My friend Brookelyn gave me permission to post this sweet three-snapshot montage of her pregnancy journey, culminating in the birth of 4th son Asher!

Click to enlarge…

Pro-choice activists are on a new bandwagon: To normalize abortion, no sob stories are allowed.

For instance, excusing abortions for rape and incest is bad. To do so is to say some abortions are justifiable, some are not. According to post-abortive Merritt Tierce in a New York Times op ed:

By repeating only the gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, terrifying abortion stories, we protect a lie: that abortion isn’t normal. We have learned to think of abortion with shame and fear. We have accepted the damaging idea that a person who wants an abortion must grovel before the consciences of others…. We have to stop categorizing abortions as justified or unjustified.

Tierce used her own two abortions as examples of what we must all accept.

Tierce got her first abortion after having an affair and being unsure who the father was. She added a sob story, even though she had just said they weren’t allowed. “My kids were 2 and 3, and the debilitating morning sickness, which I experienced early in each of my pregnancies, made it difficult to work or care for two toddlers.”

Tierce’s rationale for her second abortion was even more spurious. Her story really makes no sense. Tierce (pictured left) inexplicably “sabotaged” her birth control, she says, to get control back from an emotionally abusive partner.  ”The whole situation was a complete abscess,” she admits, therefore she got pregnant to force him to “publicly acknowledge our relationship existed”?

But her plan failed, so she got an abortion. And used her two surviving children as rationalization once again, “ I knew that having that baby would have been a terrible thing for my children.”

In other words, Tierce got pregnant on purpose to trap a man, but when he didn’t fall into the trap, she killed her tiny hostage.

This is what abortion zealots are newly advocating: No excuses for abortions. Abortions just are.

It seems to me this tactic will work in pro-life favor. For years the other side has held up the small percentage of abortions for “hard cases” – rape, incest, handicapped babies – as reasons Americans must stomach ALL abortions. Will they really throw that successful tactic by the wayside, all to theoretically normalize abortion?

Your thoughts?

I think on the issue of choice, one of the reasons, to be frank, that there’s not so much pro-choice activity is that young women, including my daughter and my granddaughter, have grown up in a world where they know if they need an abortion, they can get it. Not that either one of them has had one, but it’s comforting to know if they need it, they can get it.

~ US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elle magazine, October issue

by Kelli

To listen to pretty much anyone in the Democratic Party these days, you’d think these are dark days for women. But by any objective measure, things have been going great for women for a long time, under Republicans and Democrats alike.

Women earn 57% of bachelor’s degrees, 63% of master’s degrees and 53% of doctorates. They constitute the majority of the U.S. workforce and the majority of managers. Single women without kids earn 8% more than single men without children in most cities. Women make up almost half of medical school applicants and nearly 80% of veterinary school enrollees.

The recession — a.k.a. the “mancession” — hit men much harder, and women recovered from it much more quickly. When you account for hours worked and job choices, pay equity is pretty much here already….

Going by the endless stream of fundraising emails I get from the Democratic Party, Emily’s List - never mind New York Times editorials – and other usual suspects, we’re always one election away from losing it all. If Harry Reid isn’t the majority leader next year, it’s back to wearing corsets and churning butter for you.

Obviously, this isn’t all about elections. There’s a vast feminist industrial complex that is addicted to institutionalized panic. On college campuses, feminist and gender studies departments depend almost entirely on a constant drumbeat of crisis-mongering to keep their increasingly irrelevant courses alive. Abortion rights groups now use “women’s health” and “access to abortion on demand” as if they are synonymous terms. The lack of a subsidy for birth control pills is tantamount to a federal forced breeding program.

Sure, women still face challenges. But the system feminists have constructed cannot long survive an outbreak of confidence in the permanence of women’s progress. The last thing the generals need is for the troops to find out that the “war on women” ended a long time ago — and the women won.

~ Jonah Goldberg, Townhall.com, September 24

by Kelli

• On the 34th anniversary of China’s One-Child Policy, Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers pens an open letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping in which she minces no words about the law’s brutality:
  

  The One Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth.

  The One Child Policy is China’s war on women. Any discussion of women’s rights, or human rights, would be a charade if forced abortion in China is not front and center. It does not matter whether you are pro-life or pro-choice on this issue. No one supports forced abortion, because it is not a choice.

• At Stand True, Bryan Kemper shares the testimony of Lauran, who was raped as a teen and became pregnant with her daughter, Isabella, as a result. Lauran describes her feelings during her pregnancy:
  

  Life is a precious, sacred gift and it is not ours to choose whether life should end because of inconvenience or because of the circumstance of conception. I learned something so valuable in those eight months. I was not the person outsiders assumed I was. I was stronger than I ever knew possible. I had developed the heart of a mommy.

  In spite of the circumstances of her conception, I began to realize that my daughter was not a creation of violence, she was a gift from God, the creator of life. It was that realization that changed my perspective completely. One week after graduation Isabella Grace came into the world. I thought I had been strong for the past 9 months but I had no idea how much stronger I would become because of this beautiful little girl.

• The March for Life Conference and Expo will be held on January 21, 2015, the day before the March for Life in Washington, D.C. This is a free, one day event which will include information on grassroots lobbying, legal history, panel discussions, exhibits from pro-life groups, and more! Register here.
• Pro-Life NZ discusses in detail why the most often noted “exceptions” considered in the “pro-life with exceptions” position – rape/incest, fetal abnormality, and life of the mother – are in error:
  

  Once pro-lifers say there can be a “good reason” to kill a preborn baby, the foundation of the pro-life movement crumbles. The argument is lost. Either the preborn child is a person, or the child is not a person. Since the preborn child is a person, there can be no exceptions for abortion.

• At ProLife365.com, Kevin Kukla takes apart the “most popular abortion argument of all time” – Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “unconscious violinist” scenario.
• ProWomanProLife remarks on what happens “in an abortion-promoting culture where we attempt to separate sex from pro-creation”:
  

  It seems that Sex Ed 101 teaches where babies come from. Babies are conceived via sex. Sex = babies.

  If that’s the case and if most people in North America are aware of this fact, how in the world can a man “accidentally” conceive a child?

  This can only happen in an abortion-promoting culture where we attempt to separate sex from pro-creation. We all know that no contraception is 100% effective. But what is pretty darn effective is abortion.

  And this is what leads to an inconceivable quote like this one:

  In consenting to sex, neither a man nor a woman gives consent to become a parent, just as in consenting to any activity, one does not consent to yield to all the accidental outcomes that might flow from that activity.

  Therefore sex no longer leads to babies, or unwanted babies in any case, therefore men and women can become “accidentally” pregnant, bear no responsibility and the child in the womb is killed or, if he/she lives, may have to do without a “desperate” parent who opted out.

[Photo via personhoodusa.com]

by Hans Johnson

As hard as it is to lose loved ones, especially after a long and delibiitating illness, we usually have many memories to comfort us. But what of those very young ones who spent their entire post-birth lives in a hospital, with all the necessary tubes and instruments between them and their parents?

Such was the case for Nathan Steffel from Ohio. In the midst of his grief over the passing of his six-week-old daughter Sophie, he put out a request to users of Reddit to see if a photo of his daughter could be photoshopped to better reflect her. The results were equally overwhelming and heartwarming.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/0VsHE1NaEhg[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: TheBlaze; photos from People]

by Carder

It felt like laundering the money in a good way…. He’s such an obvious target for any feminist or sane person. It was really bizarre to me that he gave me $2,000, and he’s evil incarnate in some ways.

~ Former waitress and executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, Merritt Tierce, describing how she donated $2,000 in tips from radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh to the cause of abortion rights, Dallas News via The Huffington Post, September 24

Since 2010, abortion proponents have acknowledged with increasing frequency and alarm that they think they are starting to lose. Two recent essays reveal new crises they are adding to their growing list:

• “When the going get tough,” the report on a May 2014 meeting sponsored by the Center for Reproductive Rights and Provide
• “Another choice lost: HB 2 targets most of Texas’ independent abortion providers,” an August 28 article by Andrea Grimes, senior political reporter for RH Reality Check

Putting information gleaned from these pieces together with Time magazine’s analysis of the pro-abortion movement on Roe’s 40th anniversary and four recent assessments by abortion proponents from various vantage points, it is clear the other side believes there has been a shift in the abortion wars, and legal access is in danger. I agree.

Although there has been no concerted effort by pro-lifers, the long term result of everyone pursuing an end to abortion according to their own passions has resulted in a myriad of problems for the other side, some of which are mutating into unforeseen new problems, the topic of this post.

To summarize the abortion lobby’s old problems:

1. Proliferation of pro-life laws

2. Litigating pro-life laws

3. Abortion stigma

4. Shrinking number of abortion clinics

5. Inability to staff abortion clinics

6. Science

7. Shift in public opinion; dearth of abortion advocates

8. Attempts to defund Planned Parenthood

According to the aforementioned essays, new problems facing the abortion lobby are:

1. Abortion access (distance, funding, logistics)

2. Demise of independent abortion clinics; Planned Parenthood monopoly

The irony of the old and new Planned Parenthood problems couldn’t be richer. I’ve noted for years that Planned Parenthood is trying to drive independent abortion clinics out of business and take over the industry. I’m not the only one. Tweets from a 2012 conference of indie mills identify in part how Planned Parenthood is doing it:

Because Planned Parenthood is such a large conglomerate, is tax exempt, is subsidized by the government, wields greater political influence, can order supplies in bulk, has top notch PR, advertising, and litigation teams, has university/hospital connections to hire abortionists and get admitting privileges, has greater access to insurance claims/state Medicare/Obamacare, and has brand recognition, Planned Parenthood can easily crush the competition.

In addition, Planned Parenthood’s large donor base enables it to upgrade clinics to meet new standards, or build new clinics, often, noncoincidentally, in the competition’s backyard, such as in North Carolina and Texas.

Planned Parenthood abortion monopoly no longer deniable

Finally, mainstream abortion proponents like Grimes are acknowledging Planned Parenthood’s growing monopoly on the abortion trade. But she found a way to blame pro-lifers, claiming clinic regulations are responsible for the demise of indie clinics that leave only the stronger Planned Parenthood clinics standing.

But the failure of substandard clinics is not anyone’s fault but their own. And when Grimes and her tribe come to Planned Parenthood’s aid when fighting to hold on to its government subsidies, they only further fortify the abortion giant and the unlevel playing field.

The report I referred to at the top of my post was on a meeting held this past May between groups concerned about abortion access, particularly in the South and Midwest, where it is becoming a huge problem.

But “[i]nvitees were limited to those working in a non-affiliate based organizational structure,” the report stated, “as we believed that independent groups operate in a distinct resource and decision-making context.”

In other words, Planned Parenthood was not welcome.

Many attendees were part of an emerging field: abortion funding.

Abortion funding groups are networking nationwide to create an abortion underground railroad.  Fewer clinics and longer waiting periods mean pregnant mothers seeking abortion have to allot for transportation to clinics sometimes hundreds of miles away and hotels and meals if having to stay put 24-72 hours before getting their abortions.

Women of means have no trouble surmounting these hurdles, so it is basically the poor, uneducated, young, and/or foolish who need a helping hand, surely complicating an already complicated process. Add ticking gestational clocks to all the other drama, and you get “triage” situations where the funders determine who will and won’t get to kill their baby.

And is Planned Parenthood included in the mix? Don’t think so. From the 2012 conference of independent clinics:

It turns out Planned Parenthood has formed its own funding groups to fund abortions at its own clinics, making it more likely independent funding groups will bypass Planned Parenthood clinics if possible and send women to independent mills, both to strengthen the cash reserves of independents as well as spite Planned Parenthood.

So another interesting breach between Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups is surfacing. (Others I’ve recently documented include Planned Parenthood’s rift with women of color groups and Planned Parenthood’s split from “pro-choice” groups.)

And with the abortion lobby noting Planned Parenthood’s takeover of the industry, it makes it that much harder for Planned Parenthood to claim abortion accounts for a minuscule part of its business. Planned Parenthood went from committing 6% of all U.S. abortions in 1986 to 31.6% in 2011.

That percentage is certain to grow as Planned Parenthood runs competitors out of business.