by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• NARAL’s take on the teen whose parents allegedly attempted to force her to have an abortion is not surprising (they argue it confirms the importance of “choice”), but it leaves me wondering: “If you’re really in favor of everyone’s choice, then why is it that a pro-life group had the resources to help this young woman while I’ve never heard of a pro-choice group protecting women from forced abortion?”

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The Pope has tweeted support for the March for Life.
• Gerard Bradley discusses the paradox of Personhood and how the Supreme Court’s refusal to address the most foundational question could resurface:
  

  Roe’s shaky edifice is built on a studied and stubborn refusal to address the foundational question about who the law is for. This reticence is all the more remarkable because none of the seven justices in Roe’s majority seems to have believed that the unborn really are persons. They reckoned nonetheless that the constitutional law they produced could not be grounded in any answer — theirs, yours, mine — to that philosophical question. Their reticence was supposed to credential the Court’s judgment as somehow uniquely objective and thus supremely authoritative.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Detroit News columnist Laura Berman has a rudderless and rather pointless column entitled, “Rhetoric impedes abortion debate,” discussing Planned Parenthood’s attempt to re-frame the abortion issue and dump the “pro-choice” label. The title is odd coming from someone whose columns have been permeated with pro-choice rhetoric for years. Maybe it’s just pro-life rhetoric that impedes pro-choicers from having their way?

  I think a lot of the talking heads (who are basically tools of PP) are finding difficulty making Planned Parenthood’s newest talking points cohesive with their beliefs and arguments.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• NBC/Wall Street Journal has a new poll out on abortion and Roe v. Wade. The poll results again show that large swaths of the population (41%) in this poll don’t know anything about Roe v. Wade, and when the pollsters give an inaccurate description (“first three month” baloney) of Roe’s results, the majority are opposed to overturning it. 31% claimed they thought abortion should always be legal which seems high. Imagine this follow-up: “So you think it should be legal to have an abortion in the 8th month of pregnancy?”The poll’s options seem to favor the pro-choice side as the pro-choice options are “always legal” or “legal most of the time” while the pro-life options are “illegal without exceptions” and “illegal with rape/incest/mother’s life exceptions.” There is a rather large gap and many plausible positions between legal “most of the time” and illegal except for exceptions.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The Crescat discusses her abortion experience:
  The glass container was half full and splattered with blood. Even the tube that fed into the container was crusted with blood….

  All those graphic photos you’ve ever seen of tiny dismembered arms and legs are accurate. Only this wasn’t just one set of tiny arms and legs… this looked like all the babies that had been aborted that day. All together in one glass container….

  They hadn’t even bothered to clean the equipment between patients and I suddenly realized they had every intention of using the same filthy equipment on me.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Here’s a study which unsurprisingly finds that if a pro-abortion outfit like the Guttmacher Institute makes a bunch of guesstimates for how many abortions there are, they are often incredibly wrong:
  

  We found significant overestimations of abortion figures in the Federal District of Mexico (up to 10-fold), where elective abortion has been legal since 2007. Significant overestimation of maternal and abortion-related mortality during the last 20 years in the entire Mexican country (up to 35%) was also found. Such overestimations are most likely due to the use of incomplete in-hospital records as well as subjective opinion surveys regarding induced abortion figures….Here’s a press release on the study which will likely not be reported at any of media outlets which so readily report the Guttmacher Institute’s guesswork.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• At Live Action, Rebecca Frazer points out the ridiculousness of Planned Parenthood of Indiana promoting themselves as an adoption referrer:
  

  Yes, you read that right. Planned Parenthood is excited that they have contributed to a whopping twelve adoptions in six years. If we do some simple math that comes out to an average of two adoptions a year.

  Last year alone, Planned Parenthood of Indiana performed 5,250 abortions. 5,250. That means that if 2011 was an average adoption year, Planned Parenthood helped with one adoption for every 2,625 abortions they performed. Perhaps they should send their adoption counselors back to job training.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• For some reason the editorial board of the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel thinks a poll showing the public favors more restrictions on abortion is a good argument against adding more restrictions to abortion:
  

  Public polling shows that most people in the U.S. favor the idea of legal abortion. A CBS News/New York Times poll in September is typical. It found that 42% thought abortion should be “generally available,” while 35% said “available under stricter limits” and 20% said “not permitted.”