The current issue of Time magazine features model Jamie Grumet nursing her 3-year-old son. The photo has obviously caused a stir. The range of reactions were boiled down in this Associated Press article:

On Twitter, the cover inspired X-rated jokes along with concerns that the child might be teased when he’s older. But on many message boards, there was debate about whether it’s OK to breastfeed beyond babyhood.

Bobbi Miller, a mother of six who lives in Arkansas, expressed disapproval in a tweet and said in a phone interview, “Even a cow knows when to wean their child.” Of the cover, she said: “Why would this even be out there? It’s ludicrous. It’s almost on the verge of voyeurism.”

But Bettina Forbes, co-founder of an organization called Best for Babes that promotes breastfeeding and supports women who want to nurse their children beyond babyhood, said she hopes the cover “will make mainstream America less squeamish” about women breastfeeding children of any age. “It’s high time we talk about these things,” she said.

Reaction to the cover underscored a cultural rift between traditional childrearing and what some have deemed “extreme parenting.” The attachment philosophy encourages mothers to respond to their babies’ every cry and form close bonds with near-constant physical contact through “co-sleeping” (letting them sleep in the bed with parents rather than in cribs) and “baby-wearing” (carrying them on slings instead of pushing them in strollers).

Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist who is featured on Fox News, thought the photo portrayed a “bizarre, contemptible caricature” of Grumet because, he wrote, her son is actually helping feed her ego. He worried the boy “may never be better-known for anything than for being a breastfeeding 3-year-old on the cover of a national magazine. Ever.”

What are your thoughts?

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.

• Secular Pro-Life responds to the charge from abortion defender Amanda Marcotte that informed consent laws assume “women are too stupid to understand abortion” and are misogynistic:
  

  Informed consent laws do not operate on the assumption that women are stupid. They do, however, assume that abortion facilities cannot be trusted to provide full and accurate information in the absence of legislation. I’m perfectly fine with that assumption.

  Planned Parenthood abortion centers have been caught on tape distributing incredible lies about prenatal development; one counselor even went so far as to claim that an eight-week-old fetus has “no arms, no legs, no heart, no head, no brain.”

  In short, women aren’t too stupid to understand abortion – but abortion facilities are too greedy to explain it properly.

• ProWomanProLife discusses billionaire Melinda Gates (pictured left), who has decided that despite her Catholic faith’s teaching on contraception, she finds it “morally necessary” to promote global contraception as she “tows the old population control issue.”
• At National Review, Michael New has an article on a recent study which showed pro-life parental involvement laws reduce female teen suicide rates.
• Wesley J. Smith shares thoughts on our culture’s “sense of entitlement” and the exploitation of women and children via IVF.
• Mommy Life posts a parody of The Life of Julia. Interestingly, in the Life of Julia, President Obama appears to be President for life. Has this brain child backfired on the administration?
• At the Center for Women of Faith in Culture, Sarah Flashing has an unfavorable review of author Rachel Held Evans’ soon-to-be-released book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. In the book, Evans attempts to paint Christian bookstores and the evangelical community as misogynistic for not approving of her “edgy” work. Sarah Flashing urges readers to consider Evans’ previous interviews and work as examples of her “departure from orthodox Christianity”:
  

  I’m not sure what she has actually accomplished in all this other than a clear opportunity to be crass, to organize her readers to have further disdain for evangelicalism, to wear a Team Vagina t-shirt, or misrepresent biblical womanhood to unsuspecting readers. Until the book comes out, she hasn’t accomplished all this yet but RHE’s goals are well underway to meet her desired end.

• Stand for Life posts an excellent video by Fr. Frank Pavone, who discusses the differences between religious freedom and relativism in our culture today:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEOLZ26k1R0[/youtube]

[Gates photo via nypost.com]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell leveled the name “forces of darkness” at people opposed to America’s leading abortion provider while speaking at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser.
• An Indian woman was found alive after being thrown into a river with her arms and legs bound. She was allegedly tortured and thrown in the river after refusing to have an abortion:
  

  The woman had reportedly worked as a domestic help for the Bhubaneswar-based retired district judge, Sameer Ray for five years and had allegedly married his only son, Satyabrat. The marriage was reportedly never accepted by the family. According to the victim, she told the family that she was pregnant when they decided to fix Satyabrat’s marriage with someone else. The family then allegedly hired goons to eliminate her.

• In response to hearing about a pending piece of pro-life legislation in Michigan, a former legislative aide has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Democratic State Rep. Lisa Brown (pictured left), claiming her pregnancy led Brown to fire her:
  

  Ericah Caughey, 30, of Potterville said Wednesday her working relationship with Brown suffered after she told Brown she was pregnant in March 2009. Two months later, Brown had House staff fire her without a reason, according to Caughey.

  In a meeting with reporters organized by her state senator, Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, Caughey described Brown as being upset Caughey became pregnant shortly after her boyfriend returned home from military service in Iraq.

  Caughey said Brown stopped addressing her by her first name and instead dubbed her “preggers.” She said Brown also made a crude abortion comment while watching a Michigan Right to Life rally on the Capitol lawn….

  Caughey said she recently contacted Jones because of a bill pending in the Legislature that would make it a crime to coerce a woman to having an abortion.

[Brown photo via michiganlcv.org]

Bravo, Publix.

I watched the following ad and was saddened to think how much pro-abortion feminists are throwing away by their “choice.” They can’t embrace pregnancy, motherhood, or Mother’s Day without darkening it with a reminder that still and all they advocate mothers killing their own children.

At any rate, get out the Kleenex…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwPInEIkVS0[/youtube]

[HT: Jim Sedlak of American Life League]

As best as a mere male can, I understand the dilemma of many. I’ve said before: The Tempter has crouched on my shoulder five times and whispered in its vulture voice: “You’re too young, too unmarried, too poor, too old….”

My blood runs cold when I think of five great children who might not have been.

It was the women who had mothers’ faith; and faith, religious or secular, will get you through – without future regret.

~ Trevor Lautens, North Shore News, May 11

by LauraLoo

Happy Mother’s Day to all the great moms, step-moms, moms-in-law, grandmoms, etc.!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWHhx_svpBg&feature=related[/youtube]

Email LauraLoo with your Lunch Break suggestions.

Update 5/12 7:15a: A young gun at Feministing – who apparently doesn’t mind that Nancy Keenan and all those aging abortion proponents set their sights on her not so long ago – is denying an intensity gap while elegantly admitting, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the last year or so, sh** has gone totally f***ing haywire in this country…. anti-choicers are gunning harder than ever [the gun analogies just keep coming] right now to take away hard-win reproductive freedoms.”

The ability of pro-abortion abortion survivor to articulate their message is impressive. Take a look, abortion movement, this is your future.

5/11, 9:12a: From the Washington Post last night:

At the end of this year, Nancy Keenan will step down from her post as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the country’s oldest abortion-rights advocacy group.

The 60-year-old Keenan said she is leaving out of concern for the future of the pro-choice movement – and thinks she could be holding it back.

In recent years, Keenan has worried about an “intensity gap” on abortion rights among millennials, which the group considers to be the generation of Americans born between 1980 and 1991. While most young, antiabortion voters see abortion as a crucial political issue, NARAL’s own internal research does not find similar passion among abortion-rights supporters. If the pro-choice movement is to successfully defend abortion rights, Keenan contends, it needs more young people in leadership roles, including hers.

“There’s an opportunity for a new and younger leader,” Keenan said during a Wednesday interview in her downtown Washington office. “Roe v. Wade is 40 in January. It’s time for a new leader to come in and, basically, be the person for for the next 40 years of protecting reproductive choice.”

I’ve got news for Nancy. Forty more years of legalized abortion ain’t gonna happen. More from WashPo:

In the 2010 midterm elections, a wave of antiabortion legislators swept into Washington and took control of state governments across the country. The number of states with solidly antiabortion governors and legislatures spiked from 10 to 15…..

States passed a record 92 abortion restrictions in 2011, more than any other year since Roe. The lesson that Keenan took away then, was that elections matter. So do the voters who will soon dominate them.

Millennials will make up 40% of the electorate by 2020, and Keenan questions whether she’s the right leader to reach these new groups.

“This issue has got to be a voting issue for them,” Keenan said. “If we want to continue protecting abortion rights in this country, this is so clearly the case.”

NARAL’s research, however, suggests it has a ways to go: Young voters do not make abortion rights a priority at the polls. In 2010, the group’s poll of 700 young Americans showed a stark “intensity gap” on abortion. Most antiabortion voters under 30 (51%) considered it a “very important” voting issue. Among abortion-rights millennials, that number stood at 26%.

“There is an intensity gap between our side, being pro-choice, and the other side,” Keenan said.

You got that right, sister. And while abortion proponents like to think this is because the younger generation has grown up with abortion, so “[w]hen you’re fighting to hold onto something, rather than get something, it gets less intense,” as WashPo quoted EMILY’s List president Stephanie Schriock, the fact is the pro-abortion movement is suffering attrition. It has killed off its future supporters.

Furthermore, it continues to kill off 3,300 more chips off the ole’ block every day. So the “intensity gap” is only going to widen, thanks to the birth gap.

Meanwhile, abortion survivors – all those born after January 22, 1973 – understand that the very people now trying to woo them into the their movement dedicated themselves to trying to kill them before they took a breath. And many of those very people make a big fat living off the snuffs.

[HT: Chicken Man; photo via the Washington Post]

UPDATE 9:50a: Douglas Johnson, Legislative Director of National Right to Life, adds this thought:

Theodore Shulman entered a guilty plea in a federal court in Manhattan yesterday.  But the only press coverage seen, so far, is a short story in the New York Daily News, and an even shorter Associated Press piece.

Neither the Daily News nor the AP mentioned that Shulman is the son of famed feminist author and activist Alix Kates Shulman, whose works include Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.  I think that if a pro-life activist had entered a guilty plea to making death threats against prominent pro-abortion leaders, that story would be covered much more widely – and if the offender also were the son of a famous pro-life author and activist, that association would be highlighted.  Maybe the “mainstream media” should also enter a guilty plea – guilty to bias by grossly selective perception regarding what constitutes “news.”

I should also highlight the fact that Alix has spoken of aborting four of Shulman’s siblings, “and not one was the result of carelessness.” Theodore has commented on those abortions, saying two came before him and two after. Shulman has one living sister, Polly. One doesn’t have to be a psychiatrist to figure out why Shulman is messed up. He needs our prayers.

6a: From the New York Daily News, last night:

A pro-abortion extremist pleaded guilty in Manhattan Federal Court Thursday to posting an online comment threatening violence against two abortion foes.

Theodore Shulman, 51, faces up to 51 months in prison at his sentencing date on Sept. 12. He has been held without bail since his arrest in February 2011.

Shulman made the threat in January 2010 on the website of a conservative Catholic magazine.

The threat targets Priests For Life director the Rev. Frank Pavone and Princeton University professor Robert George and said they would be killed if the accused killer of Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was acquitted.

Anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder was convicted of the killing the same month Shulman made his threat.

“Mr. Shulman is in my prayers and I extend to him my personal forgiveness,” said Pavone who is identified as Victim-2 in the indictment.

The plea deal includes an agreement that prosecutors would not charge Shulman for possession of cyanide and two other deadly substances at the time of his arrest.

Shulman was a regular commenter on this blog under the moniker “SOMG,” among others. He also made several threats against Bryan Kemper, Gerard Nadal, Troy Newman, Lila Rose, Ken Scott, Cheryl Sullenger, myself and my pastor/church, which at one point required FBI protection. The Associated Press reports Shulman also faces a maximum fine of $250,000.

[HT: Moderator Carder; photos via New York Daily News]