Texas Abortion Law, Bro-Choice, and I Must Be a Feminist!

Ahem. So does this mean that by being pro-life, I'm a feminist? Language warning. Excerpts:

...'This link has just turned me into feminist hulk. Feminist hulk types REALLY HARD, and likes to use CAPS LOCK. You’ve been warned.

This is the part, in particular, that hulkafied me…”For those of us guys who like girls — you know, like them like them — and want to have relationships with them that may last anywhere from a few minutes to many years”…”Your sex life is at stake. Can you think of anything that kills the vibe faster than a woman fearing a back-alley abortion? Making abortion essentially inaccessible in Texas will add an anxiety to sex that will drastically undercut its joys. And don’t be surprised if casual sex outside of relationships becomes far more difficult to come by.”

Oh, you poor, poor little douchebag. GAWD FORBID we tie ANY LEVEL OF RESPONSIBILITY to that 2-MINUTE HOOK-UP in which you might accidentally CREATE ANOTHER HUMAN BEING, because, like, radical fauxminism, and labiaration, and stuff. IF YOU HAVE EVER WONDERED HOW ABORTION MAKES WOMEN MORE EXPLOITABLE THAN ANY OTHER THING UNDER THE SUN, read this garbage… I’m off to go smash $#!%… like the REAL PATRIARCHY. Ya know, the one where men expect you to kill your child so they can get a carefree piece of ass…

Yet further takedown proceeds here. Excerpts:

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Texas law that everyone is freaking the f*** out about basically moves the last possible date at which a pregnant woman can obtain an abortion from 24 weeks, where babies can be born alive and survive, to 20 weeks, before the generally-accepted point of viability.

Let’s just hang on to that for a second.

If that seems straightforward, even pro-science to you, you’re not alone: if a kid can survive outside the womb, than it’s kind of hard to make the argument that they are an inhuman parasite. But, whatever. This is abortion legislation, so the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. What matters is, we’re all like, ten Texas legislators away from starring in our own post-apocalyptic Margaret Atwood novel, where us poor folk are chained to beds and forced to have children against our will. Never mind that by the time the Texas deadline rolls around you’re more than four months pregnant, you’re an idiot who simply can’t make up her puny female mind about being a parent, and need to have available a procedure that most of the world (except Canada!) views as barbaric. And Canada doesn’t count. As a country. And just generally. Because f*** Canada.

Oh, and then there’s the part about HB2 shutting down abortion clinics that can’t adhere to the same cleanliness and operation standards as a veterinary office, which, let’s just say, if they aren’t already, women aren’t getting good care. Because they aren’t getting the same standard of care as your dog. And if that shuts a couple of them down, I’m sure no one is going to miss them...

More on this here.

Religious Freedom, HHS Mandate, and The Future in America

Kathryn Jean Lopez spells it out for you. Excerpts:

...On Wednesday, President Obama said that “maintaining our nation’s commitment to religious freedom is also vital.” He said that: “How religious institutions define and consecrate marriage has always been up to those institutions. Nothing about this decision – which applies only to civil marriages – changes that.” Forgive me for having very little confidence on this front, given this continuing HHS mandate charade. A priest on a secular campus, even if employed by a Catholic diocese, will likely have some legal trouble in his future, the way this is all going. (And we’ve already seen hints of the cultural posture that will lead there. And don’t expect retreat centers to be safe, either.)

The administration’s position in this abortion/contraception/sterilization HHS mandate controversy appears to be, and consistently, since January 2012, and the summer before and in the roots of the regulation in an abortion-industry dream of a panel: Women’s health and freedom absolutely, fundamentally requires ready and covered access to abortion and contraception and sterilization (sorry, guys, you’re not covered). Religious folk with objections are wrong, and we’ll pretend to let them off the hook with a little sliding of the hand, but they’ve got to get their employees to abortion-pill and contraception coverage, because that’s good and their teachings aren’t.

Conveniently brought to you by the graduate of a Catholic college as HHS secretary ….

“The fundamental problem here is that the government has no business deciding who is religious enough to qualify for their exemption,” Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, who has sponsored conscience-protection legislation in the House (first introduced before this HHS mandate controversy blew up), tells National Review Online in response to today’s rule finalization. ”This is a matter of deeply-held principle, the right of conscience, and religious freedom. The government should be upholding these essential rights, not coercing people to act against them.”

But here we are. Employers with religious objections to abortion, contraception, sterilization have no religious-freedom claim in the eyes of the Obama administration, despite pleas, despite good-faith discussions, despite assurances by the administration...

"Hurricane Scandy," President Obama, and Some Funny, Funny Jon Stewart

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The Week has a very informative overview of many of the scandals. The piece concludes:

...That's a long fall from grace for the White House in the short period of time since the mutual-admiration society of the WHCA's gala dinner and celebrity red-carpet evening. The scandalous snooping on journalists attempting to keep government accountable through the exercise of the First Amendment may or may not be the most significant of the scandals that the Obama administration faces at the moment — but it's the key scandal that will motivate the press to report more aggressively on all of the others. Circling the wagons with its ideological allies in the opinion media shows that the White House may have reached the same conclusion.

Dana Milbank would seem to agree. Excerpts:

...[T]he administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility and discourage allies who would otherwise defend the administration against bogus accusations such as those involving the Benghazi “talking points.” If the administration is spying on reporters and accusing them of criminality just for asking questions — well, who knows what else this crowd is capable of doing?...

Carney told the White House press corps Tuesday that Obama doesn’t think “journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs” (perhaps he could remind the FBI of that), and the administration has renewed its support for a media shield law (a welcome but suspicious gesture, because the White House thwarted a previous attempt to pass the bill).

If Obama really is “a fierce defender of the First Amendment,” as his spokesman would have it, he will move quickly to fix this. Otherwise, Obama is establishing an ominous precedent for future leaders whose fondness for the First Amendment may not be so fierce.

Some interesting points made about the IRS scandal.  Excerpts:

...The IRS scandal is just as significant. There are few greater threats to our democracy than the use of the IRS, or any part of government, to harass, punish or thwart an administration's perceived political enemies. The IRS actions are particularly disconcerting given its greatly expanded role under ObamaCare...

Peggy Noonan expands on those points. Excerpts:

...[T]he IRS scandal is different because it speaks of the political corruption of a major and crucial governmental agency to whose rules and regulations every American—everyone who has a job or a bank account, or who engages in a financial transaction—is subject. Most people will never have an interaction with the State Department or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the IRS deals with an intimate and sensitive part of your life, your personal finances. It is the revenue-collecting arm of the government. It is needed. It does necessary work. When that work is done well it is rarely noted and almost never celebrated. When it’s done badly it’s a terrible thing, because it means a citizen was treated badly or abused. But as an agency it couldn’t be more important to the national mood, the national atmosphere.

If we allow it to become politically corrupt that scandal will not pass, it will be with us every day...

Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now, it will never stop. The next White House will come in and they’ll know they can do it too. And if they’re unlucky enough to be caught, they’ll have a have a few uncomfortable moments in Congress, and a few people who were going to retire in the summer will retire in the spring. And it will all go on.

We are at a point now where you can make a list of things that, all combined and allowed to continue, can kill America. This is one of them. Widespread belief that the revenue-collecting arm of the US government is hopelessly corrupt is one of them...

An interesting note from a man who says he's recently gone through the adoption process. Excerpts:

...As we get word that the IRS has harassed a number of pro-life groups, including at least one alleged demand that a pro-life group not picket Planned Parenthood, check out this statistic: In 2012, the IRS requested additional information from 90 percent of returns claiming the adoption tax credit and went on to actually audit 69 percent. More details from the Taxpayer Advocate Service:

During the 2012 filing season, 90 percent of returns claiming the refundable adoption credit were subject to additional review to determine if an examination was necessary. The most common reasons were income and a lack of documentation.

■ Sixty-nine percent of all adoption credit claims during the 2012 filing season were selected for audit.

■ Of the completed adoption tax credit audits, over 55 percent ended with no change in the tax owed or refund due in fiscal year 2012. The median refund amount involved in these audits is over $15,000 and the median adjusted gross income (AGI) of the taxpayers involved is about 64,000. The average adoption credit correspondence audit currently takes 126 days, causing a lengthy delay for taxpayers waiting for refunds.

While many returns had missing or incomplete information (more on that in a moment), what was the outcome of this massive audit campaign? Not much:

Despite Congress’ express intent to target the credit to low and middle income families, the IRS created income-based rules that were responsible for over one-third of all additional reviews in FY2012.

■ Of the $668.1 million in adoption credit claims in tax year (TY) 2011 as a result of adoption credit audits, the IRS only disallowed $11 million — or one and one-half percent — in adoption credit claims. However, the IRS has also had to pay out $2.1 million in interest in TY 2011 to taxpayers whose refunds were held past the 45-day period allowed by law.

So Congress implemented a tax credit to facilitate adoption – a process that is so extraordinarily expensive that it is out of reach for many middle-class families — and the IRS responded by implementing an audit campaign that delayed much-needed tax refunds to the very families that needed them the most. Oh, and the return on its investment in this harassment? Slightly more than 1 percent...

The LA Times calls for the administration to cooperate fully with the IRS investigation.  Excerpts:

Message to the president: Resistance is futile.

There are plenty of juicy targets for investigators in the IRS scrutiny of conservative organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, but the most dangerous for President Obama is this: Did bureaucrats in Cincinnati create this mess on their own? Or did someone in the White House give the marching orders to target the president's enemies?...

Obama shouldn't merely allow the IRS to cooperate; he should order the IRS to cooperate fully and enthusiastically. Meantime, the White House staff should also begin combing their own records to see if there's anything else they need to fess up. Under the doctrine of executive privilege, internal White House records are normally immune from congressional probing, but it would benefit Obama to be forthcoming.

The reason is simple: The president needs to prove a negative. He needs to show that there was no political influence over the IRS decisions. Proving a negative is never easy; it's doubly difficult when others are beginning to doubt your word.

The White House hasn't done much to bolster the president's credibility so far. While Obama himself has said the right things, his aides have sounded grouchy and grudging about cooperating with congressional investigations...

Even worse, the administration is having a hard time getting its story straight on who knew about the IRS problem and when they knew it...

[B]y getting its story wrong and revising it repeatedly, the White House has managed to make itself look guilty of something, whether it is or not. And that is prompting everyone else — even some allies — to invoke the Watergate question: What did he know and when did he know it?

Of course, even though some keep referring to some sort of cabal in the Cincinnati office of the IRS, the purported targets of the politically motivated audits are popping up across the nation, so I'm not sure I buy the whole "Cincinnati Sucks" narrative. In other scandal, Attorney General Holder admits that the US drone campaign has accidentally taken out American citizens without trial, alongside those Americans killed intentionally without a trial. Excerpts:

In an extraordinary admission, Attorney General Eric Holder has told Congress that U.S. drone strikes since 2009 have killed four Americans — three of whom were “not specifically targeted.”

For all the effort that the Obama administration has gone to in asserting that its drones only kill the people that the administration intends to kill, Holder wrote in a letter today to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that Samir Khan, 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki and Jude Kenan Mohammad were “not specifically targeted by the United States.” The fourth American to die in a drone strike since 2009 was Abdulrahman’s father Anwar Awlaki, a radical propagandist whom the U.S. killed in Yemen in 2011.

The five-page letter, obtained and published by Charlie Savage of The New York Times, does not explain the circumstances that led to the unintentional killings of Khan, Mohammad and the younger Awlaki. Holder does not apologize for the killings, nor explain whether their deaths resulted from errant targeting, mistaken identity or another circumstance.

But after acknowledging that the administration did “not specifically targe[t]” those three Americans, Holder defended killing Americans the administration believes to be members of al-Qaida without due process, a constitutionally questionable proposition...

The Daily Beast on civil liberties, press oversight, and this administration. Excerpts:

...Because they tend to share his broad outlook on politics, too many journalists for too long have been in the tank for Obama, explaining away or minimizing his policy failures and reversals. Remember Obama’s heartfelt insistence that he would run the most transparent administration ever? Take a look at this document about warrantless searches of text messages that his administration finally coughed up to the ACLU and get back to me. It’s 15 pages of completely redacted prose. Such a document would be funny if it wasn’t coming from a secrecy-obsessed administration that has put the brakes on fulfilling FOIA requests and has charged a record number of people under the Espionage Act.

Then there’s Obama’s cherished belief in his inalienable right to scrag anyone he thinks was connected to the 9/11 attacks or al Qaeda or is otherwise a threat to the good old U.S. of A. Even George W. Bush never wandered into that constitutionally swampy territory—and he was worse than Hitler, Richard Nixon, and Larry the Cable Guy put together, right? Yet it took a 13-hour filibuster by the libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to get a simple—and still squirrely!—answer to whether the administration thinks it has the authority to dispatch death drones against citizens on U.S. soil...

Kirsten Powers raises some interesting points about the DoJ's bad habit of spying on the press. Excerpts:

First they came for Fox News, and they did not speak out—because they were not Fox News. Then they came for government whistleblowers, and they did not speak out—because they were not government whistleblowers. Then they came for the maker of a YouTube video, and—okay, we know how this story ends. But how did we get here?

Turns out it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to “delegitimize” a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters. In between, the Obama administration found time to relentlessly persecute government whistleblowers and publicly harass and condemn a private American citizen for expressing his constitutionally protected speech in the form of an anti-Islam YouTube video.

Where were the media when all this began happening? With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers...

These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.

Yet only one mainstream media reporter—Jake Tapper, then of ABC News—ever raised a serious objection to the White House’s egregious and chilling behavior. Tapper asked future MSNBC commentator and then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “[W]hy is [it] appropriate for the White House to say” that “thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a ‘news organization’?” The spokesman for the president of the United States was unrepentant, saying: “That's our opinion.”

Trashing reporters comes easy in Obama-land. Behind the scenes, Obama-centric Democratic operatives brand any reporter who questions the administration as a closet conservative, because what other explanation could there be for a reporter critically reporting on the government?...

If the existence of a person who allegedly associates with conservatives is a “mole,” then what does that tell us about the rest of the media?

What all of us in the media need to remember—whatever our politics—is that we need to hold government actions to the same standard, whether they’re aimed at friends or foes. If not, there’s no one but ourselves to blame when the administration takes aim at us.

Mark Shea explains why it's so hard for many Americans to get worked up over the rising tide of scandal. Excerpts:

...[T]he Right Wing Noise Machine’s relentless habit of dialing up every. single. gripe about Obama to 11 results in Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome for the average non-political man on the street who has long ago tuned out the hysterics and therefore has trouble telling when a really serious problem has appeared.

And the irony? The RWNM could have learned this simple psychological fact from the Left Wing Noise Machine. Remember the screaming about BushHITLER? Remember how effective that was in defeating Bush in 2004? Remember how the anti-war Left exhausted itself finding fault with every little thing Bush said and did till you tuned them out?

This sort of thing is, by the way, more than merely politically stupid. It is spiritually corrosive and profoundly dangerous to the soul. Here’s C.S. Lewis:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

I limit my animosity to the Obama Administration as much as possible for two reasons. By far the most important is given by Lewis. The second is given by Aesop in the Boy Who Cried Wolf...

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What Difference Did Roe Make?

Mark Steyn talks Gosnell back in February 2011. Many links and graphic details in original.  Excerpts:

With Planned Parenthood aiding and abetting child prostitution, my friend Rich Lowry argued that the back alley is back:

Legal abortion was supposed to end "back-alley abortions," both their dangers and their entanglements with shady characters. But the practice and the mores of the back alley are with us still, tolerated by people for whom the ready provision of abortion trumps all else.

Rich is right. Ever since Roe v Wade, proponents of a woman's "right to choose" have warned us against going back to the bad old days of rusty coat hangers and unsterilized instruments from money-grubbing butchers on the wrong side of town. Now, happily, the back alley is on the main drag, and with a state permit framed on the wall...

For years, the supposed regulators averted their gaze - as a matter of policy. For abortion's ideological enforcers, the official euphemisms trump reality. For those on the receiving end of infection, mutilation, sterilization and death, reality has a way of intruding...

The back alley is back, and supersized: The above New Jersey clinic performs 10,000 abortions a year. When the pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and other celebrities d'un certain age return to Hollywood, and the upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their suburbs, a woman's "right to choose" means that, day in, day out, the blessings of this "right" fall disproportionately on all the identity groups the upscale liberals profess to care about - poor women, black women, Hispanic women, undocumented women, and other denizens of Big Government's back alley.

A government back alley, licensed and supposedly regulated, is worse than the old kind, because it implies the approval of the state, and of society. That's what Gosnell thought he had, when he murdered those babies and mutilated those teenage girls. That's what Planned Parenthood think they have, when they facilitate the sexual exploitation of Third World children. And, given the silence of the PC media, maybe they're right. Aside from the intrinsic evil of not only Gosnell but a state that knowingly colludes with him, these "little" abortion stories reveal an almost totalitarian mindset in the "pro-choice" movement's determination to brook no intrusion of reality upon the official myths. You may be one of those wealthy suburban "feminists" or "new men" indifferent to the fate of eight-pound "blobs of tissue" or 14-year old "women", but the gulf between propaganda and truth, between the fatuous feelgood bumper stickers and the rusty crochet hooks, is profound - and, in a world where statists and social engineers serve as ruthless enforcers for the prevailing ideology, its deep moral corruption will eventually swallow you, too. America should be at the very minimum deeply disquieted by these revelations. That it is not - that it is dismissed as a "little thing" - is even more disquieting.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL, once discussed the reason why abortion tends to attract the worst doctors--why the Gosnell case is unlikely to be the last such.  He listed a number of reasons, both personal and professional, including the technical ease of the procedure, the distaste amongst many younger physicians who'd rather not perform it, the effect of ultrasound on people who could now see what it was that they were killing, and the high profits to be made by those willing to perform abortions quickly.  Gosnell is not alone.  Update:  Gosnell is not alone.

If these conditions are persisting, even after abortion is legalized, we need to start asking whether illegal abortions were awful because desperate women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the illegal for money, or whether they were awful because women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the unthinkable for money.

Gosnell Coverage, Clinic Regulation, and the Pro-Life Movement

"The picture above, for what it’s worth, is of the reserved media seats at the Gosnell trial. It was taken by JD Mullane, a news writer and columnist for the Bucks County Courier Times, The Intel and the Burlington County (NJ) Times. He says:
Sat through a full day of testimony at the Kermitt Gosnell trial today. It is beyond the most morbid Hollywood horror. It will change you.
I was surprised by the picture and asked 'really?' He responded 'Local press was there, Inky, PhillyMag, NBC10 blogger. Court staff told me nobody else has shown up.'"--GetReligion

Well, coverage is finally picking up, compared to the early days of the trial (see picture of an empty press section above).  A friend recently raised the following concern:

One week ago, clinic regulation represented a political compromise, a half-measure of a defeated movement. Today, discussing regulation would be surrendering on the verge of a route. Admit it, both "sides" used regulation tactically--it is no one's goal, nor should it be. But the value of the tactic has now increased exponentially for one side, and could accomplish its critical need to weather this unprecedented storm.

I think this piece answers that concern quite well. Excerpts:

...Normally, like a game, the media will only admit to this kind of oversight long after it is too late to do anything about it. Worse still, the admission of the mistake is generally just a convenient excuse for the media to talk about their favorite subject -- themselves.

That doesn’t appear to be the case this time. Last night on CNN, Jake Tapper (one of the few who had already covered Gosnell), Erin Burnett, and Anderson Cooper devoted extensive time to the story. And as you can see above, the media are promising to do more next week than just navel gaze.

And I for one am very grateful for that, because even marginally bad coverage, like what we saw from CNN's Erin Burnett last night, is a win. (Anderson Cooper's segment was flat-out outstanding and a must-watch.)

Regardless, let the left-wing media spin the Gosnell horrors into a pro-choice argument for safer abortion clinics. As someone who considers abortion a moral abomination, as long as it is legal, I don't want to see that abomination made worse with unsafe clinics and the horrific exploitation of desperate women.

But that is the worse-case scenario (which is still a plus). What is also likely to happen is an increased  public knowledge of the act of outright infanticide known as partial-birth abortion. For over a decade now, the media has tried to turn that horror into a "right-wing myth." But now we not only have an example of a doctor eagerly engaged and made wealthy by the practice, but other doctors referring patients to him.

New Media has a responsibility now, as well. We need to use this opportunity to do our own reporting on Gosnell, not just to peck away at the mainstream media for not covering the story in the way we would like...

More shame-faced acknowledgements that the story deserves coverage from Bloomberg and Politico.  My main post on the case.  And we need to keep asking:

If these conditions are persisting, even after abortion is legalized, we need to start asking whether illegal abortions were awful because desperate women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the illegal for money, or whether they were awful because women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the unthinkable for money.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, and the Low Quality of Abortion Doctors

Warning: graphic images and descriptions.

3801 Lancaster from 3801Lancaster on Vimeo.

So there's finally beginning to be a rumpus about the Kermit Gosnell trial, than which a more perfect storm of horrors could not be imagined.  (Update:  The grand jury report here.)

Elizabeth Scalia points out avenues in for media coverage and calls on Christians to seize the moment in a Gospel fashion. Excerpts:

...Embracing this moment with a Christlike heart and mind means no hateful postings on Facebook. No hashtags on twitter meant to insult, demean or cast down. Try #pro-abortion instead of #pro-murder.

Let me put it another way: if you’re a Christian who hates abortion and you see a sliver of light in this 40 years of darkness — which is exactly what this hushed admission from the press might be — and you repel the light with your anger instead of widening it (and its pathway) by taking a gentler, more merciful tone, then you will have to answer to the God of Justice about it. You’ll have to tell God why you thought it was more important to beat his wounded sheep rather than heal; you’ll have to explain why you thought your immediate “justice”, which can never be as informed as God’s, was preferable to waiting for his, which (for others) might come well after some years of regret, and contrition and penance and (for others) may be wholly beyond our comprehension.

We may be in a moment of grace, standing at the advent of a great gift. It’s not time to put a nail through a bat and start swinging...

Catholic World Report's Catherine Harmon has more on the coverage of the story and brings up Dr. Bernard Nathanson's documentary The Silent Scream , pointing out that the silent scream of the fetus in the abortion depicted in that documentary has now become rather less silent in the Gosnell case.  Warning to the weak-stomached.  Excerpts:

This week we have reports of another tiny victim of abortion screaming—not silently this time:

A Delaware woman who worked for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell recalled hearing one child “screaming” after it was delivered during an abortion procedure at Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic.

Sherry West, of Bear, said she was loyal to Gosnell – who is now facing multiple counts of murder for allegedly killing children after they were delivered alive at his clinic – but said the incident “really freaked me out.”

When Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore pressed the 53-year-old West for specifics about the incident, West struggled to answer, clearly uncomfortable with the memory.

“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” West testified, telling a judge and Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at Gosnell’s clinic.

West said she saw the child, whose face and features were not yet completely formed, lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told a co-worker to call Gosnell about it and fled the room...

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL, once discussed the reason why abortion tends to attract the worst doctors--why the Gosnell case is unlikely to be the last such.  He listed a number of reasons, both personal and professional, including the technical ease of the procedure, the distaste amongst many younger physicians who'd rather not perform it, the effect of ultrasound on people who could now see what it was that they were killing, and the high profits to be made by those willing to perform abortions quickly.  Gosnell is not alone.  Excerpts:

...Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, former employee said, "It was just unsafe. I couldn't tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was."

Werbrich alleges conditions inside the facility were unsanitary.

"He didn't wear gloves," said Werbrich.

Another former employee, Joyce Vasikonis told Action News, "They were using instruments on patients that were not sterile."

The former nurses claim that a rush to get patients in and out left operating tables soiled and unclean.

Werbrich said "It's not washed down, it's not even cleaned off. It has bloody drainage on it."

"They could be at risk of getting hepatitis, even AIDS," added Vasikonis.

Both of these nurses said, they quit to protect their own medical licenses, stunned by what they called a meat-market style of assembly-line abortions...

Gosnell is not alone.

Gosnell is not alone

Go hunt through pro-life websites, and there's no shortage of links to other stories about abortion clinics being shut down for unsanitary conditions, injured patients, and more.  Listen to the testimony of Carol Everett in Blood Money: Getting Rich Off a Woman's Right to Choose.  Read Dr. Nathanson's The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind, or Abby Johnson's Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader's Eye-Opening Journey across the Life Line (Focus on the Family Books) to learn that abortion clinics are usually first and foremost businesses.  All too often, the bottom line is the bottom line, not women's health and safety.

Update:  CNN is on the job!

If these conditions are persisting, even after abortion is legalized, we need to start asking whether illegal abortions were awful because desperate women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the illegal for money, or whether they were awful because women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the unthinkable for money.

Unborn Victims of Violence Act, Roe v. Wade, and Doublethink

The incoherency of modern American law on unborn human beings. Excerpts:

...“Well, if it were established that an unborn fetus is a person within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, you would have almost an impossible case here, would you not?” Mrs. Weddington replied, “I would have a very difficult case.” And then she laughed nervously. Justice Stewart, not laughing at all, continued that this is akin to ruling that if a ”mother thought that it bothered her health having the child around, she could have it killed.” Mrs. Weddington said, “That’s correct,” and declined any further response.

Our laws still, chillingly, reflect this inconsistency. On the one hand, we have the almost decade long 2004 Unborn Victims of Violence Act which federally recognizes a “child in utero” as a legal “victim” if he or she is injured or killed by crimes of violence, and laws such as the one decided in Alabama this month that recognize “unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law.” On the other hand, we have abortion for all nine months of pregnancy and impunity for the ones that kill those children, children who are not even guaranteed the protections given to convicted murderers and rapists in some states. It was not funny 40 years ago, and it is still no laughing matter. These are children being killed. Aren’t children people too?

The Costs of Catholicism: HHS Mandate Fines

This is why repealing the HHS mandate matters for the future of religious organizations and for businesses and organizations owned and operated by people of certain religious convictions.  Excerpts:

The owners of Hobby Lobby asked to be exempted from providing the "morning after" and "week after" pills on religious grounds, arguing this would violate their Christian belief that abortion is wrong.

Judge Joe Heaton of the U.S. District for the Western District of Oklahoma denied the request for a preliminary injunction.

Heaton ruled that while individual members of the family that owns and operates Hobby Lobby have religious rights, the companies the family owns are secular, for-profit enterprises that do not possess the same rights.

The family operate 514 Hobby Lobby stores in 41 states and employ 13,240 people. It funds a variety of Christian charities, closes its stores on Sundays and plays inspirational Christian music in its stores...

...The Food and Drug Administration lists the "morning after" and "week after" pills as emergency contraceptives. But abortion opponents like the Green family consider them abortion-inducing drugs because they are often taken after conception.

Hobby Lobby faces a January 1 deadline to comply with the mandate to provide all FDA-approved contraceptives. Failure to do so would entail a penalty of up to $1.3 million per day...

"Abortion Never Saves a Woman's Life"

UPDATE:  Some necessary substantiation here.  See also this consideration of ending ectopic pregnancies and the principle of double effect.  Excerpts:

It is absolutely true that the Catholic Church bans direct abortion to save the life of the mother. However (and this is an extremely important point) the mother's life may be saved by a surgical procedure that does not directly attack the preborn baby's life.

The most common dysfunctions that may set a mother's life against that of her preborn child's are the ectopic pregnancy, carcinoma of the uterine cervix, and cancer of the ovary. Occasionally, cancer of the vulva or vagina may indicate surgical intervention.

In such cases, under the principle of the "double effect," attending physicians must do everything in their power to save both the mother and the child. If the physicians decide that, in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, the mother's life can only be saved by the removal of the Fallopian tube (and with it, the preborn baby), or by removal of some other tissue essential for the preborn baby's life, the baby will of course die. But this kind of surgery would not be categorized as an abortion. This is all the difference between deliberate murder (abortion) and unintentional natural death.

Simcha Fisher: "Pro-Choice Catholics Worship an Idiot God"

Wow.  Excerpts:

...The God of the pro-choice Catholic says, “On Mount Horeb, I shattered the barrier between heaven and earth, and I will led an entire nation of people out of slavery and into the wilderness to give them My commandments.  The history of the human race was changed forever because of the gift of My law, which will protect them and will guide them to the promised land.  So, which commandments affirm your lifestyle?  Follow those;  don’t sweat the rest.”

The God of the pro-choice Catholic says, “I will send my Son who will give up His body to show you that there is something worse than suffering, something worse even than death. That God Himself expressed the truest form of freedom by obediently and humbly giving Himself over to death so that weaker creatures might have life.  This is the message of the Cross.  But maybe for you, freedom is best expressed with a suction machine.  Your body, your choice.  Who am I to say?”

Intolerant Seattle Pro-Choicers at UW vs. Abby Johnson

What?  Excerpts:

A divisive Thursday night lecture on the subject of reproductive rights brought both sides of the issue to the University of Washington, and some attendees ended their night with a trip to the police station.

On a college campus were [sic] writing is a requirement and lively debate is the norm, it's not surprising that Thursday's visit from Abby Johnson created controversy...

See, now, when I hear "controversial pro-life speaker" and "divisive lecture,"  I think of Randall Terry or possibly, I dunno, someone who's going to start pulling out aborted baby pictures. But Abby Johnson?  Really?  One of the sweetest, gentlest speakers you're ever going to hear?

Who Are You Who Are So Wise In The Ways Of Science!?

An example of the sort of scientific reasoning which gives us the notion that a human embryo is not a human being.  On the issue of when a human life begins, I tend to side with the scientists.  Excerpts follow:

"Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoo developmentn) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual."

"A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo)."

Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2003. pp. 16, 2.

Storks Bringing Kids to Their Mothers--Via Ultrasound

An interesting, cool new pro-life ministry.  Excerpts:

...Dave and the team have high hopes, and they should. The approach is breathtakingly simple and, if early tests are any indication, profoundly effective.

As mentioned, the Storks take to the streets of Dallas on March 13. Meanwhile their website is up and running at SaveTheStorks.com with the purpose of raising money to take the program national. A Save the Storks bus is not cheap, and it takes people to run it. While Dave and his team get things off the ground in Dallas, Joe is in charge of building a national movement.

Young Frankenstein

No, not the Mel Brooks movie--the real thing.  Warning: if you have a weak stomach, this piece from 2006 will be a little too much.  Excerpts:

It’s the hidden side of medical research. A massive industry harvesting pieces of dead children for experiments, or transplanting into animals. IAN WISHART discovers the University of Auckland has imported body parts from American babies for a research project, and asks some hard questions...

"Stand Stark and Strange": Pro-Life Witness in the Culture of Death

A piece on the subject from Catholics United for the Faith's flagship publication Lay Witness magazine. Excerpts:

...But our efforts, like similar efforts everywhere, seemed to be the most provocative thing imaginable to many people. “How dare you politicize prayer?” demanded fellow students in the school newspaper. “How dare you attack women making a very difficult choice?

HHs Mandate Politics

I wonder what the President will think of these allies if these moves cost him reelection.  Excerpt:

...The Vice President and others argued that this wouldn’t be seen as an issue of contraception – it would be seen as an issue of religious liberty. They questioned the polling of the rule advocates, arguing that it didn’t explain the issue in full, it ignored the question of what religious groups should have to pay for. And they argued that women voters for whom this was an important issue weren’t likely to vote for Mitt Romney, who has drawn a strong anti-abortion line as a presidential candidate, saying he would end federal funding to Planned Parenthood and supporting a “personhood” amendment that defines life as beginning at the moment of fertilization.

98% of Catholic Women Use Contraception

is a bogus claim. Not just according to Mike Flynn, but also according to Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post. Excerpts:

...If a statistic sounds too good to be true, be wary. A spokesman for Pelosi said she was saying that 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control at some point in their lives — because that is how the media characterized it.

But, judging from the examples above, the media has gotten it wrong. The journalistic shorthand has been that “98 percent of American Catholic women have used contraception in their lifetimes.” But that is incorrect, according to the research.

Ruse on Komen and Planned Parenthood

An interesting analysis.  Excerpts:

...In the end, Nancy Brinker faced the real possibility that affiliates would leave, personnel would quit, the funding base could be decimated, and the story would have lingered for weeks in the national media. She had little choice but to staunch the wound.

Planned Parenthood and the Food Pantry

The Anchoress points out another warning sign.  Excerpts:

...Thus, the move to dismantle the Catholic conscience — or at least to redefine it as a threat to the public good — is underway. To that end an administration that didn’t need to involve the churches in its policies at all has gone out of its way to do exactly that.

And now, comes a “nuanced” assist.

Komen and Planned Parenthood: Media Bias

Oh, boy.  Excerpts:

...the piece embedded here [is] by Howard Kurtz. He’s a media writer for the Daily Beast, after years as a star media-beat reporter at The Washington Post. He says many obvious things about how biased most stories about Komen were. He doesn’t even think it’s a bad thing, necessarily, he’s just saying that it was. So Kurtz says there’s no question that the media drove this story, forced the apology from the Komen foundation and have been approaching the whole narrative from the left. He remarks on how Andrea Mitchell hammered Komen, but adds that most journalists in the mainstream media were doing the same thing. He notes that many in the media simply weren’t interested in telling more than one side of the story, likely due to their strong feelings. But their framing was overwhelmingly similar: that Komen was stupid ever to have thought it could pull funding from such a wonderful and apolitical organization as Planned Parenthood. He points out the obvious double standard of viewing funding of Planned Parenthood as apolitical but no funding as political..