by Hans Johnson

Do half of all marriages really end in divorce? It’s been quite a contentious argument. Perhaps one of the most prominent voices calling this a pernicious urban myth is columnist Michael Medved, who has long said a careful look at the statistics belie the gloomy impression most have.

Social researcher Shaunti Feldhahn agrees in the new book, The Good News About Marriage, written after eight years of research. “There is no such thing as a 50 percent divorce rate. It’s never been close,” she told TheBlaze. “Right now … 72 percent of people are still married to their first spouse — that’s Census Bureau data.”

And that’s not even taking into account how many of the remaining are widowed, and never divorced. More good news: The divorce rate between active church attendees is 27-50% lower than non-church goers.

Here is a report from CBN News:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/All9FsEJDm4[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: CBN News]

~ Facebook post by Six Rivers Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Eureka, California

A petition drive is underway in Canada to block the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform from displaying banners with photos of abortion victims on an overpass in Calgary (pictured above) after one was perceived to have caused a car accident there this week.

Abortion, a disturbing reality

Some pros and cons, quoting CBC.ca:

For years, an anti-abortion organization has been temporarily hanging the banners from pedestrian bridges over the busiest roadway in Calgary….

“I had a traumatic miscarriage four or five years ago, and the first time I saw the banner, it was devastating,” said [Nicole] Bross, a mother of two. “It brought back all these awful, awful feelings.”

Stephanie Gray, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, the group behind the highway displays, said it’s part of a continuing effort to spread their message.

“As we have, in our 12-year history, used images of abortion-victim photography, we’ve seen, year after year, people change their minds on abortion because of what they see,” said Gray….

Bross said abortion isn’t the issue for her. Rather, she said it’s a matter of safety, as she worries the banners are distracting to drivers.

“These people claim to care about life and the unborn,” she said. “But they don’t care about the lives of the people that they’re potentially endangering.”

Gray, however, disputed the implication this is a distracted-driving issue.

“If someone is driving down the road and chooses to look out their window at a billboard or at an accident, and then they rear end a person in front of them, do we blame the pre-existing accident or the billboard for the accident? Or do we blame the driver for not maintaining their attention on their driving?”

Your thoughts? And be sure to weigh in on the poll…

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.

• Right to Life of Michigan says Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California has sent a letter to California legislators stating their opposition to a ban on sex-selective abortion. The war on women is being waged in the womb with the support of Planned Parenthood.
• Live Action highlights Planned Parenthood’s outrageous statements on sex selection abortion and infanticide. It’s all in a day’s work for this organization, which enjoys exorbitant amounts of our tax dollars and great favor in Washington, D.C.

• Pro-Life Action League recently hosted a “Face the Truth” day at two sites in Chicago where abortionist Mandy Gittler does business. Gittler is the abortionist responsible for the death of Tonya Reaves at Planned Parenthood. Armed with informational flyers and signs about the bubble zone, Reaves’ death, and the lack of inspection by the Illinois Department of Health, PLAL educated many people.
• Pro-Life in TN comments on the story of a Nashville woman who rented her womb as a gestational surrogate, only to stumble upon a couple who insisted upon sex selection and selective reduction:
  

  The third time was not a charm for the surrogate who finds “pregnancy an easy process.” This time she entertained renting her womb to a famous and mega rich heterosexual couple who must be unnamed due a non disclosure agreement.

  She started to get bad vibes when they said they wanted a boy and would use gender determining tests on five day old embryos to accomplish this…. The final straw was after they finally settled on two female embryos, but wanted to assure a singleton was born. This meant that [Jessica] Szalacinski had to agree to abort one of the babies if they both “took”… [which made] her feel like her a commodity and she backed out of this intended lucrative arrangement.

• ProLife365.com spotlights David Bereit, National Director of 40 Days for Life, who was once passively pro-life, but now devotes himself to a full time pro-life ministry. The organization has had amazing results, with 8,900+ babies’ lives saved, 50 abortion mills closed, and 100+ abortion clinic workers leaving the industry.
• Saynsumthn’s Blog notes that New York Planned Parenthood employees are unionizing – an idea Jill Stanek actually encouraged last year. A previous post by Saynsumthn points out that Planned Parenthood contracted with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to do their telemarketing to the tune of $1,067,934. (Recall that PP CEO Cecile Richards’ husband, Kirk Adams, is an executive vice president of the SEIU.)
• The Leading Edge and thirtyone8 take exception to Rev. Francis “Frank” Ritchie’s blog post on the New Zealand Green Party’s new abortion policy.

• ProWomanProLife links to LifeSiteNews’ announcement that Canadian sidewalk counselor Mary Wagner (pictured right) has been freed after nearly two years in prison for counseling abortion-bound women. Wagner believes her time in jail was not wasted:
  

  She said she saw the time as “an opportunity for the Holy Spirit really to be at work in hearts that are broken, seeking and are open to God. So quite easily, prayer groups formed and people asked why I was there, why I was in jail. Immediately, I had the chance to share the truth about the wound of abortion.”

  She estimated some 80 percent of the women she met in the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton had undergone an abortion and of those, 90 percent said they regretted it. “I would love to see more of a connection between the outside world and the inside world for women who are hurting,” she said. “Maybe just by penpals or visits and that, because a lot of them don’t have connections with somebody in their lives anymore.”

• At National Review, Michael J. New questions whether contraception truly plays a role in reducing the abortion rate:
  

  … [E]ven though contraceptive use has gone up, the fertility rate and unintended pregnancy rate have both actually increased slightly since the mid-1990s. All in all, pro-life efforts to change the hearts and minds of women facing crisis pregnancies might be more effective than commonly realized.

  New’s statements have generated a great deal of feedback. In a poorly-researched post at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum took issue with New’s conclusions, “doubting that public opinion, contraceptives, or legislation are playing a substantial role in the recent abortion decline” and stating that both sides of this debate should “stand down.” New responds by saying that looking at the actual evidence is a better strategy. After going into some must-read detail, he concludes:
  

  Overall, since the early 1990s there have been gains in pro-life sentiment, pro-life legislation, and decreases in teen sexual activity. These factors may not completely explain the decline in the abortion rate. However, they seem like far more compelling explanations than increases in contraception use.

  Also responding to New’s article – with absolutely no data or arguments to the contrary – Slate’s Katie McDonough asserts that New is “delusional”. New writes:
  

  I have a simple question for McDonough and others who think that contraception is responsible for America’s long-term abortion decline: If contraceptives are effective and contraceptive use has increased, why has the unintended-pregnancy rate gone up? Again, statistics from both Guttmacher and the National Center for Health Statistics… both show the unintended-pregnancy rate has increased since the mid 1990s. Honestly, I am not expecting much of a response. It is unfortunate that instead of thoughtfully engaging the arguments that I put forward, McDonough and others simply choose to engage in childish name calling.

[Photos via Pro-Life Action League and LifeSiteNews]

I’ve written before that it isn’t only pro-life scholars who believe the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion was fundamentally flawed: Honest abortion proponents agree.

In a June 17 Truth-out.org article, pro-choice sociologist Salvatore Babones writes:

The constitutional basis for the right to abortion found in Roe v. Wade is based on the thin reed of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868 to prevent states from reintroducing new forms of slavery.

The Fourteenth Amendment ensures that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” from which has been implied a general right to privacy, from which has been implied a right to privacy in pregnancy, from which has been implied a right to abortion.

This is good so far as it goes, but it is hardly a secure footing on which to base such a basic human right as reproductive self-determination.

Babones’ solution is to pass a federal law legalizing abortion that strikes a “balance between a woman’s right to an abortion and society’s interest in her fetus.”

One problem is Babones allows no room in his abortion fantasy for “society’s interest in her fetus,” going so far as to condemn the 2003 federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban as legislative overreach. So what law protecting the fetus would Babones approve of?

“Congress should step in to ensure that women in all parts of the United States have access to safe, affordable abortion services,” Babones writes. “It should also define the areas over which states can exercise reasonable local discretion in the regulation of abortion.”

Babones tries to balance his extremist carte blanche abortion view by adding a “reasonable” sounding caveat. But elsewhere in his article Babones goes so far as to condemn a common sense safety regulation ensuring hallways in abortion clinics are wide enough to fit a gurney or wheelchair. So what regulation would Babones approve of?

TRAP-ping abortion

As an aside, Babones erroneously claims these regulations “specifically target abortion providers – but not other, similar health care organizations.”

This is actually the opposite of the truth. In reality, states have historically treated abortion clinics differently, relaxing or nullifying regulations they imposed on mainstream ambulatory surgical treatment centers – and even animal clinics – or refusing to enforce regulations on the books, as we saw with Kermit Gosnell.

Abortion woes then and now

It is interesting to reread the 2005 Fox News article I linked to in the post referred to at the top of this piece. Nine years ago the other side knew it had problems:

Abortion rights activists say they found themselves increasingly on the defensive after the Republican Revolution in Congress in 1994, and on red alert since President Bush’s victory in 2000. The chasm between the pro- and anti-abortion camps has only grown wider, with right-to-life groups emboldened in recent years.

In the past decade or so, Roe’s breadth has been chipped away by legislation and rulings on a host of “sidebar” issues: parental consent, late-term or partial-birth abortions and public health care funding.

Back then what Babones notes as the current “major driver” for pro-abortion woes, “the so-called TRAP strategy: targeted regulation of abortion providers,” wasn’t even on the horizon.

These laws, which do regulate abortion clinics and force abortionists to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, have been tremendously productive for our side, particularly since a second Republican Revolution as well as discovery of Gosnell’s house of horrors, both in 2010, and despite the election of pro-abortion, pro-infanticide Barack Obama in 2008/12. Writes Babone:

The number of clinics that provide abortion services has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years with most of the remaining clinics concentrated in a small number of states, and nearly one-third of them are operated by a single organization, Planned Parenthood.

Research from The Huffington Post shows that 11 states saw reductions in abortion availability of more than 20% over the brief period from 2010 to 2013…. All in all, 17 states experienced reduced availability. Only two states saw expanded access.

I thought it was interesting for Babone to note that one-third of remaining abortion clinics “are operated by a single organization, Planned Parenthood.”

Perhaps I’m reading into those words, but it seems to me Babone is saying without saying that if Planned Parenthood goes down, abortion is in real trouble.

It is no secret that a major goal of the pro-life movement is to rightfully and justly bring Planned Parenthood down.

With that in mind, it will be interesting to read what abortion proponents are lamenting nine years from now.

[Top two graphics via National Right to Life, which also has several quotes by pro-abortion scholars and legal experts criticizing the Roe decision; Gosling graphic via quickmeme.com]

by LauraLoo

Kristen Anderson, speaker and author of Life, In Spite Of Me, gives her testimony in two media platforms – audio (via In the Market with Janet Parshall) and video below.  She describes how she survived her own suicide attempt in which she was run over by a train.

Part 1:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72NJka7-Z68[/youtube]

Watch Part 2 here.

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

by Carder

There is distinction between “shame-free” and “consequence-free,” and abortion will never be the latter. Most, like the character of Stacy Hamilton, agonize over up up [sic] until the last minute.

It seems to me that the MSNBC hosts and the filmmakers in this case are reaching to glamorize one of the few acts which is so emotionally draining and morally challenging that even Hollywood has been unable to destigmatize it.

Good luck, team Obvious Child. It seems like it’s going to be an uphill battle.

~ Noah Rothman, criticizing the claim by pro-abortion media that the pro-abortion film Obvious Child and the 1980’s film Fast Time at Ridgemeont High, are “a great example of a positive, regrets-free abortion,” Hot Air, June 19

by Kelli

At a time when abortion rights are in jeopardy — Louisiana’s governor recently signed a bill that would close three of the state’s five clinics that offer abortions, Texas is likely to have only six clinics by September, because of a draconian new law, and other states are cracking down — fresh ideas like this might lessen the stigma of abortion….

Katharine Morrison [pictured to the left of certified nurse midwife Eileen Stewart], the doctor who presides over all the services at the Buffalo center, doesn’t think women should suffer for their reproduction, as she puts it. She is disturbed when women endure birth control with harsh side effects, state-appointed waiting periods for abortions and a lack of control over how they actually deliver their children.

From her perspective, anti-abortion efforts are not so different from, say, doctors who do not let women have the birth process they choose and instead pressure them to have cesareans. She regards both as strains of medical paternalism….

We now hew to religious rhetoric on one hand or rights-oriented rhetoric on the other. Seeing reproductive care as a continuum might rejigger our thinking and remind us that many of us experience both childbirth and abortion.

~ Alissa Quart, writing an opinion piece on New York’s Buffalo Womenservices, a “birth and [up to 22 weeks] abortion center in one”, The New York Times, June 14

[Photo via buffalonews.com]