If we are going to be effective, we have to care about who we are talking to. You’ve got to be sensitive to make a difference in someone’s world.

~ Jen Rumpf, president of Pro-Life Aggies, speaking at REveAL, one of several pro-life teen training camps being held across the U.S. this summer, as quoted by The New York Times, August 2, which added:

Ms. Rumpf and other counselors said they tried to teach campers to avoid commonly perceived anti-abortion “turnoffs” – in particular, an overly aggressive, judgmental approach. She said counselors focused on a gentler, compassion-based form of persuasion.

“You really care about this woman, and you really care that other people don’t know about this issue. But are they bad people?” she said. “No, they just might not know all of the truth. Because that is really the only way that pro-lifers are going to win anything is inviting them in to talk.”

August 5 marks the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s signing of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

Professor Hadley Arkes (third from left in photo) testified with me in Congress about BAIPA and penned melancholy thoughts, with which I agree, to mark the occasion at The Catholic Thing:

For the sake of averting the resistance, first of President Clinton and later of a Democratic Senate, the managers of the bill removed the penalties for failing to provide care to a newborn who had survived an abortion. As the line went, the bill was mainly for “teaching.”

Nevertheless, we had now a statute. And for that reason alone, any clinic or hospital that houses a “live-birth abortion” could lose its tax exemption, because this procedure is clearly “not in accord with public policy.”

More than that, the same hospital or clinic could lose federal funds, and virtually all hospitals depend in some way on federal funds. Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act a hospital is obliged to provide emergency care to any person arriving at the hospital in need of care….

The anniversary coming up is a melancholy marker. For this simplest of all Acts may be the most potent lever that could be used now by the federal government to push hospitals and clinics out of the business of abortion, and yet the Bush Administration made only a half-hearted attempt to enforce it.

Adding the penalties to the Act could provide, for Mitt Romney, the tool that George Bush left unused: a bill that is disarming in its moderation, even while it puts the issue of abortion before the public in a stark way.

And at the same time it brings home news that people may still find jolting: that the only national Democrat who opposed bills to protect children who survived abortions is the man who now sits in the White House.

It is so odd that the current president Hadley referred to celebrates his birthday this weekend.

To date there has not been one federal prosecution under BAIPA, even though I know law enforcement is aware of such instances.

In hospitals and abortion clinics across the country babies are still surviving their abortions and either being shelved to die or killed outright, probably today more than 10 years ago.

And it is so odd

Today marks President Barack Obama’s 51st birthday.

Pro-life graphics whiz Ryan Bomberger’s birthday wish is a bit abrupt: “Happy Birthday, Obama. Now Get Out.” (Patriot Super PAC will air Ryan’s latest video project carrying that theme starting this weekend in Florida.)

I’m sure other pro-lifers would like to congratulate President Obama for even having a birthday to celebrate, while so many others don’t…

What wish do you have for President Obama on his birthday? What would you like to say to him if you could speak face to face?

The New York Times featured a sad article yesterday about the president’s increasingly campaign-friendly birthday celebrations…

[H]e will celebrate in true political fashion: spending “downtime,” as an e-mail invitation put it, at a party at his Chicago home with a bunch of strangers who made campaign donations to be there.

That party, on Aug. 12, will mark another milestone in the transformation of the president and his wife, who once tried to limit the role of politics in their lives and now seem to be increasingly giving themselves over to it. Even some longtime Obama fund-raisers expressed surprise over the party’s site: the Obamas have limited their schmoozing hours in Washington, sequester themselves while on vacation and seldom invite many outsiders into the White House living quarters. Until now, they have kept their Chicago home mostly sacrosanct, allowing only limited photographs of the interior.

The party raises questions about how far the Obamas will go in mortgaging their personal appeal for political gain in the months ahead.  In poll after poll, voters give Mr. Obama higher marks as a person – a trustworthy leader, a committed father – than as a steward of the economy. Aside from their house, how much of themselves are the Obamas willing to offer up?

Their political souls, apparently.

[Top photo via NYT]

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

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

• University of MI Students for Life reflects on a sad day in America on August 1, when the HHS mandate went into effect mandating violating our consciences:

  Today, the religious liberties of all Americans have been thrown in the trash. And it’s the same trash can where the 3,300 precious babies that will be legally aborted today will be thrown.

• Timmerie’s Blog has a fact filled post responding to an August 1 email by Cecile Richards, CEO of Planned Parenthood, asking the question,  “Can one little pill change the world?” Timmerie shows how small actions can indeed change the world, and in this case, not for the better. She discusses how history has proven that the admonitions against the pill are true, both physically and spiritually.

• Secular ProLife is pleased with the response to its latest project, AbortionSafety.com, particularly with the visibility Google is bringing to the topic of abortion and malpractice. Through SPL’s targeted advertising, a search for abortion clinics now brings up its ad, with 2,000+ subsequent hits to the site. Congratulations on SPL’s hard work and clever use of media to cover this important niche.

• Moral Outcry has a particularly relevant post up, explaining the difference between the Chick-Fil-A boycott and pro-life boycotts.

• John Smeaton says powerful incentives will keep China’s one-child policy from ending any time soon: It is a source of income for many officials:

  Officials lose points for every out-of-quota birth in their area and earn cash bonuses for every abortion and sterilisation they enforce … [D]esperate officials resort to forced abortions and sterilisations.

• Isn’t it interesting to know that sidewalk counseling now its own training conferences? And what better group to train than Pro Life Action League, which made a presentation in Minneapolis in July. Joe Scheidler pointed out that Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, could have been written by pro-life activists, because they use the same tactics.  He also read from a book by pro-abort Patricia Ireland about how paranoid clinic workers are to see sidewalk counselors.  Abortion clinics now configure their structure to discourage interaction.

• Big Blue Wave has a post up I’d like to shout from the rooftops.  It details how a Catholic priest asked a parishioner to step down from the parish council after he told the Chicago Tribune he helped lesbian couples conceive via IVF:

  That might have been the first salvo,” Caruso said. “I wasn’t angry. I really took what he had to say to heart.”

  Bottom line: The parishioner repented and stopped his work that violated Catholic doctrine.

  Clergy have great influence over people in their church, but many still fear the rejection of man so much they keep silent.

by LauraLoo

U.S. Olympic swimming competitor Ryan Lochte apparently is putting those complementary condoms to use.  According to Ryan’s mom, Ike Lochte, he’s “all about the one-night stands.”

Also according to Ryan, during the 2008 Olympics that he competed in, he had a girlfriend and claimed that was a ”big mistake.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0AO9vZSppw[/youtube]

Hey Ryan, are you emotional phobic?  Are you bored looking at the same face for two or more nights in a row?

And what mother knows the depth and detail of her son’s sexual escapades?

Weird family.

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: 89 WLS Chicago]

What happens when a corrupt state governor, Kathleen Sebelius (pictured above left), and her hand-picked court system collude to stall a case so long the statute of limitations runs out?

And what happens when that same state governor’s health department shreds evidence in that same case?

And what happens when a prosecutor with nerves of steel is replaced by a prosecutor with nerves of spaghetti?

All three combine for death by a thousand cuts of a rock solid case against Planned Parenthood of Overland Park, Kansas, for committing illegal late-term abortions, failing to report abortions of minors, and falsifying documents.

What were once 107 criminal charges – including 23 felonies – filed by former AG/State Attorney Phill Kline (pictured above right) in 2007 for an investigation he launched in 2003 against PP has slowly been reduced to 32 misdemeanor charges, and counting – the wrong way.

From the Associated Press, August 2:

A Kansas judge on Thursday dismissed 26 misdemeanor charges against a Kansas City-area Planned Parenthood clinic, honoring a prosecutor’s request to further narrow a criminal case over allegations the clinic performed illegal late-term abortions….

Thirty-two misdemeanor charges remain, covering 16 abortions the clinic performed, also in 2003, but starting in July, when a state law took effect extending the deadline for pursuing charges to five years after an incident….

For the 16 abortions covered by the remaining charges, the clinic faces one misdemeanor count each of not properly examining whether the fetus was viable and one misdemeanor count of performing an illegal late-term abortion.

Somewhere, a Burger King ad man’s toying with the idea of having “The King” declare himself “100% pro-life.”

~ Allahpundit describing the positive effect Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day may have on future fast-food marketing strategies, Hot Air, August 1

Chick-Fil-A company spokesman Steve Robinson announced that sales on August 1 were “unprecedented.”

by Jill Stanek

Abortionist Ashutosh Ron Virmani kills children at A Preferred Women’s Health Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.

On July 26 pro-life activists paid a visit to Virmani’s home asking him to repent. The rant that followed was shocking, revealing at least in part what motivates Virmani: overt racism – culminating with his accusation, “Why don’t you adopt those ugly black babies?”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH0QT_p481o&feature=youtube_gdata_player[/youtube]

[HT: Kristin McCora on Twitter]

E-mail your video suggestions to dailyvid@jillstanek.com.