AS PRO-LIFERS MARCH ON WASHINGTON, OBAMA SAYS ABORTION HELPS WOMEN ‘FULFILL THEIR DREAMS’ by ROBERT WILDE

As winter storms barrage the east coast of the US and a wind chill temperature of minus eight degrees freezes DC, hundreds of thousands of pro-life advocates are in the nation’s capitol  for the 41st annual March for Life event on Wednesday.

Today marks the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Along with its companion Doe v. Bolton, abortion was legalized in all nine months of pregnancy, for any reason, in the United States. Last year, it was estimated that 500,000 pro-life advocates demonstrated against abortion on the 40th anniversary of the crucial supreme court decision. The rallies will be covered on social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, using 360 degree cameras for those who want to experience the events online.

On Wednesday, Pope Francis sent out a tweet supporting the pro-life marchers and offering his prayers: “I join the March for Life in Washington with my prayers. May God help us respect all life, especially the most vulnerable,” he tweeted.

On a day set aside to mourn the sadness, hardship, and pain associated with abortion, President Obama praised Roe v Wade as a great moment in history for women, saying that today, “We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom.  And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children. Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.”

It is estimated that over 55 million abortions have been performed since 1973, the year it was legalized. If you do the math on those appalling figures, the numbers are deeply disturbing:

1.382 million abortions every year
115,167 abortions every month
26,577 abortions every week
3,786 abortions every day
157 abortions every hour
2.6 abortions every minute

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/22/Pro-Lifers-March-on-Washington-Protest-157-Abortions-Every-Hour

How Abortion Has Changed America

The trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, facing the death penalty for the deaths of four infants and one woman in his clinic, is over. America has moved on.

It’s exactly what the pro-abortion contingent wants. They want Gosnell out of the news because they want abortion out of the news. Ongoing discussion provokes thought about the status quo. And pro-aborts want to keep things as they are.

And, they have reason to be confident.

Our president, whom no one can accuse of not being politically astute, showed up this week, despite the Gosnell story, as the first sitting president ever to address Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

When Kirsten Powers brought attention to Gosnell, with her USA Today column, she said it wasn’t about abortion. “This is not about being pro-choice or pro-life,” she wrote. “It is about human rights.”

For Powers, the story was about lack of supervision. And, of course, where abortions are carried out legally, clinics should be supervised and inspected.

But to leave the story there is to be content with the tip of the iceberg. And the whole iceberg is a huge story that all of America should be looking at.

The whole iceberg is bigger than abortion itself. It is about how profoundly America has changed since Roe v Wade, in 1973, made abortion an accepted part of American life.

Let’s be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is.

In the state of Pennsylvania, where Gosnell was doing his dirty business, abortion is legal until the developing child is 24 weeks – 6 months – old. Among Gosnell’s many transgressions was performing abortions after 24 weeks.

But Planned Parenthood, and their guest speaker, our president, oppose that 24-week limit. They believe abortion should be legal until the child is born.

In 2007, shortly after the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, which banned a brutal abortion procedure most commonly used to destroy infants from 15 to 26 weeks old, then-Senator Obama spoke at a Planned Parenthood event and decried the decision. He called it part of a “concerted effort to steadily roll back” access to abortion.

Justice Kennedy, who wrote the decision, included a description of one of these procedures on a 26-week-old infant. It takes a certain deadening of the heart, of the soul to read the description of the little baby clasping his fingers and toes as the doctor jams his scissors into his skull , and still believe this should be permitted.

Since Roe v Wade, we’ve given birth to a new materialistic culture of narcissism where reverence for life itself is gone. Life has become a commodity and people use each other as cavalierly as they destroy innocent young life.

As our reverence for life has diminished, so has our reverence for the institutions that surround and support it.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution observed in 1996 that Roe v Wade contributed to the collapse of marriage and the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births. The idea that children were part of a sacred institution called marriage started disappearing.

The sense of honor, the sense of shame disappears in this culture of self.

In 1965, seven years before Roe v Wade, less then 10 percent of American babies were born to unwed mothers – 24 percent to unwed black women and 3.1 percent to unwed white women. As of 2010, this was up to 41 percent of our babies born to unwed mothers – 73 percent to black women and 29 percent to white women.

Sixty percent of our out-of-wedlock births are to women in their 20’s.

Soon, as our resources diminish to care for our growing aging population, we will start dealing with our elderly as we do our unborn.

But if everything is meaningless, who cares?

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It.

http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2013/04/29/how-abortion-has-changed-america-n1579604/page/full/

North Dakota to End Abortions That Stop a Beating Heart

On March 15, the North Dakota senate approved a bill that prevents abortions from being performed once a developing child’s heartbeat is detected in the mother’s womb.

This heartbeat can usually be heard “six to seven weeks into a pregnancy,” so it’s after that point that abortions will be prohibited in the state if Gov. Jack Dalrymple signs the bill.

Besides protecting life once a heartbeat is detected, North Dakota lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting “sex-selective abortions and abortions based on a diagnosis of genetic abnormality.”

Until this current pro-life push by North Dakota lawmakers, the most significant abortion ban in the country was the one passed in Arkansas on March 6 of this year. There, state lawmakers overrode a governor’s veto to ban abortions beyond 12 weeks.

After the North Dakota legislation passed the state senate, acting ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero labeled it “dangerous” and “extreme”:

Today, the North Dakota Legislature voted to become the first state in the nation to ban most abortions. We urge the governor to veto this dangerous ban and to take this complex and deeply personal decision out of the hands of politicians and put it back in the hands of a woman, her family and her doctor, where it belongs. It is time lawmakers put a stop to extreme restrictions like these and the one recently passed by the Arkansas Legislature.

 

Probably much to Romero’s dismay, North Dakota lawmakers have been hard at work on several pro-life bills throughout this year. In addition to protecting life after a heartbeat is detected and protecting life from being extinguished just because the baby isn’t the sex the parents prefer, they have also introduced “fetal pain” legislation that would protect pre-born life after 20 weeks and have introduced two pieces of “personhood” legislation—one of which “would put an amendment on the 2014 ballot that would declare [that] life at any stage of development must be recognized and protected and another that would amend the criminal code to include ‘personhood’ language.”

The honorable endgame is apparent—North Dakota legislators are determined to end abortions that stop a beating heart. However these bills fare before the activist federal judiciary in the inevitable court challenges, the message should be loud and clear to the Congress, the President, and especially the Supreme Court, which may soon be asked to consider whether abortion on demand is still viable forty years after Roe v. Wade.

Steven Aden

Steven H. Aden is senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom (www.alliancedefendingfreedom.org).

http://townhall.com/columnists/stevenaden/2013/03/20/north-dakota-to-end-abortions-that-stop-a-beating-heart-n1543445?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

So what if abortion ends life?

I believe that life starts at conception. And it’s never stopped me from being pro-choice

Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word “life.” Life! Who wants to argue with that? Who wants be on the side of … not-life? That’s why the language of those who support abortion has for so long been carefully couched in other terms. While opponents of abortion eagerly describe themselves as “pro-life,” the rest of us have had to scramble around with not nearly as big-ticket words like “choice” and “reproductive freedom.” The “life” conversation is often too thorny to even broach. Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.

As Roe v. Wade enters its fifth decade, we find ourselves at one of the most schizo moments in our national relationship with reproductive choice. In the past year we’ve endured the highest number of abortion restrictions ever. Yet support for abortion rights is at an all-time high, with seven in 10 Americans in favor of letting Roe v. Wade stand, allowing for reproductive choice in all or “most” cases. That’s a stunning 10 percent increase from just a decade ago. And in the midst of this unique moment, Planned Parenthood has taken the bold step of reframing the vernacular – moving away from the easy and easily divisive words “life” and “choice.” Instead, as a new promotional film acknowledges, “It’s not a black and white issue.”

It’s a move whose time is long overdue. It’s important, because when we don’t look at the complexities of reproduction, we give far too much semantic power to those who’d try to control it. And we play into the sneaky, dirty tricks of the anti-choice lobby when we on the pro-choice side squirm so uncomfortably at the ways in which they’ve repeatedly appropriated the concept of “life.”

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

We’re so intimidated by the wingnuts, we get spooked out of having these conversations. We let the archconservatives browbeat us with the concept of “life,” using their scare tactics on women and pushing for indefensible violations like forced ultrasounds. Why? Because when they wave the not-even-accurate notion that “abortion stops a beating heart” they think they’re going to trick us into some damning admission. They believe that if we call a fetus a life they can go down the road of making abortion murder. And I think that’s what concerns the hell out of those of us who support unrestricted reproductive freedom.

But we make choices about life all the time in our country. We make them about men and women in other nations. We make them about prisoners in our penal system. We make them about patients with terminal illnesses and accident victims. We still have passionate debates about the justifications of our actions as a society, but we don’t have to do it while being bullied around by the vague idea that if you say we’re talking about human life, then the jig is up, rights-wise.

It seems absurd to suggest that the only thing that makes us fully human is the short ride out of some lady’s vagina. That distinction may apply neatly legally, but philosophically, surely we can do better. Instead, we let right-wingers perpetuate the sentimental fiction that no one with a heart — and certainly no one who’s experienced the wondrous miracle of family life — can possibly resist tiny fingers and tiny toes growing inside a woman’s body. We give a platform to the notion that, as Christina Locke opined in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, “motherhood had slyly changed us. We went from basking in the rights that feminism had afforded us to silently pledging never to exercise them. Nice mommies don’t talk about abortion.”

Don’t they? The majority of women who have abortions – and one in three American women will – are already mothers. And I can say anecdotally that I’m a mom who loved the lives she incubated from the moment she peed on those sticks, and is also now well over 40 and in an experimental drug trial. If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I’d have an abortion. I’d have the World’s Greatest Abortion.

My belief that life begins at conception is mine to cling to. And if you believe that it begins at birth, or somewhere around the second trimester, or when the kid finally goes to college, that’s a conversation we can have, one that I hope would be respectful and empathetic and fearless. We can’t have it if those of us who believe that human life exists in utero are afraid we’re somehow going to flub it for the cause. In an Op-Ed on “Why I’m Pro-Choice” in the Michigan Daily this week, Emma Maniere stated, quite perfectly, that “Some argue that abortion takes lives, but I know that abortion saves lives, too.” She understands that it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of “Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream.” Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/23/so_what_if_abortion_ends_life/

What Abortion Has Cost America’s Future By Jim Denison , Christian Post Columnist

Every year, 32,000 people die on America’s highways. Every 10 days, that many abortions are performed in our country.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that struck down many state laws restricting abortion. Surprisingly, only 44 percent of Americans under age 30 know that Roe deals with abortion. Even more surprisingly, 53 percent of Americans think abortion “is not that important, compared to other issues.” Here’s why they’re wrong.

Since Roe, more than 55 million lives have been aborted. According to the Movement for a Better America, the resulting labor lost to our nation will cost our future GDP some $45 trillion. By comparison, our national debt stands at $16 trillion. Consider the impact on Social Security: each day for the next 19 years, 10,000 baby boomers will turn 65. At current trends, Social Security will be bankrupt in 21 years. One major reason: of the generation under 45 whose taxes support Social Security, a third was aborted.

How can you make a difference on this issue?

First, if you are pro-life, can you defend your position? It is vital that we speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15), giving a reason for our faith “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). For more on the legal, theological, and ethical issues involved in abortion, I invite you to read my essay, “Abortion and the Mercy of God.”

Second, if you believe life is sacred from the moment of conception, what are you doing to act on your conviction? My wife and I are strong supporters of the Council for Life in Dallas; what pro-life organization could you support in your community? Is God calling you to walk through pregnancy with a woman considering abortion? To share God’s mercy with a friend who chose abortion? To consider adopting a child into your family? Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned us: “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Each time I visit Israel, I am deeply saddened by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. As you know, six million Jews were murdered during World War II, one-fourth of them children. As much as we should grieve the Holocaust, let’s remember that 10 times more lives have been ended by abortion.

One of the first panels at Yad Vashem displays this statement: “A country is not just what it does – it is also what it tolerates.”

http://www.christianpost.com/news/what-abortion-has-cost-americas-future-88860/#Oe1rU0MyVFIlCUzG.99

Hardness of Heart and the Celebration of Abortion

In 1995, feminist leader Naomi Wolf called for a pro-abortion movement “that acts with moral accountability and without euphemism,” noting that, “With the pro-choice rhetoric we use now, we incur three destructive consequences — two ethical, one strategic: hardness of heart, lying and political failure.” That hardness of heart was fully manifest in the profane video produced by the Center for Reproductive Rights celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

But let’s go back to October 16, 1995, when the New Republic published Wolf’s remarkably candid article entitled, “Our Bodies, Our Souls.” Wolf made reference to “Dr. Joycelyn Elders’s remark, hailed by some as refreshingly frank and pro-woman but which I found remarkably brutal: that ‘We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus….’”

She explained that “Second Wave feminists reacted to the dehumanization of women by dehumanizing the creatures within them. . . . Yet that has left us with a bitter legacy. For when we defend abortion rights by emptying the act of moral gravity, we find ourselves cultivating a hardness of heart.” And she urged that abortion must be treated with “grief and reverence.”

In stark contrast with that attitude, the Center for Reproductive Rights released an online video which is so obscene that author Eric Metaxas writes, “When I first watched this ad, I thought, this HAS to be a spoof. It employs the ugly racial stereotype of a smooth-talking [black] predator celebrating his freedom to use women at zero cost to himself: Hey, baby, hook up with me—and then go have an abortion. Are they kidding? No; this was no spoof.”

The “smooth-talking predator” is actor Mechad Brooks who sits in a chair holding a red rose in one hand and a drink in the other, saying to the camera (as if speaking to his spouse), “All these years so many people said we’d never make it. They’ve been trying to tear us apart. . . Put limits on you, on me, on us.” And then, Metaxas notes, “he roars with laughter,” a sardonic, mocking laughter at that.

“We’re going to be standing right by your side, today, tomorrow, and the years to come,” he continues. “Because that is how much you mean to me, baby.” And then, once more, the laughter.

To repeat: This was not intended to be a sick joke or a demented spoof. This was meant to be taken seriously, presumably by the same kind of people who shouted their approval of abortion at last year’s Democratic National Convention. Let’s celebrate the slaughter of 55 million babies in the womb, especially in the African American community!

Metaxas quotes Ryan Scott Bomberger, an African-American pro-lifer who runs the Radiance Foundation, who noted that, “With the black abortion rate as high as it is and black fathers as absent as they are, it’s just sick to see Mehcad Brooks shill for the number-one killer in the black community.”

More graphic still are the comments of Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who asked what her uncle would do “if he’d lived to see the contents of thousands of children’s skulls emptied into the bottomless caverns of the abortionists’ pits?”

Naomi Wolf wrote that, “The pro-choice movement often treats with contempt the pro-lifers’ practice of holding up to our faces their disturbing graphics. We revile their placards showing an enlarged scene of the aftermath of a D & C abortion: we are disgusted by their lapel pins with the little feet, crafted in gold, of a 10-week-old fetus; we mock the sensationalism of The Silent Scream.”

Yet, she asked, “How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. Free women must be strong women, too: and strong women, presumably do not seek to cloak their most important decisions in euphemism.”

In light of these comments, I would like to make a simple proposal. The repulsive video described here has been pulled by its producer, but if someone can find a copy of it (legally), perhaps they can remake it, interspersed with these very images Wolf describes, terribly disturbing images which are now readily available online. Then let’s see if a single pro-abortion leader in the world will even attempt to minimize the horror of abortion.

Wolf argued that, “Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement and responsibility can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position and consolidate the support of the center.”

Let every American look at the pictures of these ripped up and mutilated babies and ask if it is possible for there to be an “abortion rights” movement that operates “within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement and responsibility.” And let every American ask what kind of human beings (and what kind of organization) could mockingly celebrate the slaughter of the unborn.

Michael Brown

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire, and his latest book is The Real Kosher Jesus.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2013/01/29/hardness-of-heart-and-the-celebration-of-abortion-n1500011/page/full/

Roe and the Road Ahead By Penny Nance and Kellyanne Conway , Special to CP

Frederica Mathewes-Green, author and former leader of Feminists for Life, said, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg. Abortion is a tragic attempt to escape a desperate situation by an act of violence and self-loss.” These words are the heart’s cry most of the estimated 400,000 plus Americans (mostly under the age of thirty) who will join together in the March for Life in Washington on January 25. We will remember and mourn the 52 million abortions performed in the United States since the Roe v. Wade decision forty years ago. We believe that abortion ultimately hurts women as well as destroys another human life. We believe that being Pro-Life is being Pro-Woman.

This is a difficult time for the pro-life movement. Our sadness is heighted by the second inauguration of the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history – the one who when asked four years ago when life begins joked that the question was “above his pay grade” and then proceeded to do everything in his power to support Big Abortion, the billion-dollar industry that profits from women’s lost, pre-born lives, including exporting our tax dollars abroad for those purposes.

We are faced this week with the juxtaposition of wrong-headed national leadership and the grim fortieth anniversary of one of the most divisive Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history
Even the most unapologetic pro-choicers must rue the FACT that in the U.S. 1.2 million abortions are performed each year (well over forty percent of which are repeat abortions, according to the left-leaning Guttmacher Institute). Just looking at those numbers alone would leave one to believe that the right to life, which was specifically enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, is a lost cause. However, when examined more closely, a different picture emerges – and one so clear that that Time Magazine declared this month in bold headlines “What Choice? Abortion-rights activists won an epic victory in Roe v. Wade. They’ve been losing ever since.”

That is true. Many Americans question the abortion on demand credo of abortion, anyone, anytime, anywhere, especially when they learn the extremes of elective and selective abortion, including those done late in the pregnancy, because the sex of the baby is not desired (most often, a female), and to married women who regard this as one too many or an unplanned inconvenience. Sonograms and 4D images of fetal development have upended the “out of sight, out of mind” argument that sustained the abortion rights movement for decades. And despite their phony “war on women” concocted to distract people from the Obama Economy, the abortion industry seems to be in a tailspin because the American public isn’t buying the lie.

The majority of Americans believe that this is a baby and refuse the pro-choice label (59% Gallup). The “problem” for them is even more pronounced among young people with numbers as high as 72%, according to Gallup, saying abortion is morally wrong.

Big Abortion’s biggest player, Planned Parenthood, is responsible for one of every four abortions performed in the U.S., yet, according to Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports, we still lavish them with over a half a billion dollars a year in taxpayer money. Pro-life taxpayers cannot exempt themselves from bankrolling the travesty. Cecile Richards should have to raise her own budget the way pro-life organizations do. Why should we all be held complicit in their dirty work?

The real action on abortion, like the real action on most major issues, is happening in the states. In 2011 alone, a record high ninety-two state laws were passed placing reasonable limits on abortion on demand in twenty-four states. These include clinic regulations that will keep women safe and minimal standards for the abortionists, like the requirement that they have admitting privileges at an area hospital. Other commonsense reforms include parental notification laws and right-to-know laws. Several others have banned abortions after twenty weeks. Four states – North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Arkansas – are down to just one abortion clinic, proving once again that public opinion is upstream of public policy. It will be exciting to see how the nation’s change of heart continues to impact our laws in the next five years.

Yep, the pro-aborts have an image problem. Apparently, most people don’t really think abortion is a noble cause. What to do? Like any major corporation receiving bailout money from the feds, rebranding is the next step. Using your tax dollars, they are already testing terms like “reproductive justice” and “reproductive health” and even “women’s health.” They know the public squirms when faced with their product and its results, and so they hide behind unobjectionable, albeit disingenuous, phrases like “women’s health.” To employ that with a straight face, they should be forced to include issues that actually impact ALL women’s health more commonly, e.g., cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and nutrition, long-term care.

Big Abortion lies when they say that without them, poor women would be without basic health services, including birth control, is patently false. The U.S. spends $2.37 billion per year on those services, both through Title X clinics and community health centers. Community health centers alone offer at least fourteen delivery sites in each state, with most having at least forty, according the Department of Health and Human Services. There is no dearth of birth control in this nation. There is also no shortage of people who confuse the abortion industry’s carefully crafted message with the reality that abortion, not mammograms or menopause medicine, is their cash cow.

Pro-life organizations are often accused of caring for the mother only until she gives birth. The opposite is true. Millions of pro-life Americans hold that opinion not just for the love of the baby but for the mother, too. A recent meta-analysis of twenty-two abortion studies, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry by American researcher Dr. Priscilla Coleman, showed that women who undergo an abortion face an eighty-one percent increase in risk of mental health problems. The study linked abortion to increase risk of anxiety disorders, depression, alcohol abuse, and even suicide.

Take a moment and read some of the heart-wrenching stories of regret from women who anonymously post on the website silentnomoreawareness.org. Is there anyone reading this who does not know a woman who has not experienced deep regret and even lost motherhood due to their abortions? Occasionally, I meet women who are extremely proud of their abortions.

Our community has invested in options including adoption services, parenting support, counseling, and fully licensed health clinics called pregnancy care clinics. The pro-life community has been the one to bring women in need into our homes and churches. We are the ones who help them find jobs, buy them food, drive them places, and help them sort out their messy lives. We are the ones who hold the post-abortive woman while she cries and teach her about God’s grace and forgiveness.

We cannot grow weary. We must do more. Being pro-life is being pro-woman. And 52 million “choices” – abortions – should be seen as a scourge, not as a down payment on another 40 years of turning a blind eye to what the image on the screen really is.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/roe-and-the-road-ahead-88862/#tbrCWw61BEv6waSf.99

Making the Case For Life

In an ideal world, Roe v. Wade — perhaps the most insidious Supreme Court ruling since the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 — would be overturned. And contrary to what most leftists assert, however, this does not necessarily mean that abortion would be universally prohibited and illegal. For example, before Roe became the law of the land in 1973, abortion was permissible in certain states. The legality of abortion, then, should be decided by individuals at the state level — at least in the short-term — not by a High Court of un-elected, unaccountable judges in Washington. This would be a small but significant victory.

But how do we get there?

Of course, pro-lifers argue that the taking of innocent human life is a great moral evil, and that the United States can never live up to its founding principles while such an injustice is lawful, let alone funded with taxpayer dollars. Indeed, more than 55 million unborn lives have been extinguished since 1973, and the numbers — especially in places like New York City — continue to climb. Imagine, in other words, how rich and diverse our country would be if these unborn millions were granted their God-given right to life? How many scientists, doctors, innovators and entrepreneurs would be alive today, making the United States — and the globalized world — a better place?

But sadly, the pro-life movement seems to be facing an uphill battle. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows that 70 percent of Americans support Roe v. Wade. Consequently, the High Court’s landmark decision granting individuals a right to an abortion — at any time, for any reason — will probably be on the books for years, if not decades to come. And while conservatives should never give up this crucially important fight, perhaps there’s another, more immediate way pro-lifers can raise awareness and end the culture of death plaguing our cities and states.

The battle for life unquestionably begins in New York City. In 2009, 41 percent of all pregnancies in the Big Apple ended in abortion. This is unacceptable. Worse, nearly 60 percent of black babies were aborted that same year. These staggering numbers are difficult to process — especially when one confronts the sobering fact that 56 percent of the women getting these abortions have already had one.

If anything, this suggests that a growing percentage of women terminating unplanned pregnancies in New York City are using abortion as a form of birth control. And the implications are catastrophic: How many women are choosing abortion each year in part because they don’t realize that unborn children have heartbeats as early as eight weeks and can feel pain as early as 20 weeks? The left does not want women to understand these unsavory facts. It discredits the arguments they’ve been cultivating for decades.

And yet, history teaches us that the only way totalitarian and oppressive regimes can rationalize the extermination of innocent life is through the process of de-humanization. In the eyes of their oppressors, to name just a few examples, Christians were “infidels,” Tutsi’s were “cockroaches,” Jews were “rats.” This is why educating those who are uneducated is so vitally important when making the case for life.

Moreover, rather than handing out “free” birth control pills and revamping sex education, perhaps conservatives should make the larger argument. For far too long, progressives have been winning the narrative that fetuses are nothing more than “matter” or “cells.” Of course, this belies modern science and medical research, which is one of the reasons I am hopeful (as was the case in the odious Dred Scott decision) that justice will one day prevail.

But we are not there yet.

In the meantime, most Americans still seem to believe — in the words of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” We all know, however, that abortion is not rare. It is, in many instances, a form of birth control. And so the way to most effectively reduce these staggering abortion numbers — especially in our inner cities — is to humanize the victims.

Only then can we begin to educate, and make the case that all life is sacred — and worthy of protection.

Daniel Doherty

Daniel Doherty is the Townhall.com Web Editor. Follow him on Twitter @danpdoherty

http://townhall.com/columnists/danieldoherty/2013/01/25/making-the-case-for-life-n1496749/page/full/

Ultrasound Technology: An Effective Piece of the Pro-Life Message By Jeff Schapiro , Christian Post Reporter

Pro-life groups are optimistic about the effectiveness of  ultrasound technology in  persuading pregnant women to choose giving birth over having an abortion.

Ultrasound technology has played an important role in helping pregnant women  realize that the fetuses they carry are “alive and vulnerable,” said Roland  Warren, CEO of Care Net, in an interview with The Christian Post on Tuesday. Care Net is a Christian ministry that supports  such women through its network of pregnancy centers, 60 percent of which offer  ultrasound exams at no charge.

Warren compares the impact of ultrasound technology on the pro-life movement  to the impact of television  cameras on the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement, cameras  captured images of the injustices perpetrated against black communities in the  South and allowed those images to be broadcast  nationwide.

“You have a similar kind of thing that’s happening with ultrasound,” said  Warren. “In a similar way, you know, the ultrasound is coming into the womb and  it’s helping people understand what’s happening to the most vulnerable among  us.”

A number of different pro-life organizations have found ultrasounds helpful  to promoting their cause.

The website for Options Pregnancy Resource Centers in Oregon says that among  the organization’s Project Ultrasound clients who were considered “at high-risk  for choosing abortion,” 75 percent of those who declined to receive an  ultrasound ended up having an abortion. In comparison, only 30 percent of those  who received an ultrasound did the same.

CitizenLink reported in February 2012 that Focus on the Family’s Option  Ultrasound Program (OUP), which offers grants to support the use of ultrasound  technology in Pregnancy Medical Clinics, had a role in preventing an estimated  120,000 abortions since the program’s inception in 2004.

Abortion clinic doctors in Texas are now legally required to provide pregnant  women with a sonogram at least 24 hours before an abortion can be performed,  except in some cases where the procedure can be performed no earlier than two  hours after the sonogram. Doctors must also make the unborn child’s heartbeat  audible to the woman seeking an abortion.

Texas Right to Life spokesperson Rachel Bohannon told CP via email that the  “Sonogram Law,” which went into effect in February 2012, had an immediate impact  in that it reduced the number of abortions and increased the number of visitors  who visited pregnancy centers to receive free sonograms.

“When women come face to face with their preborn children, their natural  desire to protect their children begins to kick in, and they often reconsider  their abortion decision,” said Bohannon.

“This is not manipulation on the part of Pro-Lifers. The Sonogram Law is not  meant to guilt or shame women out of abortions, as our opponents claim. The  purpose of the Sonogram Law is very simple: to make women fully-informed by  presenting them with all the medical information, and thus bring  abortion practice in Texas up to contemporary medical standards of informed  consent.”

Bohannon says appeals to “science, technology and common sense” have resulted  in many pro-life victories since Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme  Court in 1973, and will continue to be important moving forward.

Warren described this week’s 40th anniversary of the court’s decision as  being “bitter,” and even suggested that modern technology and medical knowledge  might have prevented the legalization of abortion if it had been available  before Roe v. Wade.

“I think, frankly, had people known then what we know now in terms of fetal  development and all these different pieces, it would have been very difficult, I  think, for abortion to even have become the law of the land,” he said.

Approximately 55 million legal abortions have occurred in the U.S. since the  Roe v. Wade decision. According to the Texas Right to Life website, at least 1.2  million abortions are reported every year.

A total of 43 abortion restrictions were enacted across 19 states in 2012 – the second highest total ever passed in one year – the Guttmacher Institute  reports.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/ultrasound-technology-an-effective-piece-of-the-pro-life-message-88721/#RBS2CVdiuvjm1qRL.99

Roe v. Wade at 40

At last week’s signing of “executive actions” designed to combat gun violence in America, President Obama, flanked by schoolchildren, said, “…when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now.”
There’s no doubt that children, especially schoolchildren, are vulnerable to all kinds of threats, but are they “the most vulnerable,” as the president claimed, or is there another category of human life that qualifies for that designation?
Forty years after a Supreme Court majority opened the door to legalized abortion, the number of aborted babies has reached roughly 55 million. Think of that. Fifty-five million potential what — doctors, athletes, mothers and fathers who would add branches to family trees?
There are no new arguments about abortion and most of us can probably recite the old ones by heart.
It’s a woman’s right. It’s her body.
No, it’s a separate life that is initially dependent on the woman for nourishment, but is independent of her in that it is a separate human being.
Who will take care of the unwanted child if it is born? Meanwhile, adoptive parents wait desperately for a child to love.
If one adopts the utilitarian view, the 55 million aborted in the U.S. robbed America of potential taxpayers. Pro-choice liberals may have lost a good chunk of their political base, as well as a large revenue source.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is a pro-choice liberal. In a column last week about the availability of guns in America, Kristof wrote, “When I travel abroad and talk to foreigners about the American passion for guns, people sometimes express a conclusion that horrifies me: in America, life is cheap.”
He doesn’t say why he thinks foreigners believe life here is cheap, but let me try to explain it. I believe it begins with the killing of unborn babies. Once the value of life is diminished in the womb, it seems to be a short step to devaluing life at other stages; such as killing someone for their sneakers or gunning them down in the street for no reason.
If one wishes to stretch the point even farther, add easy divorce, neglected children, out-of-wedlock babies (which is better than aborting them), spousal abuse, sex trafficking and pornography. All of these — and more — contribute to a cheapening of life and of what it means to be human.

For many, pleasing self and not wishing to sacrifice for another were hallmarks of the tumultuous ’60s, which led to what’s often called the “me” decade of the ’80s. The growing secularization of America has also contributed mightily to the cheapening of human life. If there is no Creator, Who made us and endowed us with a right to live, and if we are mere evolutionary accidents without purpose, direction or destination, then we might as well eat, drink, and be merry and abort at will.
Sophisticated ultrasound technology didn’t exist 40 years ago. Today, it gives pregnant women an opportunity to be fully informed about what it is they wish to terminate. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “Since the mid-1990s, several states have moved to make ultrasound part of abortion service provision.” As of Jan. 1, 2013, it reports, “Six states mandate that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound on each woman seeking an abortion…” It is the ultimate empowerment tool. I have talked to many women over the last 30 years who’ve changed their minds about abortion and have given birth with no regrets, once they’ve seen their developing baby.
Kristof says that even if President Obama’s “modest” gun control proposals reduced deaths by one-quarter, he calculates it could mean 7,500 lives saved a year.
Ultrasound, if made a requirement nationally, could save millions at a time when we have made life cheap.

Cal  Thomas

Cal Thomas is co-author (with Bob Beckel) of the book, “Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan War That is Destroying America“.

http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2013/01/22/roe-v-wade-at-40-n1494137/page/full/