by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli

We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.

• Culture Campaign notes that despite the lack of reporting from mainstream media, Christians are successfully and quietly winning lawsuits against Obamacare’s HHS contraception/abortifacient mandate.
• At the FRC Blog, Chris Gacek gives two updates on the federal prosecution of a Florida man who gave his six-weeks-pregnant girlfriend misoprostol without her knowledge, causing an abortion. This appears to be the third use of the state’s Unborn Victims of Violence Act to prosecute an offender.

• At Bound4Life, Matt Lockett believes that God is using the horrors of the Kermit Gosnell (pictured left) trial to speak to the conscience of both the church and our nation. In part two of his series he writes:
  

  There is no question that the ugliest parts of the abortion industry are being exposed right now in increasing measure. The debate in the last few years has centered on birth control and so-called women’s health. These are huge topics for sure, but something has emerged in the meantime. We as a nation are now revisiting late-term abortion and infanticide in spite of the fact that Congress passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in 2002. We’re revisiting it because there appears to be an increasing number of examples where BAIPA isn’t preventing the abortion industry from murdering constitutionally protected Americans. While this is obviously an enormous legal question for the nation to grapple with, I believe God is using infanticide to pierce our hearts and speak to us about abortion as a whole. God is weighing our response….

  The church cannot turn away from this question.

• Euthanasia Prevention Coalition explains its opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill being introduced in the UK, which purports to assist in the suicides of only mentally competent adults with less than six months to live. However, as has been seen in several other countries, this will more than likely extend incrementally beyond this group.
• The Guiding Star Project discusses the difficulties of delivering a child under 20 weeks who has died in utero:
  

  You see, in most states, unless you are at a private hospital (and even then it might not matter), babies stillborn under 20 weeks of gestation, or any fetal remains of a miscarriage or D & C must be treated as medical waste….

  In many places it is next to impossible for parents to obtain the remains of their babies or have them released to a funeral home for a proper burial. Since life insurance policies do not cover miscarried or stillborn children, the costs of a funeral and all the necessities are often too high for a family who wasn’t expecting to have to bury a baby.

• Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life asks why ethical issues are not considered with regards to human cloning, when cloning “can be rejected on practical [as well as ethical] grounds”:
  

  Human cloning also raises other ethical concerns, including the commodification of human life; the dangers to the health (and possible exploitation) of women, from whom eggs must be harvested; the tenuous barrier between “therapeutic cloning” (SCNT for the purpose of killing cloned embryos to derive stem cells) and “reproductive cloning” (SCNT for the purpose of implanting cloned embryos in a woman’s uterus and allowing them to develop toward maturity), which could result in the birth of a cloned baby; and the possible development of other Brave New World technologies, such as genetic engineering….

  Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) seem to offer the same potential benefits as stem cells from cloned embryos (they are pluripotent and patient-matched), and they are easier and less expensive to produce. Moreover, every proven stem cell treatment to date has used ethically-uncontroversial adult stem cells. In short, the therapeutic benefits sought from human cloning can be achieved without it.