by Kelli

From reading the New York Times, you might think that religious conservatives had started a culture war over whether company health-insurance plans should cover contraception. What’s at issue in two cases the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear, the Times editorializes, is “the assertion by private businesses and their owners of an unprecedented right to impose the owners’ religious views on workers who do not share them.”

That way of looking at the issue will be persuasive if your memory does not extend back two years. Up until 2012, no federal law or regulation required employers to cover contraception (or drugs that may cause abortion, which one of the cases involves)….

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Some thoughts on Gosnell from Ramesh Ponnuru:
  

  The question that should haunt us now is not how many victims Gosnell killed, which we will never know, but how many more Gosnells there are in our country.

• And from Robert George, who I hope is correct:
  

  Late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of first degree murder for killing babies after delivering them alive….But Dr. Gosnell is only the front man; and the real trial has only just begun. The defendant is the abortion license in America.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The Gosnell jury continues to hear the re-reading of testimony. Based on JD Mullane’s picture of the charges, the jury deliberations could take some time:
  

  The jurors are also apparently still wrestling with minor charges as well, asking to see files related to two babies that were allegedly aborted past Pennsylvania’s legal limit for abortions of 24 weeks. The panel of 12 also sent out a question asking if the medical files were the sole basis for the 227 misdemeanor charges against Gosnell for allegedly violating Pennsylvania’s 24-hour waiting period on abortions.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat Ramesh Ponnuru and Margaret Carlson have a discussion about Kermit Gosnell and abortion. Carlson, to her credit, doesn’t play defense for the abortion industry: Margaret: Let me answer the question you raise: Yes, we have gone too far. Since we’re talking about what we wrote, during last year’s […]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Longtime abortion advocate and abortionist David Grimes tries to intentionally deceive Washington Post readers with this quote:
  

  David Grimes, former head of the CDC’s abortion surveillance branch, said clinics like Gosnell’s were commonplace before Roe v. Wade, the court case that legalized abortion. Today, the problem of substandard clinics is so small that the branch, which investigated problem clinics, no longer exists, he said.“The legalization of abortion stands out as a public health triumph,” he said. “Over 1,000 women died every year from illegal abortion in the 1940s. Now it’s less than a handful a year. That’s the story, not one aberrant doctor in Philadelphia.”

  Wait. 1,000 women died every year in the 1940’s? Wasn’t abortion legalized in the 1970’s? Why is Grimes using statistics from 30 years before abortion was legalized to make his case?

  Oh yeah, that’s right – because in 1972, 39 women (as opposed to over a thousand) died from illegal abortion. An additional 24 women died from legal abortion in 1972.

On September 10 Washington Post “fact checker” Josh Hicks (pictured right) picked apart the Susan B. Anthony List ad featuring abortion survivor Melissa Ohden, which called out Barack Obama for voting against the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act four times when state senator. The ad:

When he was in the Illinois state Senate, Barack Obama voted to deny basic constitutional protections for babies born alive from an abortion – not once, but four times. I know it’s by the grace of God that I’m alive today, if only to ask America this question: Is this the kind of leadership that will lead us forward – that would discard the weakest among us?

Bizarrely, the only point Hicks could find to quibble with was the word “discard.” Was Ohden claiming she was “discarded”? Hicks pressed, apparently expecting late-term abortionists to cuddle babies they just aborted.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Planned Parenthood is opposed to forced abortion so much that they issued a press release regarding Chen Guangcheng after he had already made it safely to the United States. Gee, thanks.
• Robin Marty attempts to prove that if abortion is difficult to get, women will go to desperate lengths to end their pregnancy. She highlights a British woman who died after drinking concentrated vinegar in a home abortion attempt. One large problem with this argument is abortion is readily available in Great Britain and paid for by tax dollars. So the example undercuts Marty’s argument because it shows that some women, regardless of how much access there is to abortion, will do stupid, dangerous things.

UPDATE 12/3, 7:49a: In light of Gingrich’s comment yesterday, Dr. David Prentice has listed all the presidential candidates’ statements on embryonic stem cell research at the Family Research Council Action blog. 12/2, 3:41p: For such a supposedly smart man, presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich sure is stupid on the subject of biology. Gingrich told ABC’s Jake […]