by Kelli

On one hand, the depiction of “release to elsewhere” – especially of one of the unqualified babies, who is given a lethal injection and then dropped down a chute — could surely be used as grist for organizations who are deemed pro-life. (Especially given that in real life, abortion foes often use jarring images of fetuses to further their claim that abortion is murder, despite the fact that such images misrepresent the reality of abortion.)

That the images of “release to elsewhere” are juxtaposed with murderous images – the slaughter of elephants, the killing of innocents by military forces – could be interpreted as furthering the pro-life claim that the taking of “life” is murder. However, the suggestion that murder of the past (war, genocide, etc) has been supplanted with a different kind of murder which is no better emphasizes the hypocrisy at the heart of the pro-life stance: that those who condemn abortion as “murder” also call for the killing of abortion providers and/or support war, resist gun control, and fail to condemn genocide. The quote the current receiver says to Jonas about murder not being eliminated just renamed is applicable here: Pro-lifers do not eliminate what they call murder (abortion and contraception); rather, they call reproductive choice “murderous” and name what they do (such as killing providers like Dr. Tiller) as protecting innocent lives. In doing so, however, they perpetuate the lack of choice that perpetuates so many of the murdering forces in our society: poverty, criminalization, the military machine.

~ Natalie Wilson, reviewing the dystopian movie The Giver, Ms. Magazine Blog, August 18

[Photo by Entertainment Weekly via disneydreaming.com]

As commenter Christina noted on Facebook (a line I stole on Twitter), “Let’s make abortion the central theme of a comedy, then pretend we’re not trivializing it and trying to make it funny.”

But that’s exactly what the star of a romantic comedy about abortion is trying to say.

The movie Obvious Child is debuting across the pond, and before it has gone reviews and opinions from America, pretty much all pegging it as “the abortion romcom,” to quote The Guardian.

But the movie’s star, Jenny Slate (pictured above in a scene from the movie), doesn’t like that portrayal:

“Ugh, that is such a bummer, that term. An abortion romcom – that’s not a thing!” Slate says with an eye-roll. “The movie isn’t saying that abortions are funny. It’s saying that people are funny.”

That’s not what Slate’s comedic pal Jimmy Fallon thought when complimenting her on the picture. “It’s getting great reviews because it’s a serious issue, but you make it lighthearted, you make it funny,” said Fallon, as quoted by NewsBusters.

And Slate kept her thoughts to herself when Obvious Child was being plugged by Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards:

This is a hilarious and honest story about one young woman trying to figure out life and dating, and it includes an unapologetic look at her decision to have an abortion….

[I]t shows her as a full and complete person making the serious decision to end a pregnancy and still having a full and fun life.

Or when the Los Angeles Times was giving Obvious Child rave reviews as “finally, a romantic comedy about abortion.”

If this wasn’t a rom-com about abortion, why all the advance screenings for the abortion industry? Why was Planned Parenthood consulted in the making of the film, “vetting the script and allowing them to shoot in a clinic”? quoting Mother Jones.

But Slate and director Gillian Robespierre apparently no longer need abortion zealots to help them sell their movie. That or they have found abortion advocates are really no help at all – perhaps radioactive even?

Whatever, they’re now shunning the “abortion rom-com” label, to which I tweeted yesterday:

Promoting @ObviousChildMov across the pond @jennyslate doesnt like it being called an "abortion rom-com" http://t.co/6oTOxwglaY Own it Jenny

— Jill Stanek (@JillStanek) August 26, 2014

A few hours later Slate responded:

https://twitter.com/jennyslate/status/504384636034629633

I did see the movie, Jenny. It’s a romantic comedy about abortion. Again, own it. What’s the problem?

[HT: AntiRHOfficial on Twitter; second photo of Slate viaPlanned Parenthood]

by Carder

It’s not all about that private 20-week ultrasound anymore! More and more parents are planning gender reveal parties to find out their baby’s sex and share the excitement with family and friends through a big reveal, usually in cake form.

So how is it done? Most moms and dads have their ultrasound technician write the child’s sex on a slip of paper that is placed in an envelope. It’s then dropped off at a bakery where a cake is baked in the appropriate color and iced to hide the news. When the parents-to-be cut into the sweet treat, they learn about their future offspring’s sex.

If you need inspiration for your own gender revealing cake, check out the 30 following adorable options, and happy cake cutting!

~ Rebecca Gruber reporting on the trending gender reveal parties, Lil Sugar, August 24

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

• At First Things, J.D. Flynn pens a beautiful response to noted atheist Richard Dawkins’ controversial Tweet about the “immorality” of allowing children with Down syndrome to be born. As an adoptive father of two children with Down syndrome, Flynn’s post is a must read:
  

  You’ve often said that people who disagree with you should “go away, and learn how to think.” I’ve tried to learn to think, over the years, but perhaps I am naive in some ways. But one of things I’ve concluded is that ethical philosophy can’t be done in a sterile environment — that our humanity, our intuition, our empathy, in fact, must be recognized as a source of ethical insight if we want to think well. Perhaps you believe that your position on abortion and down syndrome is logically valid. But I wonder if you’re kept awake at night by the revulsion that comes with being the champion of killing.

• At Live Action News, secular pro-lifer Sarah Terzo also responds to Dawkins by pointing to studies affirming the overall positive attitudes of children with Ds, along with their parents and siblings. Terzo contrasts these attitudes with those of people who were surveyed when they sought amniocentesis to detect Down syndrome (some of their responses pictured, left). Nearly all decided that if their child had the condition, they would abort:
  

  You have to wonder how these parents would react if their “normal” child turned out to have a learning disability or just is less of an overachiever- not as perfect as they want him to be. The sanctity of human life has been defeated by a consumer culture where women have amniocentesis in order to decide whether or not a baby is acceptable to be born, as if they were purchasing a pair of shoes and looking for the most comfortable and attractive ones.

• After a defeat by Republicans this past April, Pro-Life Wisconsin has enlisted new pro-life help to try and make Choose Life license plates available to Wisconsinites. PLW is hopeful that the U.S. Supreme Court will “take on a lower court case that addresses the free speech rights of Americans who want to purchase ‘Choose Life’ license plates.”
• Ethika Politika shows an example of media being called out on their distortion and misinformation with regards to life issues.
• In a similar vein, Right to Life of Michigan spanks the editorial board of the Traverse City Record Eagle for their inaccurate editorial and lack of research on “citizen-initiated abortion insurance legislation” which was promoted by RTL MI.

• At Life Site News, Jason Jones reviews the new movie The Giver with impassioned words about the sterile, emotionless, engineered utopia:
  

  The world of The Giver is what people seek when they vote for men like Barack Obama, send checks to Planned Parenthood, and slap “Coexist” bumper stickers on their Volvos. It’s their Mecca, their Shangri-La, their New Jerusalem.

No wonder liberal critics are trashing The Giver. It tips their hand. It reveals too much, too soon, about the dream of the Culture of Death — whose goal isn’t really death, per se. Our enemies don’t want to kill babies and old people, cripples and retarded children, out of a sheer homicidal glee. Were we facing foes like Genghis Khan whose only plan was to heap up pyramids of skulls, our task would be far simpler.

Instead, we fight a set of people with no sharp edges or pointy helmets. They do not love death. They’re afraid of life. They see human existence as nothing more than a drawn-out tale of suffering and disappointment, that ends in an unmarked grave and eternal oblivion.

by Hans Johnson

The poster image to the right ironically accompanies a Facebook post by Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, which she used to inject her pro-abortion agenda into the controversy of the recent shooting death of a black youth by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri:

Heartbroken by the event unfolding in #Ferguson. A parent’s right to raise their child in love and safety, and to dream that their child will have every opportunity in the world to grow into a fiercely independent adult is a fundamental issue of reproductive justice.

But where is the justice for the preborn in the Black community? As noted by Ryan Bomberger in his Townhall column, more Black babies are aborted than are born alive in New York City, and Planned Parenthood plays no small part. According to Protecting Black Life, “79% of [Planned Parenthood’s] surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.”

Shane Q Genesis, a rap artist from Malawi, sees something sinister at work in this promotion of abortion in the inner cities:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/Jo7XAQei2eE[/youtube]

And in this video, Christian rapper Jonathan Cayol from Washington, D.C., with Operation Rescue Truth Truck driver Ron Brock in a cameo, points to God for hope in his community:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/GZR6IEDLdIU[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: LifeNews; Ken & Jo Scott]

Planned Parenthood executive VP Dawn Laguens (pictured above right) took Glover Park Group’s founding partner Carter Eskew (pictured below right) apart in a drippingly sarcastic August 22 Huffington Post piece, “Thanks for the lecture”:

In a recent Washington Post blog post… Eskew took the reproductive rights movement to task, and not a minute too soon by his watch. In his column, he explains that advocates for reproductive health are mired in “convoluted, poll-tested messaging” and “cannot win the debate as it is currently framed.” He probably imagines he’s doing us a favor, but he instead seems to be just tuning in to a conversation that’s literally happening all around him.

In his WashPo piece, Eskew basically concurred with me, without naming names, that pro-abortion messaging has become a hot mess:

Janet Harris says… people who support abortion rights need new language for expressing their advocacy. She couldn’t be more right, but from a pro-choice perspective, the current political dialogue is even worse than she documents.

For years, the pro-choice movement has been on the defensive, using more and more convoluted, poll-tested messaging to try to stand its ground….

The pro-choice side cannot win the debate as it is currently framed; it can achieve only small victories when the other side overreaches….  The reason pro-choice advocates can’t and won’t win is because they don’t have an affirmative argument, only a defensive one….

The problem is “choice” will never trump “life.” Choice is valuable, but life is precious. As long as there is no competing affirmative value for abortion, then life will always win.

Lately, there have been murmurings of new language presaging a new movement to affirm the true value of abortion…. But it remains abstract.

The “convoluted, poll-tested messaging” is of course, Planned Parenthood’s, the group which in 2013 rocked Abortion World by announcing it was abandoning the movement’s beloved self-descriptive term, ”pro-choice.”

Eskew obviously still likes “pro-choice” – note how often he used it in his piece.

The problem is Planned Parenthood actually hired Eskew’s firm to help formulate its “convoluted, poll-tested messaging,” or at the very least identify the weakness in using “pro-choice” terminology. Continued Laguens:

The reproductive justice movement… deserves the lion’s share of credit for articulating the weakness of the choice frame. Admittedly Planned Parenthood Action Fund was later to this party, and interestingly we worked with Eskew’s firm to help us name this in our own work.

In fact, Planned Parenthood has hired Glover Park Group, a “public relations, advertising, opinion research, and lobbying” firm, according to Wikipedia, for each of the last six years to lobby and strategize, for a total of $710,000.

So Eskew’s post is inexplicable, unless he’s on a hari kari mission.

Or perhaps Eskew just decided to be honest. Planned Parenthood’s decision to publicly dump “pro-choice” from its lexicon has resulted in chaos, particularly among groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America that boast the shunned term in their names.

Or perhaps Eskew was trying to back away from the race-relations nightmare Planned Parenthood launched within the movement by initially taking credit for the phrase, “reproductive justice,” which it is trialing as the new, cumbersome stand-in for the dreaded A-word. As Women of Color quickly reminded Planned Parenthood, they coined that term decades ago.

UPDATE 8/27, 9a:  One late thought that occurs to me is Eskew may have opposed Planned Parenthood’s decision to abort “pro-choice” and was writing an “I told you so.”

Whatever, suffice it to say we can expect Planned Parenthood to abort Glover Park Group.

And the very public infighting between pro-abortion groups continues, much to pro-life delight.

by Kelli

Smith was sent to a Boulder, Colorado, clinic run by Dr. Warren Hern [pictured], one of only four late-term abortion providers in the U.S.

Smith, who suffers post-traumatic stress disorder related to the loss, attends two support groups (an infant loss group and an abortion support group) and serves as a mentor to other women who have gone through late-term abortions for similar reasons. She says that she wishes there were more options for women in her circumstances, lamenting the death of [abortionist George] Tiller and lauding the courage of Hern, who she describes as “an absolute angel who saved me and my daughter.”

~ Ananda Rose, describing the late-term abortion of “Julie Smith,” whose daughter had fetal abnormalities, Pacific Standard, August 25

[Photo via dailycamera.com]

Around the world, famous and nonfamous people alike are filming themselves dumping or having dumped ice water on their heads in the new fad called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

The dunkee then pays it forward by challenging others to do the same. Party poopers are supposed to donate $100 to the cause.

Pro-lifers oppose donating to the ALS Association because it supports research of human embryos and aborted fetal cells.

Our opposition has even made national news, which is helpful in bringing attention to ALSA’s deadly research.

Pro-lifers are still enjoying the ice bucket challenge, they just donate to ethical causes. My own pastor took the challenge this weekend, asking people to donate to a clean water initiative in Africa.

But then there are abortion supporters.

Andrea Grimes at RH Reality Check (pictured left) took one look at the ice water challenge and knew it would be cold and wet… and mess up her hair and make-up… and force her to change clothes… in other words, be terribly inconvenient, which, of course, is the point.

But pro-choicers don’t like to be put out in any way. An ice bucket challenge might even violate bodily integrity.

So Grimes quickly issued an alternative, the “Taco or Beer Challenge,” knowing her tribe would only take up a challenge that didn’t come anywhere close to resembling a real challenge but would instead sensually satisfy.

And hey, let’s film ourselves having a fabulous time eating tacos and drinking beer, with our pets even, to support killing babies! How cool is that and are we? Click to enlarge…

Donations are supposed to go to organizations that fund abortions for mothers short on cash, but no surprise, Planned Parenthood is trying to horn in on the action.

Here, by the way, is the way classy description of the Beer or Taco Challenge. Click to enlarge:

Seriously, who talks this way other than skanks? [UPDATE 6:05p: It appears I have drawn skank ire (warning: vulgar!)].

Now the pro-abortion self-sacrifice has extended to breakfast tacos and dessert tacos. I could cry.

Meanwhile, Andrea is getting a little testy with pro-lifers for drawing attention to the uncouth egocentricity of it all…

https://twitter.com/andreagrimes/status/503196421013901312

Isn’t glass eating a new form of BDSM being promoted by Planned Parenthood?

[Top photo of Mrs. Laura Bush dumping water on former President G. W. Bush via Politico; photo of Grimes via Twitter; photos of Taco or Beer Challenge participants via Tumblr]