Tag Archives: Category: Sanctity of Life

Catholic Culture: The Swiss bishops’ spokesman said that the use of the pill would be allowed only in cases when it would not have an abortifacient effect. The spokesman acknowledged the difficulty of determining whether a rape victim could already had ovulated

YouTube: Victims of the Obama Administration’s assault on religious freedom speak out at Rep. Black’s press conference in support of the Health Care Conscience Rights Act. Speakers included:

NRLC on Pro-Life Blogs: A federal district court decision against the Idaho Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act issued March 7, 2013, opens the way to an ultimate consideration by the United States Supreme Court whether mounting medical evidence that unborn children are capable of feeling pain supports a compelling state interest allowing protection of such children from abortion.

ObamaCare’s employer mandate has become the “bludgeon” with which the government feels empowered to cripple the consciences of religious employers.

Denver Post: All the owners are evangelical Christians who specifically object to being forced to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs and devices,” said the company’s attorneys with the Alliance Defending Freedom in a statement released late Wednesday.

Kansas City Star: A Kansas House committee is preparing to debate sweeping anti-abortion legislation aimed at ensuring the state doesn’t subsidize abortions even indirectly through tax exemptions or credits.

AP: A federal judge has struck down Idaho’s law banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on beliefs held by physicians and others that the fetus is able to feel pain at that point . . . “The state may not rely on its interest in the potential life of the fetus to place a substantial obstacle to abortion before viability in women’s paths,” he said.

LifeNews: Almost half of the entire budget was allocated to HIV/AIDS – $93 million. Out of the remaining $95 million, $25 million is designated for Family Planning to “improve and expand the use of family planning methods in developing countries” and to “introduce and develop new family planning methods.”

LifeNews: Seventy-two members of the U.S. Congress have signed a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting updated detailed information about government grants to Planned Parenthood.

CNSNews: The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted 267-151 on Wednesday to approve a $982-billion continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government through the rest of fiscal 2013 that fully funds the implementation of Obamacare during that period.

All Americans, including jobs creators and providers, should be free to live according to their faith rather than be forced into violating their own consciences.

Kim Daniels at Times Union: But rather than help such women in need, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act would make a bad situation worse.

Michael J. Norton appeared on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show to discuss: New lawsuit: Planned Parenthood forced, botched abortion. | MP3 audio 5:44 mins

Rienzi, Mark, God and the Profits: Is There Religious Liberty for Money-Makers? (March 7, 2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=

Catherine Glenn Foster at Townhall: In 2012, nearly half of America’s states enacted laws designed to protect women and children from coerced, unsafe, and rushed abortions. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, has dug in his heels in blind obedience to an outdated doctrine and is pushing to expand abortion in his state.

Ahwatukee Foothills News: Steven Aden, an attorney with the privately funded Alliance Defending Freedom that is helping the state defend the law, said blocking the law “would frustrate the public’s interest, expressed through its elected representatives, in ensuring that taxpayer dollars do not directly or indirectly support abortions.” Aden also is arguing the state has sovereign rights in determining who can participate in the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state’s Medicaid program. He said it is irrelevant that most of the funds for the program come from the federal government.

Religion Clause Blog: In Sioux Chief Mfg. Co., Inc. v. Sebelius, (WD MO, Feb. 28, 2013), a Missouri federal district court, with the consent of both parties, enjoined enforcement of the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage . . . he complaint (full text) in Armstrong v. Sebelius, (D CO, filed 3/5/2013), alleges . . . Because there was not time to seek judicial relief before Jan. 1, the company (at least temporarily) kept the same coverage to comply with the mandate. An ADF press release reports on the filing of the lawsuit.

Washington Post reports.

LifeNews: Under the leadership of Chairman Sam Mims, R-McComb, the Mississippi State House of Representatives passed pro-life Senate Bill 2795 by a vote of 76 to 31 yesterday.

KnoxNews.com: State Sen. Jim Tracy of Shelbyville and Rep. Rick Womick of Rockvale said Wednesday in a news release that they instead will focus on persuading voters to pass a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion.

Christian Newswire: Today, Mississippi resident and post abortive mother Anne Reed filed a Life at Conception Citizen’s Initiative, which states: “The right to life begins at conception. All human beings, at every stage of development, are unique, created in God’s image and shall have equal rights as persons under the law.”

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing a Colorado mortgage banking company co-owned by former U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate.

LifeNews: The Republican House voted 56-33 on Wednesday to override after the state Senate voted yesterday to do the same thing. The bill arrived on Beebe’s desk after clearing the Senate, 26-8, and the House, 68-20.

Dallas Morning News: The latest assault on Planned Parenthood was launched Tuesday with a committee hearing a proposal to ban the organization from teaching or supplying materials about sex education to schools.

LifeNews: The Obama administration should understand that it cannot force Americans to abandon their beliefs at the door of the workplace,” says Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot. “The Constitution simply doesn’t allow the government to involve itself in religion by deciding what faith is, who the faithful are, and when and where their faith may be lived out. Confining our faith to our homes and our churches is not the job of Washington bureaucrats.” “Americans should be free to honor God and live according to their consciences whether they are at home, church, or work,” adds lead counsel Jonathan R. Whitehead, one of nearly 2,200 allied attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom. [more]

Statesman.com: The abortion war, always simmering at the Texas Legislature, rose in intensity this week with Republican-backed legislation to ban the procedure after 20 weeks of gestation and a House Democrat’s effort to roll back a 24-hour waiting period approved in 2011 as part of the pre-abortion sonogram law.

LifeSiteNews: Prompted by the death of a third trimester abortion patient of LeRoy Carhart’s on February 7, 2013, seventeen members of the Maryland House of Delegates have sent a formal letter to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) seeking clarification of the state’s new abortion clinic licensing regulations that went into effect last year.

LifeSiteNews: Now she has left all of that behind, including a very lucrative financial settlement stemming from the arrest. She has chosen a life that confounds the culture of death, which depends on the clamor and ceaseless distraction of the modern world to drown out the quiet voice of conscience.

Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy: Monday I filed a cert petition in Scott v. Saint John’s Church in the Wilderness, together with co-counsel Rebecca Messall, Thomas Brejcha, Peter Breen, and Jocelyn Floyd. I’m pleased to say that I’ve taken on the project pro bono, because I think it involves a very important First Amendment issue.

SCOTUS Blog: Greenhouse and Siegel use the source materials republished in the book to challenge the conventional wisdom that, “if the Court had stayed its hand or decided Roe v. Wade on narrower grounds, the nation would have reached a political settlement and avoided backlash.” Once again, Linda Greenhouse has graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her work on this subject.

ENIDnews.com: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a decision by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that invalidated a state anti-abortion statute. | Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice

Roll Call: The Senate voted 51-41 to end debate on the nomination, nine votes shy of the 60 needed to move forward. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to cross party lines, voting to invoke cloture.

NC Register: Matt Bowman of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing a number of plaintiffs in HHS cases, also welcomed the proposed legislation. While the Alliance Defending Freedom has argued in court that the federal contraception mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Bowman told the Register that the proposed conscience-rights bill “is more specific; it blocks the administration’s hostility to religion possibly without having to rely on the courts, and it makes court action to protect religious freedom more swift.”

Life News: The new Continuing Resolution introduced in the House of Representatives does not include the conscience protections against the Obama Administration’s HHS mandate that pro-life advocates were hoping for.

Wesley J. Smith at National Review: Alliance Defending Freedom has won another preliminary injunction against the free-birth-control rule based on the religious objections of a business owner, this time for a Missouri plumbing-supply company called Sioux Chief Manufacturing Co. Inc. What is interesting is that the injunction was unopposed by the feds. Welcome, but odd  . . .

Jordan Lorence on The Jason Lewis Show to discuss this: Minn. Taxpayers Illegitimately Charged For Elective Abortion. | MP3 audio 34:23 mins

Washington Times: Facing the stiffest Republican opposition to a judicial nominee in two years, the White House is pushing for a confirmation vote this week on Caitlin Halligan’s appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Alan E. Sears at the Alliance Defending Freedom: The Obama administration’s notorious abortion pill mandate – which forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties – is taking on water fast, as the reality sinks in with judges across the country that the measure is a massive legal assault on religious freedom.

San Francisco Chronicle: Alabama’s governor says he will sign tougher abortion clinic regulations if the state Senate approves them.

Washington Post: The Arkansas legislature has the votes to override a governor’s veto, and become the first state to ban abortions after as early as 12 weeks of pregnancy.

LifeNews: The Arkansas state Senate has voted to override Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto of legislation that would ban abortions at 12 weeks of pregnancy if a fetal heartbeat can be detected via ultrasound.

LifeSiteNews: All Western countries have birthrates below the replacement rates, suggesting that soon all countries will experience a graying of, and a decline in, population. Jonathan Last asks why this has happened in his new book, the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, putting demographic decline in a broader context.

LifeNews: California, a state with an aging population, falling birth rates, and rising welfare rolls, now has a super majority of Democrats in the state legislature with a Democrat as governor. The legislature has the best opportunity it has ever had to pass whatever legislation it wants. And, what it has wanted since at least 2000 is assisted suicide.

LifeNews: When it comes to babies who are diagnosed with some sort of fetal abnormality in the womb, the pressure is high from doctors, family members and society to have an abortion. That’s why approximately 90 percent of babies with Down syndrome, for example, become victims of abortion.

WREG.com: Philadephia physician is accused of running a “house of horrors” where he performed illegal abortions past the 24-week limit prescribed by law. He used scissors, authorities say, to sever the spinal cords of newborns who emerged from their mothers still alive.

Akron Beacon Journal Online: An abortion-rights advocacy group says some Ohio crisis pregnancy centers are providing misleading or inaccurate information on abortion risks.

LifeNews: If the sequester was supposed to grind government to a halt, you wouldn’t know it by the volumes coming out of Health and Human Services (HHS). On the first afternoon of the President’s doomsday, HHS was unusually productive–pumping out more than 700 new pages of ObamaCare regulations.

MPR: The DFL-controlled Minnesota House has passed a key part of the Obama administration’s health care law — a state-based health insurance exchange. The bill’s chief author called the measure the most significant health reform in 50 years. But abortion restrictions adopted last night could run into trouble with Gov. Mark Dayton.

Christian Post: According to National Right to Life (NRL), among the 1,502 people who answered the Pew Research Center’s January poll questions about Roe. v. Wade: “Only 62 percent knew it dealt with abortion.”

WorldNetDaily: The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported Feb. 27 the rate of metastatic breast cancer in women ages 25 to 39 nearly doubled between 1976 and 2009, from 1.53 to 2.9 per 100,000. The American Council on Science and Health calls the increase “slight.” But Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, points out there has been no corresponding increase in older women. | Incidence of Breast Cancer With Distant Involvement Among Women in the United States, 1976 to 2009, Rebecca H. Johnson, MD; Franklin L. Chien, BA; Archie Bleyer, MD
JAMA. 2013;309(8):800-805. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.776.

Hot Air: In a little under an hour, three members of the House Republican caucus will announce a new legislative effort to undo the HHS contraception mandate’s infringement on freedom of religious practice, and prevent the next incursion as well.

Melodika.net: “With another phony compromise, the Obama Administration continues to insult the intelligence of the American people and trample our Constitutionally-guaranteed rights,” said AUL’s President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest, as the Health and Human Services Department released additional regulations for Obamacare. “Our Freedom of Conscience, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment has been violated by Obamacare and these new regulations do not resolve the offense.”

Blog of the Legal Times: The Senate will vote Wednesday morning on Caitlin Halligan, the embattled nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, as part of a recent Democratic push to fill federal judicial vacancies.

Engage Family Minute: Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys and allied attorneys represent Sioux Chief Manufacturing Co. in a federal lawsuit filed last month to challenge the mandate, which forces employers—regardless of their religious or moral convictions—to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception under threat of heavy penalties.“

AP: The legislation would ban the procedure at 12 weeks if a fetal heartbeat is detected using an abdominal ultrasound. The Democratic governor’s veto come less than a week after the state enacted a 20-week ban.

Maria Santo at the Baltimore Sun: It is long past time to question the appalling intellectual dishonesty that has led us to kill 55 million children through abortion in the past 40 years. We must, as a matter of justice, find better solutions to difficult pregnancies. Civilized societies thrive through smart, creative, generous, life-giving and just solutions to their difficulties. Civilized societies do not kill children as a solution to any problem, no matter how grave. No society can claim to be just while legally killing its own children in the name of “choice.”

LifeNews: Americans United for Life Action President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest called for the U.S. Senate to vote no on cloture on the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in what will be a scored vote on

Helen M. Alvaré and Meg T. McDonnell at Washington Post: Pro-choice Americans must wonder from time to time what keeps pro-lifers going. Why don’t we lay down our signs, cease our marching and admit that we’ve been good and beaten for these 40 years since Roe v. Wade? One of us is a baby boomer, the other a millennial; our views may help others understand these things and, along the way, think about some rarely considered aspects of the U.S. experience with legal abortion.

ABC: Three years after drug agents searching a suspected “pill mill” at a West Philadelphia clinic instead found a medical “house of horrors,” an abortion doctor is going on trial on eight counts of murder.

LifeSiteNews: The pro-life group Operation Rescue has today published newly obtained 911 recordings of two medical emergencies at Planned Parenthood in Wilmington, Delaware, which took place on February 8, and 16, 2013.

Tim Carney at Washington Examiner: Republicans around the country railed against President Obama’s health-care law for four years, but in recent weeks, GOP governors and state legislators have embraced some of the bill’s provisions. How did Republicans learn to stop worrying and love Obamacare? In a word: industry.

LifeSiteNews: An insurance company known for not keeping its contractual obligations has received $340 million in federal loans to set up a health care exchange under ObamaCare. Critics say the only apparent criteria for the loan is the fact that the company is led by a friend of Barack Obama during his community organizer days. She is also a former leader of a George Soros-funded politically radical organization.

LifeSiteNews: An ambulance arrived at Southwestern Women’s Options, a late-term abortion clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and transported an abortion patient to UNM Medical Center at approximately 1:00 p.m. on Friday.

Religion Clause Blog: In Gilardi v. Sebelius. (D DC, March 3, 2013), the D.C. federal district court refused to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent enforcement of the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage mandate in a suit by two related for-profit Subchapter S corporations and their Catholic owners.

Edward Mechmann at Archdiocese of NY: For a long time, apologists and advocates for legal abortion liked to say that they believed that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”. Well, we know that they’ve given up on “rare”. And they certainly are unconditionally committed to “legal”. But it’s astonishing that they now seem to have given up on “safe”.

Townhall: Ayanna Byer, 40, filed suit Feb. 6 against Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, alleging an unnamed doctor at the clinic performed an abortion on her in November even though she told him she had changed her mind, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is representing her.

After more than five years of federal litigation, members of the Rockford Pro-Life Initiative have settled their federal lawsuit against the City of Rockford over the city’s alleged harassment of pro-life individuals and other alleged federal civil rights violations.

Evan Bernick at the Bell Towers: As a legal fellow with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, I’ve spent the last few months defending religious employers against the government’s efforts to impose the mandate upon them, even though I’m a pro-choice atheist. I’m proud of having done so. Here, I will argue that those who are concerned with individual rights and the real-world impact of policy choices should stand alongside me, regardless of their religion (or lack thereof). They should do so because (1) the mandate is unjust, and (2) it will hurt those whom it is intended to help.

Christian Newswire: Georgia Right to Life today called on Georgia’s General Assembly to give voters the opportunity to grant personhood status to all innocent human life from the earliest stages of development until natural death.

International Business Times: Halligan “is unqualified to sit on such a prestigious court because of her conduct in office, using her position in state government to advance radical, pro-abortion legal theories against the constitutional rights of pro-life citizens,” said AULA’s Dr. Yoest.

Kentucky.com: A House panel defeated several bills Thursday that would put restrictions on abortions, including one bill that would require a woman to view an ultrasound and another that would require a face-to-face consultation before receiving an abortion.

LifeSiteNews: DePaul University has punished a student for publicizing the names of fellow students who admitted to vandalizing his organization’s pro-life display.

LifeSiteNews: A new study commissioned by the Vitae Foundation has taken a careful scientific approach to identify what drives women’s decisions to keep their child, place a child in adoption or abort one’s child. The study has determined what influences that decision, which women are most reachable, what message is most likely to reach them and from whom vulnerable women would like to hear that message. | A New Understanding of the Trauma of Abortion

Ctr. for Law and Religion at St. John’s U.: Whatever policy concerns one might have, it seems to me that the Administration’s categorical exclusion of for-profits in its current proposed rule, and its reliance on certain definitions in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, just is not going to fly in the RFRA context.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review: Dr. Anne Nolte, a family physician, takes time today from her busy patient schedule at the National Gianna Center for Women’s Health and Fertility she directs in Manhattan to protest Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act.