To no one’s surprise, U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson, pictured right, ruled on August 4 that Alabama’s law forcing abortionists to have admitting privileges at local hospitals was unconstitutional.

This is the same judge, after all, who forced the removal of the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama capitol building. He’s a devout liberal, handpicked by the abortion industry to rule on this case. Noted Dr. Michael New at First Things:

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Another Texas abortion clinic closes its doors:
  

  A women’s clinic in North Austin closed its doors Thursday because it can not comply with the House Bill 2 standard of an ambulatory surgical center, Whole Woman’s Health said….The Austin Whole Woman’s Health Clinic had 10 employees and two doctors. Its license officially expired at the end of last month.

  The company’s CEO told KVUE’s partners at the Austin American-Statesman that renovations to create larger operating rooms, a sterile ventilation system and other changes could cost up to $2 million, and they didn’t have the money to make the changes.

This past March a three-judge, all female panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a Texas statute requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of an abortion clinic.

This week, due in part to connections I’ve been able to establish across the pro-life spectrum, I was able to:

• do original pro-life reporting in my post, “Planned Parenthood captures abortion monopoly in Texas”
• delve much deeper into a story barely covered by the mainstream media in my post, “Judge blocks Kissimmee Planned Parenthood from committing abortions”
• provide the sorely missing pro-life angle in my post, “Pro-life activists wreak havoc on New Orleans’ pro-abortion peace”

Each of these stories took several hours to several days to investigate and pull together. I was only enabled to do this thanks to the generosity of pro-lifers who freed my time to focus on pro-life journalism.

UPDATE 7/24, 5:20a: We got great news yesterday, that the abortion rate in Texas has dropped by 13% since November, when the new pro-life law began taking effect. This represents 9,200 babies saved from abortion!

7/23, 7:32a: On September 1 a new pro-life law will take effect in Texas that requires abortion clinics to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers, abortionists to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinic, and the abortion pill RU-486 to be dispensed per FDA protocol.

And on that day Planned Parenthood will seize control of the Texas abortion market, since it will at that point own six* of the eight remaining abortion clinics.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2009 the median cost of a first-trimester abortion was just under $500. Add the bus travel or gas and up to three nights in a hotel, and the cost can jump by several hundred dollars. That’s the impetus behind Clinic Action Support Network, which was founded last summer in […]

As the one-year anniversary approached of the passage in Texas of House Bill 2, a wide-ranging piece of pro-life legislation, I wrote a post, “Texas abortion allies try to ‘recapture the energy’ they said they’d never lose.”

When July 12 came and went without much more than Twitter angst, it became clear to those on the outside the 2013 spark had died.

But does the view from the inside match?

Notes from the July 2 meeting of Dallas for Reproductive Justice, attended by six people, give a glimpse of a statewide movement that is a dying ember of its momentarily fired up former self. And if the pro-abortion furor we saw inspired by Wendy Davis in Texas last year can’t be sustained, where can it be?

I was surprised to see a photo posted yesterday by a typically hostile pro-abortion news source as wonderfully exemplifying the modern-day pro-life movement.

Pro-woman/pro-life

Kudos to Cosmopolitian, for while its article unsurprisingly blasted the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision overturning Massachusetts’ buffer zone law, it took the high road and properly portrayed pro-lifers standing outside the court as the ruling was read, and really, the pro-life movement as a whole, which is young, wholesome, and in this case shady-chic! Click all photos to enlarge…

When viewing the photo above I couldn’t help but recall this photo of pro-choice protesters during Wendy Davis’s filibuster of a late-term abortion ban in Austin, Texas, a year ago, via MSNBC/Associated Press, hardly pro-life bastions…