The shocking extremism of that position - giving infanticide the nod over compassion and life - is profoundly embarrassing to him now.

So he has lied about what he did. He has offered various conflicting explanations, ranging from the assertion that he didn't oppose the anti-infanticide legislation (he did), to the assertion that he opposed it because it didn't contain a superfluous clause reaffirming abortion rights (it did), to the assertion that it was unnecessary because IL law already protected the children of botched abortions (it didn't - and even if it arguably did, why oppose a clarification?).

What Obama hasn't offered, however, is the rationalization he vigorously posited during the 2002 IL senate debate....

This party has the temerity to pretend it is inclusive and wants to reduce abortions yet bans any dissent on the issue! It doesn't even want pro-life people in the party - unless they stay in the closet.

During the surgery, doctors entered the amniotic sack using a kind of miniature "telescope." Occasionally, to their surprise, a fetus will actually grab on to the scope in the middle of the procedure.

"The fetus will reach up and wonder what this scope is," Moise said. "And even though his or her eyes are fused so they can't really see the scope, they'll grab the scope sometimes because it's an object in their cavity."

Suzanne comments: "Can you just imagine what happens during an abortion, when a syringe of potassium chloride heads for their heart?"

[Photo of prenatal surgery courtesy of discoveriesinmedicine.com]

According to a report released by The Humane Society in May, 3,656 cloned embryos, 319 egg donors and 214 surrogates were used to produce just five cloned dogs and 11 cloned cats who were able to survive 30 days past birth....

Most of the time, the twin goals of protecting the unborn and building a culture of life reinforce one another. On occasion, though, they appear to contradict each other.

[Photo of Pfupajema courtesy of CA Catholic Daily]

"[P]remature babies - babies born too soon and too small - accounted for a growing proportion of infant deaths. When linked with previous studies that have shown that abortion increases a woman's chance of having a baby prematurely, the conclusion is that women who have had abortions are more likely to bear children who die as infants or suffer from severe health issues."

She also points to a Catholic News Agency article reporting that 90% of Down syndrome babies in Spain are aborted.

[Beijing Olympic illustration courtesy of Family Research Council]

But researchers argue that a shortage of eggs fueled by the payment ban is what's kept them from making the advances that prove their technique's real potential.

"You need to have enough eggs to make this thing work, and when you have enough eggs it does work," said Dr. Sam Wood, chief executive of La Jolla-based Stemagen Corp....

"I drank [the pregnancy] to death under the basketball hoop," she said. "I nearly drank me dead, too. I had to find that balance between it dying and me dying, you know?"

Why is "the pregnancy" in [ ]? My guess is the woman in question used different words, like "the baby" or "my child" to describe what she was drinking to death.

[Illustration courtesy of Jackson Hole Planet]

But, because TakeCareDownThere is a taxpayer-funded site that targets children, I believe it is important to have an idea of just what Planned Parenthood is promoting. The site's pro-promiscuity agenda is truly degrading to human beings in general and children in particular. It presents the pedophile's dream of an omnisexual kiddie "cuddle puddle" as though such activities were normative teen behavior.

Sunday's post was particularly troubling; it relates the story of a woman who decided to go through with an abortion because she thought Planned Parenthood's staff was compassionate and kind to her. In response to this woman's story, the abortion worker blogger posts:

So here's our promise to all the anti-abortion folks out there, who think that it's horrifying to try to imagine good care through an abortion decision: We promise to continue to care for the women in your life when they need abortions and we will do it with compassion and dignity. When they can't talk to you, we will make sure that they are safe, respected and loved, through whatever decisions they make.

This blogger is absolutely right that these women need to be treated with love and compassion. No one disagrees with that. But it is not compassionate to use kindness in order to lure women into killing their children. And what about when these women are mourning or regretting these decisions later in life? I don't think any number of warm cookies from PP will be enough to comfort these women then and help them heal. How is it compassionate to hold a woman's hand and tell her that it's okay to kill her child and mislead her into thinking that she's not hurting herself?

Dr. Kato, who at first said he did not do abortions and referred The Herald to other "doctors," later admitted to offering the service, saying it would cost R600 for someone who was 5 months pregnant.

He promised the procedure was safe and quick.

"They call it safe abortion. You won't feel any pain and you won't see any blood."...

OR doesn't cover life-prolonging treatment unless there is better than a 5% chance it will help the patients live for 5 more years - but it covers doctor-assisted suicide, defining it as a means of providing comfort, no different from hospice care or pain medication.

"It's chilling when you think about it," said Dr. William Toffler, a professor of family medicine at OR Health & Science University. "It absolutely conveys to the patient that continued living isn't worthwhile."

Q: If embryonic stem cells do turn out to be best, will it be because they are the best at differentiating - that is, turning into other kinds of cells?

A: Exactly right. That's the theoretical reason they should be best, and there are stats that back that up. An embryonic stem cell is at a state that it can make a whole organism. You can make a whole mouse out of an embryonic stem cell. There are 220 cells in the human body, and embryonic stem cells can make each and every one of them.

The issue I've always worried about is do you want to make every cell in the body. That could increase the risk of cancer. What I like about our approach is that it is targeted. We're trying to heal the heart.

[Suicide "choice" photo courtesy of MSNBC; photo of leukemia cells courtesy of CherryLaurel.com]

[JLS note: I'm so glad Denny and JivinJ spotted this. I received an email about this radio show but couldn't locate the source. Tony Campolo is a Democrat evangelical pastor. On this show he proposed a tax-and-spend strategy to reduce abortion by up to 50%, he thought. My email friend reported: "The moderator made a brilliant comparison. He asked if this strategy was similar to someone leading a group of white supremecists to reduce the number of lynchings of the slaves. Campolo became enraged at this. Truth hurts."]...

While Hadden says financial considerations have played no role in whether to keep her on life support, her family contends Rivera might not be in this situation if she had more money or better health-care coverage. Rivera's medical bills are being paid by Medi-Cal, the state-federal insurance program for low-income families.

While I have no clue if this tabloid's claim is true or not, if it is true, I wonder if there were any embryos who were not implanted and then frozen and if there are frozen embryos, what Pitt and Jolie plan on doing with those embryos.

Pitt has been an outspoken advocate of embryonic stem cell research, including working to help pass CA's Proposition 71 in 2004. He was even on the Today Show promoting it.

Most importantly, though, countless hearts were changed, and in some cases, scheduled abortions were cancelled.

[Photo of Maria Benedita and miracle son Valdir Gabriel courtesy of Catholic News Agency]

When a bishop asked the women if they were open to Christian values formation, [Susanah] Reyes [research director of the Asian Social Institute] said the women readily agreed to it.

Many of women who underwent abortion were desperate and treated abortion as the last option, she noted.

"They lacked information on family planning and how it is to become a better Christian," Reyes said.

It's not clear to me what Reyes means by "family planning," whether it's artificial birth control or natural family planning. However, the concerns the group of rural women raise are significant. These mothers who are aborting their children seem to think that they have no choice, and clearly more needs to be done to provide them adequate support and care.

Times Online concludes that the nurse, Ann Downer, "was cautioned but allowed to continue practising."

Authorities say a slain pregnant woman may have been alive and was possibly drugged when a baby was ripped from her womb, allegedly by a woman who tried to pass the infant off as her own.

The eviscerated body of 18-year-old Kia Johnson of McKeesport was found bound at the wrists and ankles with duct tape, and wrapped in a comforter and garbage bags.

Her partially decomposed remains were in the master bedroom of Andrea Curry-Demus, 38, who was charged Sunday with homicide, unlawful restraint and kidnapping, officials said.

The suspect was previously involved in attempts to steal newborns.

[Photo of Curry-Demus courtesy of the Associated Press/KDKA-TV]

Just imagine if this institution used its voice and resources to ensure that, beside all those Planned Parenthood clinics located in our minority neighborhoods, African-American women could find another kind of place. A place not unlike Good Counsel - where a scared young pregnant woman could carry her baby to term, complete her education, train for a new job, and be treated with the love and respect that a mother needs and deserves.

Read more about the Cincinnati NAACP protest here.

Back in 2007, this facility stopped committing medical and surgical abortions, and now it is completely closed. This leaves AL with only two PP facilities.

PP claims that there wasn't enough public funding to keep it open....

Last year, it received $336,700,000 from taxpayers, but what else would PP say about a clinic closure? It certainly wouldn't give any credit to the active pro-lifers who were out in front of the clinic protesting and witnessing every week!

Today I received notice... that our video of... abortion clinic bio-hazard waste and the remains of the aborted babies found in their trash dumpster has been removed from YouTube!

This was a movie CPLS took on the evening of April 12, 2008, as we searched through the trash dumpster of the Women's Advisory abortion clinic located in Livonia, MI. This is a very important pro-life video because it showed the TRUTH about abortion in a way no other abortion-related video has ever done.

YouTube said the video was removed because it violated their "community guidelines." No other explanation was given. I emailed You Tube and requested an explanation. My hunch is that the video was removed because it shows the actual remains of the aborted babies (just as we took them out of the trash dumpster bags!) or pro-abortionists complained and You Tube complied with their wishes. I await a reply!! For now, our Hodari Dumpster Scandal video is still mounted!

I find Suzanne's post extremely interesting, especially since yesterday I saw a very offensive ad calling for "Young Asian Female Egg Donors" on Facebook. (Is it just me, or is that racist?) How are personal images of stillborn babies offensive and egg donor ads (an unethical, dangerous, degrading practice) not offensive?

In a speech before Planned Parenthood last year, Barack Obama said that he was well-equipped to defend a right to abortion because "I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional law." But during the past week, Obama has proven to be woefully ignorant of abortion law, or he has been deceiving voters about the legality of abortion, as well as his own position on the issue.

Downes was being investigated because she encourages women considering abortion to consider other options, and a pro-choice doctor involved in the pro-choice movement filed a complaint against her.

[Photo courtesy of The Daily Mail]

["Web grab" graphic courtesy of Times Online; human pig graphic courtesy of cracked.com]

Think about the women you know who have suffered from breast cancer. Would the world be a better place if they never had existed?

Federal authorities are investigating the actions of a Catholic charity in Richmond which helped a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl to receive an abortion in January, in possible violation of VA law....

The unnamed girl, who already had one child, had been fitted with a contraceptive device provided by CCR two months earlier, the letter said. CCR members signed the consent form necessary for a minor to have an abortion and had someone drive her to and from the abortion clinic.

It is illegal in VA for a social worker to sign a parental consent form for an abortion. The state's notification law stipulates that at least one parent, grandparent or adult sibling must give consent.

[Photo of Richmond Bishop Francis DiLorenzo, with Bishops John Wester and Michael Driscoll, is courtesy of the AP. The 3 wrote a secret letter, later intercepted and made public, detailing events leading up to the abortion.]

Second, some claim that the embryo in his or her first week of development is too small, immature, or undeveloped to be considered a "human life." Yet the human embryo, from conception onward, is as much a living member of the human species as any of us. As a matter of biological fact, this new living organism has the full complement of human genes and is actively expressing those genes to live and develop in a way that is unique to human beings, setting the essential foundation for further development....

In other words, all of those assurances about protecting women are nothing more than temporary expedients that will be swept away as soon as it is deemed politically feasible. And if the assurances made in this area are nothing but cow manure, so too are the equally oleaginous promises to limit the lives of cloned embryos to 14 days, and to never engage in fetal farming, and to never want reproductive cloning.

From the beginning of the abortion debate, those favoring abortion have pointed to the social costs of "unwanted" children who simply won't get the attention of "wanted" ones. But there is a trade-off that has long been neglected. Abortion may eliminate "unwanted" children, but it increases out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood. Unfortunately, the social consequences of illegitimacy dominated.

"Highly religious audiences are different from less religious audiences. They are looking for different things, bringing different things to the table," explains Scheufele. "It is not about providing religious audiences with more scientific information. In fact, many of them are already highly informed about stem cell research, so more information makes little difference in terms of influencing public support. And that's not good or bad. That's just what the data show."

So everyone opposed to killing human embryos for research isn't ignorant about the research. Who knew? Here's the study's abstract.

However, as a longtime reporter on disability rights, I have discovered that many fetuses so diagnosed have been aborted by parents who have been advised by their doctors to end the pregnancies because of the future "imperfect quality of life" of such children.

Palin's first reaction to the diagnosis (her youngest child was diagnosed with Down Syndrome while in the womb) was to research the facts about the condition, since "I've never had problems with my other pregnancies." As a result, she and her husband, Todd, never had any doubt they would have the child.....

And her presence could highlight Barack Obama's extremist abortion views on whether certain lives are worth living, even a child born after a botched abortion.

[Photo of Sarah and Todd Palin and baby boy Trig courtesy of