by Carder

Hollywood has long been reluctant to offer realistic depictions of what it’s like to end a pregnancy, despite the fact that roughly 1 in 3 American women will have an abortion before age 45. When it does summon the courage to address the issue at all, Tinseltown has too often distorted the facts or reverted to misogynist stereotypes — like the helpless damsel or the hysterical mistress.

That’s not to say we haven’t made progress since 1928’s Road to Ruin, one of the first films to include an abortion storyline. In that film, a teenager gets an abortion and subsequently, as a form of cosmic punishment, is mysteriously burned alive in bed.

~ Dionne Scott introducing the “Best & Worst Depictions Of Abortion In TV & Film”, Refinery 29, April 22

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• A student at Harvard shares her abortion experience in the Harvard Crimson:
  

  I headed to the clinic a week later with just a book, a water bottle, my Harvard ID, and a locket containing a picture of my ex-boyfriend and me. The procedure didn’t take long. It wasn’t even that physically painful. But when it was over, I screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming. As I write these words, it has been over a month since the abortion — and on the inside that screaming hasn’t stopped.

• The next time someone claims that “no one is pro-abortion” you can feel free to share this article from Salon with them:
  

  Recently, the Daily Kos published an article titled I Am Pro-Choice, Not Pro-Abortion. “Has anyone ever truly been pro-abortion?” one commenter asked.Uh. Yes. Me. That would be me.

  I am pro-abortion like I’m pro-knee-replacement and pro-chemotherapy and pro-cataract surgery. As the last protection against ill-conceived childbearing when all else fails, abortion is part of a set of tools that help women and men to form the families of their choosing. I believe that abortion care is a positive social good. I suspect that a lot of other people secretly believe the same thing. And I think it’s time we said so.

• Time has a piece which describes how Justice Blackmun’s (pictured left) original opinion in Roe was apparently changed at the suggestion from Justice Powell and one of his clerks:
  

  As the second oral argument drew near in October 1972, Hammond wrote a game-changing bench memo to Powell, pointing out a recent federal court case out of a lower court in Connecticut that had address that state’s abortion statute. In what lawyer’s call dicta (meaning not critical to the opinion), the Connecticut judges argued that the critical line in any pregnancy was “viability,” that is, when the fetus could live outside the womb — roughly the end of the sixth month.

No one argued “viability” in the briefs or in oral argument. Yet it was Powell who gently suggested to Blackmun that the Court consider and accept “viability” as its important dividing line. The Court adopted a three-part test, according to the trimesters of a nine-month pregnancy, but decided that the rights of a fetus were not to be considered until viability. While the other parts of Roe have dissolved, “viability” remains the law today.

[Photo via skepticism.org]

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

• American Life League’s Judie Brown says that in our society, Granny might be better protected if she were an animal instead of a human:
  

  It becomes clearer every day that if Granny were not a human being, her chances of being protected from evil acts designed to take her life would be far better….

  So we have to ask how it is that the chimpanzees Hercules and Leo will have their day in court, but Granny can feel free to either exit on her own terms or wait for a doctor or nurse to authorize her death because she signed a form allowing others to make life and death decisions for her. Human beings are expendable; chimpanzees are not? Something is incredibly wrong with this picture.

• Americans United for Life touches on this topic as well, pointing out that while this year’s legislative trends seem to be promising toward protecting life in the womb, an onslaught of bills that threaten the elderly and disabled are advancing.

• Big Blue Wave points out how a liberal writer, decrying the anti-dismemberment abortion law passed in Kansas, “doesn’t spend a single word to defend the principle objection to the procedure: that it dismembers unborn babies”:
  

  The deeper problem with the heated debate on abortion is the very premise that public opinion should bear any relevance in access to abortion care. Politics and public opinion have no place in our doctors’ offices.

  Except when you demand that people pay for it. Then politics have everything to do with abortion.

  She leaves aside the obvious objection that a fetus is a human being and shouldn’t be dismembered. It’s as if the way to fight opponents of abortion is to ignore their arguments.

• At Live Action News, Alexandra Liebl address the average, “apathetic” pro-lifer:
  

  Abortion cannot just make us sad. It is not enough for us to let its horrors just simply shock us. It does not matter if you cry while viewing a graphic image of a preborn child if your tears do not lead you to action. It does not matter if you cringe while reading about Kermit Gosnell, or you get nauseous while hearing about how abortion procedures are performed, if it does not lead you to action.

• Expose Abortion has a quote from the Kermit Gosnell grand jury report in 2011 that illustrates the need to not only pass abortion clinic regulations, but to actually enforce them. In Pennsylvania, the pro-abortion governor never saw the need to enforce Department of Health inspections:
  

  Medical equipment – such as the defibrillator, the EKG, the pulse oximeter, the blood pressure cuff – was generally broken; even when it worked, it wasn’t used. The emergency exit was padlocked shut.

• Fr. Frank Pavone has a wonderful reflection that makes me think of the way the abortion industry fights clinic inspections and regulations:
  

  “Everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids coming near the light so that his misdeeds may not be exposed” – John 3:20.

  Reflection: A key priority of our pro-life movement must be to expose the corruption of the abortion industry. Making abortion legal never made it safe, and keeping it legal can never keep it safe. You can’t practice vice virtuously. If you are willing to kill a baby, you will be willing to do many other kinds of evil as well.

  Prayer: Lord, bring into the light the evils being done behind closed doors in abortion centers, that our nation may repent and be healed, in Jesus’ Name. Amen.

[Image via artistlight.blogspot.com]

He asked for it, he got it.

Several months ago Abolish Human Abortion’s T. Russell Hunter issued an open challenge to anyone from the pro-life community to debate him on the topic of “immediatism,” which he supports, versus “incrementalism,” which the so-called “establishment” generally supports. His description of the debate frame:

I would argue for the abolitionist position - that all people who are opposed to abortion ought to unify around abolishing all forms of intentional prenatal destruction regardless of the age of the human being in question - and my opponent could argue for the pro life establishment’s position that we should focus our time and energy on regulating abortion while it remains legal and seek incremental gains against it.

Gregg Cunningham of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform eventually accepted Hunter’s challenge, and the debate was held this past Friday, April 25.

(Cunningham also rejected Hunter’s premise that incrementalism is an “either/or” thing, a concept it is actually immediatists who espouse. I find it inexplicable that they not only ignore opportunities but block attempts to save children from abortion now, thinking it is only principled to work to stop all abortions at one time in the future. But as Cunningham stated more than once, “We don’t do one or the other, we do both.”)

You can view video of the debate here. It totals almost three hours, but I think the last hour of Q&A could be skipped without missing much. Otherwise, it’s an interesting thing to watch.

A bunch of us around the country and Canada viewed it “together,” so to speak, via live stream, and the consensus was Cunningham won the debate hands down. How hands down? Nixon’s stunning debate defeat to Kennedy comes to mind. Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform’s Jonathon Van Maren called it an “out-and-out mauling.”

Hunter came ill-prepared to support his actual premise, that pro-life incrementalism hasn’t and doesn’t work, and Cunningham quickly disproved Hunter’s claim that immediatism is buttressed by historical figures like William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. None of the aforementioned were immediatists in practice. They were incrementalists.

Which is where Hunter’s thesis fell apart. He quoted their writings, which expressed an absolutist view against slavery and segregation, but ignored their work, which demonstrated an incremental approach.

By example, someone looking back at my writings some day will readily conclude I abhor all abortions, oppose the rape/incest exception, and think abortion clinics come from the pits of hell.

Yet in practice I support a 20-week abortion ban, some legislation with rape/incest exceptions, and abortion clinic regulations. These are means to get to the end: stopping all abortions. Again, incrementalists work to stop all abortions while at the same time working to save the babies we can along the way.

The reason I’m taking the time to dissect this debate here, and in another post or two or three, is because I believe AHA and Hunter’s immediatist view is not only wrong, it’s dangerous and deadly, resulting in the senseless deaths of children.

So if you consider this mere internecine bickering, I don’t. In my opinion, lives hang in the balance.

This was exemplified clearly in the debate, which I’ll get to in my next post.

But we weren’t the only ones who thought Hunter fared poorly. He thought so, too. Some of his initial Facebook comments:

• Wish I did better in last nights debate and kept the focus on immediatism instead of letting it run all over the place and of course, there were a lot of things I wanted to say or shoulda woulda could have said….
• Definitely my first [debate]….
• I was getting pretty rilled up at times and actually holding a lot back.
• I was dead tired and dealing with all sorts of strange spiritual warfare issues and family difficulties so I was not anywhere as sharp as I needed to be.
• Because it is quite difficult to explain the difference between immediatism and incrementalism while someone is constantly calling you a pharisee, accusing you of hating babies and repeatedly telling you that they regulate abortion better than you do, I have decided to finish this powerpoint presentation and put it up in its entirety for people to evaluate and assess.
• I’m a better drawer than debater….
• I didn’t get to half of [my arguments] and was to rushed and distracted to nail Gregg where I should have.
• Then Gregg got up, said that he and his organization were awesome and uncompromising and that I was a meanie head on Facebook…. Greg then said that I was stupid and that he was awesome…. He held up that paper again and said that I completely disregarded the lives of all children ever saved from abortion and that I was a monster (but that he loved me and respected my work etc etc).

As an aside, even a cursory viewing of the debate will show Gregg was strong but behaved like a gentleman. Apparently, for all the verbal bombs he throws online, Hunter can’t handle hand-to-hand combat.

But as someone wrote to NYC Mayor de Blasio, who recently complained people are mean to him at baseball games, “Toughen up, buttercup.”

At any rate, by last night Hunter had recovered his mojo, writing, “I’m starting to realize that the debate went far better than I realized,” this, he said, because he’d heard people like me were ‘totally freaking out and making promises to write articles.”

I’m totally freaking out, all right, for the babies Hunter and his followers fight to leave in the hands of abortionists.

Stay tuned for “Part I: Let babies die today, we can save the rest later.”

And meanwhile, watch the debate and tell me what you think.

[HT for research help: Tom H.]

Also read:

Part II: There’s only one way to cut down a tree?

by Hans Johnson

Adam and Danielle Busby had success using intrauterine insemination (IUI) to have daughter Blayke, so several years later they used the same method to try for another child. But they didn’t expect to have five at once.

They were prodded to selectively reduce three of the girls, but put their faith in God instead, and the babies had strong heartbeats throughout the pregnancy and were born in Houston as the first surviving all-girl quintuplets in the U.S.

KHOU reported the births:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MWy43QpiiQ[/youtube]

The Busbys appeared on Fox News with daughter Blayke.

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com wih your video suggestions.

[HT: LauraLoo]

I’ve just signed something important called the Geneva Declaration on Perinatal Care. It reminded me of why I came involved in the pro-life movement in the first place.

The Declaration, which can be signed by medical practitioners and researchers, is part of a new initiative by a group of parents under the banner Every Life Counts. They want medics (and everyone else) to stop using the phrase “incompatible with life” when giving a diagnosis of a life-limiting condition for an unborn baby – and with good reason.

They argue that the phrase is not a medical diagnosis, and they are right, it’s not. It doesn’t tell the parents anything about the baby’s condition, and it doesn’t inform families or help them deal with this devastating diagnosis.

As these parents point out, the phrase has become a label, and they compellingly argue that attaching this “incompatible with life” label to an unborn baby with a severe disability can have “lethal consequences.”

The lethal consequence before birth is an often relentless push towards abortion when conditions such as anencephaly and Trisomy 13 are diagnosed. Every Life Counts spokeswoman Tracy Harkin quotes research published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics that shows almost two-thirds of parents in these situation felt under pressure to abort their babies. She also refers to the findings of the Bruce Inquiry in Britain, which found parents felt pressure to abort after a disability was diagnosed, and they were not given information about palliative care and support for them and for their baby.

There can really be no disputing these findings when we consider the horrific reality of the percentages of babies with a disability who are aborted before birth – and these are almost always late-term abortions. Up to 90% of unborn babies with Down Syndrome are aborted and the numbers are depressingly similar for babies with conditions such as anencephaly.

These shocking rates may be, as Harkin says, because more positive alternatives such as perinatal hospice are not shared with families, and the most up-to-date research on these conditions is not relayed to them, such as the study published in Pediatrics which showed that 97% of families who brought their children with Trisomy 13 or 18 to term described their children as a happy children. Parents also reported these children enriched their families irrespective of the length of their lives.

Every Life Counts argues that language matters, and that late-term abortion is often justified as a “treatment” for these babies, whose short lives should be filled with love and their parents given support.

I know that’s true. I’ve seen how this sort of language – and the attitude that accompanies it – has changed medical practice for the worse.

Many of the second and third trimester abortions I observed or heard about at Christ Hospital were for reasons of disability. I have no doubt some of the children who survived abortion and were left to suffer and die in the soiled utility closet had been described as “incompatible with life.”

But they were alive and kicking when they received that diagnosis. Abortion, not their condition, is what took their lives away.

Some 380 medical practitioners and 37 disability and advocacy NGOs have already signed on to the Geneva Declaration on Perinatal Care, presumably because they know that medical professionals need to get behind this initiative for change if we are to bring about an end to lethal discrimination against unborn babies with disabilities.

I’m glad to be one of them.

If you are a medical professional or researcher you can sign the Declaration here.

by Kelli

The other reason the GOP’s presidential nominee should go on the offense on abortion is that the Democratic Party’s abortion platform is extreme — and its likely presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, is no exception. Democratic presidential candidates typically support abortion measures that a majority of Americans find extremely distasteful, like late-term abortions, federal abortion subsidies, abolishing parental notifications, and so on.

Then, he or she should attack Hillary Clinton for her extreme positions on abortion. Phrases like “in the pocket of the multibillion dollar Planned Parenthood abortion business” should be used as a matter of course. The key is to refuse to back down or prevaricate during the ensuing media firestorm: the GOP candidate is the moderate candidate on abortion, but Hillary Clinton has extreme positions on abortion, and the American people have a right to know it.

~ Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, April 27

[Photo via winteryknight.wordpress.com]

by Kelli

Ratio Christi-Wilmington shares a YouTube video of Dr. Mike Adams, a former liberal pro-choicer and current Townhall columnist and UNCW professor, giving his defense of the pro-life position:

Dr. Mike Adams… makes the case that most arguments for abortion beg the question on the central issue in the debate, which is: What are the unborn? He argues that there is no essential difference between the adults present in the room and the unborn babies they once were, which would justify terminating their lives at any earlier stage of development.

In his talk, he shows a 1-minute clip of the victims of abortion. The video is lengthy but engaging and well worth watching:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/1pQblj3arB0?t=2m54s[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.