by LauraLoo

Along with other Democrats recently voicing their approval on abortion-related topics, Chelsea Clinton recently lamented that her great-grandparents, who conceived her grandmother in an unplanned, unwed pregnancy, did not have access to “crucial” Planned Parenthood services.

So what is Chelsea saying? Is she in one sense wishing away her beloved grandmother, thereby wishing away her mother and herself? Is she, like some PP supporters including President Obama, using family members in an extremely awkward fashion to pander to pro-choicers and Planned Parenthood?

Hot Air notes:

It’s one thing to support family planning while being glad on some level that a distant ancestor couldn’t plan you into oblivion and another to pander to Planned Parenthood in the same breath that you’re talking about what an inspiration your grandmother, who otherwise wouldn’t have existed, was to you. It’s like getting your mom a Mother’s Day card that ends with “Sorry your parents didn’t have a choice whether to have you.” Um, happy Mother’s Day.

The whole video is worth watching, but relevant remarks begin around 18:50. Your thoughts?

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Drudge Report]

There are some brave, noble souls fighting the good fight, hoping against hope that the current situation can be salvaged, but it cannot.

No economy that has become a welfare state can sustain an aging population by draining the resources of the young, particularly when there are less and less young people who can have their resources drained.

~ Michael Voris, making the case for a grim view of the future of Western society, Church Militant.tv, June 21

[Photo courtesy of National Interest.org]

Following are my top five favorite cartoons for the week that was. Don’t forget to vote for your fav in the poll at the bottom of the post.

We begin with two I certainly wouldn’t call “favorites” but am posting because they have to do with our topic and show how liberals are lamely trying to spin the House’s passage of a bill that would ban abortions past 20 weeks in the U.S. because babies feel pain by that time…

by Mike Luckovich at GoComics.com…

 by Nick Anderson at About.com…

 by pro-abortion Joel Pett at GoComics.com, a bit of blind irony…

 by Glenn McCoy at Townhall.com (based on this comment by President Obama in Ireland)…

 by Dana Summers at GoComics.com (regarding the First Family’s trip to Africa next week)…

For the Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.

~ Job 33:4, New Living Translation

by Hans Johnson

Three-year-old Grayson Clamp has been deaf all his life as a result of a genetic disorder called Charge Syndrome. His parents Len and Nicole, who felt called to help medically-challenged children, met him as a newborn and soon adopted him. Not having cochlear nerves,  a cochlear implant was, as one would expect, unsuccessful. But as part of a trial at the University of North Carolina Hospital at Chapel Hill, he received an auditory brainstem implant – the first in the U.S.

When it was turned on after the successful surgery,  his father said: “I’ve never seen another look like that! I mean, he looked deep into my eyes and he was hearing my voice for the first time!”

Here is the report from WBTV:

WBTV 3 News, Weather, Sports, and Traffic for Charlotte, NC

There is much work to do, but Grayson’s mother has faith he will do well: “He is a very determined little boy. He makes up his mind he is going to do something – he’s going to do it!”

The family was on Fox and Friends Weekend Saturday morning.

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: TheBlaze]

[Image via hollywoodlife.com]

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.

• Wesley J. Smith says that laws dealing with Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) “are increasingly authorizing doctors to unilaterally overturn surrogate wishes and patient advance directives….”

  The laws vary from state to state, but in Vermont and Maryland, a physician can place a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order on a patient’s chart without the consent of the patient or designated patient advocate. Smith writes:
  

  Not coincidentally, Vermont has a single payer healthcare plan it can’t pay for. Some have called for the cost savings to come from assisted suicide legalization – now done – and healthcare rationing.

• Suzy B notes that during her remarks in favor of the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act this week, Rep. Michele Bachmann showed the sonogram of the son of two SBA List employees. He may have the distinction of helping to save lives before his actual birthday!
• Right to Life of Michigan lauds the passing of a state bill that prevents minors from “judge shopping” to obtain judicial bypass in order to skirt parental consent laws.
• At Secular Pro-Life, Frank Ludwig examines the origin of the feminist movement, showing that early feminists were pro-life. Demands for voting and property rights morphed into demands for contraception at the beginning of the 20th century, and then to abortion in the 60’s:
  

  Some even claim that one can’t be a feminist without being pro-abortion, but fact is that feminists before Betty Friedan strongly opposed abortion as the taking of a human life. In light of the developments of the past 45 years, the remaining pro-life feminists started organizing themselves in groups such as Feminists for Life who were founded in 1972 but “stand on more than two hundred years of pro-life feminist history.”

• Fr. Frank Pavone is getting a lot of press for his open letter to Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (pictured right with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, and sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer) in response to her public statements about abortion and her Catholic faith:
  

  “You make a mockery of the Catholic faith,” the letter tells her, and says that her comments “reveal a profound failure to understand your own political responsibilities.” The letter concludes, “Either exercise your duties as a public servant and a Catholic, or have the honesty to formally renounce them.”

  Members of the public can read and sign the letter here.

• Real Choice encourages readers to help the producers of 3801 Lancaster – a must-see documentary on Kermit Gosnell’s atrocities – to finance the next part of their series, which will “expose the truth of what happens when pro-choice groups, politicians, and bureaucrats are trusted to oversee abortion.”
• Alveda King of Priests for Life discusses the 20-week abortion ban passed by the House this week, as well as Rep. Trent Franks’ comments, under fire from abortion supporters:
  

  Congressman Franks stated that the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancies that are aborted in the sixth month of pregnancy or later is “very low.” How is this even controversial?

  We know from studies on the subject that rape results in pregnancy from about 1% to 5% of the time, depending on authors of the studies. According to one study citing the 5% stats, half of those pregnancies are aborted. We don’t know what portion of those 2.5% of rapes result in abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy or later, but government statistics tell us that 1.4% of all abortions occur in the 21st week or later.

  So, is it outrageous to suggest that 1.4% of 2.5% (0.035%) is a very low amount?

[Pelosi image via pinterest.com]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The Los Angeles Times has a story on Hoag Hospital’s decision to merge with the St. Joseph Health System and stop performing abortions. To get an idea of how pro-abortion some people in California are, the attorney general of the state is now investigating whether Hoag performed less than 100 abortions a year and is making sure Hoag is “doing enough to ensure that there are accessible alternatives for elective abortions.”
• Notice the difference in headlines. From the headline in the Denver Post (“Hundreds testify against new Texas abortion regs”), you’d never know pro-lifers testified in favor of the bill.
• PennLive’s John Micek provides an incoherent reason for why he opposes abortion restrictions:
  

  And I’ve been equally disdainful of elected officials who put needless obstacles in the way of women seeking access to a legal medical procedure.

  And that’s what abortion is: a legal medical procedure. You can disagree with whether it’s right. I’m of the “safe, legal and rare” school myself. But until something changes, it’s the law of the land.

  So you’re opposed to laws which restrict abortion because legal abortion is the law of the land and it will be that way until something changes (like the passage of a pro-life law which restricts abortion?) Later, Micek goes on to prove he knows next to nothing about the Gosnell case by claiming Pennsylvania’s unenforced pro-life laws inevitably led to Gosnell.

• Debra Saunders writes about the dangers of egg donation. California is considering a bill to legalize payments to egg donors and one proponent of the measure compared donating eggs to donating sperm:
  

  Alice Crisci, a cancer survivor and patient advocate for Fertile Action, testified that the ban on research payments “is discriminatory. It assumes all women are incapable of making their own decisions about their reproductive well-being if fair compensation is allowed.” Researchers compensate men for donated sperm, she added, so it’s only fair to compensate egg donors.

  That sperm-egg parity argument is so bogus. When men donate sperm, they risk second thoughts about unknown, random offspring, but they do not risk serious medical side effects. Egg donation, on the other hand, can be hazardous to your health. The New York Times reports, “Egg donors can suffer serious side effects from the powerful hormones needed to generate multiple eggs.” And: “The most significant risk is ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, which can cause bloating, abdominal pain and, rarely, blood clots, kidney failure and other life-threatening ailments.”

[Image via whatishowto.net]

 by LauraLoo

The recent death of Jean Stapleton allowed me time to reflect on the stark difference in two TV sitcom moms from the 1970s: Edith Bunker and Maude.

Edith Bunker was a slow-witted, big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series All in the Family.

On the other hand, Maude portrayed by Bea Arthur, often got into heated debates and occasionally succumbed to her liberal-thinking daughter Carol’s viewpoint. The show, controversial at the time, featured Maude’s unplanned pregnancy at age 47 and how her daughter tried to push abortion as the only logical solution due to her age and the fact that it was just made legal, thanks to Roe v. Wade:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxy0DTMXhwY[/youtube]

Watch Part 2 here, as well as commentary by the producer of both sitcoms, Norman Lear, on the controversy surrounding Maude.

Do you think millennials would buy into watching a new TV sitcom similar in comedy style to the submissive Edith Bunker, or the abrasive, more liberal Maude?

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.