I wouldn’t say that it’s been easy. When people say pregnancy is fun and they love it I would have to disagree. I think from this stage on it does become easier, but it’s adjusting….

Even my sister has made it look easy, but it’s not as easy as people think. It’s a little painful…. But I heard it’s all worth it, so I’m looking forward to that.

~ Reality TV star Kim Kardashian speaking about her pregnancy, via Huffington Post, January 1. The baby’s father is singer Kanye West.

[Photo via nydailynews.com]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The Hill reports Nancy Keenan will step down as the leader of NARAL:
  
  She plans to stay on at NARAL through the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade — which happens to fall just a day after Inauguration Day. The organization hasn’t picked a successor yet.
• Christianity Today interviews Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dean Russell Moore about “why adoption has become his personal cause and why more evangelicals should be joining him.”
• Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma lost a WIC contract:
  
  Terry J. Bryce, chief of the WIC program for the Health Department, said he recommended termination because the organization had a large decrease in clients, had a higher per-client cost for services and was unresponsive to repeated requests for information from his agency….

  Without a preliminary injunction in place, Planned Parenthood will be forced to stop WIC services… and the group may close its west Tulsa health center.

• At First Things, Jon Shields discusses how Roe v. Wade led to a collapse in the pro-choice movement while spurring the pro-life movement to affect our culture:
  
  While Roe bred apathy and conservatism in pro-choice ranks, it energized many pro-lifers. With the Supreme Courthaving removed abortion from the political process and deprived pro-lifers of normal avenues of political influence, some decided to blockade abortion clinics instead. Between 1977 and 1993, pro-life radicals orchestrated some six hundred blockades, leading to more than 33,000 arrests.

  Most pro-life activists, however, dedicated their lives to changing the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens, rather than simply obstructing them from procuring abortions. The more Americans who opposed abortion on moral grounds or were offered practical alternatives to abortion, such activists reasoned, the fewer abortions, whatever the laws of the land. These pro-life advocates quietly began countless conversations with ordinary citizens and continue to do so in great numbers.

• The Akron Beacon Journal has an article on how Planned Parenthood staff and an abortion protestor helped another protestor who was hit by a truck.
• Christopher Kenyon Simpson has pleaded not guilty after being accused of killing Ka’Loni Marie Flynn and her unborn child.

• At Public Discourse, Melissa Moschella discusses recent decisions on the HHS Mandate and the attempt of some judges to play theologians:
  
  In the HHS mandate cases brought by Frank O’Brien and the Green family, however, the judges found no reason to doubt either the plaintiffs’ sincerity or the religious nature of their beliefs. To remain within the limits of their competence, their investigation into the applicability of RFRA — and therefore of the need for the government to defend the mandate as narrowly tailored to the achievement of a compelling state interest — should have stopped there.

  Unfortunately, it did not. Instead, the judges crossed the line by denying the substantive correctness of the plaintiffs’ belief that providing insurance coverage for contraceptives and/or abortifacients is morally wrong. As Judge Jackson put it, despite the plaintiffs’ sincere claims to the contrary, “the challenged regulations do not… prevent plaintiffs from acting in accordance with their religious beliefs.”In effect, Judges Jackson and Heaton are telling the Greens and Frank O’Brien — and by extension the 108 other plaintiffs challenging the mandate as well — that they, and the religious authorities who support them, simply have their theology wrong.

[Milwaukee protest photo via milwaukeesfinest.net; Hobby Lobby photo via asoftplace.net]

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The title of the January 14 issue of Time magazine reads, “40 years ago, abortion-rights activists won an epic victory with Roe v. Wade. They’ve been losing ever since.”

It’s hard to imagine the other side thinks they’re losing. They’re defending their turf atop 55 million dead babies. How many more do they want? They heap 1.2-1.6 million more every year. But I agree we are slowly but surely strangling them, even as they slowly but surely commit harikari.

The cover article is only available by subscription, but I will excerpt its major points. It’s always fascinating to me to view the situation through the other side’s eyes.

Before I list them, I want to mention that Time also published an excellent essay by Susan B. Anthony List’s Emily Buchanan, “Pro-life and feminism aren’t mutually exclusive,” which is viewable online.

On to the list of pro-abortion laments…

Pro-life laws

In the past two decades, laws like the ones that govern appointments at Red River [in North Dakota] have been passed with regularity as pro-life state legislators have redrawn the boundaries of legal abortion in the U.S. In 2011, 92 abortion-regulating provisions – a record number – passed in 24 states after Republicans gained new and larger majorities in 2010 in many legislatures across the country. These laws make it harder every year to exercise a right heralded as a crowning achievement of the 20th century women’s movement.

In addition to North Dakota, three other states – South Dakota, Mississippi and Arkansas – have just one surgical-abortion clinic in operation.

According to my studies/sources, there are actually five states with only one abortion clinic, the four listed above, plus Wyoming. National Abortion Federation lists Wyoming as having NO “NAF member provider(s).” Planned Parenthood’s lone Wyoming clinic only offers abortion referrals. Perhaps someone has updated info?

The number of abortion providers nationwide shrank from 2,908 in 1982 to 1,793 in 2008, the latest year for which data is available.

This number comes from Guttmacher Institute and includes hospitals committing abortion as well as private practices. AbortionDocs.com lists the total number of free-standing abortion clinics down to 861 (659 surgical abortion clinics plus 202 “abortion pill” clinics).

Getting an abortion in America is, in some places, harder today than at any point since it became a constitutionally protected right 40 years ago this month

It might seem as though recent electoral victories by Barack Obama and congressional Democrats set the stage for a reversal of this trend. The President’s campaign mobilized Democratic voters and women around the issue of reproductive rights – an effort that produced, according to some exit polls, the widest gender voting gap in history.

But while the right to have an abortion is federal law, exactly who can access the service and under what circumstances is the purview of states. And at the state level, abortion-rights activists are unequivocally losing….

The modern era of state restrictions on abortion began in 1992 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The court upheld Roe v. Wade but said states have a right to regulate abortion as long as they don’t write laws that impose an “undue burden” on women.

Pro-life politicians enacting laws to limit abortion are now testing the limits of the Casey ruling. Their ultimate goal is to land another abortion case before a sympathetic Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn Roe. Along the way, in what Charmaine Yoest, president of the antiabortion group Americans United for Life, describes as a strategy to “work around Roe,” pro-life activists hope to severely – or completely – curtail access to abortion at the state level….

The other strength of the state-based clinic laws, which often are based on text written by pro-life activists and lawyers and distributed to lawmakers, is that they are hard to campaign against. The zoning regulation in Virginia, for example, would require abortion clinics to widen all hallways to 5 ft. (1.5 m). “Is that the kind of thing that will rally voters?” asks Cristina Page, author of the book How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America. “‘We’re not going to expand these hallways to be 5 ft. wide!’ is not a compelling message. The villain is now in the fine print.”

Cristina neglected to mention the rationale for 5 ft. hallways, which is the minimum width required for two gurneys to pass. Hello, women’s safety?

Public sentiment

Part of the reason is that the public is siding more and more with their opponents. Even though 3/4 of Americans believe abortion should be legal under some or all circumstances, just 41% identified themselves as pro-choice in a Gallup survey conducted in May 2012. In this age of prenatal ultrasounds and sophisticated neonatology, a sizable majority of Americans supports abortion restrictions like waiting periods and parental-consent laws. Pro-life activists write the legislation to set these rules.

Their pro-choice counterparts, meanwhile, have opted to stick with their longtime core message that government should not interfere at all with women’s health care decisions, a stance that seems tone-deaf to the current reality.

Pro-choice activists’ failure to adapt to the shift in public attitudes on abortion has left their cause stranded in the past, says Frances Kissling, a longtime abortion-rights advocate and former president of Catholics for Choice. Kissling is part of a small group within the pro-choice movement trying to push the cause toward more nuanced stances. “The established pro-choice position – which essentially is: abortion should be legal, a private matter between a woman and her doctor, with no restriction or regulation beyond what is absolutely necessary to protect the woman’s health – makes 50% of the population extremely uncomfortable and unwilling to associate with us,” she says.

Generational in-fighting

At the same time, a rebellion within the abortion-rights cause – pitting feminists in their 20s and 30s against pro-choice power brokers who were in their 20s and 30s when Roe was decided – threatens to tear it in two. Many young activists are bypassing the legacy feminist organizations that have historically protected access to abortion, weakening the pro-choice establishment at the very moment it needs to coalesce around new strategies to combat pro-life gains and connect with the public.

As memories of women dying from illegal pre-Roe abortions become more distant, the pro-choice cause is in crisis…. If abortion-rights activists don’t come together to adapt to shifting public opinion on the issue of reproductive rights, abortion access in America will almost certainly continue to erode….

But in Washington, establishment pro-choice activists are dealing with another set of threats that are mostly self-inflicted. What pro-choice activists call “the movement” is in many ways more fragmented than it’s ever been, thanks to a widening generational divide. The problem is rooted in leadership, which is concentrated in a small but powerful army of women who were in their 20s and 30s when Roe was decided and who now oversee a number of establishment feminist organizations, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, run by Nancy Keenan, 60; the National Organization for Women, headed by Terry O’Neill, 60; and Feminist Majority, run by co-founder Eleanor Smeal, 73.

Some of these leaders and their similarly aged deputies have been reluctant to pass the torch, according to a growing number of younger abortion-rights activists who say their predecessors are hindering the movement from updating its strategy to appeal to new audiences….

I find it interesting that although Keenan announced she was retiring eight months ago, NARAL hasn’t yet found a successor. Shouldn’t she have been grooming one? And, of course, the irony remains that abortion proponents have killed 1/3 of their future followers.

But the infighting could splinter the movement if the younger generation abandons those feminist institutions that have traditionally been the headquarters for voter-mobilization campaigns, fundraising and lobbying, the lifeblood of any political movement. Erin Matson, 32, became a vice president of NOW in 2009 but recently resigned. “When you want to build a jet pack, sometimes that means you have to leave the bicycle factory,” she says.

Playing defense

In many ways, the fight to preserve access to abortion is even more daunting than the fight to legalize it 40 years ago. In a dynamic democracy like America, defending the status quo is always harder than fighting to change it. The story of pro-choice activism after Roe reveals that there may be nothing worse for a political movement’s future than achieving its central goal.

Science

The antiabortion cause has been aided by scientific advances that have complicated American attitudes about abortion. Prenatal ultrasound, which has allowed the general public to see fetuses inside the womb and understand that they have a human shape beginning around eight weeks into pregnancy, became widespread in the 1980s, and some babies born as early as 24 weeks can now survive.

Stigma

Kissling… says the pro-choice movement’s effort to “normalize abortion” is counterproductive. “When people hear us say abortion is just another medical procedure, they react with shock,” she says. “Abortion is not like having your tooth pulled or having your appendix out. It involves the termination of an early form of human life. That deserves some gravitas.”

Aging abortionists

[T]he generation of doctors who stepped up to perform legal abortions after Roe have retired or died without a robust new class of physicians to take their place. Efforts are under way at many obstetrics-gynecology and family-practice residency programs to offer abortion training to more doctors, but the specter of protests and unwanted attention remains.

Mission impossible

Their most pressing goal, 40 years after Roe, is to widen access to a procedure most Americans believe should be restricted – and no one wants to ever need.

I have no clue what this means

These sentences made no sense to me no matter how many times I read them:

The abortion rate in impoverished black communities has remained disproportionately high despite efforts by Planned Parenthood and others to provide access to family-planning services. “What this proves,” says [Loretta] Ross [co-founder of Sister Song], “is that if people are not convinced that they have realistic economic and educational opportunities, you could put a clinic in a girl’s bedroom and she would still think early motherhood is a better choice.”

An African-American girl chooses “early motherhood” over contraceptives and then opts for abortion?

Anyway, there you go. Thoughts?

by Hans Johnson

Even as the U.S. gears up for the implementation of Obamacare, Britain is beginning to have misgivings over the quality of health care of its own NHS. Even the left-leaning BBC and Guardian newspaper are spotlighting Labour MP Ann Clywd’s claims of the shoddy treatment of her late husband:

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT:  TheBlaze]

… just a few years before they get there.

Click to enlarge…

BTW, I would add “BEFORE, DURING, & AFTER THEIR BIRTH” to the sign, although there wouldn’t have been enough room, I suppose.

Nevertheless, Abolish Human Abortion’s point on the hypocrisy of our nation and our president is irrefutable.

As Rev. Clenard Childress wrote at RenewAmerica on January 2:

For even while in the Illinois State Senate, [Barack Obama] did everything within his power to stymie, and then vote down, the Born Alive Victims Act….

Federally, from 1996 through 2003, Barack Obama made at least seven controversial votes against bills mandating medical care for newborn children after late-term, botched abortions….

Obama’s view was this: if the mother willed for the child to die, then the child should be left to die. So I ask you – somewhat cynically – how can this same man, who claimed after he had reflected upon the Sandy Hook Massacre….

“The majority of those who died today were children – beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10-years-old,” he said, pausing to wipe away a tear. “They had their entire lives ahead of them – birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.

“Our hearts are broken today, for the parents, grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children,” Obama added, “as well as the families of the adults who were lost.”

And while saying this pretends to wipe a tear away… Jill Staneck [sic] didn’t see any of his tears during her testimony…..

Also don’t forget this is the same man who endorsed suctioning the brains and crushing the skulls of every one of those school children as they were being born.

Harsh words but absolutely true. Obama’s duplicity, and the duplicity of all abortion supporters, is staggering and sick.

[HT Childress post: Ken and Jo Scott]

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Monifa Thomas is not simply a journalist who works for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Thomas was hired in 2005 as a health and medicine reporter and in 2010 was promoted to the editorial board due to her “particular expertise in medical issues and government health care,” according to the Sun-Times.

And still Thomas didn’t know about the dangers of the birth control pill. Here’s an excerpt of her story, published in the Sun-Times on December 25:

Paramedics came and took me to Saint Joseph Hospital, not far from my apartment on the North Side.

At the hospital, someone asked for my Social Security number. I told him.

Friends were there now, too. I can still picture their worried faces.

Again, the hospital worker said: I need to know your Social Security number.

“Yeah,” I told him, “I know. I’m giving it to you.”

And, in my head, I was. But instead of numbers, all that came out of my mouth were letters.

I didn’t understand then what I do now: On July 8, 2011, a clot blocked the flow of blood to my brain, cutting the supply of oxygen, causing parts of the tissue there to die.

I was 30 years old, and I’d just had a stroke….

Why me?

For some, the cause of a stroke is clear. High blood pressure, diabetes, compounded over the years, maybe with a family history of circulatory problems thrown in, lead to cardiovascular decay and plaque-narrowed arteries, then a heart attack or stroke.

But that wasn’t me.

I was young. And I had done the things you’re supposed to do to keep healthy.

I didn’t smoke. I exercised regularly. I danced salsa and practiced tae kwon do. I stayed away from bad foods, mostly. I literally ate an apple every day.

I had just had a physical in June, after turning 30, a couple of weeks before my stroke, and there was no sign of trouble.

Which led my doctors to a different likely culprit. They told me they thought birth-control pills probably were a factor.

Now, I was even angrier because I’m one of those people who actually reads the warning labels that come with any prescription drug, and I’d read that a stroke was a risk when you’re on a birth-control pill. But none of the other risk factors seemed to apply. So I thought it probably wouldn’t be a problem for me.

Read about Monifa’s long road back. It’s quite scary, yet inspiring. Monifa is quite brave. I especially appreciate that she used her experience to expose just one of the harms of the birth control pill.

A few of the comments:

Amy Hamer: I had a stroke at age 39 in Feb 2011. Mine was also caused by birth control pills. I thank God my boyfriend was with me and knew something wasn’ right…. Women think birth control pills are just a simple little pill, but you are really altering your body chemistry to make your body think it’s always pregnant. I feel extremely lucky that I got medical treatment quickly. I’m still not 100% and probably never will be, I just have to make the best of it and be thankful I’m not 20% or even dead.

Migdalia Bulnes: I too had a stoke at the age of 32, due to birth control pills. I can relate to everything in your story…. I could not even hold a cup of coffee in my left hand or even do a ponytail on my hair, simple things. Thank God that its been 12 years, I am a sergeant for the Chicago Police Department….

MadKatFever: I also lost a 35 y.o. friend to blood clots which landed in her lungs instead of her brain. Three trips to 2 separate hospital emergency rooms and they still could not figure it out. Until the fourth trip which resulted in an ICU admission and her death 40 hours later. Cause of death: pulmonary emboli related to birth control usage.

[HT: Matt Abbott]

Official statistics show that almost half of embryos used to help women conceive through in vitro fertilization (IVF) were thrown away during or after the process….

He added: “It happens on a day-by-day basis with casual indifference. This sheer destruction of human embryos – most people would not know that it took place on such a scale.”

~ Andrew Hough, The Telegraph, December 31

[HT: Bioethics.com; photo via StarStuddedSuperStep]

Scientific American termed the research findings another way: “Scientists discover children’s cells living in mothers’ brains.”

But I wanted to drive home a touching point: Mothers who terminate their pregnancies apparently don’t completely rid themselves of their babies. The cells of murdered children live on inside their mothers to help – or perhaps – hurt them:

Cells may migrate through the placenta between the mother and the fetus, taking up residence in many organs of the body including the lung, thyroid muscle, liver, heart, kidney and skin. These may have a broad range of impacts, from tissue repair and cancer prevention to sparking immune disorders.

It is remarkable that it is so common for cells from one individual to integrate into the tissues of another distinct person. We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as singular autonomous individuals, and these foreign cells seem to belie that notion, and suggest that most people carry remnants of other individuals.

I need to stop and note that this politically incorrect article correctly defines preborn babies as “distinct person(s),” “people,” and “individuals.” Moving on….

As remarkable as this may be, stunning results from a new study show that cells from other individuals are also found in the brain. In this study, male cells were found in the brains of women and had been living there, in some cases, for several decades. What impact they may have had is now only a guess, but this study revealed that these cells were less common in the brains of women who had Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting they may be related to the health of the brain.

We all consider our bodies to be our own unique being, so the notion that we may harbor cells from other people in our bodies seems strange. Even stranger is the thought that, although we certainly consider our actions and decisions as originating in the activity of our own individual brains, cells from other individuals are living and functioning in that complex structure….

They examined the brains of deceased women for the presence of cells containing the male “Y” chromosome. They found such cells in more than 60 percent of the brains and in multiple brain regions. Since Alzheimer’s disease is more common in women who have had multiple pregnancies, they suspected that the number of fetal cells would be greater in women with AD compared to those who had no evidence for neurological disease. The results were precisely the opposite: there were fewer fetal-derived cells in women with Alzheimer’s. The reasons are unclear.

A post-abortive mother who gives any of this much thought will reach either distressing or comforting conclusions, depending on whether she has made peace.

[Photo via Jezebel]