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.

• Pro-Life in TN applauds the closing of the Volunteer Women’s Medical Clinic in Knoxville – evidence of the impact of incremental pro-life laws at the state level. The Life Defense Act of 2012, which went into effect in Tennessee on July 1, stipulates that abortionists must have admitting privileges at a local hospital for the safety of patients. Since many abortionists drive or fly in from another state for the day to perform abortions and offer no follow-up with patients, causing them to seek any post-abortion care at an ER.

  The clinic director penned a revealing farewell letter, showing how vital their abortion revenue stream was.

• Secular Pro-Life examines the personhood debate as it relates to viability:
  

  In other words, a fetus gestating in the United States, whose mother has access to advanced medical technologies, may be able to survive outside the womb at an earlier gestational age than if the exact same fetus were gestating in Rwanda.

  If personhood depends on viability, the fetus is a person while in the US, and ceases to be a person if the mother travels to Rwanda…. This makes no sense. No definition of personhood should boil down to geographic location.

• At The Public Discourse, Michael New reviews a book about largely unknown 70’s pro-life pioneer Ellen McCormack (pictured left), a Democrat whose admirable political work has impacted the strategies of today’s pro-life movement.
• John Smeaton links to articles keeping us updated on the push to legalize abortion in Ireland.
• ProWomanProLife comments on an article about the Canadian Medical Association’s vote to protect abortion by saying that “life begins when the baby emerges from it’s mother’s womb.” While this political claim would no doubt be ridiculous to doctors who perform surgery on prenatal patients, the CMA also made statements which appeared to acknowledge that certain contraceptives are actually abortifacients.

• Moral Outcry laments the Salvation Army’s abandonment of their stated Christian principles in embracing the idea that abortion is sometimes acceptable. They reason that rape is considered a weapon of war so aborting the innocent life is an acceptable remedy. We may want to consider this at red kettle collection time.
• Priests for Life’s Alveda King lambasts resistance to the biblical mandate to be fruitful and multiply, stating, “What’s really sad is that when we protect these positions with “misplaced compassion,” and try to call these moral wrongs civil rights, we hurt society and humanity.”
• At The New Feminism, Margaret Sommerville discusses “genetic orphans” resulting from the use of certain types of reproductive technology, and their right to know their biological parents:
  

  The basic questions raised in all cases where all the attributes of parenthood do not reside in the two biological parents are whether all children (except, perhaps, those who are naturally conceived and born into an opposite-sex marriage) have, first, a right to know who their biological parents are, and, second, where possible to have some reasonable contact with them.

  I propose that the response to both questions should be in the affirmative, unless that is clearly contrary to the “best interests” of a particular child, and that to decide otherwise is a breach of children’s fundamental human rights.

[Photo via NY Times]