When last week Live Action blogger Kristi Burton Brown called out Democrats for Life of America for endorsing Virginia pro-abortion Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Tim Kaine, she received this response from DFLA Executive Director Kristen Day:

We support Chairman Kaine because of his record and work with DFLA.  While Governor, Tim Kaine signed the Choose Life Life license plate bill in law.  We were proud to work with the Governor to ensure the bill was passed and critical funds could be used to support crisis pregnancy centers.  He also signed in to law the Pregnant Women Support Act introduced by Senator Phil Puckett and cosponsored by then Republican Senator Ken Cuccinelli.   While Chair of the DNC, he supported pro-life Democrats and his policies help elect pro-life elected officials.

This despite the fact that Kaine’s website states:

I strongly support the right of women to make their own health and reproductive decisions and, for that reason, will oppose efforts to weaken or subvert the basic holding of Roe v. Wade.  We all share the goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions.  The right way to do this is through education and access to health care and contraception rather than criminalizing women’s reproductive decisions.

Under fire, DFLA has now rescinded its endorsement, as noted by Secular Pro-Life. DFLA’s current statement is almost the same as the endorsement, with the caveats…

Former DNC Chairman and Governor Tim Kaine has been a friend to DFLA and has previously defined himself as a pro-life Democrat…. His spokesman and website are is now identifying him as a pro-choice Democrat.   DFLA, therefore, cannot endorse Governor Kaine.  However, should he be elected to the Senate, we look forward to the opportunity to work with him to pass pro-life legislation.

… Just in the nick of time, since Kaine released an ad yesterday castigating Republican pro-life opponent George Allen for his pro-life stance…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGYBLyxf764[/youtube]

Obviously, DFLA did not vet Kaine.

As an aside, the national pro-life community has shunned DFLA since 2010, when Day signed affidavits in support of Democrat Congressman Steve Driehaus in his lawsuit against the Susan B. Anthony List, blaming the pro-life group’s ad campaign for his defeat.

Day further implicated National Right to Life Committee and Family Research Council.

The lawsuit is still live and negatively impacting SBA List’s work. SBA List announced last week that Lamar Companies would not erect its billboard against Indiana Democrat Congressman Joe Donnelly, because the Driehaus lawsuit had not been settled.

But as SBA List says, “If you can’t do billboard, you do tv!”

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.

• Judie Brown of American Life League calls out Cardinal Dolan’s hypocrisy in inviting President Obama to the Al Smith Dinner.While Dolan claimed on his own blog that dining with sinners is Christlike and that to disinvite opponents would leave him dining alone, Dolan declined an invitation to offer the opening prayer at a 2009 Pro-Life Wisconsin banquet because Brown (who has publicly castigated bishops) was going to be the keynote speaker:

  On the one hand, he found it problematic that I led and continue to lead a campaign to beseech Catholic bishops to obey canon 915 and deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians. On the other hand, he finds it Christlike to dine with the most pro-abortion president in the history of this nation.

• Albert Mohler pans a New Yorker piece which called GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan’s statements on abortion and faith “geniunely disturbing and scary” and similar to that of a “mullah.” Mohler writes:
  

  Ryan stated the obvious — “Our faith informs us in everything we do.” Any faith of substance will inform every dimension of our lives. It is hard to imagine that Adam Gopnik would have complained or even taken offense if a similar statement had been made, for example, by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., concerning his advocacy for civil rights….

• Pro-Life Action League president Eric Scheidler has an op-ed in the Washington Times explaining why liberals and moderates should be concerned about the Obama administration’s egregious attack on religious freedom.
• Abortion State captures the real war on women: another woman injured at a Planned Parenthood clinic – this time in Everett, WA. Women should be truly offended by the way Obama ignores women who have been injured and even killed at the PP clinics he so unabashedly supports.
• Ethika Politika discusses a 1947 admonition from Pope Pius XXII stating that abstaining from voting when the interests of the Church are at stake is a “grave and fatal sin.” We must not be silent in the face of evil.

• Live Action responds in two parts to Jezebel’s assertion (content warning: profanity) that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is wrong for strictly interpreting the Constitution on abortion and other social issues.
• Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life wishes she had just one question for the President at a debate:
  

  Mr. President, is there not a single limit on abortion that you would support? Not even one?

• At The Leading Edge, Brendan Malonenotes a recent TV panel discussion in which ethicists claimed parents have a “moral obligation” to use abortion to weed out imperfect children. Designer babies? Yes. Sex selection abortion? Yes. Unfortunately the audience tended to agree with the panel.Find podcasts from Malone’s “Edge of Reason” here.

[Photos via zap2it.com, businessinsider.com]

Drudge has this photo and caption up right now…

Now I know this is all tongue-in-cheek, not an actual example of President Obama looking up to God for a miracle win while holding a baby.

But I would mention to the president, if he has such a thought in mind, ix-nay on the aby-bay when reaching out to the One in whose image babies made for any sort of help.

As an aside, I do get upset every time I see photos of Obama holding a precious baby. Such photos make my skin crawl, and I want to snatch the baby away from him. I can’t fathom any mother who would let Obama touch her baby.

But I digress. The Drudge headline and photo reminded me of this…

… published in the Chicago Sun-Times on August 25, 2004, in the thick of Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign, and in response to Obama’s opposition to the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• In California, a woman has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly trying to kill the unborn child of a woman who testified against her husband, a convicted murderer.
• The New York Times covers the abortion debate in Great Britain:
  

  With hindsight, perhaps the most surprising thing is how long abortion has been off the political agenda in Britain. An intensely divisive political issue elsewhere, the subject rarely makes the front pages.

  All that changed this month, as a series of senior Conservative members of Parliament, from the prime minister down, indicated that they supported reducing the period in which abortions are permitted.

• In Iowa, a jury is deciding if liberal, pro-choice members of the University of Iowa law school staff discriminated against and decided not to hire Teresa Wagner (pictured left) because she was pro-life:
  

  Wagner’s attorney, Steve Fieweger, told jurors that professor Randall Bezanson, a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun who helped draft the Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion in 1973, led the opposition to her hiring during a 2007 faculty meeting. Wagner, a part-time employee of the law school’s writing center, had previously worked as a lawyer for the National Right to Life Committee and the Family Research Council, which both oppose abortion rights….

  Wagner testified that she thought she would get one of two full-time openings when she was among two finalists. Instead, the faculty decided to recommend the other finalist, Matt Williamson, and not fill the second job at that time. Carroll acknowledged that Williamson was considered a poor teacher and left after one year.

  “I was very surprised and disappointed, devastated even, that the job could have been given to him,” Wagner said. She noted she had prior experience teaching a similar class at George Mason University, had practiced law and gotten more articles published.

[Photo via LifeSiteNews]

by Hans Johnson

From The Life Institute in Ireland:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVGvUF217us[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

I was on a conference call yesterday regarding intelligence gathered from a highly placed source that liberal Obama surrogates are planning to target Evangelical mega-church parking lots with bigoted anti-Mormon flyers the final weekend before the election in key battleground states like Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

Mega-church pastors are being notified to have parking lot attendants be on the lookout for such a lit drop. But please forward this post to all pastors of both Protestant and Catholic churches, particularly in battleground states.

It may surprise you to learn that most of anti-Mormonism is on the LEFT, not the Right. From The American Spectator, April 18:

And a Pew poll found that 31% of Democrats and 23% Republicans said they would be less likely to support a candidate if he were Mormon. The poll also found that the more liberal the respondent, the more anti-Mormon they were. Forty-one percent of liberal Democrats said they would be less likely to support a Mormon candidate.

From Fox News, June 15:

The GOP’s all-important social conservatives may be getting more comfortable with Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith – but liberals are increasingly wary about the candidate’s religion in the run-up to November, according to a new study.

The study found anti-Mormon attitudes have increased since Romney’s 2008 presidential bid and are highest among liberal and non-religious voters….

The study found attitudes about Mormonism among Evangelicals has largely remained unchanged since 2007 – when 37% said they were “less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate for president,” compared with 33% this year.

However, that sentiment among non-religious voters increased from 21% to 41% over roughly the same period.

Among liberal voters, 43% said they were less likely to vote for a Mormon presidential candidate in 2012, compared with 28% in 2007.

The baby would likely be stillborn in the seventh or eighth month. If carried, miraculously, to term, it would suffer from Trisomy 18, likely Down syndrome and heart failure. It did not possess a nasal bone….

Other women may have carried to term, or as close to term as possible, a child whose condition could allow it to live for a few days, or weeks, or maybe a few years. But faced with the impossibility of this loss, we chose to face it then, before a child had the chance to win our hearts and let us hope for the impossible.

The abortion… happened in an understaffed hospital, in which I lay in bed with the fetus for 20 minutes after it was expelled, waiting for a nurse to remove it. I didn’t want to see it, and neither did my husband. That was another choice we had made…. In the coming days, as we collected and submitted the paperwork for our insurance company, the loss of a baby that we had briefly imagined began to sink in….

Then our insurance company responded. Our claim had been denied. Because the pregnancy was not the result of rape or incest and did not threaten my life, it was considered an elective procedure. We relied on federal insurance, the same plan available to all State Department employees. It’s a basic plan, adequate for our typical needs, but bound by legal restrictions concerning federal spending and abortion. We… began digging up $5,000 to pay for the abortion.

While the tone and content of the abortion debate has shifted and raged over the past several years, a steady 50% have believed that abortion should only be legal under the hardest of circumstances…. We can, by giving up a trip home, stretching our grocery budget and ending our date nights, pay for our choice. But what’s been lost in this compromise is how tough that choice can be.

~ Sheila Sundar (pictured), describing her abortion in Egypt, NY Times’ Motherlode, October 21

[Photo via propellerfilms.com]

I’m excited to announce several new additions to the JillStanek.com blog team!

Hans Johnson is now sharing duties with Laura Loo preparing our “Pro-life video of the day” segment, and has been for several weeks now. Hans and LL are both very diligent, working hard to post the latest videos on our topic, sometimes having to switch gears at the last minute for a time-sensitive entry. I so appreciate how seriously they take this important daily post.

We also have two new moderators: Alice and Tyler! Both are well known to post sage, measured comments and came highly recommended by our other wonderful moderators, Bobby Bambino, Carla, Gerard, and Suki.

Speaking of Carla, she has been promoted to Lead Mod! This is a new volunteer position that gives Carla more oversight of the other moderators if there are questions or concerns about certain comments or commenters, etc. Carla also takes the work of moderator quite seriously and recognizes it as an important ministry.

I might as well mention Kelli, who is maintaining her critical role of keeping me and this blog organized. Only she fully knows what a ditz I am when it comes to certain administrative tasks. I know she cares about this blog’s mission as much as I do.

And this is a good time to thank my son-in-law, Andy Moore, for always being just an email away when we have a web crisis, like a crash or slowdown (like earlier today). These have been waaaay less frequent since we switched servers, but we still have our moments.

Kelli and Suki will still split “Quote of the day” duties, which we all look forward to reading every morning. They manage to find some pretty amazing quotes, both good and bad.

Susie spends many, many hours each week compiling our “Pro-life blog buzz” posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her work is invaluable for not only disseminating information from other pro-life blogs to a wider audience but also for helping build a better sense of community.

Angela still works quietly behind the scenes proofreading and cleaning up mistakes I make that she spots before you or I do.

The only sad news I have to report is that dear Bethany and Chris are taking a break from moderating. Bethany’s family has expanded by 2 or 3 children (hard to keep track!) since she started moderating here, and Chris has increased his role at a local pregnancy care center. We will miss them both very much, but they know they are always welcome back.

In closing, I want to let you readers and commenters know how much we appreciate you, whether or not you are pro-life. Of course, we are always striving to convert abortion supporters but do like to read what you have to say.

Again, thanks to everyone for your support, and thanks to all the members of our team for their invaluable help.