Within hours of each other, two federal appeals courts handed down separate decisions that affirmed sharp new limits on abortion and birth control. One on Oct. 31 forced abortion clinics across Texas to close. The other, on Nov. 1, compared contraception to “a grave moral wrong” and sided with businesses that refused to provide it in health care coverage.

“These are the kinds of decisions we are going to have to live with,” a blunt Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, warned his caucus later as it weighed whether to make historic changes to Senate rules. Those changes would break a Republican filibuster of President Obama’s nominees and end the minority party’s ability to block a president’s choices to executive branch posts and federal courts except the Supreme Court….

The question of the composition of the federal judiciary has become even more pressing for liberals, given the battery of abortion rights cases now making their way through the courts. From Texas to South Dakota to Wisconsin, federal courts across the country – many of them with vacancies that the president will now be able to fill – are seeing their dockets grow with challenges to restrictive new anti-abortion laws.

Very quickly and unexpectedly, abortion and contraceptive rights became the decisive factor in the filibuster fight.

New York Times, November 29

by Kelli

We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.

• Operation Rescue says LeRoy Carhart has sent yet another patient to the hospital following a late-term abortion at Germantown Reproductive Health Services. Recall that the Maryland Board of Physicians refused to discipline Carhart in the abortion death of Jennifer Morbelli in February:
  

  For the third time this year, one of LeRoy Carhart’s abortion patients were [sic] rushed to Shady Grove Hospital (SGH) in Maryland for emergency treatment after a late-term abortion.

  On Tuesday at 11:45 a.m., an ambulance arrived… and loaded a women for transport to the SGH emergency room. Sources inform Operation Rescue that the women underwent emergency surgery at the hospital.

  Video [below] taken by a local pro-life activist showed a woman covered head-to-toe in a sheet and that neither Carhart nor any of his staff accompanied the injured woman from the clinic to the ambulance.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/lcIwgJTVt0c[/youtube]

• ProLifeBlogs links to a post from Leaven for the Loaf, which shows that abortion proponents in Congress have apparently learned nothing about what results from a lack of abortion regulations:
  

  New Hampshire’s senior Senator Jeanne Shaheen and 2nd District Congresswoman Ann Kuster are co-sponsors of legislation introduced in Washington earlier this month that would wipe out all abortion regulations in every state, including those recommending parental involvement and restricting late-term abortions.

• A Voice for Hope shares a sobering graphic on the impact of abortion, from Personhood USA (left; click to enlarge).
• At Priests for Life, Fr. Frank Pavone addresses pro-choicers who think themselves religious:
  

  Some abortion advocates call themselves “Prayerfully pro-choice.” The implication here is that they have consulted God about a procedure that dismembers little babies, and have found it to be OK. This is using faith against reason.

• Right to Life of Michigan is thankful for many pro-life accomplishments in their state:
  

  Together our accomplishments have changed hearts and brought hope to our state.

  In 2013, five Michigan abortion businesses closed their doors. We have helped close 10 abortion businesses in the last 23 months. Back in the late 1980’s, there were approximately 72 free-standing abortion clinics operating in our state. Today, only 28 remain.

  We are very close to “opting out” of mandatory abortion provisions found in the Affordable Care Act. Together we collected more than 316,000 signatures to initiate the Abortion Insurance Opt-Out Act….

  And many more.

• ProLifeNZ says pro-choicers failed in their attempts to stop a pro-life television ad on the grounds that the post-abortive woman’s story featured in the ad might cause others to experience “duress” or might be “misleading” because it was not “representative of all women’s experience after undergoing the procedure.” See the video below:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/7b6YD3cPK_4[/youtube]

by LauraLoo

At a recent Detroit Pistons game, the competition wasn’t just on the basketball court!  Whoever was behind the camera at a recent Pistons game did an outstanding job of capturing a dance off between kid and usher.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTBFs9i0w_A[/youtube]

Impromptu and very cute!

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

by Carder

I used to find myself feeling empty a lot. I spent almost seven years riding around on a tour bus chasing a dream. You go out and play a show and people scream and sing along, but then the show is over, and you go back to the bus and sit there alone. It’s like going from the highest high to the lowest low.

Now I look forward to getting back on my bus, so I can sing ‘Old MacDonald’ to Pearl... You can chase the dream all you want, you can make as much money as you want, but if you don’t have anyone to share it with, you’re not quite as far along as you thought.

I have a lot more substance in my life now.

~ Country singer Jake Owen (pictured with daughter Pearl) describing the positive effect fatherhood on his life, People, November 27

[HT: Laura Loo]

by Hans Johnson

There have been celebrations of thanksgiving held in what is now the United States from the Spaniards in the 16th century to the colonists of Virginia in the early 1600s. But we remember the most famous such event in 1621: a three-day feast at the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts to mark a successful harvest after the end of a drought.

These days of celebration (after military victories as well) continued sporadically  both locally and nationally, like the one proclaimed by George Washington and the Continental Congress  after the defeat of the British at Saratoga, New York in 1777.

Sarah Josepha Hale (pictured right) was a self-educated young widow who began writing collections of poems and novels. Her most well-known work was the children’s poem, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She became the editor of a magazine that had enormous influence on the culture of the mid-19th century.

Thanksgiving celebrations were common in Hale’s native New England, and so she began a 38-year campaign to advocate it as a national holiday in editorials and hundreds of letters to government officials. In 1846 she began writing to five successive presidents and her last letter, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1863, finally did the trick. (See it here, and scroll down for the text.)

100 years later as we gather to give thanks, we should also remember the woman responsible not only for rescuing this holiday from fading into obscurity, but for many recipes from her magazine more familiar to us than those of the Pilgrims.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/vwLiSVXfn2Y[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

by Kelli

Our son is a beautiful Thanksgiving and Christmas gift…. He is very lovable and sweet….

I am sure they and their mother, Jennifer, are smiling down upon him.

~ Dr. William Petit Jr., who “lost his first wife, Jennifer, 48, and daughters Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, in a brutal home invasion in July 2007,” and later remarried (pictured above with wife, left, and son, right; click to enlarge), as quoted by People, November 27

[Photos by Benoit Photography and Le Petit Studio, via NY Daily News]

by LauraLoo

It is my pleasure to rerun this video from a couple years ago as it is one of my all-time favorites.  From the father’s perspective, here is he and his wife’s short but amazing 99-day journey with their son, Eliot. They are immensely thankful for each day they had with their terminally ill baby.

I cannot think of a more perfect video to celebrate Thanksgiving and Almighty God for all of His bounties. We have SO much to be thankful for, especially our loved ones and our health which we all too often take for granted. 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqNF3FJNEpU[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

by Carder

I lost my mom a little less than a year and a half ago to cancer. Obviously, I got very lucky that even though I lost my mother, I lost her later in life, but it’s still had a profound effect on me….

I’ve always wanted to be a mom. I had a great relationship with mine. I’m ready to pass on to my child all the great love that my mom had for me.

~ Jennifer Love Hewitt, who recently gave birth to daughter Autumn James Hallisay, as quoted by People, November 26