by Hans Johnson

Among a number of well-received family-friendly movies this year was The Giver, based on a popular novel for young adults. It describes a futuristic world where a seeming utopia masks a Culture of Death where those deemed  a burden on society – whether old or newborn – are done away with.

In a column at Bound4Life, Aaron Welty (pictured left) describes the impact the film had on him. and proceeds to “delve into his own personal story of living with cerebral palsy” and the real possibility of his “not making it into life to begin with.”

Born 10 weeks premature with cp, his doctors wanted to give up the effort to keep him alive. If not for the interference of a family friend who worked at the hospital, he never would have grown up to be a congressional aide and inspirational speaker.

Here Aaron relates his story of a life in which he has certainly given as much as he has received:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/50337705[/vimeo]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: John Shepherd]

by Carder

After hearing the sentence — which by the way I think is a little light — I got curious and looked up the cost of an abortion. According to Planned Parenthood, it costs about $300 to $950 to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester.

Is this mother crazy? When you choose to support your daughter’s choice for a teen abortion, now’s not the time to get cheap — you find the money. Skip on the manicure. Bring your lunch to work. Look into adoption options. See if the clinic has a payment program. But, for goodness sakes, Dr. Moms, quit feeding your kids pills from abroad as a medical fix.

~ Michelle Maffei reacting to the report of single mom, Jennifer Ann Whalen, purchasing abortion pills for a do-it-yourself abortion for her 16-year-old daughter, which eventually landed her in jail, She Knows, September 8

by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN

• Judie Brown of American Life League discusses an issue that sometimes separates pro-life activists. She believes pro-lifers should not waste time and resources fighting for laws that force abortionists to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. While many pro-lifers rightfully think abortionists fail to meet that standard, and this is a way to expose them and shut down abortion centers when no physician qualifies, Brown quotes ALL’s Jim Sedlak, who voices an alternative opinion:

  While pro-lifers get caught up in trying to argue for these kinds of laws, statements are made that you would never expect from a pro-life person. In fact, after the Alabama decision, one pro-life leader, who is one of the strongest fighters for life in the country, actually argued that these laws are needed to protect women who are choosing to have an abortion.

  This has brought us a long way from the days when it was clearly recognized that the energies of the pro-life movement were focused on saving the baby, praying for the woman, and finding a way to show women that abortion was not her only solution to her perceived problems.

• Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life posted an op ed in Duluth News Tribune calling out MN Senator Al Franken for his support of the misnamed Women’s Health Protection Act, which “effectively would establish abortion on demand until birth nationwide.”

  This extremist, who is up for reelection this November, must be defeated! He only won in 2008 by 312 recounted votes, and at least one pundit considers him vulnerable.

• The Leading Edge, a New Zealand blog, gives tips on how to talk to your “MP,” i.e., member of parliament, about issues that matter to you. The advice is sound for the U.S. as well!

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbfrFwwQcYE[/youtube] 

• Clinic Quotes quotes Glamour magazine in 1973, which called abortion the “kiss of death” in the medical profession:

  “[Hospital administrators say] abortion is a sleazy and offensive procedure… The doctor who does abortions – even if they are only a small part of her practice – is known as an abortionist…. This label is the kiss of death for any professional hopes a doctor might have.”

• Live Action gives a high five to a Today Show story about Special Kneads Bakery, which employs special needs adults:

  “What they do is critical to our success,” says Mike, underscoring the fact that these jobs are not provided as charity or just to give adults with special needs something to do. They are earning an honest wage and contributing in a very real way to the success of the business.

  Mike says their love for repetition is a boon to the business: “They do a lot of the jobs that most people don’t even really think about, and don’t want to do.”

I’ve written previously (here and here) about the possible connection between autism and vaccines made with aborted fetal cells.

Now, the September issue of the prestigious Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology has published a study conducted by scientists at Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute that shows an spike in autism in country after country where vaccines using fetal cells from aborted babies have been introduced.

The implicated vaccines are MMR (measles/mumps/rubella), Varicella (chickenpox), and Hepatitis A.

Using data from the U.S. government, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Western Australia, researchers found a spike in autism around the world after vaccines using animal cells were replaced by vaccines using aborted fetal cells:

Autistic disorder birth year change points were identified as 1980.9, 1988.4 and 1996 for the US, 1987 for the UK, 1990.4 for Western Australia, and 1987.5 for Denmark. Change points in these countries corresponded to introduction of or increased doses of human fetal cell line-manufactured vaccines….

This pattern was repeated in the US, UK, Western Australia and Denmark. Thus, rising autistic disorder prevalence is directly related to vaccines manufactured utilizing human fetal cells. Increased paternal age and DSM revisions were not related to rising autistic disorder prevalence.

Lead researcher Dr. Theresa Deisher noted something more alarming, “Not only are the human fetal contaminated vaccines associated with autistic disorder throughout the world, but also with epidemic childhood leukemia and lymphomas.”

Right to Life of Michigan goes into great detail explaining the origin of the aborted fetal cell vaccine lines. The implicated manufacturers are Barr Labs, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Sanofi Pasteur.

The RTL Michigan website lists other vaccines using aborted fetal cells and some alternatives. Unfortunately, there are currently no approved alternatives to the MMR, Varicella or Hepatitis A vaccines.

CDC and FDA implicated in cover-up

The bombshells don’t stop. From Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute’s press release announcing the publication:

Their study comes on the heels of recent breaking news that the CDC deliberately withheld evidence of the significant increase in autism among African-American boys who were vaccinated prior to 36 months of age.

So it should come as no surprise that the FDA has known for decades about the dangers of insertional mutagenesis by using the human fetal cell lines and yet, they chose to ignore it. Instead of conducting safety studies they regulated the amount of human DNA that could be present in a vaccine to no greater than 10ng.

Unfortunately, Dr. Deisher’s team discovered that the fetal DNA levels ranged anywhere from 142ng – 2000ng per dose, way beyond the so-called “safe” level.

“There are a large number of publications about the presence of HERV (human endogenous retrovirus – the only re-activatable endogenous retrovirus) and its association with childhood lymphoma,” noted Dr Deisher. “The MMR II and chickenpox vaccines and indeed all vaccines that were propagated or manufactured using the fetal cell line WI-38 are contaminated with this retrovirus. And both parents and physicians have a right to know this!”

Certainly these discoveries by SCPI should generate an immediate investigation by FDA officials, if not an outright ban on the use of aborted fetal cell lines as substrates for vaccine production. There are numerous other non-human FDA-approved cell lines that can and should be used.

by Kelli

Duck Dynasty’s Jase and Missy Robertson never considered abortion – not even when their now 10-year-old daughter, Mia, was prenatally diagnosed with a cleft lip and potentially cleft palate. CNSNews.com reports:

At a Capitol Hill press conference sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who was born with a cleft lip and cleft palate, Jase and Missy Robertson talked about the topic and answered questions. A person in the crowd mentioned the ultrasound pictures that revealed Mia’s condition and asked Missy Robertson, “Was there ever a thought in your mind you might not follow through with the pregnancy?”

Missy Robertson said, “Absolutely not. No. That thought never entered my mind. God gave each and every one of us life, as a gift. And each life has value and importance. And Mia has a special importance now in her life because of that….

Who am I to decide that for her?… God already decided that, allowed that to happen. I’m so glad for this opportunity – I wouldn’t ask for this, this special challenge in our life, no, we wouldn’t – but I’m very grateful for it. I’m grateful for the challenge, and I’m grateful for Mia, as a human being. I can’t imagine our life without her.”

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Michael W. Chapman]; photo of Jase and Mia via Miamoo.org]

The problem with all of this posturing is that the video released by TMZ does not really constitute new - or at least probative - evidence at all…. [W]e know from Rice’s own admission that he struck Palmer in that elevator….

But we humans are weird creatures. It is one thing to know, intellectually, that Ray Rice knocked a woman unconscious in a hotel elevator. It is another thing to actually see it happen….

Humans place inordinate value at an emotional level upon what they can see, as opposed to what is visible with all their other senses….

This is, in essence, the reason our abortion policy has remained essentially static over the last 40 years in this country in spite of astonishing scientific advances in terms of understanding fetal development and our ability to move the viability window for premature children continually backwards. Virtually the entire country turned on the Iraq war between 2003 and 2006 because of the constant visual stream of war casualties that we were not willing to accept; meanwhile roughly the same number of children are killed in utero each day as died in the entire Iraq conflict, and to even speak of this atrocity is considered tiresome and gauche by the ruling elite, even within the Republican party.

There is, in fact, a reason that proponents of abortion-on-demand resist so strongly any attempt to require women who plan to get abortions to view an ultrasound of the unborn child…. [T]hey know that if America’s emotional reactions ever catch up to what we are increasingly aware of on an intellectual and scientific level, the terms of this debate can and will change quickly and not in their favor.

The lamentable and disgusting farce that has played out in the NFL concerning Ray Rice shows that we are willing to tolerate with relatively little fuss that which we intellectually know and understand, but not what we are actually forced to watch with our own eyes. And the purveyors of the campaign of death in this country know that America has much the same instinct regarding the 1+ million children who are aborted every year.

Or at least, I hope we would.

~ Leon H. Wolf, RedState.com, September 8

One of the plot lines in a movie I watched over the weekend involved a pregnant mother. The film was set in the 1940s, and I thought how blissfully ignorant were the days before ultrasounds and prenatal diagnoses gave mothers carrying ill or handicapped children the choice to bear them when nature decided or kill them beforehand.

Had Texas state senator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis been pregnant back then she would not have imagined the late-term baby girl doing flips inside her was “suffering.” Rather, Davis would have put her hand on her belly and smiled. Instead, quoting from Davis’ upcoming book, Forgetting to be Afraid, via the AP:

I could feel her little body tremble violently, as if someone were applying an electric shock to her, and I knew then what I needed to do,” Davis writes. “She was suffering.”

This was 1997. Davis and then husband had learned the brain of their preborn daughter “had developed in complete separation on the right and left sides” meaning the baby ”would be deaf, blind and in a permanent vegetative state if she survived delivery.”

So the couple decided “the most loving thing we could do for our daughter was to say good-bye,” as Davis explained in an “ABC Exclusive” that the Davis campaign scheduled to launch a book tour highlighting Davis’ abortion. “Say good-bye” in this case was code for “kill her,” which the Davises watched. Quoting MSNBC:

“In our doctor’s office, with tears flowing down both our faces, Jeff and I looked at our baby daughter’s beating heart on the sonogram screen for the last time,” Davis wrote. “And we watched as our doctor quieted it. It was over. She was gone. Our much-loved baby was gone.” She goes on to describe delivering the stillborn baby through cesarean section and how she and Jeff spent a day holding and mourning her.

Be still your heart

The Davises named their baby Tate Elise. “Quieting” little Tate’s heart in this case meant piercing it with a needle and injecting a drug, either Digoxin or potassium chloride, to cause a massive heart attack. Late-term abortionist George Tiller used the former. Quoting Matt Walsh:

Tiller said this was “painless” and “peaceful,” but why don’t you go and have a massive heart attack and then come back and tell us just how painless and peaceful it all was.

And quiet.

It is no wonder Davis then went into a funk, although I expect she’d say she was mourning and not suffering post-abortion guilt:

“An indescribable blackness followed. It was a deep, dark despair and grief, a heavy wave that crushed me, that made me wonder if I would ever surface … And when I finally did come through it, I emerged a different person. Changed. Forever changed,” Davis wrote.

Change for the worst

“Forever changed” for Davis meant turning into a late-term abortion zealot. On June 25, 2013, Davis conducted an 11-hr filibuster against a 20-week abortion ban in Texas. This would have seemed a good time to mention her own late-term abortion (as well as an earlier ectopic pregnancy), but she didn’t. Quoting Fox:

At one point during the filibuster, Davis said she almost felt compelled to talk about her failed pregnancies.

“But knowing such an unexpected and dramatically personal confession would overshadow the events of the day, I knew the time wasn’t right,” she wrote.

I’m not so sure. The emotional tug behind such a revelation might have impacted the outcome.

Another good time for Davis to mention her abortion would have been when she announced her candidacy for governor - to inoculate herself from “Abortion Barbie“ critiques.

A really good time to disclose her abortion would have been when a pro-lifer displayed “Abortion Barbie” posters in Los Angeles ahead of a celebrity fundraiser this past May. Knowing what we know now makes it pretty awful:

But Davis didn’t say anything then either.

Hail Mary pass

Now, with the election for governor less than two months away, and Davis losing in the polls to pro-life Republican Greg Abbott by double digits, Davis has decided to not only reveal her abortion but make it a large part of a book and her campaign. Quoting mysanantonio.com:

The story of her pregnancy with Tate, however, is a key part of her memoir. The book’s dedication begins, “For my daughters, Amber and Dru and Tate, who taught me a love deeper than I believed was possible.”

Amber is her daughter from her first marriage and Dru, from her second, to Jeff Davis….

Davis ends the book with a story of a time she felt Tate said good-bye to her, when she and her husband and friends were on a golf course and Davis was caught in a cylindrical swirl of leaves, lifted by the wind.

“And I felt her. I was sure of it. Tate. Moving through me, saying her good-byes to me. Letting me go,” Davis wrote.

From another mysanantonio.com article:

Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak said… he found it “really jarring and kind of amazing” that the Davis campaign was highlighting the book to try to “maximize the benefit of this revelation.”

Good Morning America is featuring a Davis appearance Monday, and ABC promoted a snippet of the interview Saturday after stories broke about the memoir.

Whether Davis’ abortion revelation might help her politically was the calloused topic of an MSNBC segment, with the determination being yes, it will “resonate with moderate women.”

Abortion sympathies

I utterly sympathize with parents who get devastating prenatal diagnoses such as that which the Davises received.

I even sympathize with mothers who decide to abort their babies in such cases. I know from viewing it firsthand the pressure placed upon them to abort while they are traumatized and vulnerable by a eugenic medical community that gives one-sided advice, either out of misplaced compassion or self-interest.

But I do not sympathize with a mother who bypasses less cynical opportunities to reveal her late-term abortion in lieu of a well-timed and financed book bombshell during the last weeks of a losing political campaign, and then to camouflage the reality of that abortion by calling it a “good-bye” done by “quiet[ing]” the heart.

And all the swooning by abortion sellers like Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, who praised Davis for her “unwavering courage,” makes me sick.

[Top photo via Associated Press]

by Hans Johnson

Kelly Gunderson of Atlanta videotaped herself lying beside her 87-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer’s. She captured a precious flash of lucidity, which she calls “God’s Gift”:

God gave me a moment with my mother remembering who I was. Even if just for a moment. Plus I am an identical twin, which makes it even more special.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/IxDo0j6l2s8[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: LauraLoo]