Counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom Matt Bowman told LifeSiteNews. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer.”

Christian Science Monitor: Matt Bowman, lead counsel for Tyndale House, claimed victory on Monday when word of the court’s action circulated. “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” he said in a statement. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer.” Mr. Bowman, a lawyer with the conservative public interest group Alliance Defending Freedom, said the administration’s move was a “retreat” in court. “We will continue to argue that the administration cannot disregard the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom for all family business owners and must offer a comprehensive exemption to the mandate,” he said.

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.

LifeNews: Alliance Defending Freedom filed the suit on the Walkers’ behalf, and they still have the prerogative to appeal the decision. Rikelman said she believes it’s likely they will. As a group with a mission to make all abortion illegal, “it seems hard to imagine that they will give up so quickly,” she said.

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.

t the government’s own request, a federal appellate court Friday dismissed the Obama administration’s appeal of an order that stopped the president from enforcing his abortion pill mandate against a Bible publisher. The administration’s retreat marks the first total appellate victory on a preliminary injunction in any abortion pill mandate case.

Anchorage Daily News: The Alaska Supreme Court Friday unanimously upheld a lower court decision that a voter initiative banning all abortions could not appear on the Alaska ballot because it was unconstitutional. | Desjarlais v. Alaska

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.

Deseret News (5/3): Faith plays a role in the lives of believers no matter what they are doing,” said attorney Matt Bowman of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing Hercules. “It’s not possible to declare areas of life, like business or education or health care, as areas where religion is banished by the government.”

WorldNetDaily: Apparently, ADF said, Obama is nervous “about trying to defend its position that a Bible publisher is not religious enough for a religious exemption to the mandate.” “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” said Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer. For the government to say that a Bible publisher isn’t religious is outrageous, and now the Obama administration has had to retreat in court. “We will continue to argue that the administration cannot disregard the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom for all family business owners and must offer a comprehensive exemption to the mandate,” Bowman added.

Life News: Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys and allied attorneys are also litigating nine other lawsuits against the mandate. The lawsuits represent a large cross-section of Protestants and Catholics who object to the mandate. More than 100 lawsuits have been filed in total.The court’s order was the third nationwide against the mandate and the second obtained by Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys.

LifeNews: However, a sixth grade student in Minnesota was recently handing out simple fliers that read, “Save the baby humans. Stop abortion.” She passed them out at lunchtime to friends and classmates interested in the topic. The school considered this political activism and regarded it as offensive. She was banned from passing them out during or after school hours, even if students requested them. The school administration essentially denied this young girl of her constitutionally protected right to free speech. And to make matters worse, they said sixth graders don’t have this right to free speech until they reach high school. Alliance Defending Freedom has since filed a federal lawsuit on the grounds of censorship and “hostility toward religious expression.”

LifeNews: The defense attorney for abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell is furious about the Fox News special that aired Friday and Sunday nights exposing the gruesome abortions and infanticides that took place at his abortion clinic.

Ester Koch letter to the Editor at BND.com: Five U.S. senators and 72 congressmen called upon the Government Accountability Office investigating the amount of tax funding awarded to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a non-profit organization.The Alliance Defending Freedom report documents $99 million in Planned Parenthood financial waste and possible fraud

The Raw Story: The anti-choice group Alliance Defending Freedom filed the suit on the Walkers’ behalf, and they still have the prerogative to appeal the decision. Rikelman said she believes it’s likely they will. As a group with a mission to make all abortion illegal, “it seems hard to imagine that they will give up so quickly,” she said.

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.

AZ Republic: The move is a response to lobbying from Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, who says Medicaid expansion would subsidize abortions — a claim that puts in a political vise anti-abortion GOP lawmakers who back the governor’s proposal . . . Herrod first raised the abortion issue in late March in a letter to Brewer, using an opinion from a Christian legal-defense organization to argue that the draft Medicaid legislation should be amended to disqualify the non-profit women’s health provider Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers from receiving public money.

NBC Montana: The 2013 legislative session wrapped up in Montana at the start of the weekend, and now Planned Parenthood of Montana says they’re planning to sue the state over a bill passed that requires anyone under 18 to get parental consent for an abortion.

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.

One News Now: ADF attorney Matt Sharp is representing the sixth-grader who was prevented from handing out the pro-life flyers during non-instructional time. “They were not even just trying to prohibit it during the school day, but even before and after school,” he explains. “So if they’re standing out on the sidewalk on school grounds, they would be prohibited from doing it. Again, that’s far too great a restriction [and] something the courts have never permitted at any school.” [more]

Catherine Glenn Foster at Townhall: Some Vermont state lawmakers are pushing to pass S.77, a bill that legalizes “physician-assisted suicide” under the familiar guise of “choice.” Their bill is an attack on human life generally, and especially on elder adults and disabled individuals.

AFLC: Late yesterday, the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s HHS “contraception” mandate.  The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Johnson Welded Products, Inc. (“JWP”), a family owned and operated company in Ohio, and its President and principal owner, Ms. Lilli Johnson, a Catholic, who opposes the HHS mandate based on her sincerely-held religious beliefs.

LIfeNews: The American Center for Law & Justice has filed its opening brief in Gilardi v. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, an appeal pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

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.

Hadley Arkes at Weekly Standard: With the scandal over Kermit Gosnell, this seems precisely the moment for pro-life congressmen to return to the Born-Alive Act and hold hearings: They could take evidence now about the volume of these killings, and they could restore the civil penalties that were dropped from the bill. After all, not a single Democrat, in either House, finally voted against that bill. The Democrats agreed that it was wrong to kill a child who survived an abortion, and so they should be faced with the question of how wrong they thought it was: Would it merit at least the kind of penalty that comes with a moving violation in traffic?

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?