by Andy Moore of AbortionWiki.org

On January 14 NARAL Pro-Choice America announced it had chosen a new president. The newly-selected leader, Ilyse Hogue, pictured right, is set to take over the reigns of the organization at the end of January.

“So, who is this woman?” is the question most pro-lifers and even many on the other side are asking.

When current president Nancy Keenan (pictured below with Hogue) announced in May 2012 her intention to retire, she said she thought a younger leader would better connect with the Millennial generation.

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:

Click to enlarge…

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.”

We are taught to “know they enemy,” and in that spirit I forced myself to watch these speeches last night. Sitting through them was ridiculously hard, but since none were longer than 10 minutes I got through my self-imposed homework assignment by taking breaks to recover in between.

Being aware of the other side’s latest twisted talking points and strategies is “frankly” (Cecile’s favorite word) smart. So I’m giving you the same homework assignment. Now, now, I can hear you groaning. But we need to be aware. None of these are longer than 10 minutes. You can do this!

If Democrats and liberal feminists lose the presidential election this fall despite their “war on women” strategy, they will have depleted their arsenal.

In their most candid interviews to date, various Democrats and abortion industry players admitted in a Politico article today they know abortion has become a losing issue for them. They have hinted at it a couple times this year (here and here), but they show all their cards in this piece.

In order to get women to unwittingly support abortion, they are pulling out all stops, accusing Republicans of wanting to ban contraception,  encourage domestic violence, and deny women breast exams, maternity care, equal pay, and education access.  It’s all in a quite revealing article…

Included in the speaker’s list for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte are Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Nancy Keenan, and Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University Law student who has become the new face of the war on birth control.

Putting reproductive rights luminaries front and center at the convention could be seen by many activists as a signal that this year politicians will be forced to be honest about their true intentions when it comes to a woman’s right to control her reproductive choices.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• There really must be something in the records of Planned Parenthood in Kansas as they’ve asked for the records back. We know it’s not patient privacy Planned Parenthood is concerned with, it’s covering up their willingness to not report statutory rape.

There were lots of interesting tidbits in Melinda Henneberger’s August 7 Washington Post piece, “Democratic abortion foes push for change in platform.”

For starters:

Democratic dissenters on the issue of abortion have made their case to the platform committee, arguing that the party should change its language enough to allow for some diversity of opinion on the matter and return to the “big tent” approach of the Clinton years.

[Democrats for Life president] Janet Robert, who founded Minnesota’s progressive talk radio station AM 950… was given seven minutes… to argue that the party simply cannot win back Congress without Democrats who differ from the ’08 platform on this one issue. She cited a slew of stats, including a Gallup poll from last year in which 44% of Democrats said abortion should only be legal “in a few circumstances.”

But with NARAL president Nancy Keenan on the platform committee, it ain’t gonna happen. Plus, the abortion lobby has more power than ever with ally Barack Obama at the helm.