During U.S. Supreme Court arguments on the Hobby Lobby case, liberals mocked Justice Kennedy for asking the Obama administration’s lawyer whether its contraception mandate could also force for-profit companies to cover abortions in their insurance policies.

Only five months later liberals have taken this to the unimaginable extreme: On August 22, the California Department of Managed Health Care announced that all employers offering health insurance – not just for-profit but also nonprofit, religious institutions, and churches – had to provide coverage for all elective abortions.

How it happened

Last fall the ACLU, working with pro-abortion employees at two Catholic universities in California, filed a complaint with DMHC demanding the schools offer abortion insurance. The employees won. DMHC suddenly decided abortion fell under under a 40-year-old California law requiring employers to cover “basic health care services.”

DMHC notified California insurance companies, which began notifying companies. Here is one such insurance letter sent to a church. Click to enlarge…

In September, Life Legal Defense Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of pro-life employees from those universities who oppose abortion coverage in their insurance plans.

Churches respond

Yesterday, the two pro-life organizations filed a new federal complaint with HHS on behalf of seven California churches that do not want to cover abortions in their employee insurance plans.

As letters from insurance companies roll out, more churches are sure to join this complaint, if necessary.

The action taken by DMHC directly violates the federal Weldon Amendment, which states no federal funds will be dispensed to any government agency that discriminates against any health care entity for not covering abortions.

California, of course, receives billions of dollars annually from the federal government, which should immediately shut off the funding spigot to the state for this gross violation.

HHS is responsible to enforce the Weldon Amendment.

There is no time table under which HHS is obligated to respond.

If HHS doesn’t stop DMHC in a timely manner, Casey Mattox of ADF told me in a phone interview today the churches will consider filing legal action.

Too crazy to be true – not

“What’s really frightening is that when you think of worst case scenarios, this goes beyond that,” said Mattox. “Progressives will always progress. Now they want churches to pay for abortions. Where will they go next? Nothing will satisfy them.”

Mattox said it’s time to wake up. “It’s not as if abortion zealots are going to look around one day and decide they have pushed their agenda far enough, Mattox said. “They ‘re going to keep pushing, and people who respect conscience and life have to fight back just as hard.”

Mattox noted that letters from insurance companies are trickling out, and some carriers may never notify a church about the new abortion normal, so many are still unaware.

“This is all so crazy it’s difficult to convince churches they’re now covering abortions,” noted Mattox. “But California churches must be proactive and call their insurance companies to confirm.”

[tweet_box]CA churches may not believe they now have to provide #abortion insurance. But it’s absolutely true.[/tweet_box]

If you represent a California church and would like to join the federal complaint, contact Mattox at www.alliancedefendingfreedom.org/legal-help  or 1-800-Tell-ADF, or LLDF’s Catherine Short at info@LLDF.org or 1-707-224-6675.

Help needed from pro-life/conscience legislators

In addition, California state legislators and members of Congress need to step up to the plate to stop this gross violation of the First Amendment.

Republican Kevin McCarthy represents California’s 23rd District and was just elected Majority Leader of the House.

Legislators like McCarthy are urged to tell DMHC to stop the insanity, or tell the Executive Branch to enforce the Weldon Amendment.

[tweet_box].@kevinomccarthy pls help stop your home state CA from illegally forcing churches to cover abortions![/tweet_box]

by Kelli

Americans United for Life has launched a new campaign, I’m Voting for Life, in an effort to get out the pro-life vote for the November midterm elections.

The Senate, run by Democrats, has blocked seven pro-life measures which were passed by the House, and the effort to “break the blockade” hinges on nine key races, six of which would need to be won for life in order to see change in the Senate.

The star of this video is none other than Levi Moore, son of AUL’s Andy Moore and grandson of our own Jill Stanek:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/merhKl-AFIE[/youtube]

I’m #VotingForLife! Are you?

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

by Carder

I’d like those people to know that using a good baby carrier makes mothering and fathering so much easier. It’s a relief to ditch the stroller and travel freely. It’s a relief to be free to get yourself a sandwich or peel a banana for an older child. And it’s a relief to have so many of baby’s needs met effortlessly so the household experiences less crying and less stress.

These benefits cross socio-economic borders and no one should be excluded from them!

~ Diana Rosenfield, creator of Wrap Your Baby, explaining the benefits of baby wearing, including being able to play in an orchestra, Baby Center, October 7

by Hans Johnson

At the 2014 Values Voter Summit sponsored by Family Research Council Action there were many pro-life speakers, including Ryan Bomberger, the head of The Radiance Foundation. He was sued by the NAACP for parodying its name in a column, and is appealing the verdict against him.

While not able to get into the specifics of the case, he urged the audience to resist efforts to quash pro-life speech – that “Silence is never an option.”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/c6xH6QSMlc4[/youtube]

Regarding the NAACP’s lawsuit, The Radiance Foundation also recently published a video showing that while the NAACP claims that Bomberger’s parody of the NAACP (as the “National Association for the Abortion of Colored People”) confuses the public, it just isn’t true:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/1x_8nuDHHJc[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Bound4Life]

Stand True’s Bryan Kemper was really looking forward to watching this weeks’s episode of 19 Kids and Counting onTLC after one of his pro-life t-shirts made an appearance in last week’s show…

Kemper hoped to spot another of his t-shirts since the entire family owns one….

Kemper met Jessa Duggar at the 2013 Students for Life of America conference and gave her one of his t-shirts, which led to a very large order from the rest of the clan.

In fact, a photo of Jessa with fiancé Ben Seewald wearing his pro-life t-shirt has been popping up all over the Internet in the wake of Jessa daring to publicly reflect on the topic of abortion after going through the Holocaust Museum a couple weeks ago.

But Kemper was shocked when viewing the October 2 19 Kids and Counting episode to see one of his pro-life t-shirts all right, but with the message, “I survived Roe vs. Wade/Roe vs. Wade will not survive me,” blurred out. Click to enlarge…

Since the same message was allowed on the previous episode without being censored, one has to conclude there were complaints, or perhaps a pro-abortion editor went rogue.

As if it’s a secret that the Duggars are pro-life? Having 19 children certainly makes that a nonrevelation.

As if anyone watching the show isn’t to expect Duggar family values to shine through?

I can’t imagine the Duggars were told about this pro-life censorship by TLC, because I can’t imagine they would stand for it.

Here’s hoping Michelle and Jim Bob put a quick stop to this flagrant attempt to suppress the message that abortion is wrong and that this generation intends to stop it.

[tweet_box]Here’s hoping @DuggarFam puts a quick stop to @TLC’s flagrant attempt to censor the #prolife msg.[/tweet_box]

by Kelli

Click photo to enlarge…

Exactly who perpetrated the fatal abortion doesn’t seem to pique the interest of those who want to hang her death around her distant-relative-by-marriage’s neck.

What I find particularly fascinating is that amid the obsession over Ann Keenan (obsession likely to arise again should [Mitt] Romney aim again for the White House) there is a blithe obliviousness of “safe and legal” abortion deaths.

In fact, one politician — Margo Davidson, a Democrat and Pennsylvania State Representative — lost her support from Planned Parenthood after going public about how her cousin, Semika Shaw, died a wretched death after an abortion by notorious Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. This is going beyond merely ignoring safe-n-legal abortion deaths and into the realm of punishing the survivors.

Is it really women’s deaths that bother abortion-rights activists so much, or is it something else?

~ Christina Dunigan, reflecting on abortion advocates’ lack of concern for women dying from legal abortions, “Which Abortion Deaths Matter?,” Real Choice, October 8

Note: Recall Gosnell’s gruesome operation was “only caught by accident, when police raided his offices to seize evidence of his illegal prescription selling,” not thanks to abortion clinic inspections or regulations.

Here is Semika’s story:

3801 Lancaster: Rep. Margo Davidson from 3801Lancaster on Vimeo.

[Meme via Real Choice]

The abortion cartel has reacted to a new genre of pro-life laws, which force abortion clinics to administer RU-486 per FDA protocol, in a way that makes no sense.

Four states – Arizona, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma – have now passed a version of this law, and the abortion lobby has responded by taking the more difficult path - suing to block the statute.

In terms of PR, this is an uphill battle. Abortion proponents are trying to justify giving RU-486 off-label by framing the FDA as incompetent. Quoting Tulsa World, October 1:

The law intrudes on women’s reproductive rights because it forbids the safer, more effective drug process used to end a pregnancy, the lawsuit claims….

“House Bill 2684… requires physicians to ignore decades of medical research, the opinion of leading medical organizations, and their own clinical experience, and instead administer medication abortion according to an outdated and inferior” regime, the lawsuit says.

If all this is true, it would seem smart for the abortion lobby to press the FDA to update its protocol, not only because it is supposedly dangerous as it stands, but also because doing so would pull the plug on an increasingly popular piece of pro-life legislation that hinges entirely on the FDA’s current protocol.

Such an effort would make abortion groups look like leaders in the field of research for advancing abortion safety. It would also save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses.

Abortion groups are certainly up to such as task. We now know they goaded the FDA into legalizing RU-486 in the first place. They also successfully applied pressure when wanting Plan B legalized, and then when wanting to make it available over-the-counter.

So why, particularly with an abortion-friendly president puppet master, aren’t abortion groups pressuring the FDA to update its 14-year-old protocol on the dosage, routes of administration, and gestational limits of RU-486?

Here are three of the most likely reasons.

Lying about safety of RU-486 off-label?

The most obvious answer is the abortion industry is lying. As Americans United for Life attorney Mailee Smith noted, eight women are known to have died after using RU-486 per off-label abortion clinic protocol (including 18-year-old Holly Patterson, pictured below left, following a chemical abortion at a California Planned Parenthood in 2003), but no women are known to have died using FDA protocol (which is not to say that’s safe either).

So platitudes are preferable to cold, hard statistics, especially against the prospect of comparing complications.

In Ohio, for instance, there were 42 reports of complications from off-label RU-486 abortions during an 18-month period between 2011-13, 35 of which required a follow-up surgical abortion.

The reality is the abortion industry wants to follow off-label protocol to save on drug expenses, abortionist expenses, and overhead – in other words, to increase its profit margin.

Implications the abortion lobby can’t tolerate?

Laws regulating RU-486 open a new legal door: legislating against abortion at the earliest stages of pregnancy.

“This is a significant place legally for state government to be,” explained Ovide Lamontagne, General Counsel for AUL, in an email. The abortion lobby knows this as dangerous precedent and may think it has no choice but to try to beat it back in court.

[tweet_box]RU-486 laws open a new legal door – regulating abortion at the earliest stages of pregnancy.[/tweet_box]

Chinese manufacturer of RU-486 says screw that?

In this scenario the abortion industry is hoist by its own petard. Since no American pharmaceutical company would touch the manufacture of RU-486, the dirty work was punted to Shanghai New Hualian Pharmaceuticals in China.

Shanghai New Hualian is not known for its concern for humanity. In 2008, the company was caught selling tainted drugs that left “nearly 200 Chinese cancer patients… paralyzed or otherwise harmed,” according to the New York Times.

While Shanghai New Hualian’s RU-486 plant was not implicated in the scandal, the point is corporate likely has zero interest in taking on the expense of conducting new clinical trials for the purported well-being of American abortion patients - particularly to make less money, since the abortion industry advocates using 1/3 the currently recommended dosage. As the proverb goes, “Do not wake sleeping dogs.”

Furthermore, the abortion industry likely has zero interest in showing its “evidence” on the safety of off-label chemical abortions. A “study” it published last year had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

[tweet_box]The Chinese manufacturer of RU-486 was once busted for selling tainted drugs that killed 200 people.[/tweet_box]

As I wrote yesterday, RU-486 regulation laws stand a great chance of getting the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention, which bodes well for our side.

If SCOTUS confirms states have a right to regulate RU-486 according to FDA protocol, this would really hurt the abortion trade, particularly Planned Parenthood, which runs 90% of RU-486 clinics, and help save babies.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The Abortion Gang has a guest post by Canadian Mel Waters in which she describes her experience in Colorado for an elective abortion after 24 weeks at Warren Hern’s clinic. The story is sad on many levels:
  

  It was a long physical recovery; the mental scars have been a longer journey, and after 4 years I am still working through it. I can’t close my eyes at night without reliving the whole thing again, I still have nightmares!

• An abortion clinic in El Paso is shut down again after being open for part of the day on Saturday after they received an exemption that was meant for another clinic in El Paso. In another example of how abortion is a business, the clinic isn’t referring women to the abortion clinic in El Paso but instead to one of their affiliated clinics in New Mexico:
  

  They are not completely closed, though. They still take walk-ins and phone calls and instruct women requiring an abortion to go to their clinic in New Mexico.

• Cosmopolitan magazine has endorsed… drumroll… Wendy Davis! (I know, big surprise, right?) The start of the story mentions the pink shoes as if that’s a reason to vote for her:
  

  An 11-hour filibuster. A bold stand for women in a red state. Those pink tennis shoes.

  They’d probably call other media outlets sexist for mentioning the shoes. The end of this sentence caught my eye:
  

  A Davis governorship would represent all Texans, including those who are traditionally underserved by Austin, setting the state on the road to restoring basic women’s health care and ensuring that the children women do choose to have are cared for.

  Why the need to mention “the children women do choose to have”? Why not just say “ensuring that children are cared for”? In saying this, Cosmo concedes the reality that women are aborting “children” they don’t want.

[Photo via Live Action News]