by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Colleen Carroll Campbell on the efforts of MO pro-choicers to argue against scientific facts included in ultrasound legislation:

The complaint hinges on these words in the law: “The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.”Sounds pretty straightforward right?

Wrong, says Paula Gianino, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest MO. As she told the Post-Dispatch recently, “Those are not sentiments that all the world’s religions, or all the people in the state, believe in.”

Actually, those are not sentiments at all. They are statements of fact. They can be verified by most any embryology textbook, including those written decades ago, when abortion-rights activists still were claiming that “no one knows when life begins.”

As the 1975 edition of Medical Embryology put it, “The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.

• A Taiwanese student has won a “best of the best” prize for her 3D animated film: The 4-minute film depicts the human gestation process through a video game setting. The main character, a combat aircraft named “Eros,” is transformed from a baby who keeps moving inside its mother’s womb as it struggles against various obstacles that could block its birth.

  Lee [Pei-Wen] said her inspiration came from her elder sister’s first pregnancy and the experience of her own mother, who once considered an abortion.

• AK voters approved a parental notification law and it will likely go into effect in December, 90 days after the election results are certified. AK’s Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller sounds like my kind of guy.
• Do not, I repeat, do not read Bonnie Erbe’s column on stem cell research. The ridiculousness and stupidity of every paragraph will have you questioning our entire education system.This woman not only somehow graduated from high school, she graduated from college, got a master’s in journalism from Columbia and her J.D. from Georgetown University cum laude. How is that possible? This column doesn’t meet the standards of a high school newspaper. Here’s just a taste: I find most social policy positions taken by not just Christian but all religious extremists to be fairly nonsensical. After, “Thou shalt not Kill,” (or steal or lie, etc.) I’m not a fan. Why bother forming a movement to oppose gay marriage, for example? What a waste of time and energy. The same for abortion. Those who oppose abortions are nowhere required to have them. That’s like saying it’s nonsensical for there to be laws against stealing because we’re not required to steal.

[Photo via focustaiwan.tw]