Tag Archives: Topic: Abortion

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.

CNSNews: Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American who serves as the top judge at the Vatican, recently stated that Catholic politicians who support abortion must not receive Holy Communion.

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.

News & Tribune: A controversial bill that imposes new state requirements on clinics that offer the abortion pill is likely headed for a constitutional challenge if passed and signed into law, as expected.

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

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.

Kristen Hatten at LifeNews: The horror of such a place is difficult for us to imagine, but it is a reality, every day, for over one billion people. How? How could such a nightmarish Orwellian state exist in 2012, when every day we pride ourselves on moving forward and becoming more and more enlightened? The answer is simple: Communism.

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.

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: One of the top pro-life concerns when multiple pregnancies occur is the advice doctors routinely give to mothers to consider an abortion in order to “save” one or more other children. Never mind that mothers frequently give birth to multiple children without complications — doctors still give the advice anyway. But, not every mother has a “selective reduction” to kill one or more of their unborn children in abortion.

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”.

Life News / C-Fam: “The problem we are facing with the work of treaty bodies goes beyond resources and money,” the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) told the forum. “The real problem lies in the treaty bodies assuming powers which do not belong to them.”

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.

BBC: Campaigners and politicians from NI and the Irish Republic have gathered at Stormont to oppose any change to abortion laws on the island of Ireland.

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.

Foreign Policy: The initiative committe is led by politician Heinz Hürzeler, a member of the country’s Social Liberal Movement, and maintains that in Switzerland, where 12 percent of pregnancies end in abortion, the practice represents a huge blow to the economy (comparatively speaking, Switzerland has one of the lowest abortion rates in the world, with only 6.4 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44)

Guardian: SDLP’s Alban Maginness and DUP’s Paul Girvan to push for law that would make abortions available only via NHS in province

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.

Matt Bowman at Townhall: Democratic consultant Jason Stanford of the Huffington Post thinks he has made a scientific discovery by claiming “birth control doesn’t cause abortions.” And he thinks opponents of ObamaCare’s abortion-pill mandate should throw in the towel.
Apparently Stanford failed to research the definition of “Orwellian.” Stanford actually admits, in a crude way, the central claim of religious believers and pro-life Americans: that an individual human life begins when “the sperm takes the egg out to Bennigan’s and fertilizes it” and that many forms of “contraception” act after that event to “prevent the implantation in the uterus” of the new human being.

Charisma News: “Americans should be free to honor God and live according to their consciences whether they are at home, church or work,” said lead counsel Jonathan R. Whitehead, one of nearly 2,200 allied attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom. “The court was right to stop enforcement of this unconstitutional mandate against Sioux Chief and its owners. They, like all other family-run businesses, have the God-given freedom to live and lead their company according to the values of their faith. American entrepreneurs cannot be forced to surrender their First Amendment freedoms when they go to work.” [more]

Baptist Press: Kellie Fiedorek, litigation counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said this is a time of “great peril” for religious adherents. In particular, business owners with religious convictions about business, marriage and family are the targets of attacks for refusing to violate their beliefs, she said. “You couldn’t expect an African-American photographer to take a picture of a family who is in the KKK, who is going to wear long white robes and pointy hats,” Fiedorek said. “Similarly, you couldn’t expect a Jewish … baker to bake a cake with swastikas on it and have it say, ‘Happy Birthday to Hitler.’”

Breitbart: In 2012, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) released a report that found more than $99 million in waste or possible PPFA fraud, including an alleged illegal taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion-related procedures.

Press Democrat: The Santa Rosa Catholic Diocese is requiring its 200 schoolteachers to sign an agreement affirming that “modern errors” such as contraception, abortion, homosexual marriage and euthanasia are “matters that gravely offend human dignity.”

C-FAM: Pro-life organizations spoke at a special forum at UN headquarters this week to ask the UN General Assembly to reform treaty bodies which deviate from their mandates by pushing abortion, homosexuality and controversial sex ed programs. The UN is in the midst of a full review of the treaty bodies to identify ways to reform a system riddled with backlog, inefficiencies and abuse of authority. (also reported in LifeSiteNews)

A Missouri-based plumbing products manufacturer is the latest company to win a court order against the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate, bringing the total number of court rulings against the mandate to 12 compared to four in its favor.

Christian Institute: It is a “great idea” to allow the morning-after pill to be handed out in schools, a leading GP in England has said.

First Things: The Knights of Columbus should be commended for commissioning this Marist survey. The mainstream media enjoys reporting on polls that purportedly show strong public sentiment in favor of legal abortion. However, by asking people what they thought about abortion in specific circumstances, Marist is able to present a more nuanced and a more accurate view of public attitudes toward abortion.

Jackson Free Press: Mississippi’s only abortion clinic is scheduled for an April 18 license revocation hearing before the state Department of Health, and officials say a decision could come days or weeks later.

Argus Leader: A South Dakota Senate committee Wednesday approved an extension of what is already the nation’s longest waiting period for a woman to receive an abortion. Women seeking abortions in South Dakota currently must wait three days after seeing an abortion clinic doctor before they can have the procedure.

CNSNews: “This is a principle–this is a constitutional principle–that’s been handed to us from our Founding Fathers, and it’s not something that I think we should be negotiating on,” said Rep. King. “I would like to see the conscience protection language go into that CR, and I’d like to see conservatives band together and refuse to pass the CR until such time as we get that language in there.”