The woman and her friend, Kristi Oetken, first attempted to draw attention to the issue in 2006 after receiving a campaign mailer from Erickson touting his endorsement by OR Right to Life during Erickson's first run for OR's 5th Congressional District. The woman and her friend said they considered Erickson's anti-abortion stand hypocritical in light of his experience with the woman.

Below is the damaging email Mannix included in his mailer. Read his intro letter here. Click to enlarge:

Abortion not only kills babies and sometimes their mothers, it kills miracles. It kills hope.

From HattiesburgAmerican.com, May 11:

Judy and Yu Loong [Liew] were born in Malaysia, and moved to the U.S. in 1996 to study at Mississippi State University. Judy earned a degree in industrial engineering, and Yu Loong obtained a degree in electrical engineering. They married in December 2004 and moved to Laurel [MS].

Life was good, and then it got even better in the fall of 2007 when they learned that they were expecting their first child....

All was well until a routine ultrasound... during the 4th month of her pregnancy revealed a complication. The doctor explained that the ultrasound indicated the baby's bones were not developing properly....

The couple was referred to a specialist in Jackson. After additional testing, the specialist reached the same conclusion as the obstetrician.

The couple turned to their faith to comfort them in this difficult time. They prayed for their unborn child, and family and friends around the world joined them in prayer.

Prayer provided Judy with peace and hope.

Eight weeks later another ultrasound was performed... the news was not good. That test revealed fractures in the arms and legs of the baby.

Doctors feared that he was suffering from Osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare genetic disorder in which the bones are brittle and break easily. In some cases, it is fatal.

Another ultrasound performed on March 21 revealed multiple fractures so clearly that even Judy and Yu Loong could detect them with their untrained eyes. They were devastated as the doctors explained that their baby boy had the most severe type of Osteogenesis imperfecta.

They also were told the baby's lungs were not developing properly, and they were given little hope for his survival.

The couple continued to pray, as did their family and friends. Family members and friends sent gifts for the baby, but eventually Yu Loong tucked them into a closet because it was too painful for Judy to see them. The room in their home that they planned to decorate as a nursery was turned into a home office.

A few weeks later, the Liews invited their pastor, Father Tommy Conway, to their home. Father Tommy blessed their home with holy water and anointed Judy with holy oil. Judy and Yu Loong asked him to be present during the birth of their baby so that he could baptize the child immediately....

[T]he delivery... was scheduled for May 2 - one week before the original due date.

Judy's parents... traveled from Malaysia and her sister... from Australia.... They were in the waiting room of Forrest General Hospital that Friday just before noon when Father Tommy emerged from the delivery room in scrubs exclaiming "He's alive, and he's perfect!"

Asher Liew entered this world at 11:46 a.m. screaming at the top of his lungs. He weighed 7 pounds 1 ounce and measured 19 inches in length.... [D]octors who worked on Asher's case are amazed that he is so healthy.

It truly is a miracle. Judy and Yu Loong believe that Asher is with them today because of the power of prayers. They wish to thank everyone who prayed for them.....

First-time grandmother, Alice, said the family never gave up hope throughout the entire ordeal....

[HT: moderator MK; photo courtesy of HattiesburgAmerican.com]

On Saturday, the day before Mother's Day, TN, pro-lifers organized a funeral "Procession of Healing" to commemorate 3,100 babies killed by abortion in Knox Co. last year.

Between 300-350 cars participated in the funeral procession that wove through Knoxville. Must have been quite something. Watch a VolunteerTV.com news video by clicking on the graphic below:

According to knoxnews.com:

Organizers formulated the idea after hearing of a funeral and burial of 25 aborted babies found in dumpsters behind a clinic in Detroit.

... Hodari's babies.

Balance, we must have balance. So VolunteerTV.com dredged up a pro-abort to condemn the mourning:

"I think that it is a little dramatic, and implies that it was a kind of intended murder, which I don't believe choice is," said Ina Hughs, a pro-choice advocate who also said she understands why healing is needed, but called the procession a mockery. "I think it denigrated the spiritual and ritual side of a funeral."

Notice Hughs avoided the word abortion, which rendered her statement incoherent. And why is healing needed? Exactly WHY?

On May 1 University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point sophomore and Student Government Association senator Roderick King was caught on video vandalizing a UWSP-approved cross display commemorating aborted babies. In 1 week the video, posted on YouTube, has been viewed 38,000 times.

Since then a sidebar has developed involving fellow SGA senator Claire Smith, who wrote a juvenile and poorly crafted email blaming Pointers for Life, the group displaying the crosses, posted here first, for King's behavior. She was responding to a respectful complaint that the SGA had not reprimanded King.

Pro-lifer Milissa fowarded UWSP official Steven Ward a link to my posting of Smith's email. Smith first responded last night by shedding just a tad more light on King's SGA staus.

Later Ward forwarded Milissa an email he had just sent Smith. It is good to see at least 1 UWSP administrator appreciates the ramifications of King's actions as well as the significance of an immature little snit making matters worse. I also appreciate Ward's transparency. Here's his latest email...

The fact that UWSP is receiving "international attention" is also encouraging. Even the Huffington Post covered the King story with no defense of his actions.

[Photo courtesy of the Wausau Daily Herald]

From the Associated Press, May 12:

Warsaw, Poland - Irena Sendler - a Polish social worker who helped save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and giving them false identities - has died. She was 98....

Born in Warsaw, Sendler served as a social worker with the city's welfare department, masterminding the risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany's brutal World War II occupation....

Records show that Sendler's team of some 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto's sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and her assistants went inside in search of children who could be smuggled out and given a chance of survival by living as Catholics.

Babies and small children were smuggled out in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families - most of whom perished in the Nazis' death camps - Sendler wrote the children's real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate's yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.

"It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child," Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler's team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. "Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come."

After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland's communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983....

Such a beautiful woman and story. Someday many in the pro-life movement, like sidewalk counselors outside abortion mills, will be similarly honored.

[Photos courtesy of the AP]