He hoped for justice but saw only slaughter, for righteousness but heard only cries of distress.

~ Isaiah 5:7b, God’s Word translation

Good morning, and Happy Sunday! Here were my top five six favorite political cartoons for the week. Be sure to vote for your favorite in the poll at the bottom of the post!

by Jack Ohman at GoComics.com…

 a twofer by Steve Kelley at GoComics.com…

 by Glenn McCoy at GoComics.com…

 by Matt Davies at GoComics.com…

 by Henry Payne at Townhall.com…

This week members of ARPACanada planted 100,000 pink and blue flags on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The display was spectacularly heart-breaking in that the flags represented the number of babies killed by abortion in Canada every year. Click to enlarge…

Also this week American pro-lifers celebrated National Pro-Life Chalk Day with some impressive works of art! See more at Students For Life. Click to enlarge…

From CNN, September 30:

“If life starts at conception, should medicine that prevents conception like Plan B be legal?,” a woman asked him during a question-and-answer session here.

Paul at first gave a terse answer: “I am not opposed to birth control,” he said.

After a pause, Paul elaborated. “That’s basically what Plan B is,” he said. “Plan B is taking two birth control pills in the morning and two in the evening, and I am not opposed to that.”…

Paul stood by his answer after the event, when asked about the exchange by reporters.

“Plan B is taking birth control,” he said. “I am not against birth control and I don’t know many Republicans who would be indicating that they are against birth control.”

Rand Paul’s representation of Plan B is untrue. As Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins tweeted:

W/due respect to @SenRandPaul, Plan B isn’t "basically" birth control. Its function is to create conditions hostile to human life in utero.

— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) October 2, 2014

Plan B’s own packaging agrees.

Actually, Plan B is not alone in potentially aborting a 5-to-9-day-old tiny human who hasn’t yet implanted in the wall of his or her mother’s uterus, which the drug blocks. Hormonal birth control – the pill, implants, etc. – and the IUD can do the same.

This is the reason Hobby Lobby owners sued the U.S. government. They opposed being forced to provide certain forms of birth control that can cause abortions.

The “emergency contraceptive” Ella can also kill an embryo, but directly. It contains the same “embryotoxic” chemical compounds as RU-486.

Should pro-lifers disqualify Rand Paul as a presidential contender because he supports forms of contraception that can abort the youngest of humans?

[Graphic via Daily Beast]

~ RH Reality Check’s Andrea Grimes, itemizing the “undue burden” placed on pregnant mothers who have to travel further to get an abortion at a regulated abortion clinic in Texas, as opposed to a closer unregulated clinic.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of these regulations on October 2, effectively shuttering 13 unstandardized abortion clinics around the state.

Ok, the dresses aren’t quite the same, but I had to google to compare, because they sure looked close at first glance.

Here was Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards today at a fundraising event for pro-abortion New Hampshire U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen….

Here’s a view without the jacket. It looks like a black uterus right there where a uterus would be…

And here’s the dress Michelle Obama wore on Election Night 2012, which pro-lifers dubbed the “abortion dress”…

It’s Friday afternoon, what can I say?

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

• Life Issues says the deep, dark secret of the health industry is the “hastening of death” through euthanasia thanks to a lucrative market for organ harvesting:
  

  The difficulty of making a pinpoint diagnosis in such complex neurological matters — and the lucrative financial incentives to harvest organs — will ultimately propel this issue into the forefront of public consciousness and discourse.

  Not surprisingly, the current procurement market for human tissues and organs in the United States is booming, driven by insufficient supply and heavy demand. According to The Milliman Report (see page 4), if all 11 tissues and organs could be harvested from a single patient declared brain-dead, however unlikely, the going rate for procurement would exceed half a million dollars. If all costs related to those 11 transplants are counted — preparation, physicians’ services, post-op care and the like — the money involved exceeds $5.5 million.

  Life Issues is asking for help from health professionals in drawing attention to this.

• Wesley J. Smith says the mother of Jahi McMath (the little girl declared brain dead 10 months ago; pictured left) has petitioned for the case to be reopened so her daughter can be declared alive:
  

  Here is the gist: Petitioner [Jahi’s mother] is in possession of current evidence, including MRI evidence of the integrity of the brain structure, electrical activity in her brain as demonstrated by EEG, the onset of menarche… and her response to audible commands… demonstrating that Jahi McMath’s brain death was not “irreversible.”

• Pro-Life Action League’s Eric Scheidler, father of six girls, takes strong exception to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation “that physicians promote the progestin implant and the intrauterine device (IUD) for teen girls.” Four of his objections: It would interfere with the role of parents, weaken the decision to abstain from sex, set a double standard, and ignore the abortifacient potential of the implant.
• Right to Life of Michigan honors the 38th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, which is responsible for saving many lives:
  

  If ending tax funded abortions in Michigan saved 10,000 lives in one year, imagine how many lives 38 years of the Hyde Amendment (which effects the whole nation) has saved. Today is a day to celebrate the millions of lives saved by the Hyde Amendment and continue in our efforts to uphold the sanctity of human life.

• At Priests for Life, Fr. Frank Pavone mourns the death of pro-life warrior Sandra Cano (pictured right) – “Doe” of Doe v. Bolton, the companion decision to Roe v. Wade:
  

  Father Pavone said: “Sandra’s work to overturn that devastating decision that was based on lies will not end with her death. When life ultimately triumphs over death, Sandra will share in that victory.”When Sandra Cano approached attorneys for help, she understood her case as an effort to obtain a divorce and regain custody of her children. She was pregnant, and her attorney, in partnership with her mother, arranged an abortion for Sandra at Georgia Baptist Hospital. When she found out about the plan, she fled to Oklahoma and never had the abortion.

  Interestingly enough, neither Roe (Norma McCorvey) or Doe (Cano) had abortions.

• The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform shares Justina Van Maren’s reflections on how her summer internship experience with CCBR changed her perspective on pro-life work.
• ProWomanProLife features a video in which The Blaze’s Dana Loesch interviews the Gosnell movie screenwriter, Andrew Klavan. Klavan shares that he used to be pro-choice but became pro-life after losing an argument to a Catholic friend. Click below to watch:

[Life Issues HT: Bobby Schindler; Cano image via National Right to Life News]

Yesterday there were 21 abortion clinics in Texas, today there are eight.

Thanks to a federal Fifth Circuit Court ruling that allows the state to immediately begin enforcing part of a pro-life law that had been enjoined by a judge in April, the unshackled statute forces abortion clinics to meet the same physical requirements as other ambulatory surgical treatment centers. It also requires that abortionists have admitting privileges within 30 miles of a clinic.

No surprise, when the decision came down late yesterday afternoon the abortion lobby proclaimed an apocalypse. Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards tweeted:

Catastrophic decision for women in TX, whose access to safe & legal abortion will be wiped out in much of the state: http://t.co/PSe4uz55BB

— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) October 3, 2014

This was interesting, since Planned Parenthood is largely to blame for the scorched earth abortion clinic landscape in its leader’s home state.

Beginning today, Planned Parenthood will hold an abortion monopoly in Texas, owning five of the remaining eight clinics.

Two of Planned Parenthood’s five are brand new additions, built, ironically while independent clinics were filing a lawsuit claiming the stricter clinic guidelines would be nearly impossible to meet. How embarrassing.

It cannot be coincidental that Planned Parenthood placed these two new clinics in the same cities as existing rival independent abortion clinics - Dallas and San Antonio.

This in a state that is 268,601 square miles, larger than France and Greece combined. There was nowhere else for Planned Parenthood to build?

This after Richards lamented that pregnant mothers might have to drive hundreds of miles to get an abortion. Planned Parenthood couldn’t spread abortion access around a bit?

I previously explained how Planned Parenthood has such deep pockets.

But one other aspect relevant here is why Texas independent mills have no nest egg, pardon the pun, to fall back on.

There are certainly those owners who don’t manage their finances well. But if 13 out of 21 clinics were forced to shut down today, having failed to improve – or make plans to improve – their facilities with over a year’s warning, there is something else going on.

That is, Planned Parenthood, with all its other resources, has been able to keep abortion market prices artificially low, forcing independent clinics to operate without any margin.

Planned Parenthood is able to come in to town like a Wal-Mart or a grocery store chain or any other big business and engage in price wars until the competition goes under. As a contender complained:

Ms. Hagstrom Miller… says she can’t match the nonprofit’s budget for advertising or clinic upgrades. She has carved her own niche by touting her care as more holistic - and by charging $425 for a first-trimester surgery at her Austin clinic, compared with $475 at the local Planned Parenthood….

“They’re not unlike other big national chains,” Ms. Hagstrom Miller said. “They put local independent businesses in a tough situation.”

That was 2008. Hagstrom’s Austin clinic closed this past July. Planned Parenthood’s Austin clinic is one of Texas’s eight still still standing today.

This is how it came to be that so many indie abortion clinics were so financially weak when the Texas legislature passed HB2 last year, and how Planned Parenthood now owns 63% of the abortion clinics in Texas.