by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The National Post has an article on a case in Canada where a woman named Melinda Morin was convicted of manslaughter for killing her boyfriend after he kicked her in the stomach when she wouldn’t get an abortion:

  At trial, Morin testified she had tried to leave her boyfriend, saying she would raise the baby herself, but that [Barry Neil] Godwin didn’t want the drug-addicted prostitute to have a “crack baby.” They got into a heated argument and Mr. Godwin kicked her in the stomach, put her in a choke hold and came at her with a knife.

  “I told him I didn’t want to go for an abortion. I’d keep the baby and I wouldn’t bother him. I’d take care of it myself,” Morin testified. “But he didn’t want to know there was a kid out there that was his. He was upset and he wanted me to have an abortion. No way around it.”

• CBS News has a video news story on Matt Hoffman, the college football player who donated his bone marrow stem cells to save a cancer patient’s life:

  … [D]octors told him that the drugs he needed to even donate stem cells would force an end to his junior year season. It was no contest.

  “It’s a football game. They come and go,” Hoffman said. “You have a man’s life. It was very easy for me to choose.”

• Is a pro-life group “extreme” when more than 70% of state’s lawmakers (including numerous Democrats) are endorsed by and/or agree with them? In her plea for Gov.-Elect Rick Snyder (pictured left) to abandon his self-proclaimed pro-life position, Sarah Scranton, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of MI, doesn’t seem to understand the conflict between calling Right to Life of MI “extreme” and then in the next sentence noting that “more than 70% of the incoming state lawmakers [are] either endorsed by MI RTL or [are] known to hold anti-choice views.”
• Wesley Smith catches Michael Kinsley inaccurately describing President Bush’s policy on the federal funding of embryonic stem cells. Smith is too kind in the title when he says that Kinsley doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Unfortunately, Kinsley does know what Bush’s policy was, he just prefers to continuallylie about it.
• In the Irish Times, Breda O’Brien has an editorial discussing the recent European Court of Human Rights case and pushes back against the idea that abortion is a good thing for women:

  As a woman who still calls herself a feminist, it makes me furious that feminists seem to think that abortion is such a good thing for women, an absolutely necessary “right”, when so often it is a somewhat brutal substitute for what they really need.

[Snyder photo via whtc.com]