by LauraLoo

It is such a privilege to post, on this 50th anniversary – the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s address at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, in Washington, D.C.

This is one of the most iconic and most important speeches EVER on the importance of valuing all human beings – and on judging them not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

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

The metaphors, imagery and alliterations in this speech are, in my opinion, unparalleled.  Dr. King’s speech was used as the example to follow in my Speech Fundamentals class 20 years ago, and it made a lasting impression on my mind and heart.

Some questions to ponder:

1.  50 years later, have we made progress and, if so, how?

2.  What about civil rights, freedom and liberty for the preborn?

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Liberals are smart. They target our greatest weapons. But too many Republicans see our greatest weapons as our greatest weaknesses.

In short, I’m not impressed or intimidated by rabid women with coathangers, mommy dearest.

~ Pro-life political commentator Alfonzo Rachel, PJTV’s ZoNation, August 20

RH Reality Check’s Andrea Grimes and Sharona Coutts wrote a piece last week deeming it a “myth” that babies survive abortions:

Gosnell was, in fact, a rogue provider, and that there is no evidence of a pattern of infants being “born alive” after an abortion, much less of doctors killing infants in those circumstances….

[T]his notion – that there are multiple cases of fetuses surviving an abortion, only to be killed by a doctor – is a confection of the anti-choice camp, designed to replace fact-based arguments with the lowest form of fear-mongering….

During a state committee hearing in Florida earlier this year, anti-choice legislators ambushed a Planned Parenthood lobbyist with a “born alive” inquiry…. Flummoxed, the lobbyist struggled to answer questions that were largely based on a myth.

Grimes and Coutts based their conclusion on responses 38 attorneys general have provided to the House Judiciary Committee in answer to a letter that in part asked whether they had ever prosecuted an abortionist for murdering abortion survivors.

The authors did acknowledge knowing of one abortionist who murdered abortion survivors (Kermit Gosnell) and one abortionist whose botched abortion resulted in a live birth (James Pendergraft).

But had Grimes and Coutts cared to truly investigate, they would have found much more evidence.

How about 77 annually? Would that constitute “a pattern”? As Americans United for Life reported:

In 2003, the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] reports that 40 newborns died as a result of pregnancy terminations in the United States.  In another 37 cases that year, abortion was a “secondary” cause of death. In 2005, there were 45 reported born-alive deaths after abortion, with another 21 “secondary” deaths associated with abortion.

Abortion reporting to the CDC is voluntary, with some blue states like California opting not to, so those figures are almost certainly low. As an aside, while the CDC has the mechanism to report these statistics, it has stopped doing so.

When I went public about my experience holding an abortion survivor as a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, the hospital admitted to the Chicago Sun-Times no small number of babies survived abortions there:

In 2001, a perinatal symposium co-sponsored by the Waukesha Memorial Hospital OB/Gyn Dept. and The Medical College of Wisconsin OB/Gyn Dept. reported “Live birth” as a “complication” of a “labor Induction Mid-Trimester,” i.e., abortion:

How rare can post-abortive live births be if spotlighted?

Then there are the abortion survivors. Birth certificates for Gianna Jessen and Melissa Ohden prove they were two of those “complications.” Their stories and those of seven other survivors can be found at theabortionsurvivors.com. Melissa, who runs that website, told me today she is in contact with 157 abortion survivors. The youngest is two years old. (Her adoptive parents reached out to Melissa.)

The RHRC authors failed to note at least one other live birth at a Pendergraft abortion clinic. Listen to the 911 call. Clinic workers told EMTs,”There’s nothing to see here,” and the EMTs inexplicably said, “fine.”

Another abortionist, Pierre Renelique, lost his license in 2009 following the death of an abortion survivor. Nevertheless, that baby’s murder was never prosecuted.

But back to the RH Reality Check story.

Actually, in their rush to carry water for the abortion industry, Grimes and Coutts completely missed the story.

That is, why is there such a discrepancy between the reality of babies born alive after abortions and those AG reports?

For starters, is anyone in state government even looking for them? The Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act was signed into law eight years ago, in 2005. Yet to this day the State of Illinois abortion reporting form doesn’t even ask the question: Did any babies survive your abortion? Click to enlarge…

Furthermore, as indicated on the symposium screen shot above, code language is often used for late-term abortions. In that case they were called “labor induction mid-trimester.” Loyola Hospital called them ”early induction of labor.” Christ Hospital said they were “mid-trimester labor inductions.” When an abortion survivor died, Christ Hospital often listed the cause of death as “extreme prematurity.” So the real cause of death is often hidden.

Before Gosnell was caught, the State of Pennsylvania would never have responded “yes” to a congressional letter asking if it had a problem with a) abortion survivors, b) who were being murdered. What abortionist in his or her right mind is going to report a fixed botch?

The other story here is analyzing the motive for RH Reality Check to go out on such a long limb to claim born alive abortions are “myths” in the first place. Both reasons are found in the story.

“…  the anti-choice bogeyman of the soulless abortion doctor, slaughtering newborns in clinics across the country with nary a second thought.”

and

“… it is more than a little misleading for the House Judiciary Committee to suggest that newborn children are being murdered by abortion providers with regularity and abandon; it is the very myth-making and fear-mongering on which they increasingly rely in their push to eliminate safe abortion care.”

The answers are:

1. The prospect of abortion survivors – and abortion survivors being murdered – only humanizes abortion victims in the minds of the public and makes them think worse of the industry. It’s terrible PR.

2. The abortion industry is scrambling to stem the tide of bills among the states creating abortion clinic regulations. It is also desperate to stop investigations that expose its underbelly.

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 Live Action News, Calvin Freiburger warns abortion advocates not to party too much over RH Reality Check’s (I’m sure totally nonbiased) analysis claiming abortion is completely safe and already extremely regulated, so pro-life legislation is a waste of time:
  

  … A-OKs from state agencies don’t automatically settle the issue. No pro-lifer denies that the average abortionist has basic common sense about avoiding punishment and lawsuits, getting paid, or ensuring repeat customers. The bigger issue is that when abortionists do skirt the rules, liberal government officials and abortion movement leaders can’t be trusted to hold them accountable.The least-acknowledged detail of the Kermit Gosnell case, after all, is that both the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the National Abortion Federation deliberately ignored Gosnell since the early 1990s. Indeed, when faced with those supposedly-nonexistent born-alive abortions, the current occupant of the White House decided nothing should be done about them.

• Down on the Pharm discusses New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates, and their apparent efforts to outdo each other with repulsiveness:
  

  Christine Quinn [pictured left], current speaker of the city council, is good buddy to Planned Parenthood and foe to pregnancy care centers. She is pushing to supply the morning after pill in middle schools.

What’s next? Slipping birth control pills into the lunches of elementary students?

• American Life League says the Catholic Church has failed to take a principled stand against Obamacare’s contraception/abortion mandate, even going so far as to accept grants to advance the law’s implementation.
• Big Blue Wave posts a story, written with a pro-abortion bias, profiling the pro-life movement in Canada. There seems to be quite a bit of concern over many young, unabashedly pro-life, “charismatic” leaders.
• Americans United for Life joins with 83 Oklahoma legislators concerned about women’s health and safety by filing an amicus curiae brief in the OK State Supreme Court regarding the use of the abortion drug known as RU-486:
  

  “Women have died when these deadly, life-ending drugs, are administered in ways not advised by the FDA, and yet the abortion industry lobbies and files suit to use them contrary to FDA protocol anyway,” said AUL Action President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest. “It is scandalous that Big Abortion puts its profits over the safety of women….

Big Abortion openly flaunts its dangerous misuse of abortion-inducing drugs such as the RU-486 regimen. The FDA approved the drugs only through 49 days gestation — but abortion providers administer them up to 63 days. The drugs are to be taken in a clinic or doctor’s office—but abortion providers send women home to administer the drugs alone and away from medical supervision….”

• Ethika Politika wonders why motherhood is considered taboo among young women’s future aspirations:
  

  Why, in a world constantly reassuring women that they can do anything they want, do so many women identify a sense of embarrassment when admitting a desire to embrace motherhood as a legitimate and stimulating life option?…

The lack of essential connection between sexuality and family gives rise to the phenomena of “choosing to have a family,” a hobby seemingly no different than choosing to start a garden, or choosing to take up marathon running, except with far greater start up and overhead costs. When children are not seen as a good in themselves, but rather as a good dependent upon their parents’ whim, having and raising children becomes inadvertently viewed through a lens of suspicion. Is it really the best thing for a woman to waste economic resources and stay at home enjoying a hobby, when she could be contributing to society? Moreover, if she chose to work and have children, she could outsource the maintenance of the child’s basic necessities to another. She could remain an autonomous contributor to and participant in modern life; she could do so much more than simply raising a child.

This belies an inherently false assumption, namely, that devoting oneself to the formation and development of the next generation by raising a child is not a worthy endeavor.

• 40 Days for Life plans to celebrate, on September 7, the closure of the Bryan/College Station Planned Parenthood in Texas, in operation for 15 years. Interestingly, 40 Days chooses not to legitimize abortion facilities as “clinics” because the majority are not licensed as ambulatory surgical treatment centers:

[Quinn image via NY Daily News; graphic via Ethika Politika]

by Hans Johnson

We’ve all heard of road rage: sudden bursts of anger because of supposed slights by another motorist. Some also can’t control themselves around others with differing points of view.

Donna Holman knows this quite well from past experience – and most recently from her experience on the morning of August 21 when she was protesting in front of a Planned Parenthood in Iowa City, Iowa. Mrs. Holman, of Missionaries to the Preborn of Iowa, was struck in the back of her shoulder by a man, sending the literature she was holding to the ground. He then kept walking without saying a word.

She grabbed her walkie-talkie and alerted her husband Dan, who was protesting two blocks away. He chased down the assaulter, who was Man Chun John Ma (pictured above right), a 30-year-old from Hong Kong and a graduate student at the University of Iowa, and began interviewing him with his video camera  Asked why he,  a 6′ 1″ 200-lb. young man would hit a 78-year-old woman, he said: “Sorry about that. I know I’m in trouble.”

Ma later admitted to the arresting officer: “I did punch her. That was probably wrong.”

Unfortunately, the arresting officer seems to suggest that Ma’s reaction was provoked by Mrs. Holman’s practice of free speech (holding an anti-abortion sign):

“Listen, you and I both know why he did it,” the officer tells Holman on camera. “He doesn’t like the sign. I personally don’t like the sign… he was extremely offended by the sign… you’re looking to provoke an extreme reaction with that. I don’t have a problem with what you’re doing; I don’t like it… but that doesn’t mean that what he did was okay.”

Court documents say that Ma’s motive for the crime was that “he found the idea of being anti-abortion to be strange.”  He was released from jail on a $1,000 bond and is expected in court on September 11.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/kK5mp1wF3mM[/youtube]

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[HT: TheBlaze]

In a statement set to be published in the September issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 100 ob-gyns condemn new state restrictions on abortion as a “political regression.” The article… criticizes hospitals for relinquishing abortion to stand-alone clinics that are easily targeted by abortion activists, and calls on the medical community to integrate the procedure into women’s-health services and medical training.

“In our view, hospitals have disregarded the responsibility that our academic predecessors expected them to assume,” the professors write. “The savings in lives and money from legalization were soon forgotten and many hospitals now claim they cannot afford to provide abortions even if they wanted to….”

It’s a rare call to arms for the medical community, which tends to lay low when it comes to abortion. A 2011 study from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists found that while 97% of ob-gyn doctors in the U.S. have met with a patient who wants an abortion, just 14% actually perform the procedure.

Hospitals provide just 4% of abortions in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit sexual-health-research organization, and many facilities limit the procedure to rare cases, like fetal abnormalities or when the life of the woman is at risk. The majority of hospitals perform fewer than 30 abortions per year. Others refuse to provide the procedure at all….

In the end, many doctors are faced with the unsatisfying choice of either performing abortions, or becoming a practicing ob-gyn….

Despite these obstacles, however, pro-choice physicians say they have already made progress toward normalizing abortion in the medical community, most notably by expanding training through residency programs and family-planning fellowships. About 50% of the 200 ob-gyn residency programs in the U.S. now integrate abortion into training requirements, up from just 12% in 1992. Professors believe that a new generation of doctors will use their training to bring abortion back into hospitals and doctors’ offices. A 2011 study of ob-gyns found that female doctors and those ages 35 and younger were far more likely than their colleagues to perform abortions.

“It is very unusual for us to find new residents who don’t want to learn abortions,” [former Planned Parenthood board member and current UCSF professor Philip] Darney says. “They may find it difficult to practice, but we have a whole new generation of young women who are replacing the old men, and they have a very different view about their relationships with their patients. It’s very promising.”

~ Grace Wyler, Time, August 23

[HT: Susie Allen; photo of recent Hoag Hospital protest via newportbeach.patch.com]

With attendance estimated to range between 200,000 to 500,000, the March for Life is the largest annual civil rights event in the world.

For 40 years, founder Nellie Gray, pictured right, dedicated herself to the March for Life. “The last call she made before she died was about the March,” new M4L president Jeanne Monahan told me in an interview. Jeanne was appointed to her position after Nellie passed away in August 2012.

Jeanne and her team are now exploring ways to expand on Nellie’s vision and to capitalize on the innate power M4L holds. With advances online, in texting, and social media, I’ve hoped for the day when M4L would tap into the strength of its vast yearly crowd of mostly young people to promote the sanctity of life in a greater capacity. Jeanne agrees: “We want to make March for Life a year-round thing.”

M4L was founded as a 501(c)3 nonprofit educational organization. Many don’t know Nellie also created a 501(c)4, which can involve itself in politics through lobbying legislation that advances the sanctity of life and also support pro-life candidates.

“The March for Life has always been ‘no exceptions, no compromise,'” said Jeanne. “But very few bills and candidates are that pure. M4L seeks to move both in that direction.”

Seeking to reactivate its political arm, M4L wooed Family Research Council Vice President Tom McClusky, pictured left, earlier this month to head its (c)4 division. His vision?

“I’m basically heading a 40-year-old brand new organization,” Tom told me, since the (c)4 has not been active for a number of years. “But I’m not looking to replace any other organization.”

Tom said he tried to look at what was unique about the M4L, which, of course, is its populace. “But they come to D.C., march, go back home, and then what?” Tom noted.

So Tom wants to create citizen lobbyists – get young people to call their legislators. “Currently neither Senate nor House leadership whips on pro-life issues, but that is going to change,” Tom promised. Tom wants to keep marchers engaged, much as Barack Obama did during his campaigns as well as the Tea Party.

Tom also sees M4L as a relationship builder between pro-life groups. “My role would be to help them on the Hill,” Tom explained.

But M4L is primarily concerned with education. That is its heart. “We want not just to make abortion illegal but also undesirable to any woman or man. We want people to know abortion is never good for anyone – the baby, mom, or dad,” Jeanne explained.

As for the M4L itself, leaders are focusing on outreach to Evangelicals, “because we know the event is mostly Catholic, but most of America isn’t,” said Jeanne. To that end M4L has hired Bethany Goodman, a member of McLean Bible Church, and has also formed an Evangelical task force.

Jeanne, pictured right, would additionally like to use M4L’s platform to encourage adoption as a heroic choice and to spotlight that abortion hurts women. And Jeanne is working to expand M4L’s presence in the media and as an educational organization.

In 2014, M4L organizers will also encourage marchers to post on Facebook and Twitter and work harder to capture email addresses and phone numbers. They will also foster unity by having all the major groups represented on stage during the rally.

“Politics is downstream from culture,” Jeanne summarized. “We want to stand on the shoulders of a giant, Nellie, and work both upstream and downstream to create a culture of life – with no exceptions.”

[Top photo via LifeSiteNews.com]

by LauraLoo

Kanye West was the special guest on Kris Jenner’s new show (Kris) .  He debuted the first photo of his daughter with fiancee Kim Kardashian. Their daughter (North West) is nicknamed Nori.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IciJbbIi300[/youtube]

Not only does Nori look just like Kim, she’s even decked out like Kim in black (for that matter, Kanye too). 

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