I love being a mom. I’m less judgmental than before I had a kid.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that parenting is a totally different experience for every person.

~ Actress Natalie Portman, as quoted by People, October 29

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.

• At Priests for Life, Fr. Frank Pavone reflects on the fact that so many Christians – even pastors – will say they are not interested in politics and don’t vote:
  

  Everything we can say about the tremendous moral responsibility of those who craft legislation and put it into effect really reflects the moral responsibility of those who put them in those positions in the first place – the voters.

• Wesley J. Smith points out the mainstream media’s lockstep misuse of terms such as “fetus” even when children are born alive, and therefore no longer fetuses. This is deliberate dehumanization with an agenda.

• Right to Life of Michigan links to a video and story about the Michigan State Board of Medicine’s chairman, Dr. George Shade (pictured left), who “single-handedly blocked an investigation into the complaints” about a Muskegon abortion facility which was closed down last year due to unsafe, unsanitary conditions. Apparently Shade and the ex-con abortionist, Dr. Robert Alexander, had a previous mentor-type relationship.
• Foundation Life reports that at America’s oldest Catholic university – Georgetown – law students will be required to work with the National Women’s Law Center, an abortion advocacy organization:
  

  … [T]hat organization’s senior counsel, Kelli Garcia… a radical pro-abortion rights lawyer, wrote the poem titled, ‘Planned Parenthood, Why Do I Love Thee?’ in 2011. The poem was part of a larger effort by Garcia and her group to halt the potential defunding of Planned Parenthood, which is the nation’s largest abortion provider.

  But the real outrage is that Garcia is not just senior counsel for the NWLC, she is an adjunct professor at Georgetown. Her bio states that in her work at the NWLC, she “oversees the Center’s efforts to address religious restrictions on women’s access to reproductive health services, including its work on hospital mergers and crisis pregnancy centers.”

  Patrick Reilly, president of The Cardinal Newman Society, believes forcing students to work with the NWLC makes Georgetown “an active agent of the culture of death. If allowed to continue, this puts Georgetown in direct opposition to the Church.”

  You know, I’m guessing if one of your adjunct professors is a staunch abortion advocate and your law school unashamedly advertises this fact, your institution is already in opposition to the Catholic Church.

• At ProWomanProLife, Andrea Mrozek says she recently learned that New Zealand’s Dr. William Liley, who pioneered amniocentesis in order to save unborn life, took his own life years ago in part because “he saw how his technique was being used both for ‘search and destroy’ missions and to inject saline in a saline abortion.” How awful.
• Pro-Life Action League’s Matt Yonke shares some thoughts after attending the showing of After Tiller, a film that glorifies late-term abortionists. He notes how engaged the audience was in the film:
  

  It was especially surreal sitting one row in front of a group of hard-core abortion-supporting feminists. Early in the film there is discussion of recent restrictions on abortion, including bans on abortion after 20 weeks. At the mention of the fact that a 20 week old fetus can feel pain, one lady behind us muttered, “Bulls**t!”

  But as the camera later panned across a shot of abortionist Leroy Carhart’s horses as he talked of other horses he lost in a fire supposedly started by anti-abortion activists (though this has never been proven), the ladies behind us gasped in horror….

  These conflicting sentiments were just one example of the contradictions and moral blindness that were at the root of After Tiller.

  He recommends that pro-lifers see the film to keep their passions alive. Here is the trailer:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/xf3rETOO62s[/youtube]

by Hans Johnson

The body of a newborn female  was found last Thursday on a conveyer belt where cans and plastics are sorted at a Victorville, CA, recycling plant. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is investigating, and an autopsy will be done.

A report from KABC:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/P4E-0mITAcc[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: LauraLoo]

Tomorrow pro-lifers will take to Twitter to pressure Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to #BeTransparent about abortion coverage in Obamacare.

Sign up here, where you’ll also find sample tweets as well as twitter handles of people to ping in your tweets.

The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to hide the abortion surcharge, making it difficult if not impossible to find the deadly tariff in most insurance policies in exchanges.

For starters, insurance companies are banned from mentioning the surcharge in ads or plan descriptions. It is only after one chooses a plan that one may (or may not) be told. To rephrase Nancy Pelosi’s infamous quip, you have to buy it to find out if abortion is in it.

Tomorrow the rabidly pro-abortion HHS secretary is expected to testify at a hearing in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Republicans need to add the covert abortion surcharge to their list of questions about the spastic rollout of Obamacare on October 1.

Here’s a primer on the abortion secrecy in the exchanges, from a source on the Hill:

• The ACA contains the most radical departure from the principles of the Hyde amendment to become federal law since the 1970s.  It deviates from decades of abortion policy by allowing taxpayer money to flow to plans that include coverage for abortion on demand. As a part of this deviation from the Hyde amendment, plans that include abortion will charge a mandatory abortion surcharge.
• As the exchanges have gone “live” this month, it has become evident that it is nearly impossible for consumers seeking exchange plans to identify which, if any, plans on their state exchange exclude abortion.
• Even if consumers are able to log into the exchanges and view the available plans, the information posted online does not indicate whether abortion is covered or the price of the mandatory abortion surcharge.
• The “Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act” (HR 3279) was introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) to require prominent, transparent disclosure of abortion coverage for each plan offered on an exchange.
• This is vital information since the many plans that include elective abortion are required by law to impose a mandatory monthly abortion surcharge.  These surcharges are not optional.  Once you sign up for a plan with abortion coverage, you MUST pay the surcharge.  Doubtlessly there are many Americans who would object to paying a surcharge into a fund to be used for the purpose of destroying innocent human lives.
• When you buy a house, the mortgage documents always clearly disclose the total cost of the mortgage with interest over the length of the loan. Yet, when search for insurance plans that could include an abortion surcharge, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to simply find out if the plan includes abortion.
• A telephone representative with the D.C. Health Link said that persons wishing to know about abortion coverage should call each individual health insurance carrier individually.  The average person seeking coverage on a marketplace should not have to spend hours trying to obtain basic information about whether or not they will have to pay a surcharge for a procedure that dismembers and chemically poisons innocent unborn children.
• If consumers call the insurance companies they still may not get answers to their questions. Contacting CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield in Maryland, the Charlotte Lozier Institute was told that customer-service representatives “don’t get a full contract” to have on hand and the “part of the site [that would allow her to determine whether abortion was covered] is not working.”
• A representative with the “Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat” told one consumer “You may have to wait until you pick a plan to see if they cover abortions.” Once an individual enrolls is clearly too late, since he or she will be required to pay the monthly abortion surcharge at that point.
• The ACA law says that enrollees can only be notified of abortion coverage “as part of the summary of benefits and coverage explanation, at the time of enrollment.”  Only providing this information as a part of the summary of benefits and coverage explanation at the time of enrollment is unacceptable, but it appears that even that requirement is being ignored, since the summary of benefits documents posted on the federally facilitated exchange don’t even list whether the plan includes abortion or not.
• So far we know that at least two states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, do not have a single plan that excludes elective abortion.

Make plans now to participate in the #BeTransparent TweetFest. Also be sure to click on the Facebook events page that you are attending.

I see a lot of women without kids, in their 40s, who are miserable and I see a lot of women after they have children saying, “what the f*** was I doing? Why was I doing fashion PR? I was doing seating plans for a fashion show telling what people sit in what chair. Now I’m shaping human life.”…

I see the housewife as a far superior vocation to mine, and to most….

I mean I make commercials, and funny videos, and T.V. shows or whatever, film projects that people will watch for ten minutes and go ‘heh’ and get on with their day. I essentially… make comic books. You flip through it and you’re done. My wife creates life from her vagina and then — that’s just the beginning — then she shapes this human life….

Who is changing the world more?…

[The birth of my children] made me religious. I was an atheist most of my life and now I am a God-fearing Catholic, because of the miracle of life. And I’m [now] pro-life.

~ Controversial editor, writer, comedian and “Godfather of Hipsterdom” Gavin McInnes, expressing his belief that childbirth and raising children are too often trivialized, as quoted by The Daily Caller, October 23

[HT: The Guiding Star Project; photo via Vimeo]

From Townhall.com comes news that a new Pennsylvania law slaps unwanted “baby bump” touchers with harassment charges. The question is, according to Townhall, – “[S]eeing as touching a woman without her consent is illegal already, why is it that we need to make laws against this too?”

[JLS note, 10/29, 12p: The code in this video was throwing off the margins on our site, so I had to remove it. View it here.]

What do you think? Is the law necessary?

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

When ‘No Easy Decision’ came out, that was the first time that I was hearing other people’s stories, and the first time I had engaged with strangers and people who weren’t my close friends about abortion experiences. That experience with MTV really reinforced for me that it can be really powerful to provide these opportunities and to allow stories to heard — stories that are complex, and that don’t necessarily fit a pro-choice or pro-life narrative.

~ Pro-choice, post-abortive activist Katie Stack on supporting an abortion “speak out” at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Think Progress, October 24

Katie’s abortion story was featured on MTV’s “No Easy Decision” with Dr. Drew in 2010.

[Photo via KatieStack.com]

by Hans Johnson

Simon was not just “man’s best friend” to David Furukawa, he was the visually-impaired man’s guide dog. While they were walking his four-year-old son Will to school, a car ran a stop sign and struck the 80-lb. boxer, breaking his leg and causing internal injuries as he pushed young Will forward. Furukawa was also hit and rolled on to the car, left sprawled on the street with a broken elbow, knee, and heel.

Then, as witnesses rushed the boy back to his home, the dog limped after them, only collapsing after they arrived. While family members were transporting Simon to the animal hospital, he died.

A report on this family’s best friend from HLN:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/om-EoTT2GuI[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: TheBlaze; photo from CNN]