What health care? 92% of Planned Parenthood’s pregnant customers get abortions | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

For such a proud defender of the “right to choose,” Planned Parenthood notably chafes at the suggestion that its primary business is abortion. The organization’s spokespeople have laughably claimed that abortion constitutes just 3% of their services – yet LifeNews reports that Planned Parenthood’s 2011-2012 annual report shows that 92% of the pregnant women who come to them receive abortions.

LifeNews also report several astonishing findings from the Susan B. Anthony List’s analysis of the numbers:

• During fiscal year 2011-2012, Planned Parenthood reported receiving a record $542 million in taxpayer funding in the form of government grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements. Taxpayer funding consists of 45% of Planned Parenthood’s annual revenue.

• In 2011, Planned Parenthood performed a record high 333,964 abortions.

• Over the past three reported years (2009-2011), Planned Parenthood has performed nearly one million abortions (995,687).

• Planned Parenthood reported a total of three million clients in 2011, meaning that 11% of all Planned Parenthood clients received an abortion.

•  In 2011, abortions made up 92% of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy services, while prenatal care and adoption referrals accounted for only 7% (28,674) and 0.6% (2,300), respectively. For every adoption referral, Planned Parenthood performed 145 abortions.

•  Cancer screening & prevention services and contraceptive services provided by Planned Parenthood continue to drop. Contraceptive services have dropped by 12% since 2009, and cancer screening & prevention services have dropped by 29%.

The numbers are consistent with the previous year’s findings, which found that abortions made up 91.2% (329,445) of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy services, with prenatal care coming in at 8.6% (31,098) and adoption referrals at 0.2% (841). While Planned Parenthood’s adoption referrals more than doubled, it and other legitimate medical services still represent a tiny sliver of their business.

As SBA List president Majorie Dannenfelser points out, “Planned Parenthood has upped the ante even further by mandating that all affiliates provide abortions beginning this year,” so we should expect the kill-to-care ratio only to grow even starker.

Whenever its taxpayer funding is endangered, Planned Parenthood trots out all the harmless services that would be impacted. But SBA List notes that the abortion giant “reported $87.4 million in excess revenue, and more than $1.2 billion in net assets.” In light of how little real care Planned Parenthood actually does, it’s clear that cutting down on cancer prevention and prenatal care rather than abortion would be its choice in the face of restricted income.

Of course, pro-aborts have always played fast and loose with the significance of percentages to the debate. Despite abortion constituting so much of Planned Parenthood’s work, we can’t cut its funding because of all the women we’d supposedly doom to breast cancer. But we’re not supposed to care about late-term abortion or fetal awareness, because most abortions take place earlier. Then again, the 1% of abortions due to rape are so incredibly important that we can’t talk about prohibiting abortion without the conversation getting derailed by shrieks about “rape babies.” 

Like the Mafia and Tammany Hall providing social services to provide cover for their real objectives, Planned Parenthood is a massive chain of butcher shops, whose interest in women’s genuine wellness is merely a product of political necessity. The time to end the con is long overdue.

Washington Democrats find a new low: compulsory coverage of abortion in private insurance | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

Nationally, pro-abortion politicians at least go through the motions to hide their extremism on the issue, such as insisting that the insurance mandates they support only cover contraception, and wouldn’t force anyone to pay for abortions against their will. But in the state of Washington, Democrats have dropped the charade and lunged for what the rest of their party really wants— forcing private insurers to cover abortion:

The Reproductive Parity Act, as supporters call it, would require insurers in Washington state who cover maternity care — which all insurers must do — to also pay for abortions.

The bill passed the state House earlier this month by a vote of 53-43, though it faces an uncertain future in the Senate. A similar bill in the New York state Assembly has been introduced each session for over a decade but has never received a public hearing.

“This is a core value for Washingtonians,” said Melanie Smith, a lobbyist for NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. “We should protect it while we still have it and not leave access to basic health care up to an insurance company.” […]

Supporters of Washington state’s proposed abortion insurance mandate are careful to stress that it wouldn’t lead to a dramatic uptick in abortions or require carriers with a religious bent to cover the procedure. They also note that a pair of federal plans that will be sold on all 50 state exchanges will be barred from covering elective abortions.

So if Washington’s enlightened masters decide a particular company is religious enough to not ignore its First Amendment rights, it won’t have to worry about being forced to pay for killing babies. How generous. Maybe we could save liberals a lot more time and effort by just making an application form for American citizens subjects who would prefer the Constitution still apply to them.

Perhaps the issue’s most telling detail is this admission:

At present, all major insurers in Washington state cover abortions, and [Democrat Rep. Eileen] Cody, the bill’s sponsor, said she knows of no carrier with plans to change. Insurers new to Washington state on its exchange may be tempted to adopt different policies, she said.

So the proposed mandate isn’t even in response to some lack of abortion “access” plaguing the state; plans that insure the procedure are readily available in the state. Pro-choicers not of a tyrannical bent would be content to leave it at that, but not here: to Washington Democrats, the very possibility that one or two future insurers might choose to run their business differently is a good enough excuse to take away their freedom. Apparently the Left’s already-elastic definition of “access” is now so broad that even putting in the effort to find out for yourself whether the policy you’re purchasing covers abortions is too strenuous a burden to ask of people.

As Human Life of Washington spokeswoman Peggy O’Ban says, this proposal is ultimately a “conscience coercion act.” As unhealthy as a society that tolerates the slaughter of its children is, one that forces others to join in sinks to an entirely new level of depravity.

Abortion is Health Care? Doctors’ Actions Speak Louder Than Words | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

Creepy though it may be that anyone can muster the moral detachment necessary to support legal abortion, the desensitization necessary to personally perform one rises to an entirely different level of depravity. While mere advocates may be deceived or willfully ignorant, abortionists possess more than enough knowledge to know exactly what they’re butchering, experience the bloody deed, and decide their consciences can handle doing it regularly.

It’s noteworthy that so few doctors are willing to get their hands dirty, as Pro-Life Action League’s Eric Scheidler writes:

“The younger doctors are apathetic and the old doctors are retiring,” complained MSFC conference speaker Dr. Rachel Phelps, a former pediatrician who now serves as associate medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rochester/Syracuse Region.

Phelps noted that only 2% of obstetricians perform over 50% of all abortions, and declared that without providers, “abortion may as well be illegal.” […]

According to the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research wing, the number of U.S. abortion providers decreased 38% between a peak of 2,908 in 1982 to only 1,793 providers in 2008, the most recent year for which data were available […]

Data from the Federation of State Medical Boards reveals [PDF] that only 0.2% of physicians provide abortions. That’s only 2 doctors out of a thousand.

A recent survey of 1,144 obstetricians revealed that while 97% said they’d had patients who sought abortions, only 14% percent ever provided them.

Signs of the same reluctance can be found among the medical professions of Canada, the UK, Portugal, France, and Italy. Why might that be?

We can see pro-choicers’ default answer coming a mile away: “because anti-choice violence scares them away!” This, of course, is a red herring—no respected pro-lifers or meaningful segment of the movement supports violence against abortionists, and violence by lone extremists are similarly rare; Feminist Majority Foundation puts the grand total number of anti-abortion murders at…ten people. That’s about 0.07% of the 14,748 total murders and manslaughters committed in 2010 alone, and about 0.00002% of the murdering done by the poor abortionists themselves since Roe v. Wade.

The less defamatory variation is that mean old anti-choicers have stigmatized abortion to the point where many doctors don’t want to deal with the image problems. As Scheidler says, we’ll gladly cop to that one:

 For 40 years, we have been peacefully protesting at their abortion clinics—a pro-life presence that has only increased in recent years with initiatives like 40 Days for Life. We’ve picketed their homes.

We’ve made sure that the word “abortion” conjures up the ugly reality of abortion’s victims—abortionists’ victims.

We’ve also shined a light on the malpractice and criminality of which so many abortionists are guilty of. We’ve made “abortionist” a dirty word.

Of course, shaming the abortion industry wouldn’t be nearly as effective if abortion wasn’t intrinsically shameful, and the heart of the disconnect is something pro-choicers simply can’t blame on pro-lifers, no matter how hard they try.

Most doctors still take their profession seriously, respect the preservation of life as medicine’s most basic and essential end, and follow the medical evidence to its inescapable conclusion that unborn children fall within that mandate. To any doctor worthy of the title, all life is incalculably precious, and treating one patient doesn’t mean killing another.

This above all is why the recent pro-choice push to cast abortion as a central component of women’s healthcare was so obscene: because abortion is fundamentally opposed to the very nature of healthcare. That most doctors want nothing to do with the vile practice is no coincidence.

Three guesses how pro-aborts celebrate Human Rights Day! | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

Tomorrow is the United Nations’ International Human Rights Day, which is ostensibly dedicated to “the full enjoyment of all human rights by everyone everywhere.” So what better time for abortionistas to desecrate the concept?

At RH Reality Check, Pathfinder International’s Purnima Mane complains that “there are still those around the world who think that reproductive rights are not human rights,” equating such people with flat-earthers:

For me, it is a simple concept: every person should be able to make decisions about her or his body. I see that in the young women and men Pathfinder International works with every day.

Of course. Everyone deserves the full, unconditional right to decide whether to reproduce, “make decisions about her or his body,” or use whatever (non-abortive) birth control drugs she wishes. Nobody denies that the 17-year-old Indian girl Mane talks about should “have the right to stay in school, delay marriage, and then choose if, when, and how often to have children” and “feel empowered to negotiate condom use with her partner,” or believes that she should “face death during pregnancy due to lack to maternal health care.”

The problem, of course, is that along with those genuinely noble goals, Mane and her organization sneak in two additional and very different propositions—the right to kill one’s offspring and the right to have someone else provide birth control for you—under the “rights” umbrella (Mane doesn’t mention abortion in her post, but Pathfinder’s website makes clear it’s a part of her definition of “reproductive rights”). This is the rhetorical equivalent of a traveler putting someone else’s bag with her own luggage, then when the rightful owner dares to notice and call her out, accusing him of trying to steal her stuff.

We have discussed the real meaning of rights ad nauseum, sacrificing the word’s substantive meaning and moral usefulness to make it mere shorthand for an ever-expanding Christmas list of things they feel entitled to. So here let’s take the next step and consider how they made the switch. It all traces back to the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century, and was part of a broader effort to uproot the nation’s allegiance to her founding principles and transform the relationship between the individual and the state.

The Heritage Foundation’s Edward Walton provides a useful overview of leading Progressive academic John Dewey’s work on redefining freedom:

What the Founders called liberty Dewey dismisses as a mere formal freedom, an essentially empty idea. If we are to truly speak of freedom, formal freedom must give way to real, effective freedom.

Effective freedom requires two preconditions: (1) the necessary material means to fulfill one’s desires, and (2) developed mental capabilities allowing one to use foresight and make proper decisions without being subjected to baser desires.

The implications of this redefinition of freedom are momentous. Men and women are no longer free by nature—they must be made free. Freedom, as Dewey wrote in Liberalism and Social Action, is “something to be achieved.” And it requires not only material means but also enlightened decisions.

Hence, to use a contemporary example, the freedom to use the Internet means nothings unless you have access to the Internet and possess the “powers of intelligent self-control” to make intelligent use of it.

Building on his redefinition of freedom, Dewey argues that we must reconstruct society to allow for attainment of effective freedom in “The Future of Liberalism.” Here Dewey embraces “the idea of historic relativity” and translates it into a methodology—a “continuous reconstruction” of vast experiments to socialize individuals, to make them more cooperative. The ultimate aim is “full freedom of the human spirit and of individuality.”

Thomas West elaborates:

In this view, freedom is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making, a gift of the state. Man is a product of his own history, through which he collectively creates himself. He is a social construct. Since human beings are not naturally free, there can be no natural rights or natural law. Therefore, Dewey also writes, “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”

Since the Progressives held that nature gives man little or nothing and that everything of value to human life is made by man, they concluded that there are no permanent standards of right […]

The Founders’ supposed failure to recognize the crucial role of society led the Progressives to disparage the Founders’ insistence on limited government. The Progressive goal of politics is freedom, now understood as freedom from the limits imposed by nature and necessity. They rejected the Founders’ conception of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of the individual pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state.

To this end, Dewey writes, “the state has the responsibility for creating institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities that are theirs.” So although “it is true that social arrangements, laws, institutions are made for man, rather than that man is made for them,” these laws and institutions “are not means for obtaining something for individuals, not even happiness. They are means of creating individuals…. Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out.” “Creating individuals” versus “protecting individuals”: this sums up the difference between the Founders’ and the Progressives’ conception of what government is for.

Here’s a crazy thought: maybe using the occasion to educate people on what real human rights are and why they matter even within the womb is a more faithful way to celebrate International Human Rights Day than trying to promote and romanticize the killing of the world’s tiniest humans?

Refuting Libby Anne: No, Pro-Lifers Aren’t Making Children Too Expensive to Let Live | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

Pro-choice denizens of the blogosphere have found a new hero in Libby Anne, whose article “How I Lost Faith in the Pro-Life Movement” tries to be a one-stop shop for why pro-lifers are wrong about everything.

Fortunately, Live Action is here to refute her claims, one by one.

Kristi Burton Brown and Kristen Walker Hatten have already tackled two of ‘em, and now it’s my turn. Here, I’ll be addressing Anne’s argument that pro-lifers actually encourage abortion because the other policies of pro-life politicians make it more expensive to have children.

(Naturally, left unmentioned is the ghoulishness of deciding whether to kill a child based on finances, making abortion the only area of life where liberals aren’t instinctively repulsed by the thought of putting money above basic human compassion. But I digress.)

Citing data from the Guttmacher Institute (which is nowhere near as objective as she wants her readers to believe), Anne begins with a simple proposition:

One thing I realized back in 2007 is that, given that six in ten women who have abortions already have at least one child and that three quarters of women who have abortions report that they cannot afford another child, if we want to bring abortion rates down we need to make sure that women can always afford to carry their pregnancies to term. Maternity and birth is expensive, adding your child to your health care plan is expensive, daycare is expensive, and on and on it goes.

While it’s obviously true that children are expensive, Anne’s link between low income and abortion isn’t quite a slam dunk. Analyzing a Guttmacher study on rising abortion rates among poor women, Witherspoon Institute researcher Michael New points out that “this finding is not consistent among racial and ethnic groups”—even as abortions spiked dramatically among low-income white women, they only rose slightly among low-income black women and declined among low-income Hispanic women, an inconsistency Guttmacher doesn’t “adequately explain.”

New also observes that there’s another painfully obvious explanation for these abortions—because state governments are paying for them—and that, even more embarrassingly for Anne’s side, this increase happens to coincide with an increase in public funding of the very services she hails as the key to abortion prevention: “federal grants to Planned Parenthood increased from $165 million in 1998 to $363 million in 2008.”

Further, Patheos blogger Marc Barnes, in another reply to Anne worth reading, compares NARAL’s state scorecards with state abortion rates, and finds that the most pro-life states tend to also have lower abortion rates—meaning that if those states’ pro-life leaders are also enacting the burdensome economic policies Anne attributes to them, it’s not having the effect she predicts.

If we found a way to offer more aid to parents, if we mandated things like paid maternity leave, subsidized childcare, and universal health insurance for pregnant women and for children, some women who would otherwise abort would almost certainly decide to carry their pregnancies to term. But the odd thing is, those who identify as “pro-life” are most adamant in opposing these kind of reforms. I knew this back in 2007, because I grew up in one of those families. I grew up believing that welfare should be abolished, that Head Start needed to be eliminated, that medicaid just enabled people to be lazy. I grew up in a family that wanted to abolish some of the very programs with the potential to decrease the number of abortions […]

And lately, it’s gotten worse. You see, in some cases conservatives are actively working to make it harder for poor women to afford to carry unintended pregnancies to term […] In other words, this bill would make it so that if a poor woman gets pregnant, she has to decide whether to have an abortion or whether to carry to term, have the baby, and see her welfare benefits slashed, taking food out of the mouths of the children she is already struggling to feed.

It’s easy to list a bunch of nice-sounding things and then browbeat your opponents for being against X, Y, and Z. It’s much harder to engage the reality that behind the innocuous names and superficial goals lie complex policies with little things called “details” and “effects.” Any serious thinker knows that it isn’t the thought that counts, that truly responsible policymaking requires weighing benefits against costs and recognizing that even the most well-intentioned measures can have unintended consequences.

For instance, forcing employers to pay for one benefit means reduced compensation somewhere else. The “universal insurance coverage” she’s talking about is actually a hornet’s nest of increased costs for women. And when conservatives speak critically of our welfare status quo, we’re not talking about throwing destitute women into the streets—we’ve got very real waste and abuse in mind, as well as the undeniable harm done to a populace conditioned against recognizing the difference between a hand up and a handout. (Besides, the conservative theory of government is to make life less expensive for people in a far simpler way: by not taking as much money from them through taxes.)

I want to say I’m surprised, but I’m really not, because I’m remembering rumblings underneath the polished surface of the things I was taught. This idea that women shouldn’t “spread their legs” if they’re not ready to raise the results of their promiscuity, that the government shouldn’t be expected to pick up the tab for some slut’s inability to say no.

Actually, Anne has just alluded to the ultimate refutation of her point: Pregnancy doesn’t just happen. The women she’s talking about presumably know they can’t financially handle parenthood, yet have chosen to bring the possibility of pregnancy into their lives. All of them could have chosen to say “not tonight,” and it wouldn’t have cost them a cent. Why isn’t it reasonable to expect people to factor basic responsibility into their decision-making? Why isn’t your preparedness for children something you should consider before having sex? And once you’ve brought about a situation you’re not ready for, why should the burden for alleviating it automatically shift to the rest of us? Most importantly, why should your child pay the ultimate price for costs you’ve incurred?

So far, Libby Anne’s reasons for leaving the pro-life movement aren’t withstanding closer scrutiny. Might we win her back? Stay tuned.

The Limits of Godwin’s Law | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

Reductio ad Hitlerum is among the most well known logical fallacies – a form of guilt-by-association which denotes trying to win an argument by comparing one’s opponent to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, or any number of comparable monsters. Closely related is Godwin’s Law, under which anyone who plays the Nazi card is usually automatically deemed the debate’s loser. Clearing such hyperbole from our political discourse is generally worthwhile.

But what about when the subject in dispute really is Naziesque?

Right now, Britain is getting a crash course in the limits of Godwin, as the Bishop of Motherwell, the Rev. Joseph Devine, faces criticism for comparing graphic abortion images to death camps:

As other commentators have observed, such images should not be suppressed from the public consciousness any more than pictures of famine or the reality of war. If we cannot face the pictures, how can we conceive of endorsing the reality?

I have no doubt that the publication of the photographs of the victims of Auschwitz and the Burma Railway brought home the horrors of such evil catastrophes far more effectively than a million pleading words. Two hundred thousand abortions take place in Britain each year. Why is the pro-choice lobby so desperate to hide the truth about abortion from the public?

British Pregnancy Advisory Service spokeswoman Clare Murphy is naturally outraged:

I think most people would find it utterly despicable to compare abortion to the Holocaust. It is deeply insulting to the millions of Jewish people who died during the second world war.

It is hugely inflammatory. I can’t imagine anyone would feel that comparing abortion to the Holocaust is a useful or pertinent analogy.

Personally, I can’t help but feel my stomach churn a little every time I see people express more disgust toward someone describing abortion than they do toward abortion itself. It’s such a dramatic desensitization toward violence, such a perverse reversal of basic morality, that it illustrates why Devine’s rhetoric is not only valid, but often necessary.

Objectively speaking, unborn babies are every bit as human as Auschwitz prisoners, and killing them is every bit as unjust. True, Holocaust victims also endured unimaginable pain that many abortion victims don’t feel, but that doesn’t change the final analysis – if knowing what you’re going through and feeling the associated pain make that much of a moral difference, then would the Holocaust have been okay if the Jews were killed painlessly in their sleep?

And in terms of raw numbers, the ugly truth is that the 50 million lives taken by American abortion dwarf the Holocaust’s 6 million – that’s over eight Holocausts, in this country alone.

Like graphic images, using Nazi analogies isn’t necessarily advisable in all venues and with all pro-choicers. But they are morally and intellectually valid, and in a culture that has dehumanized so many of its innocent children and become desensitized to their mass murder under the façade of “choice,” it’s sometimes necessary to shock people’s sensibilities awake by invoking one of their only frames of reference for true societal evil. To avoid speaking such hard truths in harrowing clarity just because they hit too close to home for abortion apologists’ tastes would be the real logical fallacy.

Shots Fired in War on Women – to Punish One for Choosing Life | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

If the absurdity of the “War on Women” narrative wasn’t already abundantly clear, the following story from LifeSiteNews illustrates it nicely:

A 24-year-old man tried to shoot his ex-girlfriend in the face after she refused to get an abortion, according to police in northern Pennsylvania.

Allentown police say 24-year-old Jashua Kinch-Rodriguez had an argument with his ex-girlfriend, Jessenia Rosario, in a car outside her apartment last Friday night. Things became heated when she refused to have an abortion.

Officers say Kinch-Rodriguez began to punch her in the stomach and groin area before slamming the car door on her legs and threatening her life.

Court documents state when she went upstairs to her apartment, her ex-boyfriend got a handgun and shot into the dwelling, narrowly missing her and the four people staying there at the time.

Gee, for a war that’s been going on all this time, you’d think actual violence would have shown up sooner. But when somebody finally picks up a weapon against a woman, he turns out to be pro-abortion! Who knew?

Yes, I know pro-choicers don’t mean the “war” in “War on Women” literally. But the story still illustrates how their frenzied victim-mongering has lost any semblance of perspective. This is what harming and controlling women really look like—not protecting the lives of unborn children (of both sexes), not requiring abortion seekers to inform themselves before killing their offspring, not letting individuals and businesses decide for themselves whether they want to provide somebody else’s birth control, and not the occasional insult or misstatement that’s universally denounced and apologized for in the blink of an eye.

Indeed, the hyperbole has gotten so bad that at least one pro-choice Democrat can’t stomach it anymore. Reacting to Sandra Fluke’s Democratic National Convention speech, commentator Kirsten Powers tweeted that she “found this speech so offensive as a woman. The idea that women are silenced victims”:

The US is one of the best countries in the world to be born in if you are a woman. I thank God that i was born here […] Sandra Fluke should visit Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and then see how she feels about how the US treats women[.]

The Pennsylvania case also illustrates something we’ve discussed before: that abortion more naturally lends itself to being a tool of misogyny rather than an escape hatch from it. Abusive boyfriends and husbands aren’t any more likely to value their unborn children than they are to value their women, and for those who don’t want the hassle of fatherhood, abortion is naturally where such men would turn.

It does women no good to have the self-appointed arbiters of feminism defining war down by demonizing legitimate policy disagreements instead of focusing on misogyny’s real perpetrators and casualties.

The Abortion Crowd’s Selective Science | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

Of all the false premises the abortion lobby carpet-bombs our culture with, perhaps the most aggravatingly preposterous is their claim to a monopoly on respecting science. The truth is that they’re the first to reject science when it suits them, denying established knowledge with a zeal that makes Samuel Shenton look like Stephen Hawking.

Case in point: at RH Reality Check, Dr. Tracey Wilkinson opines on the danger of public officials “plant[ing] a bad seed” of scientific misinformation in the public’s mind. Her primary example, of course, is Todd Akin’s claim that the female body can shut down the reproductive process during rape.

Fair enough – bad science is bad science, though for what it’s worth, there’s little reason to worry about this seed taking root. The media instantly took to shouting Akin’s wrongness from the rooftops, his own side almost universally condemned him, and even efforts to characterize this as more than an isolated incident fell short, considering that the most recent instance they could find of someone else saying the same thing was in 1999. Considering the nonsense politicians spout every day on every other issue, a myth popping up once every 13 years is nothing.

Unfortunately, Wilkinson next goes from overemphasizing a real falsehood to planting a bad seed of her own:

Yet despite numerous scientific studies proving that emergency contraception is safe and works by preventing fertilization, and despite its FDA approval, controversy around this medication still exists and is propagated when public officials falsely claim that the morning-after pill is an abortifacient. This misinformation surrounding the morning-after pill creates obstacles for people who are legally allowed to purchase it.

Originally, pro-aborts tried to deny that contraceptives could be abortive by sowing confusion about whether “conception” meant fertilization or implantation. Since that didn’t work, they’ve now moved to arguing that “no evidence” suggests that birth control pills prevent implantation. While it’s true that pro-lifers need to be careful about what the science does and doesn’t show, such blanket declarations from pro-choicers are even more unfounded.

First, it’s not pro-lifers who planted this idea in people’s heads, but the Food and Drug Administration’s labeling and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ own admission to that effect. Second, the Obama administration’s contraception mandate includes Ella, which is abortive (indeed, Ella’s website admits that it “may also work by preventing attachment to the uterus”). Third, as the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs’ Dr. Donna Harrison explains:

And here, abortion proponents speak out of both sides of their mouth. The quote from Trussell in the NYT article was particularly amusing. If you read his previous research papers, sometimes he claims over 90 percent efficacy from Plan B, and sometimes he claims around 50 percent efficacy. Why these differences? Well, as he so readily admits, you can’t get numbers of 90 percent efficacy without some sort of post-fertilization effect. So when the issue of mechanism of action is raised, suddenly the efficacy for Plan B gets “adjusted” to what would be expected from a drug with no post-fertilization effect. But, when issues of funding arise . . . well Plan B becomes much more effective.

But by far the biggest indicator of who really respects science is embryology. The single most important question of the abortion debate is, “What does abortion destroy?” The answer determines whether or not there is an abortion debate; if it were somehow proven that abortion does not destroy a live human being, the pro-life movement would collapse almost overnight. So you’d think anyone trying to develop a responsible, informed position on the subject would take great care to learn what the science says.

On this question, the science is undeniable. The life of an individual, distinct, genetically complete human being begins with fertilization. The terms blastocyst, zygote, embryo, and fetus all denote stages in the development of the same organism. Mainstream biology textbooks make this clear, as do the admissions of abortion’s more honest defenders, such as Faye Wattleton, David Boonin, and Peter Singer.

And yet, scientific illiteracy about when life begins is peddled with far more regularity than rape misinformation, and by far more influential people than an obscure, unpopular Missouri congressman.  The president of the United States says figuring it out is “beyond my pay grade.” The Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, denies that “anybody can tell you when life begins.” Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz claims that it’s “extreme and radical” for law to tell the truth about fetal development. The glaring scientific falsehoods on Planned Parenthood’s website include lying about whether “medical authorities” refer to fetuses as “babies,” claiming that pregnancy doesn’t begin until implantation, and suggesting that embryos are “alive” only in the same way an individual egg or sperm cell is alive.

Indeed, Wilkinson’s own organization, Physicians for Reproductive Choice, completely ducks the issue. Searching through their website, I’ve failed to find an example of the group engaging the question head-on…though I have found their chair, Dr. Douglas Laube, sneering about making policy “just to give legal rights to fertilized eggs,” without an argument to back up his condescension, and their 2010 policy agenda’s claim that “attempts to define legal personhood as beginning at conception are “without scientific foundation.” No, they didn’t bother to give that statement scientific foundation, either.

Before Todd Akin, I cannot recall ever hearing one of my fellow pro-lifers claim that rape victims’ bodies can shut down reproduction, yet pro-choicers telling me life begins sometime other than fertilization – sometimes consciousness, sometimes viability, sometimes birth – is an almost daily occurrence. For all their caterwauling over Akin’s bad seed, abortion apologists have yet to take responsibility for the forest of ignorance they’ve planted.

Party beyond Parody: Pro-Abortion Democrat Convention Boos God | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

It’s the sort of thing you expect only in hyper-partisan diatribes, Onion articles, or Saturday Night Live skits, a political blunder so epically, gratuitously embarrassing that its happening to a major political party in real life is inconceivable.

But it happened this week: the Democrats snubbed God. First came this change to the 2012 platform:

This is the paragraph that was in the 2008 platform:

“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.”

Now the words “God-given” have been removed. The paragraph has been restructured to say this:

“We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth – the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”

There remains a passage endorsing the charitable work of faith-based organizations, but that hardly mitigates the shock of somebody feeling the need to remove mention of Americans’ “God-given potential.” To all but the most hardened secularists, the line didn’t need changing – it was completely benign, implied no religious burden, denigrated no religion, and bound the Democrats to no particular policy. The only reason for removing it is that those who did so were simply so radical they didn’t want God getting any credit.

So far, the Democrats have yet to offer a better explanation – Sen. Dick Durbin deflected questions with indignation, and party chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz denied that there was anything to see behind the curtain.

Recognizing that pointlessly offending 89% of the population might be a PR problem, yesterday Democrat leaders moved to restore the 2008 language (as well as language recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital)…

…and somehow made the situation worse.

Convention chair Antonio Villaraigosa held a voice vote on the resolution. And a second one. And a third. Each time got plenty of “no” votes, and from the video, it’s not at all clear that the “yea” voices outnumbered them. On the third try, a visibly uncomfortable Villaraigosa declared the restored language approved…causing the hall to erupt into a hail of boos.

Even allowing that the original omission might have been an unintentional error, there’s no denying that a significant percentage of Democrat convention-goers – possibly a majority – wanted to keep the language out, and angrily voiced their disapproval when party leadership overruled them.

Booing God. On camera. At the president of the United States’ nominating convention. That’s a milestone nobody’s gonna pass in a while.

It’s no coincidence that a party growing increasingly hostile to God is also becoming increasingly absolutist on abortion. Both trends are rooted in a hubris that puts human desire at the center of moral and political theory and denies there are higher principles binding human behavior and limiting the burdens we can impose on our neighbors in the pursuit of our goals.

Sen. Kay Hutchinson: Abortion Too “Personal, Religious-Based” to Build a Party On | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

For the past week, the right to life’s enemies have had a blast exploiting the Todd Akin affair to depict the Republican Party as extreme and insensitive, but the truth is that GOP gaffes on abortion are just as likely to be so pathetically conciliatory that they offend conservatives rather than liberals.

Over the weekend, retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas had this to say about where abortion belongs in the Republican pecking order:

“Mothers and daughters can disagree on abortion, and we shouldn’t put a party around an issue that is so personal and also, religious-based,” the retiring Republican senator said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think we need to say, ‘Here are our principles, and we welcome you as a Republican. We can disagree on any number of issues, but if you want to be a Republican, we welcome you.”

[…]

Despite what the platform says, Hutchison said abortion rights supporters feel welcome in the GOP. “A lot of people think the party platform is something that is rigid,” she said. “It’s not really.”

Hutchinson, who has a strong yet imperfect pro-life record, really ought to know better. The killing of another human being is not “personal” any more than Mr. Smith shooting Mr. Jones is a personal matter in which the government has no interest. Likewise, the sanctity of unborn life is “religious” only to the same extent that religious reasons make your or my life sacred; that we and the unborn are equally alive and human is a matter of cold, hard science, and the equality of all humans’ natural rights is a philosophical truth which dates back to the Enlightenment and formed the Declaration of Independence’s backbone.

If one misunderstands that, then one cannot help but misunderstand how a political party should prioritize abortion. It’s true that abortion per se shouldn’t be the center or foundation of a party – but the principles that make abortion wrong should. The equal worth of all human beings and their unalienable rights to their own lives, liberties, and property must be the basis of any just political organization, and it’s from those premises that pro-life conclusions about abortion flow.

A sound liberty platform isn’t uniquely fixated on abortion. Quite the opposite, in fact: it seeks to remind America that abortion isn’t unique from other assaults on human rights; it reminds us to restore the right to life’s place among all the other rights society already protects. Any history-minded Republican should understand this especially well, considering that the GOP was founded to do the exact same thing with slavery.

Granted, abortion is far from the only issue facing America, and coalition-building is a complicated art. It’s legitimate for Republicans to find authentic areas of common ground between pro-lifers and pro-choicers, but that’s a far cry from bending over backwards to court those who violate their party’s deepest principles.

Dominican Pregnancy Death Sparks American Demagoguery over Life-of-the-Mother Cases | Live Action News

De Live Action News, por Calvin Freiburger

The girl’s mother, Rosa Hernandez

On Saturday, CNN reported on the leukemia death of a pregnant teenager in the Dominican Republic, which is being blamed on the Dominican constitution’s uncompromising anti-abortion language. Because chemotherapy could have harmed the unnamed girl’s unborn baby, doctors delayed the treatment for 20 days after hospitalizing her:

Her body rejected a blood transfusion and did not respond to the chemotherapy, and her condition worsened overnight, Cabrera said.

She then suffered a miscarriage early Friday, followed by cardiac arrest, and doctors were unable to revive her.

Representatives from the Dominican Ministry of Health, the Dominican Medical College, the hospital and the girl’s family had talked for several days before deciding to go forward with the chemotherapy.

The case sparked renewed debate over abortion in the Dominican Republic, with some lawmakers calling on officials to reconsider the abortion ban.

According to Article 37 of the Dominican Constitution, “the right to life is inviolable from the moment of conception and until death.” Dominican courts have interpreted this as a strict mandate against abortion.

The story has sparked a flurry of chatter in pro-choice circles including Jezebel, RH Reality Check, Addicting Info, and RichardDawkins.net, all of which follows a common theme: uncaring pro-lifers are on the verge of dooming American women to a similar fate.

Now, I’m as thrilled as the next guy to be held accountable for laws passed in other countries, but this pro-choice fear-mongering doesn’t check out. First, there’s some indication that the blame lies not with the law, but with the doctors interpreting it:

Bautista Rojas Gomez, the Dominican minister of health, has publicly indicated he favors chemotherapy over protecting the pregnancy, but doctors are still reluctant to act for fear of prosecution.

Pelegrin Castillo, one of the architects of Article 37, says the constitutional ban does not prevent doctors from administering the treatment. It does, however, prevent them from practicing an abortion in order to treat the patient with chemotherapy.

“It’s an artificial debate,” Castillo said. “What we have clearly said is that in this case doctors are authorized by the constitution to treat the patient. They don’t have to worry about anything. They have the mandate of protecting both lives.”

Second, the closest any of the linked authors and commenters come to showing that American pro-lifers want to let pregnant women die is this quote RH cites:

“There are no exceptions in Personhood USA’s presidential pledge because there are no situations where it becomes necessary to dismember a baby,” said Jennifer Mason, spokesperson for Personhood USA, in a January press release.

“With the passage of federal or state personhood amendments, recognizing the personhood rights of both mother and child, women will still of course have access to life-saving treatments and medical care,” Mason continued. “Procedures to treat both mom and baby can potentially lead to happier outcomes for both patients, whereas abortion procedures, which are dangerous as it stands already, intentionally kill a child.”

But reading the rest of the press release makes clear that RH is taking Mason out of context:

Regarding cases where the mother’s life is at risk, the pledge states: “I believe that in order to properly protect the right to life of the vulnerable among us, every human being at every stage of development must be recognized as a person possessing the right to life in federal and state laws without exception and without compromise. I recognize that in cases where a mother’s life is at risk, every effort should be made to save the baby’s life as well; leaving the death of an innocent child as an unintended tragedy rather than an intentional killing.” […]

Dr. Patrick Johnston of the Association of Pro-life Physicians explains: “When the life of the mother is truly threatened by her pregnancy, if both lives cannot simultaneously be saved, then saving the mother’s life must be the primary aim.  If through our careful treatment of the mother’s illness, the preborn patient inadvertently dies or is injured, this is tragic and, if unintentional, is not unethical and is consistent with the pro-life ethic.”

American Life League, perhaps the largest national-level advocates for the personhood and no-exceptions wings of the pro-life movement, also make clear that they don’t consider such genuine life-saving treatment to be abortion, and aren’t interested in banning it. It’s not abortion because lethal force is not being directly inflicted on the baby, and the baby’s death is an unintended side-effect.

Contrary to the stereotypes our detractors constantly spread about us, pro-lifers understand the pain and nuance of such situations all too well. Recall that in 1996, pro-life Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s wife Karen underwent medically induced labor to save her life from an infection, resulting in the death of her premature baby. Fair-minded pro-choicers could have admitted that the Santorums’ ordeal revealed that pro-lifers are people too; instead, they accused Santorum of hypocrisy. For them, the personal is always political.

Though increasingly rare, there are pregnancies where complications make it impossible to pull both patients through safely. Pro-lifers understand this, but we’ll never settle how society should handle such situations as long as abortion apologists insist on denying that there are two patients.

NY Senator Says Congress Needs More (Left-Wing) Women | Live Action News & Opinion

De Live Action News & Opinion, por Calvin Freiburger

Photo credit: ProgressOhio on Flickr

Once upon a time, the phrase “gender equality” meant exactly what it sounds like – securing the equal rights of women to do whatever men could, from the workplace to the ballot box. It was fundamentally about making sex less relevant in judging people’s worth and qualifications, about viewing them as individuals first and members of a group second.

Today’s pretenders to the feminist throne, for whom “women’s rights” and “gender equality” are but code words for abortion and birth control, have completely turned that principle on its head, as strikingly demonstrated by a recent RH Reality Check post on comments made by New York Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Robin Marty reports that Gillibrand realizes “how much work needs to be done to get more women running for office, especially women who don’t stump for the religious right”:

“[I]f we had 50 percent of women in Congress, we would not be debating contraception,” she said at a fundraiser, according to The Washington Post. “We would be debating the economy, small business, jobs, national security — everything but.”

Gillibrand is using her massive fundraising prowess to focus on other women now–in this case Tammy Duckworth in Wisconsin, Christie Vilsack in Iowa, and Val Demmings in Florida. If all three women won, it could make a massive change in the ratio not just of Republicans to Democrats in the House, but from male to female as well.

If Congress isn’t achieving Gillibrand’s desired results because too few lawmakers are female, presumably that means there’s something about being male that makes one’s judgment on such issues intrinsically worse, and something about being female that makes it intrinsically better.

Of course, that raises the obvious question of whether there are also issues that men are inherently better at deciding. Is Kathleen Sebelius’s leadership handicapping the Department of Health and Human Services with some sort of female-centric bias? It’s safe to assume that most left-wing feminists would bristle at such a suggestion, leaving us with only one alternative: women are just better.

If that’s the case, then the original feminists were wrong. The sexes aren’t equal. Men’s objectivity, comprehension, and decision-making skills are fundamentally inferior to women’s. Reason, justice, and prudence aren’t independent concepts accessible to all; only by possessing the right chromosomes can one fully perceive them.

Simply put, this is bunk. We are all individuals capable of reason, not drones beholden to hive minds. Men and women are equally capable of understanding how religious liberty and freedom of association work, reading that the Center for Disease Control’s own data finds no sign that women are suffering a crisis of “access” to birth control, and learning about the humanity of the unborn.

Not only does it deny the equality of the sexes and the objectivity of truth to suggest that only members of a particular demographic group are fit to govern for that group, but it also threatens to widen society’s divisions. If self-interest and the ability to perceive it are inextricably tied to one’s physical characteristics, then there’s no such thing as common good or general welfare, and trying to find them is a nonsensical exercise in futility. Earnest efforts to cross identity lines and find what’s best for everyone must give way to people banding together in “every demographic for itself!” struggles.

Ironically, Marty undermines the very quote she’s highlighting with her quip about how the female politicians we need aren’t part of the “religious right,” such as Gillibrand’s pro-life opponent, Republican attorney Wendy Long. Long, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and other female politicians are exactly the type of women feminists always say we need in politics: confident, passionate, and just as comfortable in the professional world as they are in the home. But despite, y’know, being women, they aren’t good for womankind, because they don’t sign onto the pro-abortion/forced contraception agenda.

In the name of “feminism,” abortion advocates have hijacked and corrupted everything the real feminists fought so hard to achieve, and all for a cause those venerable women would have been disgusted by. The best way to honor the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their allies is to rebuke Kirsten Gillibrand and her ilk.