by Hans Johnson

During a discussion of Choice vs. Life at Indiana Wesleyan University, which claims to be an evangelical, “Christ-centered academic community,” Dr. Greg Fiebig straightforwardly admitted to having “cognitive dissonance” on the topic. He claimed to be equally pro-choice and pro-life.

The guest panelists, including Seth Drayer of Created Equal, challenged his viewpoint:

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

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

by Carder

I would not use the Eucharist or as they call it the communion rail as the place to have those discussions or way in which people would be either excluded from the life of the church. The Eucharist is an opportunity of grace and conversion. It’s also a time of forgiveness of sins. So my hope would be that that grace would be instrumental in bringing people to the truth.

~ Archbishop Blase Cupich, the new archbishop of Chicago, responding to the question of whether he would give communion to pro-choice politicians, as reported by Breitbart, December 2

by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli

• Saynsumthn’s Blog says the CDC and Guttmacher abortion numbers don’t agree, and here’s why: the CDC gathers only data that is reported voluntarily from certain states. Guttmacher gathers much more comprehensive data, which is why their abortion numbers for the latest year available show nearly 300k more abortions than the CDC. Their reports also show that Planned Parenthood performed anywhere from 32-46% (so at the very least, one-third) of the abortions in the United States annually, and received $542.4M from taxpayers.
• Secular Pro-Life reflects on World AIDS Day with some sound advice, including the suggestion to “steer clear of Planned Parenthood” when getting tested for HIV:
  

  Not just because they’re an abortion business: they’ve also demonstrated some serious skeeviness when it comes to HIV prevention. They were caught on tape advising someone who wanted an STD test to donate blood instead — horrible advice, for reasons that should be obvious.

  And a few years ago, Planned Parenthood put out an “educational” pamphlet for HIV-positive people that suggested that it’s totally fine to have sex with someone without disclosing your HIV-positive status. Thankfully, Planned Parenthood is not your only option for HIV testing. HIVtest.org is a good place to start, or try your local health department or regular physician.

• Bryan Kemper of Stand True (pictured left with students from Oxford and Cardiff) must be doing something right, as British columnist Catherine Bennett has listed him as an “influential foreign women-hater” and is actually calling for him to be banned from the UK. Kemper is taking it all in stride, while Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life had this to say:
  

  If he weren’t so effective in his defense of the unborn, Ms. Bennett would never have heard of Bryan Kemper…. English women are heeding his message, and the message of our wonderful pro-life colleagues and friends throughout Britain, and that scares pro-abortion ideologues there. Because of that, and because of the urgency of protecting the unborn, we will continue sending Bryan to Britain and to many other nations as well.

• Real Choice shows how the reluctance to discipline unsafe abortion clinics is nothing new. In the 1980’s, Maryland’s Hillview Clinic botched legal abortions on two women, and in typical fashion, not a thing was done:
  

  The TV show 60 Minutes… interviewed Barbara Radford, then-president of the National Abortion Federation, [and] she defended the head-in-the-sand attitude the organization took toward safety issues by saying, “We want to make sure that women have choices when it comes to abortion services, and if you regulate it too strictly, you then deny women access to the service.” When they asked pro-choice Maryland State Senator Mary Boergers why nothing was being done to address dangerous abortion clinics[,] Boergers said, “There’s only so much of a willingness to try to push a group like the pro-choice movement to do what I think is the responsible thing to do because they then treat you as if you’re the enemy.”

  The political goal of “access” trumped the bodies and lives of women like Susanne [Logan] and Debra [Gray]. Is the abortion lobby devoted to women’s access to safe abortions, or abortionists’ access to vulnerable women?

• Bound4Life remembers Rosa Parks’ stand against injustice 59 years ago, reminding us to continue standing against human injustice today:
  

  As Bound4LIFE Director Matt Lockett notes, “History records the effectiveness of non-violent direct action as the prescribed method of bringing about change through legal recourse.”

  Lockett points out that Parks’ stand on principle, a flashpoint in the movement for cultural change, led to a court case. The monumental case Browder v. Gayle introduced into court evidence an illustration of the bus, denoting where she refused to budge [pictured right; click to enlarge]….

  Such evidence begs the question. “It’s easy to say ‘I’m pro-life’ in today’s culture of slacktivism. But is there evidence of your stand for life, strong enough it could be introduced in court?” asks Lockett.

• The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition reports that the Dutch plan to “increase the number of life-saving organs available for transplant – by harvesting them from people who want to be [euthanized]. Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam and the University Hospital of Maastricht have already written national guidelines which are being studied by the Dutch Transplant Foundation.”
• Wesley J. Smith discusses how discussion of making a living by ushering in death seems to follow legalization. Might this be the next business venture of Planned Parenthood?
  

  And now, in the journal Bioethics, bioethicist Roland Kipke argues that if assisted suicide is a right of autonomy, we should permit entrepreneurs to go into the business of making people painlessly dead, what he calls “commercially-assisted suicide.”

  Hmm, it seems like we’ve seen that concept somewhere before…

[youtube]http://youtu.be/yOV8mBjHHYg[/youtube]

[Photos via Stand True and Bound4Life]

In The American Prospect, Cherisse Scott, founder of SisterReach, an African-American “reproductive justice” group centered in Memphis, laments the passage in Tennessee of Amendment 1 this past month.

Amendment 1 undoes a 2000 Tennessee Supreme Court decision that blocked any pro-life laws from being passed in the state. Scott writes:

The results will be particularly devastating for poor families.  As it is, these families struggle to have their voices heard by state lawmakers, who stigmatize and shame them for facing very hard choices….

Now, more than ever, we must be intentional about fighting the policies that fail those women and girls who are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, incest, age-discordant relationships….

SisterReach staff and members spent day after day calling attention to the unique concerns of black and poor communities…. Though the outcome of the vote on Amendment 1 wasn’t what we worked for, I congratulate those voters and advocates in Tennessee who engaged with us and began to believe, for the first time, that their votes and voices are important.

I don’t understand this misplaced fixation on abortion as the solution for violence imposed on women and girls of color. Why doesn’t SisterReach expend its energy stopping the source of woes – violence? Abortion is just another form of it.

As an abortion advocate, SisterReach is actually helping silence black voices through extermination. New abortion statistics released by the CDC only last week reveal the annihilation. Reported The Daily Caller:

The race of the victims is disproportionately skewed as well. Non-Hispanic black women had the highest rate of abortion — for every 1,000 black women between the ages of 15 and 44 years, 29.7 had abortions in 2011. Non-Hispanic black women accounted for 36.2% of all abortions that year; non-Hispanic white women accounted for 37.2%.

That’s a serious skew - the 2013, the Census Bureau reported that in the U.S. at large, 62.6% of people in the country were non-Hispanic white alone, while 13.2% were black or African American alone.

It gets worse, at least in New York City. Reported CNSNews.com:

In New York City, 77.56% of the abortions in 2011 were performed on Black and Hispanic babies, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Abortion is destroying the black race, rendering its population stagnant for decades. Blacks comprised 12.1% of the U.S. population in 1990, 12.3.% in 2000 and 13.2% in 2013.

Meanwhile, the Hispanic population jumped from 9% in 1990 to 12.5% in 2000 to 17.1% in 2013.

Abortion is such a tragedy, and I haven’t even discussed the high incidence of breast cancer and preterm births among black women, just to name two disproportionally high health consequences of abortion in their community.

African-American women are needlessly walking right into the eugenic trap. When will they wake up?

by Hans Johnson

Victor Hugo said, “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” Whether we sing, dance, or just tap our toes, life and music seem to be inextricably tied.

K-Mart uses this principle effectively in their Joe Boxer ads during the holidays.

Whether they feature men using their ample holiday-time bellies as musical instruments or women dancing while sporting much healthier pregnant bellies, we just can’t help but groove along:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/N94ES_HI-K8[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

by Kelli

We need to talk about abortion because the phoney war (small groups of vigil-antis outside clinics, praying, thrusting rosary beads and plastic foetuses into women’s hands, giving out leaflets packed with fake science and scare stories) – is over. For the first time an anti-abortion group has declared real war on abortion clinics with new levels of harassment that have left staff feeling beleaguered, and women intimidated, invaded and upset.

[W]e know from the American experience we can’t turn a blind eye to abortion opponents and just hope they’ll go away. If we want to protect our rights, we really do need to talk about how much we cherish them. We need to talk about abortion.

~ Lisa Hallgarten, Huffington Post, November 30

[Photo via ibtimes.co.uk from a 2012 protest of Northern Ireland’s first abortion clinic]

In a November 26 Washington Post essay, political scientists John McTague and Melissa Deckman reported news of epic proportions to pro-lifers while dissecting why the “war on women” meme bombed in the 2014 Midterms:

Democratic campaigns mistakenly conflated abortion and government-mandated insurance coverage for birth control, even though voters view these two issues through different lenses. In short, Democrats fundamentally misunderstood why there is a gender gap in American politics in the first place.

Attitudes about the size and scope of government - not abortion - are what drive the gender gap. Women are more likely than men to believe that the federal government should provide assistance to the poor, in part because women are disproportionately likely to be recipients of such government aid.

However, as the Udall ad… illustrates, the rhetoric of the “war on women” often fuses the separate issues of insurance coverage for birth control with abortion rights, treating both as “culture war” issues, and this is not how most voters perceive the issue.

As our research shows, attitudes about abortion and attitudes about government-mandated insurance coverage for birth control are not strongly related. Americans view abortion largely as an issue of personal morality, akin to other “culture war” issues, such as gay rights and marijuana. By contrast, insurance coverage for birth control taps into attitudes about economic opportunity and the proper size and scope of government.

This news is big because it strikes at the very strategy abortion proponents were pinning their hopes on to entice both women and Millennials, key demographic groups whose support of abortion is flailing, as noted by pro-abortion Sarah Kliff at WaPo in 2012 (and NARAL back in 2010):

[T]he White House sees… a chance to widen the reproductive health debate beyond abortion to issues like contraceptives, winning over key demographics of independent voters in the process… young voters and women…

These voters have tended to be difficult for abortion rights supporters to engage on reproductive health issues like abortion. Research from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which I wrote about last weekend, found a significant “intensity gap” there, with abortion rights supporters much less likely to see it as a crucial voting issue than their anti-abortion counterparts.

But when the conversation moves away from abortion to contraceptives… the intensity gap flips: A much larger segment of voters are willing to penalize a legislator who votes to defund family planning.

Hence, the entire “war on women” strategy, which clearly flopped last month. McTague and Deckman weren’t sure it was ever a success.

The important take-away is abortion proponents thought they found a winning issue – contraception – to leech the losing issue of abortion to, but they were wrong.

Both Millennials and women still separate the two in their minds – even after being pounded by millions of dollars of advertising – deeming abortion a moral issue they’re not necessarily crazy about and contraception an economic issue they’re not necessarily flocking to the polls to support.

[tweet_box]WaPo: Attempt to hide losing issue of abortion behind contraception an epic fail. What now?[/tweet_box]

Not that I don’t think the other side will think of a new strategy, but they’re still losing, and everyone knows it. For example, a few recent articles by abortion supporters: ”It’s not just Hobby Lobby: the pro-life movement is winning,” “Ten reasons women are losing while gays keep winning,” “Pro-life movement winning the battle over abortion, birth control accessibility.”

:)

by Kelli

The new short film, Mitosis, by 18-year-old director Hannah Victoria (pictured right), aims to show the value and potential of every human life. From Live Action News:

It may seem that the choices we make for ourselves will affect us and us alone, but it simply isn’t true. There is always a ripple effect, whether small or large.

Mitosis tells the story of a young doctor, who after making a promise to a childhood friend, sets out to find a cure for cancer. The film, from Victoria’s company Expressionistic Studios, was released on YouTube this week and promises to shine a light on the magnitude of damage each and every abortion could have on the world.

While some may take issue with the film’s pro-life apologetics, the director says she has received a great deal of positive response:

It is amazing to see the impact it is having just in the few days it has been released…. I’ve gotten e-mails from people who have had multiple abortions, people who want to thank me for making a film about what their baby could have done, and pro-life supporters who are excited to have this tool to show to those who need to see the message!

[youtube]http://youtu.be/mHRKu21suYc[/youtube]

What are your thoughts on Hannah Victoria’s pro-life short film?

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.