I will talk to the baby before I compete. [I’ll say] no kicking, stay calm for one hour and 15 minutes only please.

~ Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi, Malaysia’s entrant in the Olympics’ 10m rifle event, 34 weeks pregnant with a baby girl, not the first expectant mother in history to compete in the games , but “believed to be the furthest along,” according to Yahoo Sports

[HT: Kelli]

Kudos to CBS Chicago for investigating the death of Tonya Reaves after her abortion at a Chicago Planned Parenthood (pictured right) on July 20.

The timeline, according to documents the news organization obtained:

11:00a: Reaves had a D&E, or dilation and evacuation abortion procedure, wherein her baby’s body was removed piece by piece

4:30p: Reaves was taken by ambulance to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

5:30p: After an ultrasound, Reaves got another dilation and evacuation abortion at Northwestern for an unspecified reason, likely for either an incomplete abortion or to try to stop the bleeding.

Sometime later: “More problems, and pain” warrant another ultrasound, when a “perforation,” i.e., puncture, apparently of the uterus, was discovered.

10:12p: Reaves was taken back to the operating room, where “an uncontrollable bleed was discovered.”

11:20p: Reaves was pronounced dead in the O.R.

Now, according to Planned Parenthood’s website, two germane items: D&Es take 10-20 minutes, and recovery is “about one hour”…

This means Reaves was kept at Planned Parenthood three to four hours longer than the norm.

This will all come out in court – if Reaves’ family indeed sues, or if they don’t settle out of court and allow documents to be sealed – but it appears obvious Reaves exhibited complications that kept her at the clinic, and Planned Parenthood tried to contain the damage until it got out of control.

I expect that since they both did D&Es, Planned Parenthood and Northwestern will accuse each other of being the ones that perforated Reaves’ uterus, particularly since Northwestern didn’t discover the perforation until after its own D&E.

Northwestern also should anticipate being sued for what looks like a lot of lag time, lax treatment, and a potential missed diagnosis on its part.

I wrote July 19 that the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (HR 3803) was in danger of not getting a vote in the House in the final days of session.

But now word comes from National Right to Life that a vote will indeed be held July 31:

“This roll call will be a landmark – the House has never before voted on the question of whether to endorse legal abortion for any reason until birth,” said NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. “Under the Constitution, members of Congress and the President are ultimately accountable for the current abortion-until-birth policy. Any lawmaker who votes against this bill is voting to ratify the extreme policy currently in effect in the nation’s capital, where abortion is perfectly legal for any reason until the moment of birth.”

“If we can achieve a big majority on this groundbreaking initial vote, it will lay the foundation to achieve legal protection for pain-capable unborn babies in the not-distant future,” Johnson said.

In other words, legislators voting against the DC fetal pain ban will be endorsing abortion for any reason whatsoever until the moment of birth, as is currently the law in our nation’s capital. As was noted in The Weekly Standard on July 25:

The Washington Surgi-Clinic, located just five blocks west of the White House, advertises on its website that it performs abortions 26 weeks (6 months) into pregnancy. The website of another clinic advertises second- and third-trimester abortions involving the “intercardiac injection of medication into the fetal heart” at a “private facility in the Washington, D.C. area.” All of this is perfectly legal.

While abortion proponents continue to deny medical advances demonstrating preborn and born babies by at least 20 weeks gestation feel pain when being torn limb from limb via the late-term dilation and evacuation abortion, eight* states have now moved ahead since 2010 with fetal pain legislation banning abortions past that age.

H.R. 3803 currently has 223 House cosponsors. Check the list. If your rep isn’t on it, please call him or her and urge support.

*Those states are Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Arizona, meanwhile has enacted a ban on abortions past 18 weeks gestation.

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.

• Women’s Rights without Frontiers has another story of the family planning “terrorism” in China:
  

  The couple’s second daughter fell to her death from a fourth floor window during a quarrel with her boyfriend. Her parents took the boyfriend’s parents to court and won a judgment of 43,000 RMB ($6700), but they were never paid. The victim’s husband petitioned to enforce the judgment.

  In retaliation for this petition, that local government forcibly sterilized his wife. The local government told the victim’s husband that if he and his wife kept quiet about the forced sterilization, they would receive compensation. The couple, however, decided to post the incident on the Internet.

• At Moral Outcry, Susan Tyrrell writes about a Minnesota bar that has installed a pregnancy test vending machine in its women’s restroom:
  

  The idea this bar is perpetuating is another sign that society knows that life begins at conception. The vending machines aren’t for women who are 5 or 6 months pregnant, but for those who don’t know yet and want to be sure before they drink. It’s a wonderful idea if people do choose to drink, but the underlying message is better. It says, “if you have another life in you, even if that life is so teeny you didn’t know it was there yet, don’t hurt it.”…

What happens when $3 pregnancy tests come to a bar? Maybe then a woman has time to process without coercion, or reads the information about fetal alcohol syndrome which humanizes the baby she is carrying, even if he or she is three weeks old at that point. Maybe it gives her time to think and consider real options. And certainly the pub’s original goal is valid and viable. A baby may be spared pain and a hard life from suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome because a mom makes a choice to protect her child.

• Pro-Life Action League advertises AbortionWiki’s 10-week internship opportunity for pro-lifers of all ages and locations.
• The Road to Roe continues to examine the influence of the late Justice William Brennan in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton and gives fascinating insight into the behind-the-scenes lobbying on the laws.

• Wesley J. Smith notes how the New England Journal of Medicine has now suggested physicians be taken out of the assisted suicide equation (due to their reluctance to participate) and replaced with “the development of a central state or federal mechanism to confirm the authenticity and eligibility of patients’ requests, dispense medication, and monitor demand and use. Such a mechanism would obviate physician involvement beyond usual care.” Smith writes:
  

  Do we really think that a government that is constantly looking for ways to contain health care costs will be likely to deny death eligibility? Do we think that government death-control officials will do the right thing — or the cheap thing?

Take this proposal, coupled with government-run health care, and you have “death panels on steroids.”

• We previously reported that the pro-life group from New Zealand’s Auckland University were under attack for distributing pro-life pamphlets on campus. ProLife NZ has this update:
  

  Pro-Life Aucklandwas facing exile after complaints were laid alleging it was harassing students and spreading misinformation about abortion. If the vote had passed, the club would have lost access to AUSA-supplied benefits like room booking and funding.After an hour of speakers and debate, the motion failed: 125 for and 227 against, with 12 abstentions.

• A University of Michigan Students for Life member recounts a time when he had to answer the question, “Why are you pro life?” His answer:
  

  I am pro-life because I believe in the intrinsic value and dignity of the human person–that is to say, a value and dignity that he possesses not because of his perceived worth, condition, convenience, or any other factor aside from the very nature of his membership in our human race.Have you thought of how you would answer this question?

[Photos via HuffPo and Catholic Lane]

Pro-life stalwart Abby Johnson recently received a request from the American Cancer Society for a donation via snail mail.

Abby responded with a note explaining she would not give to ACS because 1) it had given money to Planned Parenthood in the past and never recanted; and 2) it refused to acknowledge the link between abortion and breast cancer.

Abby expected nothing to come from her response but was surprised to receive a letter from Dr. Otis W. Brawley (pictured right), ACS’s Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President, Research and Cancer Control Science.

The surprise didn’t end there. In his letter, Dr. Brawley made the wild claim that “Planned Parenthood delivers more children than any other medical practice in the U.S.”

Read for yourself (click to enlarge)…

Dr. Brawley has obviously confused obstetrics with abortion. In actuality, Planned Parenthood is the United States’ largest abortion provider, not baby deliverer.

According to Planned Parenthood’s most recent Fact Sheet, it served 7,021 prenatal clients in 2009 while committing 332,278 abortions and making only 977 adoption referrals.

This means that 97.6% of pregnant mothers who come to Planned Parenthood get abortions, while only 2.1% get prenatal care and only .3% get adoption referrals.

According to Tair Sye, national spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation, only 63 of Planned Parenthood’s 800+ clinics, or 7.8%, offer prenatal services.

And providing “prenatal services” is not to say PP delivers babies. This could only be possible if a PP has 1) in-house physicians and/or midwives who are on 24 hour call; and 2) those physicians and/or midwives have hospital privileges.

So Dr. Brawley is vastly misinformed.

And now we see the American Cancer Society is vastly misinformed about Dr. Brawley’s claim. Pro-lifers complaining to ACS about Dr. Brawley’s whopper were told no such whopper had been made. Several pro-lifers received the same response, “To be clear, we have no record of ever making that statement and it is not our position.”

Here’s one email received (click to enlarge):

No surprise, Dr. Brawley leans left. He donated to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.

Perhaps that is why Brawley has served as a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection and Control Advisory Committee, which is also ironic, since the very Planned Parenthood Brawley defends increases the risk of breast cancer.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Here’s a classic B-word slip in a Slate article discussing how the placenta works, entitled, “Your fetus is an alien”:
  

  [NYU’s Adrian] Erlebacher’s not the only one studying this stuff. [Harvey] Kliman, the Yale researcher, also investigated human placentas, and his findings suggest an entirely different mechanism in play. Kliman suspects that a specific protein in pregnant women, called PP13, acts as a decoy of sorts to trick the mom’s immune system to stay away from the baby.

• A Michigan Senate committee has passed a bill to regulate abortion clinics in the state. Northland Family Planning Center executive director Renee Chelian (pictured left) classed up the place by calling the committee chairman a liar:
  

  Jones asked how late into pregnancy Chilean’s clinics performed abortions, and when he disagreed with her answer, citing an unnamed witness he had spoken with, he warned her of committing perjury with witnesses in the room.

  “You, sir, are a liar,” Chelian replied, audibly shocked by his response. “You (should) have picked up the phone and called me, instead of relying on some right-to-life flunky with an agenda.”

• The New York Times editorial board seems dismayed the Arizona fetal-pain bill case may not be going their way. Commenting on the “state-by-state assault on women’s rights and the Constitution by Republicans,” editors write:
  

  Since this is settled law, upheld by the Supreme Court in subsequent cases, Judge Teilborg should not find it hard to make the right call. But the plaintiffs could not have been encouraged by his line of questioning on Wednesday morning. He began by asking [Center for Reproductive Rightsattorney] Ms. Crepps irrelevant questions about which abortion procedures might be involved and the relative frequency of each.

  Then he lectured her for what he suggested, wrongly, was a lack of compassion for the unborn. He said he had read the plaintiffs’ affidavits and had found that they “reflect profound compassion and concern for their patients, the women, and presumably the fathers.” However, he added, “I didn’t find anywhere in those affidavits any expression of concern by the plaintiffs’ positions for the unborn child — or even a hint of concern on their part.

  “Given that silence on that part,” the judge said, “and given the silence in your own presentation, doesn’t that underscore the legitimacy of the state’s regulatory action out of concern for the unborn child?”

• Another day, another lame Obama attack on Mitt Romney’s position on abortion (they really couldn’t find a better actor?). The most irritating thing to me is how the Obama campaign team seems to think that all women are scared of pro-life laws:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33NT0_MgsVU[/youtube]

[Photo via Fletcher Armstrong]

by LauraLoo

Here’s your invitation to join the 40 Days for Life – Australia LIVE worldwide webcast event TODAY! Discover how you can help save lives from abortion.

                                                                                                                          
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmdCSwC0W9E[/youtube]

Click on the link above to register for this free event.  After entering your name and email address, your participation details will be immediately sent to you by email.

                     United States:  Friday, 7/27, 9:00 PM EDT (6:00 PM PDT)
                     Australia:  Saturday, 7/28, 11:00 AM AEST (9:00 AM AWST)  

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Jill]

Ashley Moser [pictured right] was also shot by James Holmes, and she is still in the hospital recovering. Relatives just broke the news to her about losing her beloved daughter in the shooting, and she reportedly broke down in tears and said she wants to die. But as it turns out, she actually has a very important reason to live.

Ashley Moser is pregnant, and even though she was shot in the stomach, somehow her unborn baby managed to survive.

And while the baby isn’t out of the woods yet, I have to believe that this is the one thing that is going to give Ashley the strength to go on and somehow pick up the pieces of her life after losing her little girl.

~ Mary Fischer, reporting on the pregnancy of the mother of Veronica Moser-Sullivan, the six-year old Dark Knight Rises midnight premiere shooting victim, Cafe Mom, July 23