by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Detroit News columnist Laura Berman has a rudderless and rather pointless column entitled, “Rhetoric impedes abortion debate,” discussing Planned Parenthood’s attempt to re-frame the abortion issue and dump the “pro-choice” label. The title is odd coming from someone whose columns have been permeated with pro-choice rhetoric for years. Maybe it’s just pro-life rhetoric that impedes pro-choicers from having their way?

  I think a lot of the talking heads (who are basically tools of PP) are finding difficulty making Planned Parenthood’s newest talking points cohesive with their beliefs and arguments.

• Some pro-choice tolerance at DePaul University:
  

  At about 5:00 PM Tuesday evening the DePaul YAF chairman, Kristopher Del Campo, along with other executive board members, went to remove the flag display. But what they found was startling; the flags had been removed and stuffed into trash bins [pictured] inside and outside the entrance to the DePaul library.

• Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk abortion, the pro-life movement and single mother families in Salon, arguing that the pro-life movement’s success is the cause of rising of out-of-wedlock births. Ross Douthat responds:
  

  But Cahn and Carbone’s suggestion notwithstanding, for whites as well as minorities the steepest increase in the out-of-wedlock birth rate actually occurred in the years immediately following Roe itself…. ([T]he white out-of-wedlock birth rate nearly quadrupled between 1970 and 1990; it has only risen by about fifty percent in the two decades since.)

  Meanwhile, divorce rates and teen pregnancy rates both rose with the abortion rate and then fell with it from the early 1990s onward — which, again, is not exactly the pattern you’d expect if abortion-on-demand was a major boon to the two-parent household, and pro-life sentiment a significant driver of family breakdown.

[Photos via yaf.org]

by Hans Johnson

On January 15, the Susan B. Anthony List sat down on Capitol Hill for a discussion with many of our pro-life leaders on Roe v. Wade’s impact on mothers and their children.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/dawFw_fPCw8[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Jill]

by Hans Johnson

Discussing where the pro-life movement has been and where it is going are John Piper, founder of desiringGod; John Ensor, president of PassionLife; and Scott Klusendorf, president of Life Training Institute,  who says:

As a pastor, it’s easy to take a stand on popular social issues. But what about unpopular ones?

John Piper addresses that question in this 45-second clip.

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

You can see the four-part interview here.
Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Scott Klusendorf]

Tony at BloodWorker.com has just released this video, taken on October 16, 2012, at the Women’s Pavilion abortion clinic in South Bend, Indiana.

It features aged abortionist Ulrich G. Klopfer, who decided to engage in a debate with pro-life sidewalk counselor Ellen and her 12-yr-old daughter. Klopfer sadistically envisions a theoretical  gang-rape of the girl:

And while your little girl gets raped by 10 guys, gets pregnant with twins, you’re gonna have your grandchildren. Shut up!

I’m not sure whether Klopfer was calling Ellen a hypocrite, implying that in the unthinkable event her daughter was gang-raped, and then impregnated, she’d come knocking; or whether he was wishing a gang rape and pregnancy on the girl. Either way, sick. Who thinks like this?

Just before that verbal altercation a racist abortion worker told Ellen if her daughter “got pregnant by a black dude you would put your picket sign down, bring her in here, get an abortion, go back out there.”

This was reminiscent of the time abortionist Ashutosh Ron Virmani yelled at pro-lifers to “adopt those ugly black babies.” Again, who thinks like this?

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

We are a plague on the earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now….

We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves — and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.

~ British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, as quoted by The Telegraph, January 22. Attenborough is a patron of The Optimum Population Trust, which recommends a two-child policy for families and also supports abortion and homosexuality as two means of curbing population growth.

LiveScience has more to say on the topic, including the insistence that what the world needs now is more contraceptives.

[Photo via datuopinion.com]

This morning pro-lifers were singing and praying in front of Mississippi’s lone remaining abortion clinic when a security guard pepper-sprayed three of them in the face.

The aggressor was Roy Benjamin, a private, armed security guard who works for Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in Jackson.

Clinic staff had placed an oscillating sprinkler on the public sidewalk to spray pro-lifers (also blocking the entrance to patrons).

Benjamin apparently became incensed after 15-yr-old Jim Zastrow put his shoe over the oscillator to keep it from spraying his father Cal, who was witnessing to mothers and staff on the public sidewalk next to it.

After Jim refused to move his foot, Benjamin suddenly and without warning left clinic property and shot first Jim and then Cal in the face with pepper spray.

When pro-lifer Doug Lane, who was videotaping the scene, told Benjamin, “Dude, you’re going to jail on that one, bro,” Benjamin pepper-sprayed him in the face as well.

All three were taken to the hospital, where they were treated for eye, throat, and facial irritation. All three have been released.

When I spoke with Cal, he was at the police station pressing charges. Good for him.

Here’s video of the incident:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrJLIx7zNRA[/youtube]

Here is how the incident was described on WAPTnews.com:

Jackson Police Department spokeswoman Officer Colendula Green said… when the three pro-life supporters came onto the property, the guard turned on a sprinkler and got them wet. The trio walked toward the guard and a verbal argument broke out between them, which resulted in the guard spraying them, she said.

Clinic officials said the sprinkler was there to water the grass….

“When you’ve got people screaming at the women who come in here and a governor who evidently thinks that’s OK, this is exactly what’s going to happen,” said clinic owner Diane Derzis.

Derzis said the guard felt threatened and defended himself.

Fortunately there is video to prove this was all totally fabricated.

And who waters their grass in 45 degree weather in January?

[HT: Leslie Hanks of The Passionate Pro-Lifer]

by LauraLoo

In commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

This first video contains audio excerpts from the actual 1973 Supreme Court hearing on the monumental Roe v. Wade case:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81NrWq3p5Ag&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

Next, the three-part story of Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQzdMv6nW4o[/youtube]

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Anyone else feel like it really is a tide that is turning these days? The American College of Nurse Midwives issued a statement in support of working towards quality, competent care for trans and gender non-conforming people.

Woo-hoo!

~ Radical Doula Miriam Zoila Pérez, January 17, excited over a recent statement issued by ACNM that “addresses the need for education about transgender issues in midwifery education.” The statement explains:

[G]ender variant individuals desire parenting roles and can and do create biological families….

[Photo, via UK Telegraph, is of pregnant transgendered California couple Scott and Thomas Moore, both born as girls, and their two adopted sons, “children of a former female partner of Thomas’s.” Scott is due with his/her first baby next month.]