by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• At the Huffington Post, Cassie Farrell responds to a piece by Canadian abortion proponent Joyce Arthur:
  

  What Choice Joyce and her cronies need to understand is that their lies simply aren’t cutting it in Canada anymore. Instead of formulating a sound argument, they attack the legitimacy of the debate. However, the debate is on, and isn’t going away until the right to life for all Canadians is acknowledged and ensured.

• National Right to Life News points out the need for RH Reality Check’s Robin Marty to open mouth, insert foot. It’s amazing how the regular bloggers there like Marty and Jodi Jacobson have an incorrect understanding of what Roe v. Wade did. They assume it actually protects children/confers rights after viability as opposed to allowing states to pass laws. If the state doesn’t have a law on the books, there’s no protection:
  

  Marty writes, “In D.C., an abortion post-viability is allowable for the exact same reasons it is allowed under the established criteria in Roe v. Wade: life or health of the mother.” Let’s stop right there. Marty has just made what used to be known as a “schoolboy error.” (Are we still allowed to say that?) She apparently slipped into thinking that Roe v. Wade itself imposed some affirmative limitations on abortion — by which I mean, some limits that are constitutionally required and that therefore, somehow, are in force everywhere.

  But that premise is entirely erroneous. I am not aware of any attorney, on any side of the abortion issue, who has ever defended such an assertion.

  As far as I know (and I’ve done some reading on this subject), the U.S. Supreme Court has never held, in Roe v. Wade or any other ruling, that any legislative body is required to adopt a limitation on abortion, at any stage in pregnancy, with respect to any jurisdiction. Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, all other abortion-related Supreme Court decisions deal entirely with what limitations on abortion the Supreme Court will permit state, local governments, or Congress to apply to abortion.

• Michael Hiltzik hits back at the response from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s president and chairman to his original column lambasting their misleading ad campaigns. Hiltzik claims his characterization is fair and points to CIRM’s own ads to prove it:
  

  So let’s look at the record. It may be true that no ads for Proposition 71 used the term “miraculous cures,” but then neither did I. What did the ads promise, however? Several of them have been archived by UCLA, and here’s what we find.

  [The late actor Christopher] Reeve [pictured above with wife, Dana] taped an ad shortly before he died, in which he observed, “Stem cells have already cured paralysis in animals. Stem cells are the future of medicine.”

  Michael J. Fox taped an ad in which he urged, “Vote yes on 71, and save the life of someone you love.”

  Joan Samuelson, a leading Parkinson’s patient advocate, is shown in another ad asserting, “There are more Americans than I think we can count who are sick now, or are going to be sick in the future, whose lives will be saved by Prop. 71.” Shortly after the measure passed, Samuelson was appointed to the stem cell program’s board.

  Do these ads amount to promising “miracles”? Given that the essence of scientific research is that no one can predict the outcome, to assert as fact that “lives will be saved by Prop. 71” is plainly to promise something downright extraordinary, if not outright miraculous.

[Photo via LA Times]