The anti-abortion activist group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America came out of a meeting with former President Donald Trump Tuesday praising him for his anti-abortion positions despite a falling out last month over his affirmation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that allowed abortions nationwide, reverting it back to the states to decide individually.
“This afternoon I joined Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Tony Perkins for a terrific meeting with President Trump. His presidency was the most consequential in American history for the pro-life cause,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement Tuesday. “During the meeting, President Trump reiterated his opposition to the extreme Democratic position of abortion on demand, up until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers — and even in some cases after the child is born.
“President Trump believes such a position is unworthy of a great nation and believes the American people will rebel against such a radical position that aligns us with China and North Korea.”
The organization said it is a “network of more than 1 million pro-life Americans nationwide” that is dedicated to ending abortion by electing national leaders and advocating for laws that save lives.”
“President Trump knows the vast majority of Americans oppose brutal late-term abortions when the child can feel pain and suck their thumbs,” she said in the statement. “President Trump reiterated that any federal legislation protecting these children would need to include the exceptions for life of the mother and in cases of rape and incest.
“Protecting unborn children capable of feeling pain would align America with the civilized world and with 47 out of 50 European nations.”
While speaking positively about the meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, calling it “terrific,” Dannenfelser said she was also speaking with other GOP candidates about their positions, The Associated Press reported.
“I am not aligning with Trump,” Dannenfelser said in the report. “I’ve had similar conversations with all other GOP presidential hopefuls.”
The meeting comes two weeks after the organization expressed displeasure with Trump’s stance on the Dobbs decision, claiming the court “got it right” by allowing the states to decide the issue individually.
According to the AP report, she said Trump held a “morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate.”
“Saying that the issue should only be decided at the states is an endorsement of abortion up until the moment of birth, even brutal late-term abortions in states like California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey,” she said in a statement April 20. “The only way to save these children is through federal protections, such as a 15-week federal minimum standard when the unborn child can feel excruciating pain.
“We will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections.”
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used.
The Associated Press Stylebook, a once-respected linguistic guide for journalists, conceded the definition of the word “woke” to conservatives on Thursday, in an update instructing writers to “use quotes around the slang term.”
“Woke” was originally popularized by left-wing proponents of identity politics to flatteringly refer to their own “enlightenment or awakening about issues of racial and other forms of social justice,” as the AP explains. Conservatives have used it to describe those same people and their ideas.
Those ideas more often than not, demand revolutionary social changes that prejudge people based on their secondary physical characteristics. If, like the vast majority of America until about five seconds ago, you think such identarian prejudices are a bad thing, you might use the word “woke” in a less than fawning manner. Apparently, the AP’s staff can’t handle that.
AP’s concession of the word is hilariously thin-skinned, but it’s also a rare win for conservatives in the war of words. Just by describing woke behavior as such, we’ve held a bit of ground against the unhinged language police who are mad that the right is using their terminology against them. Unintentionally, it seems we’ve ended up with command of the word altogether, if left-wing outlets like the AP are henceforth refusing to use it.
While there are times individual ideologies require a more specific description — queer theory, or socialism, for example — “woke” is a completely fair and often helpful term to use when speaking generally about the coalition of people on the left who want to see meritocracy replaced by identity politics. As my colleague Samuel Mangold-Lenett noted recently in these pages, “what other slogany-sounding word really works as a catch-all for what leftism has become?”
“They lost complete control of the English language,” he added, “and the word they used to indicate their radicalism to one another is being used to expose that radicalism to the rest of the world.”
The apparatus of left-wing media outlets, cultural celebrities, and tech platforms that drives our modern discourse has a majority share in defining the language we use. From headlines to search engines to literal dictionaries, activists manipulate the tools of debate. In any debate, the first step is defining your terms — if your definitions are off, you’ve already lost.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon conservatives to be intentional, honest, and straightforward with the words we use. That includes defending the legitimacy of disfavored-but-accurate terms (like “woke,” or “woman”) and refusing to use inaccurate language.
Take the nonsense phrase “gender-affirming care,” for example. The diction dictators have effectively standardized the term, to the point where even people who disapprove of such procedures will glibly repeat it. But nothing about the phrase is tethered to reality.
The whole idea that people have “genders” beyond their natural sex is pseudo-science crafted to further an ideology. Procedures that attempt to inhibit or reverse the physical realities of a person’s sex are not “affirming” that sex, but actively rejecting it. And deformative surgeries that involve amputating healthy body parts and creating Frankenstein-esque “penises” and “vaginas” with scraps of carved-up skin are certainly not “care.”
To use the phrase “gender-affirming care” is to give up the entire argument before it’s even begun. Or, as George Orwell put it, such nonsense terms “construct your thoughts for you,” and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
The same goes for using improper pronouns to describe sexually confused people: calling a man “she” or a woman “he.” Doing so indulges a delusion. Having physical reality on your side does little good if you concede it away by the very words you use.
Concurrent with the effort to mainstream invented euphemisms such as “gender-affirming care” is an effort to cannibalize established English vocabulary. Other victims of the AP Stylebook’s recent crusades include “riot,” “mistress,” “crazy,” and “pro-life.” Proper grammar is also a victim, with the redefinition of the plural pronoun “they” to refer to individuals who are in denial of their natural sex.
Tech monopolies such as Google instruct their employees to avoid terms like “man hours” and “blacklist.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has nixed “criminal” and “foreigner.” From journalism to medicine, terms such as “mother” and “woman” are replaced by dehumanizing lingo like “birthing parent” and “person who menstruates.” Merriam-Webster has redefined “anti-vaxxer,” “sexual preference,” and “assault rifle” to further the editors’ ideological ends.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used. But the same people policing the word “woke” are appointing themselves the arbiters of the rest of the English language, too.
For those of us who prefer our words to reflect reality, there is nothing to be gained by good-naturedly going along with linguistic charades. On the other hand, there is the entire discourse to be lost.
“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell protested not just sloppy use of language, but intentional misuse of language for political purposes.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” he said. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Politicians and dishonest media propagandists today use inaccurate language to frame narratives and foster a leftist perspective. Inadvertently, even well-meaning audiences sometimes internalize this language and end up propagating the very ideas and framing they fundamentally reject. Don’t let that be you.
In every debate, it’s vital to start by defining your terms. If conservatives want to counter the radical left’s agenda, we have to begin by using words that accurately reflect what we mean — not words that actively mean the opposite. Here are just 10.
1. ‘Mainstream Media’
The public communication cartel headed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC does not represent mainstream Americans. Earlier this year, Axios (another culprit of heavy-handed political spin) reported that 56 percent of Americans believe “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Big Media has engaged in deception through false and misleading “reporting” on Georgia’s election laws, the trespass and unrest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and more. Embracing “Russiagate” and the allegations of the Steele dossier against President Trump was one indicator of crumbling credibility. The cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election was another.
Even more recently, CBS’s “60 Minutes” invented a scandal about Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, while giving minuscule coverage to New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s cover-up of COVID-19 nursing home deaths his policies caused.
Leftist propaganda outlets who are running cover for Democrats and spreading inaccurate opposition research on conservatives don’t deserve to be called mainstream. Instead, use “Big Media,” “corporate media,” or — as DeSantis says — “smear merchants.”
2. ‘Gender,’ When You Mean ‘Sex’
Words have gender; people are one sex or another. For Latin and in many of the languages that have grown out of it, gender is a linguistic term indicating which word endings a term should possess. Gender is either feminine, masculine, or neuter. The phrase “la boulangerie,” for example, is French for “the bakery,” and its gender is feminine.
Male and female, on the other hand, refer to sex. Sex is a biological category that reflects a person’s physical characteristics and reproductive systems, and also manifests in certain broad behavioral differences that distinguish men and women.
3. ‘Sex-Reassignment Surgery’
Further, sex is not assigned, at birth or ever. If it is not “assigned,” it cannot be reassigned. Surgical procedures that remove or conceal the outward appearance of a woman or man’s reproductive organs, are most accurately described as genital mutilation or amputation.
4. ‘Democracy,’ When You Mean ‘Republic’
A democracy is direct rule by the supreme will of the people: the highest law is that of the loudest mob. Derived from the Greek “demos” (people) and “kratia” (power), democracy involves no higher law than popular consensus, and subjects the majority will to no checks and balances but itself.
In Book VIII of “The Republic,” Plato lists democracy as the social structure directly followed by tyranny. Democracy, Plato theorized, “comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.” He continued, “that is the constitution of democracy alike whether it is established by force of arms or by terrorism.”
The American system was established as a constitutional republic. The highest law of the land is the U.S. Constitution, to which all public servants are (or should be) accountable. Additional laws are made by elected representatives of the people. Further, the American system is a federal republic, meaning power is divided between federal, state, and local governments, all of whom serve as the guarantors of the people’s sovereignty and rights.
5. ‘Abortion Doctors’ and ‘Abortion Clinics’
Doctors protect life; they don’t willfully take it. The Hippocratic Oath, written by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and long respected as a noble description of a doctor’s vocation, includes a commitment to “not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” Doctors are also obligated to, as far as it is in their power, “do no harm.” (This phrase is commonly attributed to the Hippocratic Oath, but actually comes from another work of Hippocrates, his book, “Of the Epidemics.”)
Similarly, clinics are medical facilities where people receive help and care. We do not call the room in which a prisoner on death row is executed a “clinic,” and neither should we use the term to describe the place where preborn babies are killed and dismembered. Call abortionists and abortion facilities what they are.
6. ‘Antidiscrimination’
Often, “antidiscrimination” policies actually refer to legal preferences based on sex, race, socioeconomic status, or some other category. The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, for example, released an “Antiracist Agenda For Medicine” earlier this month that would provide “preferential care based on race” for black and Latino patients.
In another example of discrimination under the name of its opposite, Yale University unlawfully discriminated against white and Asian students, according to a two-year Department of Justice investigation. Instead of using the leftist buzzword “antidiscrimination” to describe these policies, call them legalized preferences, or simply the discrimination they are.
7. ‘Undocumented Immigrant’
“Undocumented” is the term used by people who don’t want to call breaking immigration laws “illegal.” However, most illegal immigrants have identification documents from their home governments. Further, 16 states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Washington — as well as Washington, D.C., issue drivers licenses to illegal aliens, giving them U.S. documents as well.
8. ‘Equity’ Or ‘Equality,’ When You Mean The Other
Equity and equality sound similar, but have widely different implications today. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines “equality” as “The same degree of dignity or claims; as the equality of men in the scale of being … an equality of rights.” The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” recognizes this equal value and dignity in personhood of each human being.
Equity has traditionally been a common legal term, referring to civil remedies; it can also mean the “impartial distribution of justice.” But in the jargon of identity politics, equity describes a policy that “recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” See the above entry for “antidiscrimination” for an example of how equity-driven policies usually work.
9. ‘Cisgender’
Cisgender is an unnecessary word and assumes that sex is a result of human choice. A cisgender man is a man; a cisgender woman is a woman. Only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, “cisgender” was invented to represent the opposite of “transgender” in the 1990s.
10. ‘Pro-Choice’
“Pro-choice” is a euphemism to get around having to call yourself pro-abortion. But just as we don’t use “pro-choice” to describe supporting a person’s decision to murder another, we shouldn’t use it here. Abortion denies giving the unborn baby the choice to live; in that sense, it is violently anti-choice.
“This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases,” Orwell continued, “can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them.” Sloppy, inaccurate phrases will “construct your thoughts for you,” he says, and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
Don’t let corrupt media and politicians design your words and supplant your meaning. To win the culture debate, you better first define your terms.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
Indiana’s GOP legislature is poised to increase funding 2,000 percent for an agency that oversaw abortion businesses after whose services three women died in 2022.
Indiana abortion records The Federalist obtained this week indicate that in 2022 three women died after abortion procedures and two babies were born alive after chemical abortions. They also suggest Indiana abortionists failed to report four abortions on girls aged 15 and younger, as legally required. One of the minors not referred for a state abuse investigation after her abortion, a violation of state law, was just 13 years old, the records say.
The Indiana Department of Health receives legally mandated Terminated Pregnancy Reports on each abortion committed in the state. More than 100 of these from January to November 2022 indicate that abortion facilities in the state may have committed crimes and health violations, according to recordkeeping from Voices for Life, a Hoosier pro-life organization.
IDH has shut down no abortion facilities since January 2022, however, even facilities where records show women died after abortions. As for the 22 abortionists named in these numerous recent reports indicating potential medical malfeasance, “I am not aware of any doctors who have lost their licenses,” Voices for Life Executive Director Melanie Garcia Lyon told The Federalist Wednesday.
IDH communications personnel did not respond to any questions about these records from The Federalist.
GOP to Reward Incompetent Health Agency
Indiana’s Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature are poised to increase taxpayer funding for the health department by 2,000 percent this week, from $7 million a year to more than $150 million. IDH also pushed Indiana families into lockdown and covid testing chaos across two school years despite early-available evidence children were at low risk from Covid-19 exposure.
Gov. Eric Holcomb is now using the damage his lengthy Covid shutdowns caused, including mental distress, obesity, and academic catastrophe, to amp up funding for the shutdowns’ top enabler and enforcer in Indiana. That enforcer also happens to be low-energy in investigating abortion businesses whose services have resulted in Hoosier women’s deaths.
Voices for Life and their national partner Students for Life collect these records and file complaints about apparent violations with IDH and the state attorney general’s office, Garcia Lyon told The Federalist. Forty percent of the potential violations the group found from January to November 2022, Garcia Lyon said, were from Planned Parenthood locations.
After receiving such complaints, the office of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita investigates, then submits a summary or a complaint to Indiana’s medical licensing board, said Rokita Press Secretary Kelly Stevenson. The board hears complaints and decides whether to sanction the investigated abortionist or facility. Indiana’s governor oversees that board and appoints its seven members.
On Saturday in Indianapolis, Students for Life and Voices for Life will highlight the state-reported health and safety violations related to an abortion facility that may move across the border to Illinois. That’s the Clinic for Women, currently in Indianapolis.
In September, Indiana banned abortions, except for very small babies who are the claimed results of rape and incest. The law is currently suspended by two injunctions pending litigation. Garcia Lyon noted that the law “still allows for abortion at hospitals. And the same people making these violations often do abortions in hospitals already. [So] code violations will still be relevant once the law goes into place, because it’s still the same people, just moving places.”
Records: 15-Year-Old Girl’s Womb Evacuated By Infamous Abortionist
One of the abortion reports, dated April 21, 2022, shows a chemical abortion on a 15-year-old girl performed by abortionist Deborah Nucatola in Bloomington, Ind. at a Planned Parenthood. Nucatola was infamously recorded on a 2015 undercover video discussing how to “crush” a child to death during an abortion to leave his organs intact for sale.
The state report suggests this abortion was not reported, as legally required, to the state Department of Child Services for investigation as the potential result of child rape. The space on the form for the date of reporting this abortion to IDH is blank. Legally, the form states, the abortion should have been disclosed to DCS within three days of the child’s death.
One of the four underage girls whose 2022 abortions weren’t reported to child services, as legally required, was 13 years old when her child was aborted, according to state records. That surgical abortion on a seven-week-old baby was performed at a Planned Parenthood branch in Indianapolis by abortionist Cassandra Cashman, the record states.
DCS also failed to answer any Federalist questions about these reports.
Records: 3 Women Died After Indiana Abortions in 2022
According to three TPRs from 2022, three women died in Indiana after abortions at facilities overseen by the Indiana Department of Health. At the Indianapolis Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Hospital, a 31-year-old married woman died after an abortion on June 25, 2022, says one TPR.
The record says she was given abortion pills when her baby was 21 weeks of gestation, an age at which babies can survive outside the womb in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The baby was diagnosed via ultrasound with a chromosomal anomaly, says the record, which IDH received on July 22, 2022. The physician committing this abortion was listed as Amy Caldwell in the report.
Caldwell was also the abortionist listed on the April 24, 2022 report of another Hoosier woman who died after an abortion at Planned Parenthood-Georgetown in Indianapolis. The 29-year-old unmarried woman was given abortion drugs to kill a 7-week-old baby, say the state records.
The third Hoosier woman to die after an abortion in 2022 undertook a surgical abortion in Bloomington, Indiana, by abortionist Rhiannon Amodeo, says another state record. The baby cut to pieces inside her was an estimated eight weeks old. His mother was 31 years old. The Indiana Department of Health received the report of this double death on November 23, 2022.
Caldwell is also listed as the physician on a January 7, 2022 report that says she delivered a baby alive during an abortion procedure. That baby was also potentially viable in a NICU: she was listed on the report as 20 weeks old when her mother and an abortionist ended her life.
Indiana Department of Health Blaming Data ‘Errors’ Since 2018
In March 2022, Hoosier pro-lifers said the Indiana Department of Health stopped releasing Terminated Pregnancy Reports for a South Bend facility after local conservative news highlighted TPRs indicating multiple illegal abortions at the Whole Women’s Health facility.
“Over the past four years, IDOH has taken zero action on reported abortions that indicate they were illegally performed,” wrote state Rep. Jake Teshka in a March 2022 letter to the agency about the incident.
More than 50 Indiana lawmakers wrote to Holcomb in 2021 complaining about the IDH’s history of alleged data errors and lackluster follow-up on abortion reports that indicate potential crimes. The letter noted that since at least 2018 the department has claimed several abortion reports that indicate criminal or health-violating activity were false, due to “computer error.”
“We submit complaints all the time about things that are reported on Terminated Pregnancy Reports, and the excuse nearly every time is, ‘Oh, it was an error. Oh, it was an error,’” Jackie Appleman, a Voices for Life board member, told a local newspaper in February after the department used the excuse again over reports of unlicensed abortions occurring in Indiana. “We’ve been getting this excuse back from the (Indiana) health department for the last, I don’t know, three or four years.”
The December 2021 letter from elected officials notes that despite multiple postabortion deaths of women and abortions performed at unlicensed facilities, Indiana abortionists have failed to lose their medical licenses and IDOH has failed to resolve investigations into such cases. The officials asked Holcomb to update them on “on all open cases relating to abortion clinics” and to investigate why complaints “are not examined and resolved.”
Holcomb responded in January 2022, providing no update on IDH investigations of abortion facilities nor announcing any investigation into why IDH fails to secure penalties for abortionists after procedures that lead to women’s deaths. One year later, he moved to reward the badly discredited IDH with hundreds of millions more taxpayer dollars. Holcomb’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Instead of demanding that IDH prove competence at stopping criminal and human rights violations under its purview before any expansion of its duties, the Indiana legislature is cooperating with Holcomb in rewarding IDH with a 2,000 percent increase in taxpayer funding.
Extremists have got to learn to take half a loaf. Just like the cheap labor-demanding GOP donors, pro-lifers need to be told: You can’t get everything you want. If Republicans give you this, they’ll lose their jobs, and the people who’ll replace them want you dead.
Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot. That’s why I’m begging them to stop pushing wildly unpopular ideas. These fanatics are going to get millions more babies killed when Democrats win supermajorities in both houses of Congress and immediately pass a federal law making abortion-on-demand the law of the land.
They’re also going to get a lot more adults killed when those same Democratic supermajorities pass laws taking our guns, defunding the police and packing the court, among other great Democratic ideas.
We’ve been rolling our eyes at pro-choicers forever, telling them to calm down, that overturning Roe would just return the issue to the states. Blue states would make abortion legal until the kid turns 14. A few states, like Louisiana, would impose tough restrictions, but most states would come out in the middle — allowing abortions in the first trimester, plus parental notification laws, and exceptions for rape and incest.
Instead, the moment Dobbs was released, pro-life nuts rushed to the mics, saying, This is gonna be great! We’re going to ban abortion from the moment of conception and prosecute the mothers for murder!
The Democratic Party has been using abortion to scare suburban women in every election cycle for 50 years. Now, Republicans are finally giving them something to be scared about.
In Michigan, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Tudor Dixon, said she opposed abortion for 14-year-old girls who’d been raped because giving birth to her rapist’s baby could be “healing.”
Does the name Todd Akin mean anything to you? Anything at all? Richard Mourdock?
Dixon lost by 11 points.
Pennsylvania responded, Watch this! Doug Mastriano, Republican candidate for governor, called abortion the “number one” issue of his campaign and said he looked forward to signing a six-week abortion ban. In 2019, he’d called for criminally prosecuting women who got abortions and doctors who performed them.
Mastriano lost by 15 points, taking the Republican Senate candidate down with him.
If we don’t bind and gag these pro-life militants, in about two more election cycles, we’ll have no Republicans in office anywhere. Good luck saving babies then!
Of course, it’s possible that there were other things voters didn’t like about Dixon and Mastriano.
Ah, but we also have pure test cases. Since Dobbs, there have been a total of six statewide ballot initiatives exclusively about abortion. The pro-life side lost every single time. They lost in blue states, in purple states and in red states. They were not outspent. These were direct-to-the-people votes. The tiniest restriction on abortion failed — even wholly theoretical restrictions! Every expansion of abortion rights won.
Army of Todd Akins: I don’t care! They’re wrong! They’re evil! What about the babies??? [Please give me a standing ovation now.]
In Montana, a proposal merely to require doctors to give life-saving treatment to babies born alive after a botched abortion lost 53% to 47%. Trump won Montana by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
In Kansas, pro-lifers wrote a ballot initiative that would have amended the constitution to clarify that it said nothing at all about abortion. The initiative placed no new restrictions on abortion, but simply moved the issue from the courts to the legislature.
It failed by 18 points, 59-41, losing in every congressional district in the state. Trump won Kansas by 20 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020.
Kentucky voted on a similar initiative, proposing to amend the state constitution to say: “… nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”
That initiative lost 52-48. In 2016, Trump won Kentucky by a whopping 30 points, and in 2020 by 25 points.
In three other states, Michigan, Vermont and California, voters put a right to abortion in their state constitutions.
Six ballot initiatives expressly on abortion, and the pro-life side lost ’em all.
We’ve been waiting half a century to get Roe overruled so Americans could finally vote on the issue. Well, guess what? They’ve voted! In the privacy of the voting booth, the people have spoken, and what they’ve said is: We don’t want the stupid and incompetent having any more babies.
The fanatics cite three Republican governors who won reelection after signing six-week abortion bans as proof that a certain miracle governor in Florida hasn’t just nuked his own presidential chances by approving such a law. All three governors signed their six-week bans when Roe was still the law of the land. All three bans were tied up in litigation on Election Day.
But more important, in the entire country, only one incumbent governor lost in 2022 — pro-life, pro-choice, it didn’t matter. Thirty-six governors up for reelection; 35 won.
The only flipped governorship was in Nevada, where the winning Republican, Joe Lombardo, said he opposed a national abortion ban. Luckily, abortion was a complete nonissue because state law already allows abortion up to 24 weeks and can only be changed by a vote of the people. (Lombardo also said there was no fraud in the 2020 election, for any Republicans who care about winning.)
But even in the face of a brutal 6-0 losing record, there are still pro-lifers who will say, I’m proud and I’d do it again! (Did you see my write-up in Catholic Insights magazine?)
This is our “DEFUND THE POLICE” faction — people whose ideological zealotry outruns their rationality.
Fine, be a showoff. Just understand, you’re going to get a lot more babies killed. I hope that’s worth your moral preening.
Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law last week to circumvent red-state bans on abortion and transgender treatments.
While Republican lawmakers ramp up protections for vulnerable teens caught in America’s contemporary transgender craze, Polis aims to make Colorado a destination for impressionable minors to seek permanent procedures from puberty blockers to surgery.
“Here in Colorado, we value individual freedoms, and we stand up to protect them,” Polis said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “I’m excited by the work of advocates and legislators to further Colorado’s reputation as a beacon of freedom, a beacon of choice, a beacon of individuality where we live on our own terms.”
Senate Bill 23-188, signed into law Friday, opens the door for “trans tourism” in the state, allowing minors to seek abortions or “gender-affirming health care services.” In other words, teens seduced by transgender ideology in Kansas, where lawmakers are preparing to ban interventions for minors, may travel to Colorado for sterilizing procedures under Polis’s protection with parental consent. Similar legislation is under consideration in Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill to bar underage transgender surgeries earlier this year but included provisions in the legislation to make the new law toothless.
The Colorado Senate bill signed last week, titled “Protections For Accessing Reproductive Health Care,” also allows minors to abort pregnancies without parental consent.
The new law protects people seeking abortions and transgender interventions who travel to Colorado by prohibiting state or local agencies from penalizing complicit medical providers. The legislation also nullifies extradition requests in other states where such procedures are banned and refuses to recognize out-of-state criminal or civil proceedings relating to these procedures. Previously, Colorado already established itself as a go-to destination for women seeking abortions from Texas and Oklahoma, where it is banned.
While policymakers in other blue states already passed laws to establish their states as abortion “safe havens,” Colorado’s protections for transgender minors seeking life-altering surgeries is a first-of-its-kind. The new law comes as transgender surgeries are expected to become a $5 billion-dollar industry by the end of the decade, according to a report last year from Grand View Research.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
How many voters understand that the Democratic Party supports legalized abortion through all nine months of pregnancy on demand for virtually any reason? How many voters know this position aligns with only six other countries in the world — three of them, not incidentally, being North Korea, Vietnam, and China?
Indeed, Democrats want to pass a federal law overturning the democratic will of states that ban sex-selective abortions or the dismembering of the post-viable unborn or require parental or guardian notification for minors before getting abortions. Democrats want to allow non-doctors to perform abortions (probably because it’s not medical care) while at the same time stripping real medical workers of their conscience rights by compelling them to participate in the procedure or lose their jobs. Democrats want to eliminate the popular Hyde Amendment that stops the federal government from funding abortions with taxpayer dollars. They believe abortion is vital in ensuring that poorer Americans have fewer children.
Now, maybe a majority of voters aren’t aware of Democrats’ maximalist positions because the media endlessly lies and obfuscates them. And maybe pollsters rarely ask useful questions on the topic — offering absurdly vague queries like “do you support abortion access” or should “abortion be legal” rather than should it be legal until the “due date” or “for any reason” or “after the baby is viable” or “for sex selection” — because the answers are a lot more complicated than they’d like.
And, maybe, after the shock of Roe being overturned — treated by Democrats as if it had been chiseled into magical stone tablets over the past 50 years — the energy and passion of the debate will temporarily reside on the pro-abortion side. And, maybe, if every voter knew all the facts, it still wouldn’t matter. Abortion is a complex and emotional issue.
None of that excuses the inability, or aversion, of national conservatives to make a coherent and compelling pro-life case. Sometimes it feels like Republicans are more terrified by the Dobbs decision than pro-abortionists. Even if pollsters were right about the unpopularity of abortion restrictions, there is this crazy thing that politicians occasionally engage in called “persuasion.” Rather than just chasing around voters for approval, this entails convincing them with arguments.
The problem, it seems, is that too many in the GOP accept the media’s concern trolling or listen to risk-averse advice of the consulting class. Take Wisconsin. On the same day Republicans took a supermajority in the legislature, Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly by 10 percentage points to flip the state’s Supreme Court. Virtually every outlet treated the race, in which 36 percent of Wisconsin voters showed up, as a national referendum on abortion. Anonymous consultants were recruited to offer off-the-record comments voicing their deep concern about the deleterious effects of the abortion issue. “The drubbing Republicans took in Wisconsin this week revealed how harmful the issue of abortion still is to the party — and will likely remain through 2024,” Politico explained. “Wisconsin Supreme Court election sends message on abortion rights,” says the Washington Post. And so on.
Weird how this dynamic only works in one direction. In 2020, Brain Kemp, who signed a heartbeat bill limiting abortion to the first six weeks a year earlier, easily defeated media darling Stacey Abrams to win the Georgia governorship (in a state that Donald Trump also lost.) Abrams made abortion, along with guns, the central issue of her campaign, carpet-bombing the state with ads. In 2018, Terry McAuliffe also attempted to make abortion the dominant issue of his campaign against Glenn Youngkin. At the time, two of the Washington Post’s most dedicated partisan flaks promised that the race was “our first big test of the new politics of abortion.” Well, Youngkin, who supports 15-week abortion limits, won. Alas, there were no four-bylined handwringing deep dives from the Post about abortion undermining Democrats.
Georgia and Virginia are swing states. Ohio, where Mike DeWine signed a six-week ban in 2019 and won the state by 10 points in 2022, was one not long ago, as well. This is the same state in which pro-life JD Vance easily beat “moderate” Tim Ryan. But Ohio and Virginia teach nothing about abortion. Only the Wisconsin Supreme Court race matters.
This week, the governor of Florida and prospective presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, signed a six-week ban on abortion. One imagines DeSantis will be just as popular among Republicans in his state since the bill passed overwhelmingly in the Florida Assembly. Of course, conventional wisdom says this hurts his presidential chances.
Every GOP president since Ronald Reagan has taken a pro-life position. Even in a post-Dobbs world, the idea that abortion is going to be the determinative factor in the presidential race is likely wishful thinking. Now that Roe has been overturned, the president has even less say over the future of abortion. Abortion has become a state issue. That’s what irks Dems.
Whatever the case, the Republican nominee doesn’t need to impress California voters. They need to convince social conservatives in Virginia, Ohio, and Florida to go out and vote. Does anyone really think DeSantis would be better off politically if he vetoed a pro-life bill? Running from the abortion conversation, as so many Republicans seem to do, creates the impression they don’t really believe in their own stated position. Quite often, that’s probably the case. If you’re going to run as a pro-lifer, allowing the opposition to define your beliefs makes little sense. Especially when making a rational and moral case for protecting viable life, at the very least, isn’t particularly difficult — certainly not when contrasted with the left’s extremism.
Then again, if every Republican lost every race in the country over abortion, it still wouldn’t make killing human beings for convenience any less of a moral abomination or the fight to stop it any less important. A majority position isn’t, by default, moral or decent — quite the contrary. And meaningful political fights aren’t predicated on short-term gains. Overturning Roe took 50 years. The political fight over abortion might take even longer.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
In his 67-page straight-talking opinion, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
“Unborn humans.” “Eugenics.” “Head, hands, and legs, with defined fingers and toes.” “Shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts.”
Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s Friday decision freezing the FDA’s approval of the abortion-pill combination, mifepristone and misoprostol, included these phrases and more. And while the left is already attacking Kacsmaryk’s 67-page straight-talking opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA by framing it as filled with anti-abortionrhetoric, the Trump appointee stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
After a brief introduction in which Kacsmaryk highlighted the FDA’s two decades of stonewalling that delayed a legal challenge to the 2000 approval of the abortion drugs, the court opened with the basic facts. The plaintiffs — doctors and medical associations that provide health care to pregnant and post-abortive women and girls — sued the FDA, challenging several administrative actions related to the approval of the chemical abortion drugs.
‘Unborn Humans’
The court then explained the drugs and their functioning: “Mifepristone — also known as RU-486 or Mifeprex — is a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone, halts nutrition, and ultimately starves the unborn human until death.” But “because mifepristone alone will not always complete the abortion,” the court continued, “the FDA mandates a two-step drug regimen: mifepristone to kill the unborn human, followed by misoprostol to induce cramping and contractions to expel the unborn human from the mother’s womb.”
Calling an unborn human an “unborn human” immediately triggered abortion activists, but as Kacsmaryk explained in a footnote, such terminology is scientifically correct, whereas the lawyers and courts “often use the word ‘fetus’ to inaccurately identify unborn humans in unscientific ways.”
“The word ‘fetus,’” Kacsmaryk explained, “refers to a specific gestational stage of development, as opposed to the zygote, blastocyst, or embryo stages.” And because the FDA’s approval of the abortion drugs applies at multiple “gestational stages,” the word “fetus” would be inaccurate.
It is understandable that abortion activists want to hide the humanity of unborn humans, but that doesn’t make the science less real: It just means girls and women who have bought the “clump of cells” narrative will suffer when faced with the truth, which chemical “at home abortions” force.
“The mother seeing the aborted human ‘appears to be a difficult aspect of the medical termination process which can be distressing, bring home the reality of the event and may influence later emotional adaptation,’” the court wrote, based on the record evidence. “For example, one woman was surprised and saddened to see that her aborted baby ‘had a head, hands, and legs’ with ‘[d]efined fingers and toes.’”
Another woman alleged that “she did not receive an ultrasound or any other physical examination before receiving chemical abortion drugs from Planned Parenthood.” According to the record, “The abortionist misdated the baby’s gestational age as six weeks, resulting in the at-home delivery of a ‘lifeless, fully formed baby in the toilet,’ later determined to be around 30-36 weeks old.”
Harm to Women
Beyond exposing the reality that abortion kills an unborn human, Kacsmaryk’s opinion also refuted the “popular belief and talking points” that using the abortion pill is “as easy as taking Advil.” Here, the federal judge detailed the factual evidence. Among other things, “bleeding from a chemical abortion, unlike surgical abortion, can last up to several weeks,” and by being done at home, “without physician oversight,” it can lead “to undetected ectopic pregnancies, failure of rH factor incompatibility detection, and misdiagnosis of gestational age — all leading to severe or even fatal consequences.”
The opinion also countered the claim that side effects are rare by highlighting evidence that “over sixty percent of women and girls’ emergency room visits after chemical abortions are miscoded as ‘miscarriages’ rather than adverse effects to mifepristone.”
The evidence also shows emotional and psychological injury, Kacsmaryk stressed, with 77 percent of women who underwent a chemical abortion reporting “a negative change” after the at-home abortion, and 38 percent of women reporting issues “with anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the chemical abortion.”
While the abortion industry prefers to cite its own evidence, as Kacsmaryk noted, those studies are flawed both because of the miscoding of chemical abortions as miscarriages and because the FDA stopped requiring the reporting of non-fatal adverse reactions.
Eugenic Roots
The left also didn’t like Kacsmaryk exposing the eugenic beliefs of the Population Council, which had sought FDA approval for the abortion drugs. John D. Rockefeller founded the Population Council in 1952, “after he convened a conference with ‘population activists’ such as Planned Parenthood’s director and several well-known eugenicists,” the court wrote. Attendees of that conference discussed “the problem of ‘quality,’” and concluded that “[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.”
“[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.” …….. “Natural Selection”????? Can you say, “disciples of Margarete Sanger”?
Many Americans remain oblivious to the historical backdrop eugenics played to the abortion movement, and activist groups prefer they remain in the dark. The sunlight Kacsmaryk shined upon that truth infuriates them.
Political Pressure
Judge Kacsmaryk also exposed the political pressure placed on the FDA to approve the abortion drug — something Americans are likely to appreciate more today in the aftermath of the FDA’s hasty approval of the Covid mRNA shots.
In the case of the abortion pill, the FDA took the unprecedented step of arranging a meeting between the French pharmaceutical company that owned the patent rights and the eventual drug sponsor, the Population Council. “The purpose of the FDA-organized meeting was ‘to facilitate an agreement between those parties to work together to test [mifepristone] and file a new drug application.’”
Evidence further shows the Department of Health and Human Services “initiated” another meeting to determine how the Clinton administration “might facilitate successful completion of the negotiations” between the French firm and the Population Council to ensure the group secure patent rights and eventual FDA approval.” In fact, Clinton’s HHS secretary “believed American pressure on the French firm was necessary.”
Then after the Population Council submitted a new drug application, the FDA proposed detailed restrictions to address safety concerns, including that the drug be administered by doctors “trained and authorized by law” to perform surgical abortions; trained in administering mifepristone and treating adverse events; and able to provide treatment at a medical facility that had the equipment necessary to perform surgical abortions, resuscitation procedures, and blood transfusion, within one hour’s drive. The FDA’s restrictions were leaked to the press, prompting a political firestorm.
So Much for Safety
The FDA later abandoned the above safety mandates and approved the drug for use to kill unborn humans aged seven-weeks gestation or younger. The FDA further required three “in-person office visits: the first to administer mifepristone, the second to administer misoprostol, and the third to assess any complications and ensure there were no fetal remains in the womb.” All adverse events were also required to be reported.
In 2002, the FDA removed even more of the safety restrictions, increasing the maximum gestational age from seven-weeks gestation to 10-weeks gestation, reducing the number of office visits from three to one, increasing the drug dosage, allowing non-doctors to prescribe and administer chemical abortions, and eliminating the requirement for non-fatal adverse reactions to be reported. Then in 2019, the FDA approved a generic version of the abortion pills, and on April 12, 2021, the FDA announced it would allow abortion pills to be dispensed through the mail.
“Whether FDA abandoned its proposed restrictions because of political pressure or not,” the court wrote, “one thing is clear: the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or threatening adverse reactions.” But “due to FDA’s lax reporting requirements, the exact number is not ascertainable,” Kacsmaryk stressed.
Straight Facts
But it was not on politics that Kacsmaryk based his decision to freeze the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill. Rather, in his methodical opinion, the federal judge explained that the FDA lacked the authority to accelerate approval of the drug under what is called “Subpart H” of the FDA. That subpart only allows for accelerated approval of drugs that treat “serious or life-threatening illnesses” — something pregnancy is not.
Kacsmaryk also concluded the evidence the FDA supposedly relied upon to approve the abortion drugs failed to support the conclusion that they were “safe and effective under particular conditions of use.” And finally, Kacsmaryk held the FDA’s approval of mail distribution violated the 1873 Comstock Act, which makes it illegal to use the mail to deliver any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”
The Biden administration has already filed a notice of appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in issuing his opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, Kacsmaryk entered a temporary stay, which he or the court of appeals will likely make permanent pending resolution of the case. Thus, abortion pills will remain available for now.
How the Fifth Circuit and eventually the Supreme Court will rule remains to be seen, but what is clear now is the abortion-loving left is desperate to keep the truth about abortion from the public and is furious that Kacsmaryk dared to expose the reality: Abortion kills unborn humans.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Pro-life activist Abby Johnson addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2, 2023, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington, D.C. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A women-centered panel at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference focused on defending human dignity and how the panelists believe the culture has lost sight of God’s intended vision for humankind.
The panel, “Some Tuff Mutha,” featured pro-life advocate Abby Johnson, founder of And Then There Were None; Penny Nance, CEO and president of the conservative group Concerned Women for America; and Kimberly Fletcher of Moms for America. Radio host Sandy Rios served as the moderator for the panel.
One of the ways the panelists believe human dignity has been lost is through the practice of abortion, which has killed 63.5 million Americans since it was legalized in 1973.
Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director (read more about her here and here), drew attention to the Food and Drug Administration modifying restrictions on abortion pills and enabling women to obtain prescriptions for the drugs at major retail pharmacies. Under the Biden administration, the FDA “greenlit abortion into the home of every woman across the country,” she said.
“We have created abortion facilities in every woman’s home across the country,” Johnson added, lamenting the risk this imposes on women.
The former abortion clinic director noted that the full extent of the ramifications of the FDA’s decision is still unknown, highlighting the lack of medical supervision surrounding at-home chemical abortions. According to a 2009 study, the complication rate for chemical abortions is four times higher than for surgical abortions.
Johnson cited several concerns she has with the modified regulations, such as women potentially hemorrhaging to death in their bathroom. She also emphasized that women will be looking into the toilet to see the remains of their “fully-formed baby.”
“And then they’re going to have to make a decision,” she said. “‘What do I do with this fully-formed baby? What do I do with this child? Do I scoop the child out of the toilet? Do I take the child to be buried? Do I flush my child down the toilet?’”
The pro-life advocate raised further concerns about the psychological impact of seeing their child’s remains.
Nance added that abortion is the “ultimate disrespect of human dignity,” but stressed that God still loves and can redeem women who have had abortions.
The conservative leader pointed to another loss of human dignity, criticizing the Biden administration’s treatment of women. She asserted that the Administration seemingly believes “men can do everything better than women, including being women,” highlighting the appointment of Rachel (Richard) Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, to the position of U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health. In 2022, USA Today listed Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, as its Woman of the Year.
Nance said CWA intends to “stand up for the unique dignity of American women” and encourages other Americans to do the same.
“We are fearfully and wonderfully made as male and female,” she said. “That is the ultimate disrespect, to deny who we are and how God created us in that unique, dignified position as American women.”
Speaking about public education, Fletcher shared how, when she talks to mothers, she tells them how “parental rights are fundamental and supreme.”
“We as parents have got to stand up,” she said. “First of all, we have to know what’s coming our way.”
Fletcher noted that mothers are attending school board meetings, reading the sexual content in books made accessible to their children, and being lectured for sharing such things out loud. She also pointed to incidents involving comprehensive sex education being taught to early elementary school students or schools instructing young children about changing their sex.
The parental advocate asserted that conservative Christian women haven’t been voting or paying enough attention to what’s happening at their school boards. This demographic of women, she added, can “repair” what’s wrong in the education system.
In terms of fixing what they see as negatively impacting the culture, Johnson said God wants His people to participate in “daily victories,” imploring those gathered to use their “voice” and “speak boldly” on these issues.
Nance seconded Johnson’s challenge, adding that the “Holy Spirit is alive and well,” and whether it be at school board meetings or outside abortion facilities, she called on everyone to speak the “truth” and fulfill God’s command to “care for the least of these.”
A Democrat official in Massachusetts is facing backlash and being pressured to step down after he reportedly complained about the cost of special education for children with disabilities who are not aborted. The official, Michael Hugo, is chair of the Framingham Democratic Committee, according to Fox News. At a recent city council meeting, Hugo reportedly claimed that pro-life pregnancy centers misdiagnose defects in babies before they are born. As a result, babies with disabilities end up being born and become a burden on school budgets.
In a video of the meeting obtained by Fox, Hugo said: “Our fear is that if an unqualified sonographer misdiagnoses a heart defect, an organ defect, spina bifida or an encephalopathic defect, that becomes a very local issue because our school budget will have to absorb the cost of a child in special education, supplying lots and lots of special services to children who were born with the defect.”
Members of his party slammed his remarks, with one claiming Hugo “went off the rails.”
“I’m a lifetime member of the Democratic Committee, and the person who wanted to represent us went off the rails in a different direction that had never been brought before the committee,” Patrick Dunne, who is also a former School Committee and Town Meeting member, said, according to MetroWest Daily News. “We are not talking about eliminating special ed students, we are talking about getting out good information to the people in Framingham, and he is casting a net a bit too wide for me.”
City Council member Adam Steiner said that he was “disappointed and saddened” by the remarks, according to Daily Mail.
“Unfortunately, there has been a long history of arguments in our town/city pitting the needs of particular students against the financial constraints of the Framingham budget,” Steiner wrote. “In the context of reproductive freedom and abortion rights, making this connection was totally unacceptable and disturbing.”
And, Fox News reported that Hugo sent a letter to city council members hours before making his remarks. In the preview of his remarks, Hugo reportedly asked if the state would “cover the medical costs for a fetus that had a sound medical reason to be terminated.”
After 10 days of backlash and calls to resign from members of his party and parents of special needs children, Hugo issued an apology.
“I am writing to offer my most sincere and humble apology to members of the Framingham Democratic Committee, but more especially my fellow members of Framingham’s disability family community, for comments that I made at the last City Council meeting which were offensive and hurtful,” he reportedly wrote.
Laura Green, a disability advocate from Framingham, told Fox News that she felt like his apology was “generic and lackluster.”
“I feel like after a statement like that is made, you can’t just pretend that it didn’t happen or take it back because it’s damaging to a community of people,” she said. “The disability community is the only minority group that you can become a part of at any time.”
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, told Fox News that “this is discrimination plain and simple.”
“I think people who say that the sick cost too much for our society better find the fountain of youth real quick because someday that’s going to be them, it’s going to be their family members,” Hawkins said. Her two children have cystic fibrosis.
“This is eugenics, this is eugenics in 2023 America, this is an argument that sadly we’ve heard before and throughout American history, just regurgitated using a bunch of fancy lingo or support for abortion,” Hawkins added.
An Indiana doctor went viral over the weekend after she bragged about providing abortions, leading many people who identify as “pro-choice” to question their stance.
Last Friday, Dr. Katie McHugh, a “queer OB/GYN,” posted a picture of herself holding a cannula — a device used in abortions to remove the tissue of the deceased unborn child from the womb — while boasting about providing abortion “care.”
“Happy Friday! #Abortion care is still legal in Indiana. We’re doing everything we can to keep it that way,” she tweeted. “#AbortionIsHealthcare — as well as a community priority, a family value, and a normal part of life!
“Abortion is moral, common, and it isn’t going away,” she claimed. “Neither are we.”
Happy Friday! #Abortion care is still legal in Indiana. We’re doing everything we can to keep it that way.#AbortionIsHealthcare – as well as a community priority, a family value, and a normal part of life!
Abortion is moral, common, and it isn’t going away.
The post, which received millions of views by Monday, generated a tidal wave of backlash.
Specifically, many people who identify as “pro-choice” — i.e., those who support abortion — spoke out against Dr. McHugh and her “creepy” post.
“Abortion should *never* be common and should *never* be celebrated. I say this as someone who’s against making it illegal. What an absolutely unnerving and creepy post,” one person said.
“Seeing how happy you are to kill babies makes me question my pro choice stance,” another person said.
“I’m largely pro-choice but I question if I’m on the right side of the argument when I see providers get excited to perform abortions. This is a very, very creepy post,” another person said.
“I’m pro-choice, not pro-abortion. A distinction I never felt the need to make until this recent — and yes creepy — Democrat/lefty embrace of abortion,” one person responded.
“All they wanted was safe, legal, and rare. Now we have ‘moral, common, and isn’t going away,'” another person observed.
“Why are you smiling with an abortion tool.. even in the most straight forward of circumstances it still isn’t smile worthy…” another person responded.
The sharp reaction, rather than drawing out a spirit of contrition, caused Dr. McHugh to dig her heels in.
“Despite the *many* hateful comments, I am proud to normalize #abortion care, smile at and for people needing help, and honor the people choosing abortion,” she responded.
“I celebrate the chance to honor people as they choose their lives, families, and futures,” she added.
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A dozen Catholic school students were kicked out of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., because they were wearing beanies with a pro-life message.
The American Center of Law and Justice is representing the parents of the students from Our Lady of the Rosary School in Greenville County, South Carolina. An attorney for the ACLJ told WYFF-TV that the teenagers tried to attend the museum after attending the annual March for Life on Jan. 20.
A mother of one of the students posted to Twitter about the incident. She wrote that her daughter told the man they were wearing the hats in order to identify each other in the crowd attending the museum. They said that a security guard approached them and told them to either take off the beanies or leave the museum. When they asked why they were being asked to leave, the guard reportedly told them that the museum was a “neutral zone.”
Nora Luz Kriegel, a parent of students at the Catholic school, joined a group that wrote the museum to petition for a change in its policies.
“They should be allowed to wear the hats that they were wearing and to be able to express themselves,” said Kriegel to WYFF. “And I felt it was very wrong that this person harassed them.”
A spokesperson for the air and space museum released a statement about the incident.
“Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not in keeping with our policy or protocols. We provided immediate training to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of incident, and have determine steps to ensure this does not happen again,” said Alison Wood, the museum’s deputy director of communications.
Here’s a local news report about the incident:
Greenville students removed from National Air and Space Museum for wearing pro-life hats www.youtube.com
Fox Nation host Alveda King reflects on her uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, life and legacy and urges others to love and forgive.
Black History Month begins this week, just two weeks after tens of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for the 50th annual March for Life. This month and the March for Life collectively present an important
opportunity to highlight two of the most pressing issues facing America’s Black community today: abortion and fatherlessness.
Ultimately, the reason these issues are widely accepted in the Black community is our country’s decline in church attendance and its move away from Jesus. Yet the sad reality of our times is that these issues receive little to no attention from the mainstream media or the far left today. Instead of focusing on these issues and working to develop solutions for them, the left and the media continue to promote ideas about “systemic racism” and critical race theory while calling for ever-expanding forms of “racial equity.” Rather than responding to these distractions, we want to use this Black History Month to raise awareness about fatherlessness and abortion and the devastating effect both are having on America’s Black community.
Our Nation is home to approximately 24 million fatherless children, or about 1 in 3 of all American children. Approximately 80% of these homes are led by single mothers, and the rate of children living in single-parent households is the highest of any country in the world. Our Nation’s fatherlessness epidemic has particularly ravaged the Black community. Nearly 70% of all Black babies in America today are born to unmarried mothers, and 64% of all Black children grow up in a single-parent home.
Tragically, fatherlessness strongly correlates with negative outcomes in nearly every aspect of a child’s life. Fatherless families are 25% more likely to raise a child in poverty, and 90% of all homeless and runaway children do not have a father. Additionally, 85% of children and teens with behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes. Fatherless children also account for 71% of child substance abuse cases, and approximately 70% of all youths in state-operated institutions are fatherless.
This Black History Month, we want to draw attention away from the noise and back to the issues that matter. The rampant fatherlessness and shocking rates of abortion in the Black community should be stunning to all Americans of good faith.
The issues of abortion and fatherlessness are closely linked, as one of every three pregnancies in a fatherlessness home end in abortion. America’s epidemic of fatherless children largely correlates with abortion rates, and women raised in fatherless homes account for approximately 70% of all teen pregnancies.
Equally tragic is the vastly disproportionate impact abortion has on the Black community. Of the roughly 930,000 abortions performed in 2020, about 39% were performed on Black women, for a rate of 24.4 abortions per 1,000 Black women. This means that over the course of a year, more than 350,000 Black babies, or almost 1,000 per day, are aborted. As a result, approximately 1 million Black babies are killed in the womb every three years.
Deep down, Americans understand that fatherhood is essential to society. According to a poll by Scott Rasmussen, 84% of Americans believe a strong family is foundational to a strong America.
Most Americans also understand the relationship between absent fathers and abortion. Sixty-nine percent of Americans think a man becomes a father at the moment of conception, and 78% think the father’s financial responsibility begins at the start of a pregnancy. The book of Malachi reflects this wisdom and reminds us that God “will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”
This Black History Month, we want to draw attention away from the noise and back to the issues that matter. The rampant fatherlessness and shocking rates of abortion in the Black community should be stunning to all Americans of good faith, and we genuinely believe these two related issues are among the biggest civil rights battles of our time.
Fixing anything begins with first identifying the problem. The simple truth is that Black Americans will continue to struggle and fall behind if the fatherlessness crisis is not addressed.
At the same time, the effects of abortion on significant parts of the Black community will keep robbing our country of untold ingenuity and talent.
By highlighting fatherlessness and abortion this Black History Month, we can help the American people learn more about the biggest issues Black America faces. Then, and only then, can Americans of all stripes unite to solve them.
Jack Brewer serves as Chair, Center for Opportunity Now and Vice-Chair, Center for 1776 for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI).
Evangelist Alveda King is Chairman of the Center for the American Dream at the America First Policy Institute. A niece of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she is the author of several books, including “King Rules” and “How Can the Dream Survive if We Murder the Children.”
On Monday a federal jury acquitted Mark Houck, the Christian pro-life activist whose house was swarmed by FBI agents last fall in front of his wife and children. The not-guilty verdict comes more than four months after the Biden administration accused Houck of violating federal law for protecting his son from an angry abortion activist across the street from a Planned Parenthood in 2021.
After leaving the courtroom in a deadlock on Friday, on Monday a federal jury agreed Houck was not guilty of violating federal law, contrary to the Biden Department of Justice’s position.
The early-morning FBI raid on Houck’s home in front of his children and wife included battering rams and ballistic shields at the ready and was committed even after Houck’s attorney had told the U.S. Department of Justice Houck would turn himself in if they asked. Since his arrest in September 2022, Houck and his lawyers maintained“This case is being brought solely to intimidate people of faith and pro-life Americans.”
“We are, of course, thrilled with the outcome,” stated Peter Breen, head of litigation for the Thomas More Society, which defended Houck in court. “We took on Goliath – the full might of the United States government – and won. The jury saw through and rejected the prosecution’s discriminatory case, which was harassment from day one. This is a win for Mark and the entire pro-life movement. The Biden Department of Justice’s intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place.”
Houck is now freed from the threat of “a maximum possible sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000.” He also thanked Americans and pro-lifers for their support after the FBI raid and subsequent federal prosecution.
After weeks of ignoring pro-abortion violence and threats against pro-life pregnancy support centers across the nation, dozens of FBI agents arrested Houck in front of his wife and seven children in a raid at his home in September. When Houck’s wife recounted that “they had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” the FBI defended their “guns out and ready” positions as necessary.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice alleged Houck violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law barring the physical obstruction of abortion facilities, by “attacking a patient escort” more than 100 feet away and across the street from a Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia during one of his regular trips to peacefully protest abortion.
The “patient escort,” Bruce Love, repeatedly initiated profanity-laced verbal confrontations with Houck and his son, Mark Houck Jr., said court documents. The documents also say Houck asked Love to stop multiple times to no avail. On Oct. 13, 2021, when Love escalated by invading Mark Jr.’s personal space, Houck Sr. shoved him away.
Love fell and claimed he “required medical attention,” an allegation the DOJ indictment took as fact. Brian Middleton, a spokesman for the Houck family, said the “medical attention” Love spoke of was “a Band-Aid on his finger.”
During his testimony to the jury, Houck gave his side of the story.
“You consider it to be a battle, don’t you?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ashley Nicole Martin asked Houck during the trial.
“A spiritual battle,” the father of seven replied.
Houck also disclosed that Love instigated the incident that later was used to sic federal investigators on the Houck family.
“All of this was set in motion by the escort, and that’s not a FACE violation,” Thomas More Society Senior Counsel Michael McHale said in a trial recap video on Friday. “FACE is about access to clinics. And what happened here was an escort interfering with Mark and Mark’s son.”
Houck’s son Mark Jr. also testified on Friday. In his testimony, Mark Jr. explained that Love initiated a conversation with him.
“That directly contradicted Bruce Love’s testimony,” McHale said. “Mr. Love testified that he never, has ever, talked to Mark Jr. And to have Mark Jr. on the stand today and just testify confidently and clearly that Bruce Love talked to him and said ‘Your dad’s a bad person and your dad’s harassing women.’ I really think that went a long way, at least with some people on the jury.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
While House Democrats’ first act of the 118th Congress was to demand a vote on their unsuccessful abortion up-until-birth in all 50 states legislation, House Republicans, keen to defend the nation’s most vulnerable, committed to using their newfound majority to pass two pro-life measures.
Neither of the legislative acts limits abortion in any way as the GOP’s previously proposed 15-week abortion ban would have done. Yet, Democrats and their allies in the corrupt corporate media, still reeling from the end of Roe v. Wade, shunned the legislation and smeared Republicans for daring to use their congressional power to curb Democrats’ abortion for all agenda.
“House Republicans turn their attention to restricting abortion rights,” the Washington Post wrote.
“Republican-controlled House pushes for new abortion restrictions,” the Guardian reported.
“House Republicans Are Already Voting On Anti-Abortion Bills As GOP Eyes Even More Restrictions,” one Forbes headline blared.
The first, a bill dubbed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, doesn’t just seek to mandate life-saving medical care and legal protection for babies who survive botched abortions. The legislation also criminalizes abortionists’ failure to administer proper care and treatment for infants who are born alive.
The GOP’s belief that “Every baby is a precious life that must be protected,” however, was not shared by their Democrat colleagues. Instead of agreeing with Republicans’ attempts to give newborns who survive abortions proper care, Democrats defended the gruesome act of dismembering a delivered baby. Despite claiming the bill is unwarranted because infanticide is illegal, talking heads and leftist mouthpieces smeared the legislation as “extremist, dangerous, and unnecessary” and committed to obeying Democrat leadership’s orders to vote against it.
Democrat Sheila Jackson defends partial birth abortions, in which the abortionist “deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until…the entire fetal head is outside the mother’s body” before snipping the baby’s neck.
The second GOP-led action is a resolution designed to condemn the more than 100 attacks, firebombings, and violent acts of vandalism that plagued pregnancy centers, churches, and other pro-life organizations following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
Additionally, the resolution urges the Biden administration, the FBI, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the politicized Department of Justice, which focused on targeting peaceful pro-life protestors instead of violent pro-abortion vandalists, to “take action now to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
“Who could be opposed to that?” the resolution’s proponent Rep. Mike Johnson asked from the House floor on Wednesday.
My @HouseGOP resolution on the floor today is simple and important.
Congress must condemn the recent attacks on pro-life facilities, groups, and churches following the Dobbs decision. pic.twitter.com/brCe2l7JJE
Yet, Democrats were more than willing to brush off the history of political violence against pro-lifers in exchange for pushing more support for abortion.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D), arguing against a resolution condemning attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers:
"We have to make sure that people who are pro-life and pro-people who support abortion rights, and we support life, are included in opposing violence." pic.twitter.com/9uwhISGUlJ
Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe last summer, pro-life laws all around the nation have saved more than 10,000 lives. Despite House Republicans’ best efforts to pass pro-life legislation on the national level to expand life-saving measures, the Democrat-controlled Senate does not plan to advance the legislation.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
In a direct rebuke to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s radical abortion agenda, the City Council of Hobbs, New Mexico, unanimously voted last week to become a sanctuary city for the unborn. Overwhelming support for and passage of the ordinance mean abortion is now classified as murder and outlawed within Hobbs city limits. It also means that any blue politicians or abortion facilities that try to go against the city’s wishes could face an uphill legal battle.
The vote was vehemently opposed by Lujan Grisham, who called the architects of the ordinance “out-of-state extremists.” The governor’s reaction is no surprise considering her own history of abortion extremism.
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Lujan Grisham signed an executive order designating $10 million in taxpayer funds toward the development of an abortion facility in Doña Ana County, an area that shares a border with El Paso, Texas. That was just a couple of months after Lujan Grisham signedan executive order “protecting medical providers from attempts at legal retribution” for granting abortions and refusing to comply with other states’ abortion extradition laws.
“As more states move to restrict and prohibit access to reproductive care, New Mexico will continue to not only protect access to abortion, but to expand and strengthen reproductive health care throughout the state,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “Today, I reaffirm my resolve to make sure that women and families in New Mexico — and beyond — are supported at every step of the way.”
Since then, abortion dominated the state’s political scene and even became a focal point in Lujan Grisham’s re-election race against Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, one of the nation’s largest dealers of abortion, previously told Reuters that Lujan Grisham’s friendliness toward abortion led her to consider relocating some of their Texas facilities closer to the border with New Mexico.
The goal was to offer abortion to women in neighboring Texas cities such as Lubbock, which voted to become a sanctuary city for the unborn in May of 2021, following the Lone Star State’s ban on abortion via the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Residents of Hobbs, a nearly 40,000-person town, however, weren’t taking any chances on getting swept up in Lujan Grisham’s pro-abortion executive spree. The pro-life community in Hobbs as well as the nearby city of Clovis revolted with the introduction of ordinances designed to protect unborn babies.
The threat of legal challenges thanks to widespread support for those sanctuary city ordinances, Hagstrom Miller confessed, “has given her pause about operating in eastern New Mexico.”
“In this post-Dobbs era, where anti-abortion folks are emboldened, I want to be sure we’re in a place where our patients can be safe, where our doctors and our staff can be safe,” she said.
The Clovis City Commission postponed its vote on the ordinance allegedly so it can “perfect the language to better protect against litigation.” “We hope this sends the message to our state legislature that there are pro-life cities out there and we want to self-determine on this issue,” Clovis Mayor Mike Morris said shortly after a vote to advance the ban.
If Clovis passes the ordinance, it will join Hobbs and a myriad of other towns that all recently decided to push back against Democrats’ abortion extremism.
“Between Governor Abbott’s resounding defeat of Robert Francis O’Rourke to four more municipalities joining over fifty towns with existing sanctuary city for the unborn ordinances, this is an exciting time for Texans as we work to end abortion,” Texas Right to Life President Dr. John Seago told The Federalist. “Additionally, as the abortion industry looks to target Texas women from just outside our borders, it is equally exciting that Hobbs, New Mexico has joined the fight and passed the ordinance to keep the desperate abortion industry out of their city limits.”
The pro-life movements in Texas and New Mexico have been so effective recently that they’ve even earned the wrath of the Biden White House.
“We have been very clear about what MAGA extreme Republicans are trying to do when it comes to a woman’s rights to choose,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a recent trip to New Mexico with President Joe Biden. “They’re trying to take that away, clearly, and in the most extreme ways. What it’s doing is it’s putting women — women and girls’ lives at risk.”
This article was updated on 11/16 to reflect that members of the Clovis City Commission are no longer unanimously “expected to vote in favor of the ban.”
“The Ordinance, as it stands now, is ready. The commission, however, is unready and unwilling,” Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, told The Federalist.
Dickson also said that Clovis Mayor Mike Morris is facing backlash after he was “pressured by several Republicans to push things past the election and even past the legislative session.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
If there’s a clear lesson to come out of Tuesday night’s bizarre midterm election, it’s that Republicans can no longer be content with defensive victories or defensive politics. To win political power and do what must be done to save the country, Republicans will have to go on offense, present a compelling vision for the future, and engage culture war issues like abortion and critical race theory without apologies.
When they do that, they win. But it stands in stark contrast to the perennial advice of Beltway GOP consultants, who think it best to avoid major culture war issues like abortion. Indeed, the “official narrative” of corporate media in the wake of Tuesday’s midterms is that abortion was a big winner for Democrats, who supposedly capitalized on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, successfully making abortion a major electoral issue and blunting a red wave by boosting turnout among young, pro-abortion voters.
It sounds good, but it’s not quite right. Republicans who didn’t shy away from talking about abortion after Dobbs, and who signed into law abortion legislation earlier this year without flinching or apologizing, did really well — they were Tuesday night’s winners. As Marc Thiessen noted on Fox News, Republican governors in Ohio, Georgia, New Hampshire, Texas, and Florida all signed post-Dobbs abortion restrictions, and they all won reelection by comfortable margins.
That’s not to say abortion was a non-factor. Democrats squeezed every last electoral drop they could out of Dobbs, spending $320 million on abortion-related TV ads (much more than on all other issues combined) which helped motivate a voter base that might have otherwise been depressed.
Still, there was a clear contrast between Republicans who heeded the advice of Beltway consultants and tried to dodge abortion questions or take a noncommittal stance and those who defended their anti-abortion positions and pushed for post-Roe legislation. Only one of those groups fared well Tuesday.
The larger lesson here is that Republican candidates should lean into the culture war and make no apologies for their positions, even on contentious issues like abortion. Fighting back against the left, it turns out, is what a lot of voters on the right want from Republicans.
Consider what Ron DeSantis achieved in Florida, winning 60 percent of the vote after narrowly eking out a victory four years ago. He did that by not shying away from big, high-profile fights over hot-button culture war issues like critical race theory and transgender indoctrination. Glenn Youngkin did the same thing last November to pull off an upset in the Virginia governor’s race.
But DeSantis and Youngkin are, sadly, exceptions to the general rule that Republicans tend to be reactionary and defensive. Indeed, the failure of the conservative movement is largely attributable to this default defensiveness, and it needs to end. For decades, conservatives whined about just wanting to be left alone even as the radical left was marching through our institutions and transforming society, showing us at every turn they had no intention of leaving us alone. Yet some on the right still don’t seem to get it. On Tuesday morning, anticipating a red wave, Ben Shapiro tweeted: “The mandate for Republicans will be to stop Biden’s terrible agenda dead. It will not be to make very loud but tactically foolish moves.”
Shapiro didn’t specify what he meant by “very loud but tactically foolish moves,” but he followed it up with this:
The American people keep saying the same thing over and over: we want some semblance of normalcy. Stop bothering us. Leave us alone. This is not a difficult thing to achieve.
Sorry, but the era of normalcy and being left alone is over. The left will never leave us alone. They want to win and wield power, and if we want to stop them, we will have to win and wield power ourselves. Conservatives who want to be left alone will simply lose, as they have been for decades now.
Those like Shapiro who long to be left alone are also apt to argue that the conservative project has been moderately successful over the years, moving slowly to notch wins. Look at Dobbs. Look at religious liberty and the Second Amendment. Look at all the good judges appointed to the federal bench during the Trump administration.
But this is a cope. Yes, there have been a few victories for conservatives. The Dobbs decision was the greatest policy victory of the conservative cause in a generation, and it was due mostly to the dogged work of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, two institutions often unfairly maligned as “Conservative, Inc.” by the New Right, and — at least before Dobbs dropped — dismissed as failures.
Yet even the Dobbs decision was a defensive victory, handed down like a gift from on high by the Supreme Court. But it didn’t end legal abortion, and indeed the ruling itself bent over backward to avoid the broader implications of its own constitutional logic, which, as Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his concurring opinion, calls into question the constitutionality of substantive due process and the long train of Supreme Court rulings that have followed its invention more than a century ago.
As Dobbs itself suggests, defensive victories delivered by the federal judiciary aren’t going to reverse what has been, with few setbacks, a relentless, decades-long march by the left through every institution of American life. Anyone who tells you things aren’t that bad because we happen to have five mostly reliable Supreme Court justices is either delusional or quietly willing to acquiesce to leftist tyranny.
They’re probably also inclined to think Republicans didn’t really do so bad in the midterms, and that what Americans really want is just some tinkering with Social Security and the welfare state. Nothing too loud and tactically foolish. That’s more or less Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s plan if he becomes speaker of the House. After all, the country just wants to heal.
No. The country does not want to heal. It does not want “some semblance of normalcy.” There are two diametrically opposed moral systems at war right now in America, and it’s not enough at this late hour to be content with the status quo, to repose in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and hope the five good justices will somehow stop the revolutionaries.
Just look at the successful pro-abortion midterm referendums in Michigan, Vermont, and California, where the right to kill the unborn is now enshrined in those states’ constitutions. What’s true of the abortion issue is true of nearly every other major issue in American public life. Being passive and defensive is not going to cut it. If Republicans want to win, they’d better be willing to fight. Let’s hope they are. The future of the republic depends on it.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a bill signing ceremony at Nido’s Backyard Mexican Restaurant on Feb. 9, 2022 in San Francisco, California. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Governor Newsom,
Proposition 1 will be detrimental to women in California who deserve not shame and discouragement, but support, empowerment and encouragement when facing an unplanned pregnancy. When an ad campaign, paid by California taxpayers, targets women and tells them they are not capable of carrying a child, being a mother, or even giving them the chance to consider an adoption.
A woman in Orange County, back in the late 1960s, was married, had four small boys, and found herself in an unplanned pregnancy after having a one-night stand with another man. She felt her only option was to drive to Mexico and abort the baby.
During that two-hour drive south, she had time to reflect on her options. By the time she reached the abortion clinic she had made the choice to choose adoption for her unwanted baby. She knew the baby would be wanted by someone.
I am that unwanted baby girl.
My life began in Santa Ana because my birth mother made the choice for life.
My adopted parents were hardworking immigrants. My adopted father was a plumber, a proud member of UA582 Union Pipe Trades for over 60 years. He passed away this last March at the age of 96, and I was blessed to be his daughter.
This unwanted baby girl, almost aborted, has made a difference in the state of California as a tax paying, law abiding citizen, a loyal friend to many, a mentor to young women and a foster/adoptive parent to at-risk children and teenagers. Today, I serve as CEO of the national nonprofit organization Save the Storks. Our mission is to create a story of hope and empowerment for every woman facing an unplanned pregnancy.
If Proposition 1 passes, it will be yet another setback for women. Why? Because millions of women who made the choice for abortion deal with depression, anxiety and addictions. Post-abortive women are 155% more likely to commit suicide.
Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry have hidden the truth about abortion. Pro-mom organizations who truly care about women, their physical, mental and emotional health, their futures and their families often go unrecognized for the life-affirming programs and services they provide.
California has incredible rescue missions, pregnancy clinics, wraparound services, foster family agencies and ministries that empower women when facing an unplanned pregnancy. When a woman doesn’t feel ready or capable of being a mother, these organizations step in to help her be a parent,or find parents who will adopt her child/children.
Please, consider sharing the choice for motherhood and the choice for adoption when you speak to women. And make sure you have all the facts and statistics. Women I personally know have reported that they were rushed into an abortion by workers at clinics. They regretted their decision after. This is not just my opinion or anecdotal, but a fact. According to Support After Abortion, 22 million people are currently hurting after their abortion experiences.
Women in California deserve better, and their preborn children deserve better.
Diane Ferraro is CEO of Save the Storks, a national prolife organization that exists to reach women facing unplanned pregnancies and save the lives of babies through compassion, education and holistic care. As a woman who has her own personal adoption story, Diane believes every human being, including the preborn baby, has intrinsic value. Learn more about the work of Save the Storks at savethestorks.com.
MSNBC host Tiffany Cross recently went on a rant about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in which she referred to him as “Tom” (short for the derogatory term “Uncle Tom”) and invoked a series of other ugly and disrespectful names. But while Cross and her fellow leftwing TV hosts have been spewing hatred, Thomas has been laying out a jurisprudence of faithfulness to the text of the Constitution that now represents a view held by the majority of justices on the Supreme Court. This view does away with the nonexistent constitutional “right” to abortion while reigning in out-of-control federal agencies and giving the Bill of Rights the respect it deserves.
Cross criticized Thomas for not representing black men in his jurisprudence, but where did she get the idea that a supreme court justice is supposed to represent a constituency? In our system of government, a judge’s job is to decide cases according to the Constitution and the law, without regard to any person. Take, for instance, Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s views on affirmative action. It is certainly not her job to represent the median views of Hispanics, 68 percent of whom oppose race being a factor in college admissions, yet she continues to support racially preferential admissions systems that categorize people by their heritage and not their merits.
Contrary to Cross’s claim, working-class black Americans historically have been in agreement with Thomas’ views on virtually every contentious issue. Thomas has long been opposed to affirmative action and racial preference programs, and so are most black Americans. According to a 2022 poll from Pew Research Center, 59 percent of black Americans are against race factoring into college admissions. It is unlikely Cross is a part of this 59 percent.
Justice Thomas has opined for thirty years that there is no constitutional right to abortion. According to a 2020 Gallup article, from 2001-2007, only 24 percent of black Americans believed abortion should be legal in all circumstances. From 2017-2020, only 32 percent did. In a May 2022 YouGov poll, 81 percent percent of black respondents said that abortion should be banned after the 25th week. Cross likely is unwilling to tolerate any limit on abortions up to the moment of birth, which would put her far outside the mainstream of black Americans.
Thomas has ruled that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage. While that is wholly different than whether one supports or supports same-sex marriage, it is notable that a large percentage of black Americans have, until very recently, been opposed to the practice. According to Pew Research, only 21 percent of black Americans supported same-sex marriage in 2004, only 30 percent in 2010, and 51 percent in 2019, and now it is 59 percent.
On topics where Thomas has not ruled from the bench, it is noteworthy that 81 percent of black parents support school choice, but the NAACP opposes school choice.Sixty-nine percent of black Americans support Voter ID laws. Only 28 percent of black Americans support leftist calls to defund the nation’s police.
Why do Cross and black leadership groups, like the NAACP, continue to be so out of touch with the black Americans they claim to represent? Why do they prioritize the goals set by rich white socialists? Perhaps it is because the NAACP receives significant funding from a majority of white leftwing organizations and labor unions and, therefore, may feel obligated to parrot the views of their funders. Certainly, that’s what happened in 1991 when the NAACP opposed Justice Thomas’ nomination at the insistence of the white labor unions, despite his support in the black community. Cross works for, in her own words, “a white-run media” company, and she pushes far-left views, whereas Thomas has a lifetime appointment and answers only to the Constitution and his conscience.
Elites have worked to destroy Thomas for years because, among other things, he exposes how out of step they are with the concerns of everyday black Americans. Thomas has argued for affirmative action programs that help students of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds, but the major beneficiaries of racial set-aside programs are wealthy blacks and Hispanics. A recent analysis showed that 71 percent of blacks and Hispanics at Harvard were from wealthy families. These wealthy individuals prevent the truly disadvantaged members of their communities from getting ahead.
During her tirade, Cross also attempted to smear Thomas by mentioning the ridiculous “pubic hair on a Coke can” comment that Anita Hill bizarrely claimed Thomas made to her many years ago. But the majority of the American people – men and women – did not believe Anita Hill’s testimony at Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991. A New York Times/CBS News poll showed people believed Thomas by 58-24 percent. Only 26 percent percent of women believed Anita Hill.
In 1998, Anita Hill was interviewed by Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” where she trashed two women who claimed to have been sexually harassed or assaulted by then-President Bill Clinton, one of whom Clinton later settled with out of court for $850,000. After Hill had zealously defended Clinton, Russert asked if there were a double standard on harassment allegations for liberals and conservatives. Hill said there is a double standard, saying, “We live in a political world, and the reality is that … there are … larger issues other than just individual behavior.” Hill meant thatif you are pro-abortion, women’s groups will give you a pass if you sexually assault or harass women. Despite Hill being a blatant fraud, Cross still used her antics to smear Thomas.
The left and the out-of-touch black leadership have attacked Thomas since he joined the Reagan administration forty years ago. Nevertheless, he does not care what they think or say. Cross’s attacks may play well to her leftist audience, but that’s not a lot of people, given she is the second lowest-rated show on the lowest-rated cable news network.
Nevertheless, it’s important to respond to these attacks to demonstrate how out of touch she and her colleagues are. On the other hand, Thomas will continue building a long-lasting legacy by writing well-reasoned opinions and persuading a majority of his colleagues to join him in ruling in a manner that is faithful to the Constitution.
Mark Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush White House Counsel’s office and worked on the confirmation of Justice Thomas. He is a senior fellow at Center for Renewing America, and partner at Schaerr Jaffe.
The Biden administration is “weaponizing” the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to go after pro-life activists, an attorney who served under George W. Bush and Barack Obama told the Daily Caller.
The Biden administration has charged at least 16 pro-life activists with a maximum of 11 years in prison for alleged violations of the act, which prohibits obstructing people seeking reproduction services. Pro-life activist Mark Houck allegedly pushed an abortion escort to the ground after a verbal confrontation. FBI agents swarmed Houck’s house and took him away at gunpoint months after the initial charges against him were dropped.
Houck is being charged with the decade-long version of the FACE Act violation because the abortion escort “scraped his arm,” his attorney Peter Breen told the Daily Caller. “The charges shouldn’t apply at all, but even if they did, he’s being overcharged.”
“It’s outrageous that you would take a six-month misdemeanor … and turn it into a 10-year federal felony,” Breen added.
One of the other pro-lifers facing over a decade in prison, Paul Vaughn, never blocked the door of an abortion clinic, but was standing nearby, Breen claimed.
Video of the FBI's arrest of Paul Vaughn of Centerville, Tennessee. DOJ charged him with “conspiracy against rights secured by the FACE Act, and committing FACE Act violations" for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic. Paul tells me the footage was taken by his wife. pic.twitter.com/KSDvLRSrlF
Severino, who served under both former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2008 to 2015, said he’s “never heard of a charge being so excessive” as the 11-year maximum prison sentence and $350,000 fine put forth by the current administration for allegedly obstructing abortion clinic doors.
“This is law enforcement run amok. The FACE Act had always been enforced very rarely, because the pro-life movement is a movement of peace,” Severino said. “All of a sudden, they are inventing cases and doing sham prosecutions in an election year for purely political purposes to go after their political enemies.”
The DOJ did not respond to an inquiry from the Daily Caller asking if they have comment on whether the Biden administration has used the FACE Act more excessively than previous administrations.
Attack at Loreto House in Denton, Texas. Photo courtesy of Randy Bollig
The effort to arrest pro-lifers is specifically being pushed before the midterms, Department of Homeland Security official under the Trump administration, Ken Cuccinelli, told the Daily Caller.
“This has nothing to do with public safety. This is political virtue signaling to the radical-left base that has control of this administration,” Cuccinelli said.
“I think it will thoroughly backfire on them. I can’t think of a way they’ll get one more vote because they arrest these people, but I guarantee you, a lot [more] pro-lifers will stay home than might have for the midterm election,” he added.
‘MAGA Republicans want women arrested for having an abortion,’ Rep. Eric Swalwell tweeted.
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Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell has released a campaign ad that features a dramatic scene in which police arrive at a family’s home to arrest a woman for having an abortion and even draw their weapons during the tense episode. In the video, two police officers arrive at the house as the family is apparently having dinner. An officer informs the woman that he has a warrant for her arrest, and when the husband asks what the arrest is for, the officer explains it is for illegally terminating a pregnancy.
As a little girl looks on, the officer notes that the mother’s medical records were subpoenaed and then names a doctor who is in custody. The officer then informs the woman she will need to undergo a “physical examination.”
“What? By who?” the distressed woman asks.
When her husband steps forward and vehemently objects, the police draw their guns. The officer then apparently handcuffs the mother before saying, “We’re just enforcing the law here.”
The ad, paid for by Swalwell’s campaign, urges people to “Vote Democrat on November 8th” and “Stop Republicans from criminalizing abortion everywhere.”
“MAGA Republicans want women arrested for having an abortion. This is what that looks like,” Swalwell tweeted while also adding the hashtag “#LockHerUp.”
The video the congressman tweeted has racked up more than 2 million views so far on the social media platform.
“Now post a video of an abortion — you know, something horrific that actually happens. Or maybe a video of a peaceful pro-lifer being arrested, which also actually happens. It’ll be much easier. You won’t have to hire actors and stage everything,” Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon tweeted in response to Swalwell’s post.
Earlier this year, Democrats bewailed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that returned to the states the authority to determine how to handle the issue of abortion, including whether to ban it. In a statement at the time, Swalwell described the decision as “a dangerous and deliberate attack on our most basic freedoms.”
Google-owned YouTube has been flexing its censorship muscles against conservative voices for a while, but the Big Tech company’s tactics just got even worse: Now, tacked onto the posts of pro-lifers, YouTube is directing users to pro-abortion information.
This means that life-affirming videos — such as those that tell the truth about the grisly details of abortion, share deeply held Catholic beliefs on the sanctity of life, and discuss alternatives to abortion, such as the life-saving pregnancy centers Democrats have slandered — will now have links slapped onto their videos that direct viewers to the pro-abortion talking points they’re advocating against. YouTube is following its predictable partisan pattern, using the cover of “misinformation” and “context” to dehumanize unborn human lives.
YouTube’s purported “context” accompanying the videos reads “abortion health information,” with a definition from the National Library of Medicine (NLM): “An abortion is a procedure to end a pregnancy. It uses medicine or surgery to remove the embryo or fetus and placenta from the uterus. The procedure is done by a licensed healthcare professional.” And though YouTube hides behind the cover of medical “experts” at the NLM, like it did when it censored Covid-19 dissenters, it’s notable that NLM is just another hub of progressive federal government bureaucrats within the National Institutes of Health that plugs abortion and has reportedly published thousands of papers on “racism and medicine.”
YouTube’s “context” disclaimer also includes a link to the NLM’s abortion informational page, which suggests ways to abort a child: “medication abortion” or “procedural abortion.” The former is a chemically induced abortion in the first trimester, during which time babies’ limbs, skeletons, and major organs are fully developing, their hearts are beating strong, and they can taste and feel pain. In this type of abortion, the mother takes a pill that blocks nourishment and blood from the unborn baby, which kills it. The mother then takes a second pill to cause contractions and severe cramping and bleeding, leading to the delivery of her dead child.
“Procedural abortion” after the first trimester entails a dilation and evacuation abortion (D&E), in which an abortionist dilates the mother’s cervix and then uses a suction tube and sopher clamp to kill the unborn child by ripping its body apart limb by limb. The National Library of Medicine page linked by YouTube describes this in wholly dehumanizing terms, describing the dismemberment abortion as “a procedure to remove the pregnancy from the uterus.”
Under the “Learn More” section of this NLM abortion information webpage, it includes links to pages such as “Abortion Care,” “Ending a Pregnancy,” and “Know Your Rights: Reproductive Health Care,” but no pro-life pages or post-abortion testimonies discussing the horrific realities of abortion, such as this Live Action video to which YouTube attached its abortion-sanitizing “context.”
Live Action
“Adding these disclaimers is clear political bias on the part of YouTube against pro-life groups and messaging,” policy analyst Clare Morell told the Catholic News Agency. “Rather than allowing for free speech and debate in today’s modern public square, YouTube is preferring one side and position over the other by adding these disclaimers. And attempting to prejudice viewers against the pro-life position.”
This is certainly not the first time Big Tech has attempted to choke out pro-life perspectives. In August, after pressure from House Democrats, Google announced it would change its search results “to distinguish pro-life pregnancy centers from abortion clinics in search results for people dealing with crisis pregnancies.” In other words, Google would ensure that women exploring abortion online wouldn’t stumble on a wholistic women’s pregnancy center that would give them a different choice.
Google’s YouTube is not new to putting disclaimers on videos in the name of fighting misinformation, either. The tech giant has added so-called context to videos discussing Covid-19 too, and it even went so far as to suspend people from its platform — including Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. — for purportedly “spreading misinformation” on the topic.
Sophia is an intern at The Federalist and a student at Le Moyne College. She majors in English and intends to pursue a career in journalism.
In less than one month, if Proposal 3 passes, children will have a right under the Michigan constitution to walk into one of Planned Parenthood’s 12 so-called “gender affirming” facilities in the state and, without parental knowledge or consent, obtain puberty blockers. And with Planned Parenthood of Michigan promising “gender affirming” care “via telehealth in the coming months,” Michiganders’ kids won’t even need to leave their house to obtain these sterilizing drugs.
Passage of Prop 3 will also give boys a constitutional right to be castrated and girls the right under Michigan’s constitution to be sterilized by way of a hysterectomy or the removal of their ovaries — all without their parents’ consent.
Deceptive marketing by Planned Parenthood and far-left politicians, such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, hides this reality from Michigan voters, leading Prop 3 to be uniformly referred to as “the abortion amendment” even though the expansive language of the proposed constitutional amendment reaches far beyond abortion. And on abortion alone, notwithstanding proponents’ claims that “passing this amendment simply restores the same protections that Michiganders had for five decades under Roe v. Wade,” Prop 3 goes far beyond the controlling Roe-Casey precedent: If passed, the constitutional amendment would create an extreme regime in Michigan of abortion on demand, at any time, for any reason, without informed or parental consent, and paid for by taxpayers.
The expansive and legalistically worded language of Prop 3, crafted by Planned Parenthood and left-wing backers, however, extends beyond abortion to create a constitutional right to several aspects of what transgender activists call “gender-affirming care,” despite it being neither affirming nor caring. And Prop 3 extends that right to all individuals, including children.
This is not merely a political point, and it is not a worst-case-scenario argument based on how some liberal activist judge or justice might interpret Prop 3. This reality flows from the plain language of Prop 3 and rests on general legal principles of constitutional construction.
It’s Right in the Text
Here is the pertinent language Prop 3 would etch into the Michigan constitution as Article 1, Section 28, with the key language underscored:
“(1) Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care. An individual’s right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, burdened, nor infringed upon unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means. …
(2) The state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.
* * *
(4) For the purposes of this section:
A state interest is “compelling” only if it is for the limited purpose of protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.
* * *
(5) This section shall be self-executing….
Prop 3 Applies to Men and Women AND Boys and Girls
By its express terms, Prop 3 applies to “every individual” and guarantees an “individual’s right.” The proposed constitutional amendment further provides that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.”
As a matter of constitutional interpretation, then, the rights guaranteed by Prop 3 would be rights that both adults and children possess as “individuals,” and the rights apply equally to males and females.
This proposal represents a huge demarcation from controlling Michigan law, under which minors must have parental consent to obtain medical treatment or receive prescription medications, with the only current exception being the judicial bypass provisions governing minors seeking abortions. Specifically, Michigan law currently provides that to obtain an abortion, females under the age of 18 must have the written consent of one parent or legal guardian, but the law allows a girl to seek permission for an abortion from a judge, called a “judicial bypass.” A court must grant a judicial bypass if the judge finds either that “the minor is sufficiently mature and well-enough informed to make the decision regarding abortion independently of her parents or legal guardian,” or “the waiver would be in the best interests of the minor.”
In the context of abortion, Prop 3 guts Michigan’s requirements for either parental consent or a judicial bypass, first by declaring that the amendment applies to all “individuals” and second by expressly providing that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.” Treating females under 18 differently than those 18 or over is a textbook example of discrimination.
Section 4 of the amendment further cements the reality that minors must be treated equivalent to adults for purposes of the rights Prop 3 would establish. That section of the proposed amendment expressly limits the justifications allowed for regulating abortion or the other rights Prop 3 would inscribe in the constitution.
Under Section 4, the state may only regulate abortion and the other rights covered by the proposed constitutional amendment if it is necessary to “protect[] the health of an individual seeking care,” and “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
The rights of parents do not matter; Mom and Dad have no rights. And even the health of the girl does not matter because, under the plain language of the amendment, the state’s interest cannot “infringe” on the “individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
This legal analysis flows straight from the plain language of Prop 3, but case law from other states where a state constitutional right to abortion exists confirms this analysis. For example, in Alaska and Florida, courts have declared parental consent and parental notification statutes unconstitutional. And courts in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have struck parental consent statutes.
Prop 3’s grant of such “autonomous decision-making” is not limited to abortion, however. Rather, the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment provides that the right to “reproductive freedom,” “entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to … sterilization … or infertility care.”
Under Michigan law currently, minors cannot be chemically or surgically sterilized (or rendered infertile) without their parents’ consent, and even then most physicians would refuse to sterilize a minor — except in the case of transgender-identifying patients.
The modern medical community has embraced the transgender ideology that teaches that human beings can be born “in the wrong body,” and that the appropriate treatment for such individuals consists of making their bodies appear to conform to their “internal sense” of gender.
The first step in such wrongly named “gender-affirming” medical response consists of prescribing puberty blockers to children. Puberty blockers, at a minimum, render children temporarily infertile by preventing them from maturing sexually, and a longer-term use renders them sterile. The surgical procedures used under the guise of “gender confirmation” — castration, hysterectomy, and the removal of ovaries — likewise sterilize the patients.
In fact, it is this very destruction of children’s future fertility and the medical rendering of them sterile that has led to several states banning the use of puberty blockers and surgical “gender confirming” procedures on minors. For instance, in Iowa, the Legislature made these legislative findings to explain its proposed ban on puberty blockers and surgical procedures that sterilize children:
Puberty blockers prevent gonadal maturation and thus render children taking these drugs infertile. Introducing cross-sex hormones to children with immature gonads as a direct result of pubertal blockade is expected to cause irreversible sterility. Sterilization is also permanent for those who undergo surgery to remove reproductive organs[.] … For these reasons, the decision to pursue a course of hormonal and surgical interventions to address a discordance between an individual’s sex and sense of gender identity should not be presented to or determined for children who are incapable of comprehending the negative implications and life-course difficulties resulting from these interventions.
But in Michigan, if passed, Prop 3 guarantees children the right to “make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to … sterilization,” and without “discrimination,” giving boys and girls the right to obtain puberty blockers and surgical sterilization without parental notice or consent.
If passed, Section 4 of the proposed constitutional amendment will further guarantee that the Michigan Legislature cannot interfere in transgender minors’ decisions to obtain puberty blockers or surgical “gender reassignment” through castration, removal of ovaries, or a hysterectomy. That section, as excerpted above, provides that the state may only regulate such procedures for the limited purpose of “protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine,” and then, only so long as it “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
But the “accepted clinical standards of practice” by the supposed “mainstream” medical organizations is, at a minimum, to provide puberty blockers to children, with a steady movement toward the cash cow that is surgical interventions for minors.
Planned Parenthood Targets Kids One Way or Another
Again, these conclusions flow directly from the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment. But here the public would be wise to note two significant facts: Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan helpedlead the ballot initiative to amend the Michigan constitution through the passage of Prop 3, deceptively described as the “Reproductive Freedom for All” amendment, and Planned Parenthood nowrepresents “the second largest provider of ‘gender-affirming hormone therapy.’” In fact, less than two weeks ago, Planned Parenthood launched an ad marketing puberty blockers to minors.
What Planned Parenthood and its extremist political partners don’t want publicized, however, is that a “Yes” vote for Prop 3 will not merely make abortion-on-demand, for any reason, at any time, and without informed or parental consent the law of Michigan: It will guarantee that children have an unfettered “right” to “transition” by obtaining puberty blockers and surgical sterilization, parents be damned.
With less than one month to go before Michiganders cast their final ballots, little time remains to give proof to the left’s lie that Prop 3 is about codifying Roe. It is not. It is about sacrificing the children of the state — both born and unborn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The New Jersey Department of Education is imposing sex education standards that require school districts to teach middle school students about anal sex and pregnancy options like abortion or face potential “disciplinary action.” The state board of education approved several changes to the statewide education standards in June 2020, which school districts are required to implement this month under threat of losing state funding.
The new standards expect students by the end of grade eight to be able to “describe pregnancy testing, the signs of pregnancy, and pregnancy options, including parenting, abortion, and adoption” and be able to define “vaginal, oral, and anal sex.”
The state’s education standards also state that children by eighth grade should be able to “differentiate between gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation,” and schools should “develop a plan … to promote dignity and respect for people of all genders, gender identities, gender expressions, and sexual orientations in the school community.”
The Christian Post contacted the New Jersey Department of Education for comment on the sex education standards. A response was not received by press time.
Melissa Varley, superintendent of the Berkeley Heights Public Schools, told Fox News that while parents can have their children opt out, the sex education requirements still have to be taught in her school district.
“If we do not, we do not pass New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum (NJQSAC) monitoring. If the district fails this process, we may become ineligible for state and even federal funding,” Varley explained.
A spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Education told Fox News that the learning standards are “mandatory for Local Education Agencies (LEAs) to implement and failure to comply can result in disciplinary action.”
“Under [New Jersey Statutes Annotated] 18A:35-4.7, for children to be excused from any part of instruction in health, family life, or sex education, their parent or guardian must inform the school principal in writing that the instruction conflicts with their conscience or sincerely held moral or religious beliefs,” the spokesperson said.
The NJQSAC system the state uses to monitor school systems evaluates based on five “core components” that research has identified as “key factors in effective district operations,” the spokesperson added.
“Specific indicators in each of the five areas are self-evaluated by the district and verified by the Department,” the spokesperson said. “If a district scores below 80% in any of the NJQSAC areas, the district is required to create a district improvement plan to address the indicators found to be out of compliance. An assessment is made of the district’s capacity and effectiveness based on its compliance with the indicators.”
“Following the assessment, the district is placed on a performance continuum that will determine the level of oversight, and technical assistance and support it receives in accordance with NJSA 18A: 7A-10,” the spokesperson continued. “Dependent upon the percentage of quality performance indicators a district satisfies upon review of the improvement plan, the Department may determine whether additional monitoring or intervention is warranted, pursuant to NJSA 18A:7A-14.”
In 2020, following five months of discernment, public comments and revision, the state board of education voted to revise the 2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards for Comprehensive Health and Physical Education for classroom instruction, with a key focus on the “Personal and Mental Health” section.
Concerns over how the standards will be implemented prompted Gov. Phil Murphy to ask the state DOE on April 13 “to review the standards and provide further clarification on what age-appropriate guidelines look like for our students.”
Acting Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan issued a memo on April 14 to school officials declaring that “the State does not mandate curriculum” and that specific materials for the course remain at “the discretion of local educational agencies.”
“To be clear, any report indicating that the NJDOE has approved a specific vendor or instructional material (e.g., lesson plan) related to the implementation of NJSLS-CHPE or any other content area is not accurate,” stated the memo.
“These standards are based on research making clear that receiving age-appropriate information about health education is essential for students’ physical and emotional well-being.”
Regarding the requirement that students know about “vaginal, oral, and anal sex,” Allen-McMillan said this is “foundational to keeping [students] safe and protecting themselves from pressure, dating violence, and assault.”
“It is important to provide students language for, and understanding of, specific acts, empowering them to stay safe, evaluate risks, make informed decisions, and communicate health issues or injuries if necessary,” the memo continued.
“Further, youth who are unable to appropriately name sexual acts may not be able to accurately report instances of sexual harm or abuse if it occurs.”
In May, four state board of education members wrote an open letter to Allen-McMillan, expressing an ongoing concern about the sex education standards and their implementation.
“As board members, we continue to hear views of parents and educators with passionate feelings about what is appropriate and inappropriate for their children to learn, especially about sex,” they wrote.
“[W]e are hoping the committee and department will recommend removing some of the more controversial and graphic language as well as reexamine the age appropriateness of the grade at which some of these topics are recommended to be taught.”
President Joe Biden’s approval rating sank below 40% in a poll released Sunday, appearing to contradict various reports of the president making a “comeback” among voters. The ABC/Washington Post poll of 1,006 adults, 908 of whom were registered voters, reported that 53% of respondents disapproved of Biden’s job performance while only 39% approved. Respondents gave Republicans double-digit leads when asked who they trusted to handle inflation, the economy and crime. (RELATED: ‘People Are Feeling That’: Chris Christie Reveals Why New Poll Is ‘Bad News’ For Dems)
Multiplereportshave suggested Biden is making a “comeback” among voters, citing an uptick in approval in recent polls. Only 36% of those polled approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, with 74% describing it as “bad.” The economy was seen as highly important by 84% of those responding to the poll, while 76% considered inflation highly important.
The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade did not seem to help the Democrats, according to the poll, with 76% of those who supported the Dobbs ruling saying they were certain to vote as opposed to 70% of those who opposed the ruling.
Gross domestic product shrank by 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, following a 1.4% decline in the first quarter. Two consecutive quarters of contraction is a commonly-used metric to determine if a recession is taking place, according to Investopedia.
The Consumer Price Index rose 8.3% year-over-year in August, following increases of 8.5% in July, 9.1% in June and 8.6% in May.
The poll had a 3.5% margin of error and was conducted Sept. 18-21.
Chemical abortion is the backup plan of the abortion industry post-Roe, but it shields a ghastly history. The demand for this dangerous drug is rising in the U.S. despite its four times higher complication rate than surgical abortion and a jaw-dropping reality: the chemical abortion drug is connected to Nazi Germany. The affiliates of those who killed innocent children in the Holocaust introduced to our county the drug that is today killing innocent preborn children and numerous mothers.
Pro-life activists often argue that the dehumanization of Jews by the Nazis and the dehumanization of the preborn by the abortion industry are philosophically similar phenomena. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a relentless racist. However, few know the true historical relationship between the Nazi genocide during World War II and today’s chemical abortion industry, now responsible for 54 percent of abortions nationwide.
In the early to mid-20th century, the pharmaceutical holding company I.G. Farben Chemical Company controlled much of the German chemical industry. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the infamous Auschwitz was one of I.G. Farben’s very own chemical plants, responsible for the slavery and deaths of more than a million people in World War II.
Several of Farben’s directors were also found guilty in the U.S’s Nuernberg War Crimes Trials for slavery and mass murder. Georg von Schnitzler, a member of the managing board of directors of Farben, was even a captain in a violent division of the Nazi party that helped facilitate Hitler’s rise before WWII. I.G. Farben Chemical Company was the archetype of an industrial demon.
After the war, Western countries attempted to utterly splinter I.G. Farben industrial power, but divided the holding company into three of its own industrial members, Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF.
In 1974, the first of these three entities, Hoechst, gained a majority share of the holding company Chimio that controlled a French pharmaceutical company called Roussel Uclaf. By 1982, Roussel Uclaf had developed the RU-486 chemical abortion drug mifepristone.
Abortion Drug’s Ties to Population Council, Planned Parenthood
During the mid-1990s, Roussel Uclaf allied with the nonprofit Population Council, which led the charge for FDA approval of the abortion pill in the U.S., officially granted in 2000. During that time Hoechst acquired the remaining shares of Roussel Uclaf.
Like Hoechst, the Population Council had deeply eugenic roots.Aided by the director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the organization was founded by John D. Rockefeller III, son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Rockefeller Jr. sponsored German eugenic research leading up to the late-1930s that influenced later Nazi policy. Through the Rockefeller Foundation, he funded multiple institutions at which Ernst Rüdin, who spearheaded Hitler’s gruesome medical research during the Holocaust, held leading roles. One such organization was the Institute for Brain Research. According to The History News Network:
Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The Institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler’s medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin’s organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Following in the footsteps of the organization his father founded, in the 1950s Rockefeller III’s Population Council supported the American Eugenics Society, eugenics-motivated sterilization of women, and the use of sex-selective abortion. It also tested, along with International Planned Parenthood Federation, population controlling IUD contraceptives in Pakistan, Taiwan, South Korea, and India in the ’60s despite knowing their dangerous side effects on women. The council itself was led for years by openly eugenicist presidents Frederick Osborn and Frank Notestein, both of whom were members of the American Eugenics Society.
Aborting Minorities
Rockefeller III acted as chairman of President Nixon’s 1969 Population and the American Future Commission just two years after receiving Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award. The commission staff was headed by Dr. Charles F. Westoff of the American Eugenics Society and advised by eugenicist Daniel Callahan. The final report endorsed decreasing population growth through supporting the option for women to obtain contraception and/or abortion. No wonder the Population Council was such a willing candidate to spearhead FDA approval for the Hoechst/Roussel Uclaf chemical abortion drug.
Certain mid-19th century eugenicist figures such as Gunnar Myrdal in his 1944 book “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” schemed that “the most effective way they could advance their agenda would be to concentrate population control facilities within the targeted communities,” according to Life Dynamic’s Racial Targeting Report. Today, abortion is the leading cause of death among African Americans, having taken an estimated 19 million black lives. According to Students for Life of America, “Almost 80% of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. 88% of its new ‘mega facilities’ are located within walking distance of minority neighborhoods.”
Today’s abortion industry today is continuing Sanger’s racist legacy. As filmmaker Jason Jones bluntly put it, even though today’s abortion supporters generally reject eugenics, by still endorsing policies (namely abortion) that disproportionately kill black babies, they are “watering an apple tree hoping they get peaches.”
A disproportionate number of black babies are being killed by the abortion industry. This is the effect Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Sanger hoped for. It is no surprise that organizations like Hoechst and Population Council, who have eugenic roots too, were inclined to join the abortion bandwagon considering its ability to control populations.
Eugenic leaders laid the groundwork for today’s abortion industry. Similar to the 1969 Commission using the language of women’s choice to propagate what was possibly the eugenic dispositions of its leaders, today’s abortion industry touts the language of bodily autonomy to bolster their abortion business. Considering that nearly half of black babies are aborted in the U.S. today, abortion supporters don’t seem to care that their policies, in effect, carry on the eugenic tendencies of the Population Council, both J.D. Rockefellers, I.G. Farben Chemical Company, and Margaret Sanger.
The sad irony is that while the language of the abortion industry changed, its policies did not. Planned Parenthood still propagates a eugenic legacy through killing innocent children by chemical abortion.
Rachel Schroder is a history major at Hillsdale College. She wrote this article during her internship at the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women.
In preparation for the close of the year’s second economic quarter, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has already started the spin: We’re not in a recession if we just redefine what a recession is.
“While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” the supposedly nonpartisan group said in a blog post on Thursday.
It’s doubtful the verbal smoke and mirrors will persuade the average Americans whose grocery bills keep growing as fast as their gas tanks empty. A recession is a sustained downturn in economic activity, and many Americans can feel it without knowing what the Q2 numbers are. But it’s far from the first concept the left has simply redefined to deflect the consequences of their failed policies and ideas.
One of their favorite words to redefine, apparently as “full and unchallenged political control,” is democracy. When actual democratic processes are at work — such as when an elected majority votes not to pass a pet piece of legislation, or when issues such as abortion law are left to elected representatives of the people at the state level — leftists scream their favorite catchphrase and call it a “threat to democracy.” They’ve levied that smear at everything from our bicameral legislature to the Supreme Court to the other party in our two-party system. It’s obvious they’re not really talking about democracy in any honest sense of the word. When democracy is a threat to their power, it simply gets redefined.
Another word that’s undergone a 180-degree redefinition is racism. No longer is it considered racist to treat someone differently based on his or her skin color, and not racist to value all human beings equally. Instead, if you’re not promoting theories that “remedy … past discrimination [with] present discrimination,” as critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi suggests, you are clearly a racist according to the left’s new dictionary. Do you believe in meritocracy? Racist. Think people are responsible for their own choices, and it’s neither possible nor beneficial for the government to dole out equivalent outcomes to everyone by force? Doubly racist. The new liturgy says that true equality lies in teaching some children that they’re part of a hopelessly oppressive system and other children that they’re hopelessly oppressed.
On the subject of pitting people against each other, the term “vaccine” has been ridiculously redefined to cover for the incompetence of the people who profit from them. After the shot that was promised to protect people from Covid transmission and infection failed to ward off either, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention simply changed the definition of “vaccine” to fit the narrative. “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” was quietly altered to “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” Barely a week later, Merriam-Webster followed suit by changing the definition of “anti-vaxxer” from someone who opposes vaccines to someone who doesn’t believe the government should mandate Covid shots.
Just last week, as part of the trans-crazed campaign to redefine what a woman is, Merriam-Webster added“having a gender identity that is the opposite of male” to its definition of “female.” Categories such as “men” and “women” that are based in biological reality don’t suit the agenda that seeks to abolish those realities from minds and bodies. So rather than advocate their agenda within the bounds of reality, the left simply attempts to redefine reality itself. It’s apparent in the push to call women by the objectifying terms “pregnant persons,” “menstruating people,” etc. We saw it when then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson told Congress she couldn’t define what a woman is, and it’s obvious in the attempts to put confused men in women’s prisons, shelters, and bathrooms. The reality of womanhood is in the way, so it’s being redefined out of existence.
And while abortion advocates lately have been willing to defend the act of killing a baby in the womb even with the understanding that it takes a human life, for years they’ve pushed their agenda by redefining an unborn baby as a “clump of cells” or some other dehumanizing description.
On any of those topics and more, leftists and their allies in Big Tech also persistently redefine any dissenting opinions or perspectives as disinformation,using that disingenuous label to erase opposition from channels of discourse.
Of course, many people who hear them prattle about “disinformation,” “birthing persons,” “anti-racism,” “threats to democracy,” and their host of other buzzwords know those words are nonsense. We can tell, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
But, as he noted, “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.” The danger is in allowing these redefinitions of reality to be said, unchallenged, until enough people forget they could ever be challenged at all.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Democrats love to talk about democracy — mostly about how it’s under threat from Republicans and “Christian nationalists” and anyone who opposes their agenda. But at least on a rhetorical level, they seem to cherish democracy and rightly think that a government of the people, by the people is the surest safeguard against tyranny.
In practice, though, they hate democracy and will use every tool at their disposal to subvert and destroy it. Hardly a day goes by that Democrats don’t proclaim as much by their actions. Just look at their response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last month, which triggered laws in more than a dozen states banning or placing new restrictions on abortion. Voters in those states elected the people who passed these new laws, which in many cases are broadly popular. By overturning Roe, the court breathed new life into the democratic process, returning an issue to the American people that an earlier Supreme Court had snatched away from them.
But Democrats don’t really want democracy when it comes to abortion, which they consider sacrosanct. They have no qualms about protecting it from regulations by state lawmakers through the raw exercise of federal executive power, if need be. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to sue states that have outlawed or restricted abortion since the end of Roe, and he also said the Justice Department would try to get a judge to toss a Texas lawsuit that would block newly issued rules from the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services forcing doctors to perform abortions in emergency rooms.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Garland’s DOJ said last week it had launched a special task force to “evaluate state laws that hinder women’s ability to seek abortions in other states where the procedure remains legal or that ban federally approved medication that terminates a pregnancy.” The task force will also “oppose state efforts to penalize federal employees” who perform abortions “authorized by federal law.”
What could that mean? Well, take a look at the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed against HHS. The administration is trying to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it contravenes state laws outlawing the procedure. EMTALA was passed in 1986 as a way to prevent “patient dumping,” or turning away people who couldn’t pay, and it requires hospitals that receive Medicare money (which today is all of them) to treat people who show up at an ER in need of emergency treatment.
The Texas lawsuit argues the Biden administration is trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic,” and that “EMTALA does not authorize — and has never authorized — the federal government to compel healthcare providers to perform abortions.”
Garland and HHS claim that EMTALA preempts state law, but it’s unclear what that means in the context of the new HHS rules. If a state legislature passed a law saying that emergency rooms are prohibited from treating patients who have no health insurance, then yes, EMTALA would preempt that.
But as Paxton’s lawsuit rightly notes, the law says nothing about abortion, nor does it say anything about which specific treatments a hospital ER must administer. It only states that Medicare-participating hospitals have to provide “stabilizing treatment” for “emergency medical conditions,” and it specifically defines both of those terms in the statute.
For Democrats, though, laws passed by representatives of the people don’t carry as much weight as rule by administrative fiat. On July 11, the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued “guidance” purportedly reminding hospitals of their obligations under EMTALA. But the guidance was much more than a reminder, and it was accompanied by a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that amounted to an abortion mandate for hospitals, asserting powers under EMTALA that simply don’t exist anywhere in federal law.
First, Becerra’s letter claims that if an ER doctor determines that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve [an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA], the physician must provide that treatment.”
But this is nothing more than a cheap word game. Abortion isn’t a “stabilizing treatment,” and nowhere in federal law is it construed as such. Becerra is conflating Democrats’ loose rhetoric about abortion — that it’s “reproductive healthcare” or “women’s health” — with the straightforward reality of the federal EMTALA statute, which says nothing about abortion and, to the contrary, specifically includes a mention of an “emergency medical condition” as one that threatens the life of an unborn child.
Second, Becerra’s false claim that EMTALA preempts state abortion laws is contradicted by the plain language of the law itself, which says it doesn’t preempt state law “except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement” of EMTALA. But abortion is not a requirement of EMTALA and doesn’t even fit the law’s definition of “stabilizing treatment” for an “emergency medical condition.”
In a decent country, Texas would easily win this lawsuit — and the Justice Department would never step in to try to get it thrown out. But Democrats are committed to subverting the democratic process at both the state and federal level in order to preserve some shred of their abortion regime. They’re trying to preempt state laws they don’t like by twisting the meaning of federal laws that don’t have anything to say about abortion.
Remember that the next time you hear President Biden or some other leading Democrat talk about “threats to democracy.” They don’t care about democracy, they care about power. And they will use every ounce of it they have to advance their policies — the will of the people be damned.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called for “reproductive justice” and advocated for pediatricians helping minors get abortions without their parents’ knowledge in the July issue of its official journal Pediatrics. Like other pro-abortion advocates who exploit young and vulnerable girls to advance their agenda — as in the recent viral story of the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim — the article used the story of a 14-year-old Guatemalan immigrant girl to argue for a more “holistic approach to reproductive rights that considers factors such as race, language, and socioeconomic status on the reproductive health of women.”
According to the article, the girl experienced complications after taking the abortion drug misoprostol and went to a facility that gave her a surgical abortion and helped her with the “judicial bypass” process so she could do it without her parents’ knowledge. After the abortion, the girl received a Nexplanon implant — a type of birth control that increases the chance that any pregnancy that occurs will be ectopic and puts the female at greater risk of blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes.
The academy’s takeaway from this story, which it foisted upon its readers, was that the “pediatric community” should “advocate for reproductive policies that expand access to care for adolescent patients.” In other words, it thinks doctors should push for making it easier for kids to abort their own children. Further, the American Academy of Pediatrics wants to hide this from minors’ parents and couches its concern in terms of the “deeply intertwined social, economic, and cultural barriers” of racial minorities.
“Now more than ever, training programs should ensure that pediatric residents competently provide culturally sensitive, nonjudgmental counseling around abortion care, contraception, and judicial bypass,” the article said.
Dr. George Fidone, who has a large private practice with five clinics in Texas, told The Federalist that the journal has become increasingly left-leaning. “Years ago the lead article might be on meningitis or pneumonia or a new vaccine or whatever,” he said. “Now it’s all about trans health, gender fluidity, how we’re supposed to counsel people, starting at very young ages, about the notion of gender fluidity or whatever.”
The article also said the academy “joined 38 other physician groups in opposing the passage of Texas Senate Bill 8,” which prohibits abortions after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected.
“So the American Academy of Pediatrics is advocating for the wholesale murder of unborn children,” Fidone said. “What? What has the state of our academy become?”
Olivia Hajicek is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at Hillsdale College studying history and journalism. She has covered campus and city news as a reporter for The Hillsdale Collegian. You can reach her at olivia.hajicek@gmail.com.
On Thursday, The New York Times published a “Sex Ed” quiz on “key concepts every person should know in a post-Roe era.” It contained numerous pieces of false information about fertility, contraception, abortifacients, and more. Here are their answers fact-checked by an OB-GYN.
Question 1: Doctors generally start counting pregnancy from what point?
Fertilization.
Implantation.
The day a woman started her last menstrual period.
The last time a woman had intercourse.
This answer is correct.
Question 2: Can you count on a vasectomy being reversible?
Yes
No
This answer is correct.
Question 3: What’s the difference between an embryo and a fetus?
An embryo and a fetus are the same thing.
The embryonic stage is early in pregnancy — through about 10 weeks.
A fetus is created right when the egg is fertilized.
This answer is correct.
Question 4: When is sex most likely to result in pregnancy?
Shortly before or on the day of ovulation.
While a woman is on her period.
Shortly after a woman’s period ends.
This answer is correct.
Question 5: Is it still legal for a woman to get her tubes tied in America?
Yes.
No.
This answer is correct.
Question 6: What’s the difference between an abortion and a miscarriage?
Abortions involve pills or a surgical procedure; miscarriages resolve on their own.
Abortions are for unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages occur for wanted pregnancies.
Abortions are induced; miscarriages happen spontaneously.
This question has no correct answer listed.
In a miscarriage, the baby has spontaneously died. In an elective induced abortion, the baby is purposefully killed during the process of the abortion, since the purpose of every elective induced abortion is to produce a dead baby. That is the product that the abortionist is paid to produce.
A clear illustration of this fact is that, after viability, a “failed abortion” is when the baby is born alive. The separation of the mother from her fetus did not fail to occur. What “failed” is that the baby “failed” to die.
Both an elective induced abortion and a miscarriage can leave tissue left inside, which must be removed by a procedure known as a D&C (dilation and curettage). But doing a D&C for retained tissue is not an abortion.
Question 7: Can a woman have a miscarriage and not know it?
Yes.
No.
This answer is correct.
Question 8: What is the most common cause of miscarriage?
Vigorous exercise.
Stress.
Random chromosomal abnormality.
This answer is correct.
Question 9: How soon can a woman typically find out if she’s pregnant?
Immediately after she has sex.
After her period is late.
A few days after having sex.
This answer is correct.
Question 10: What does Plan B do?
Prevents ovulation.
Kills sperm.
Causes an abortion.
This question also does not have the correct answer.
The correct answer is that the mechanism of action of Plan B depends on when in a woman’s cycle she takes the Plan B. If taken during her period or shortly after, the Plan B does nothing. If taken 4 days to 2 days before egg release, the Plan B can delay egg release.
If taken one day before egg release, the Plan B can interfere with the ability of the woman’s body to make progesterone at the correct time, thus can interfere with the development of the lining of her womb and inhibit implantation.
If taken after egg release, the Plan B doesn’t appear to do anything.
Question 11: Which of these is the most effective form of birth control?
Fertility awareness/natural family planning
An IUD
The Pill
Spermicide
Withdrawal
Condoms
This question also has debatable answers, depending on which study is looked at, whether the study is reporting “perfect use” or “normal use,” how obese a woman is, when the IUD was placed, etc. The top three for efficacy are IUD, the Pill (but depends on what formulation of pill), and fertility awareness.
Spermicide alone, condoms alone, and withdrawal alone are much less effective.
Question 12: Which of these is the most effective form of male birth control?
The male birth control pill.
Condoms.
Women can control ejaculation in the body.
This question also does not have a correct answer, since the most effective form of male birth control is vasectomy.
Question 13: Does an abortion have to take place at an abortion clinic?
Yes.
No.
This answer is correct.
Question 14: What is an ectopic pregnancy?
When the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus.
When a fertilized egg is expelled from the womb and needs to be re-implanted.
Spontaneous loss of pregnancy before the 20th week.
This question itself is scientifically incorrect, as there is no such entity as a “fertilized egg.” There exist sperm and there exist eggs. Once the sperm cell membrane and the egg cell membrane fuse (fertilization), then the entity created is a one-celled embryo called a “zygote.”
That one-celled embryo becomes a two-celled embryo then a four-celled embryo, then continues dividing to become a blastocyst, which goes on to implant and grow into a fetus, a newborn, a toddler, and an adult, etc. It is one continuous existence.
An “ectopic pregnancy” is when the embryo implants anywhere other than inside the lining of the uterus.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center in Lynchburg, Virginia, was vandalized hours after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide, June 25, 2022. | Facebook/Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center
A pro-life pregnancy center in Virginia has become the first anti-abortion organization to face vandalism since the United States Supreme Court reversed the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Early Saturday morning, hours after the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Constitution does not contain a right to abortion, pro-abortion activists vandalized Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center in Lynchburg, Virginia. While several pro-life pregnancy centers and churches have found themselves subject to varying degrees of vandalism since Politico first published a leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs case eight weeks ago, the attack on Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center is the first to take place since the publication of the Dobbs decision.
One image of the vandalism shared on Facebook by the Lynchburg Police Department shows the words “Jane’s Revenge” spray-painted on the ground in front of the facility, with the “A” in the phrase written like the symbol for the anarchist movement. The symbol for the anarchist movement was also spray-painted onto the side of the building.
A group of pro-abortion activists calling themselves Jane’s Revenge has taken credit for many acts of vandalism against churches and pro-life pregnancy centers in recent weeks. They have also called on pro-life organizations to disband and declared “open season” on such groups in a communique released two weeks ago. Republican federal lawmakers have called on the Department of Justice to take action against the group in response to the aforementioned threat.
The FBI has already announced an investigation into attacks against “pregnancy resource centers and faith-based organizations across the country.” Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security included both pro-life and pro-abortion groups on a list of “domestic violent extremists” that “pose an elevated threat to the homeland in 2021.”
Another image of the property damage at Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center reveals graffiti declaring, “If abortion ain’t safe you ain’t safe.” Additional images of the vandalism illustrated a broken window at the facility, along with the words “Vote blue LOL” spray-painted on the side of the building.
The Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center in Lynchburg, Virginia, was vandalized hours after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide, June 25, 2022. | Facebook/Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center
The Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center in Lynchburg, Virginia, was vandalized hours after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide, June 25, 2022. | Facebook/Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center
The Lynchburg Police Department also provided a still image of security camera footage documenting “four masked individuals” who committed the acts of vandalism. The timestamp showed the perpetrators gathered outside the facility at around 1:20 a.m.
Susan Campbell, executive director of Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center, reacted to the targeting of her business in a statement posted on Facebook Saturday: “BRPC has been vandalized greatly and we need the support of our community now more than ever. If you are available to give financial support for additional security, and lots of prayers, we would greatly appreciate you. We know God has [His] Hand over our center and the work at BRPC is not finished.”
Campbell also posted additional pictures of the vandalism, including the defacement of a streetside sign advertising the facility with a symbol for the anarchist movement.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, condemned the vandalism of Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center in a tweet Saturday. “There is no room for this in Virginia, breaking the law is unacceptable,” he said. “This is not how we find common ground. Virginia State Police stands ready to support local law enforcement as they investigate.”
There is no room for this in Virginia, breaking the law is unacceptable. This is not how we find common ground. Virginia State Police stands ready to support local law enforcement as they investigate.
There is no room for this in Virginia, breaking the law is unacceptable. This is not how we find common ground. Virginia State Police stands ready to support local law enforcement as they investigate.https://t.co/BONC83jKgj
— Governor Glenn Youngkin (@GovernorVA) June 26, 2022
In a statement issued following the Dobbs decision, Youngkin said he plans to “take every action I can to protect life” now that “the Supreme Court of the United States has rightfully returned power to the people and their elected representatives in the states.”
Maintaining that “Virginians want fewer abortions, not more abortions,” he insisted that “we can build a bipartisan consensus on protecting the life of unborn children, especially when they begin to feel pain in the womb, and importantly supporting mothers and families who choose life.”
“I’ve asked Senator Siobhan Dunnavant, Senator Steve Newman, Delegate Kathy Byron and Delegate Margaret Ransone to join us in an effort to bring together legislators and advocates from across the Commonwealth on this issue to find areas where we can agree and chart the most successful path forward,” Youngkin added. “I’ve asked them to do the important work needed and be prepared to introduce legislation when the General Assembly returns in January.”
Youngkin’s comments reflect the fact that with Roe overturned, the legality of abortion will be decided on a state-by-state basis. Virginia is one of 10 states that will continue enforcing existing abortion laws and/or restrictions until new legislation is passed. Currently, Virginia bans abortions after the second trimester of pregnancy.
Twenty-one states will either completely ban or more severely restrict abortion than they do now and 16 states will continue allowing abortions throughout most or all of pregnancy as the right to abortion has been codified into law. Three additional states could soon enact changes to their abortion laws depending on the results of possible ballot referendums on the matter.
It’s the body of government closest to the people, yet it’s the most forgotten, overshadowed, and weakened body in recent years. However, with the Dobbs opinion returning the power to regulate abortions to state legislatures, we now have the opportunity to focus our attention on legislative elections, sessions, and policies and settle our acerbic cultural and legal differences in the most prudent and democratic process.
We are an irrevocably divided nation, and it will only get worse over time. We can’t agree on the definition of a marriage, a woman, a citizen, a criminal, a fundamental right, or the purpose of our existence, much less the purpose of our government. We can either continue forging ahead with a winner-take-all approach to politics and have the federal executive bureaucracy – the least accountable and transparent branch of government and most distant from the people – decide every important political question. Or we settle those debates in state legislatures – the branch closest to the people where most members are elected every two years.
Whether you abhor abortion as murder or think it’s the greatest sacrament of virtue, the reality is that red states are going to ban abortions (many already have) and the blue states are going to obsessively expand access to them. Unlike the seven justices who initially banned all regulation of abortion in 1973, all those legislators in each state will be subject to removal every two or four years. For the most part, the legislators will vote in a way that reflects the values of the majority in their areas. This is the self-sorting process we’ve always needed. This dynamic needs to expand to every other important issue of our time. It’s not a perfect process, but it’s much better than where we are today, and it will allow us to live side by side harmoniously in a de facto amicable separation, albeit with shared custody over certain issues that are national in scope.
In the coming months, conservatives will be trained by their favorite Fox News media figures to obsess about the potential of a RINO takeover of Congress and the coming presidential election, even though the latter won’t even be relevant, policy-wise, until 2025. But the reality is that Republicans control trifecta supermajorities in a number of states today and will only expand that dominance next year. Come January, they have the ability to make those states de facto sanctuaries for our rights and values – if only we focus our pressure on elected state Republicans and educate them concerning the enormity of their power. It’s time to use it.
In his national design for governance, Madison explained the state vs. federal arrangement in Federalist #45 as follows:
“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”
Think about issues like COVID fascism and transgenderism. Internal order, liberties, and property, etc. – this can all be rectified at a state level. Anything outside war and foreign commerce is fair game. This is where conservatives failed to act during the lockdowns and COVID fascism. They should have activated the legislatures immediately and forced debate for the states to immediately reject the federal policies. It’s still not too late to change course.
In responding to the Biden administration’s immoral and illegal policies and edicts over the next two and a half years, conservatives should have a one-track mind and be singularly focused on how they can pressure their legislatures to interpose against the federal tyranny. Conservatives have long been distracted away from a state legislative focus, but perhaps the Democrats will teach them how it’s done. Believe me, the blue states will immediately take action and juice up funding for abortion while expanding its legal scope – perhaps even to after the birth of the baby.
Likewise, most GOP legislatures and attorneys general seem to have acted swiftly to immediately ban abortion at the first opportunity. But we now need to see this swiftness on other issues as well. For example, Biden’s Department of Education just promulgated a rule putting any school or university on the hook for sexual harassment if they don’t call men who think they are women by female pronouns. This is the sort of illegal federal regulation that states must immediately stop. Legislatures should instantly convene and block its implementation within their states.
The big problem we have in legislatures, though, is that so many of them are only in session for a few months a year. In states like Texas, they are only in session every other year. This means that, for example with COVID, when you have federal and state executive branches suspending the republic, we often have to wait months or years for legislatures to act. It was OK to have a part-time legislature when we had a part-time executive branch and the legislature was the only organ of government that legislated. However, now that the federal and state departments of health and education legislate 365 days a year without any checks or balances, the concept of a part-time legislature actually harms us.
As such, conservatives must begin pushing reforms to make it easier to call legislatures back into session, and it should not be tied to the whims of the governors. We don’t need state legislatures voting on bills all year, but we must reserve the prerogative to get them back into session at a moment’s notice to interpose against tyranny.
For years, Republicans have accumulated a ton of power in many states, have done nothing with it, and have failed to clean up their own cultural Marxist swamps within state-run agencies. Abortion was the only red line conservative voters established and held their elected representatives to. It succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Now it’s time we harness that energy for issues like medical freedom, Pfizer liability, transgenderism, illegal immigration, crime, First Amendment protections, and interposition against the tyrannical Biden administration. What the Dobbs victory has clearly shown is that we will only enjoy the rights and policies commensurate with our desire to fight for them.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Left-wing protesters blocked intersections Monday leading to the Supreme Court in anticipation of a possible verdict on the abortion decision that could overturn Roe v. Wade. Protest group ShutDownDC said it successfully blocked several intersections Monday morning after previously having posted its plans to do so “to rise up for the transformative change that our communities need” on its website.
“We have successfully split off into different groups to hold multiple intersections #ShutDownSCOTUS,” the group tweeted.
The website lists instructions for what protesters should do if they’re arrested, including filling out a “jail support form.” There is also a form to sign up for an “affinity group,” with an option for “people who have been organizing protests at conservative justice’s homes.”
Monday is one of the Supreme Court’s decision days, and the court has not issued a verdict on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which could overturn Roe v. Wade — for over a month. The draft opinion was leaked May 2 indicating the majority of the court would vote to overturn it. (RELATED: SCOTUS Intends To Overturn Roe V. Wade: REPORT)
Several protesters held posters with conservative Supreme Court justices, calling them “liars.”
A man was arrested and charged with attempted murder Wednesday after claiming he wanted to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Police said they caught him with a weapon and burglary tools outside Kavanaugh’s home. The left-wing protest group Ruth Sent Us gathered at his home the same night.
Pro-abortion protesters with ShutDownDC protested at Kavanaugh’s home in 2021.
The same party that wants to raise the legal age for rifle purchases to 21 is also pushing to let minors kill preborn babies and mutilate their own genitals. American adults aged 18-20 already aren’t allowed to purchase handguns (and many states don’t allow them to obtain a concealed carry permit), more or less blocking them from practicing the basic self-defense precaution of stowing a defensive weapon to stop a bad guy with a gun. Now, Second Amendment deniers also want to bar these Americans from owning a rifle, a popular choice for home defense.
But while Democrats want to punish millions of law-abiding, prospective young gun owners for the evil, disturbed actions of a few of their peers, they’re also demanding that kids far younger be allowed to commit infanticide and mutilate their own bodies.
Letting Teens Commit Baby Murder
The radical abortion bill that Democrats renewed after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade sought to virtually eliminate any restrictions on abortion up to the point of birth. Minors are already allowed to obtain abortions, but the legislation would also nuke state laws mandating parental notification for such young girls. Lest you think this is an incidental inclusion, Democrats have specifically attacked state parental notification laws.
Planned Parenthood’s website doesn’t even try not to sound like a pervert offering kids candy: “If you’re under 18, you may or may not have to tell a parent in order to get an abortion,” it teases.
The ACLU estimates that 350,000 girls younger than 18 get pregnant in America every year, and that 31 percent (or roughly 108,500) of them choose to terminate their babies’ lives. There were 652,639 abortions reported to the Centers for Disease Control in 2014; in the same year, the Guttmacher Institute found that 0.2 percent of abortions — or roughly 1,300 — were executed on girls 14 years old or younger.
Fighting for these young, impressionable girls to get abortions doesn’t just push them into the commission of murder, with the likely accompaniment of lifelong guilt, it also subjects them to trauma themselves. Sarah Eubanks, a former abortion facility employee, described one 12-year-old girl whose grandmother brought her in for an abortion:
I remember that look on her face that she just didn’t understand what was going on. She didn’t want to be there. She started moving around and the doctor said, ‘You need to hold her down.’ I did put my hands on her and said ‘You have to settle down, you gotta be still, you’re gonna hurt yourself. You have to be still.’ And within an instant, she pushed her feet out of the stirrups and started running down the hall with the speculum in her vagina with blood running down her legs. The doctor said, ‘I’m not touching this.’ She was that upset. She just didn’t want to be there. She was screaming.
The hundreds of thousands of preborn babies’ lives lost to the abortionist’s scalpel every year haven’t dampened Democrats’ desires to let adolescent girls (or any women) make the decision to take a human life. But at the same time, the left will throw gun death numbers in your face to push their anti-gun agenda, even when firearm-related homicides are a fraction of abortion numbers, and are far outpaced by defensive gun use. Pew reported 19,384 murders involving a firearm in 2020, compared to up to 3 million “defensive gun uses by victims” per year, according to a CDC study.
Not only do Democrats want to let children kill their babies, they want to let children make damaging and irreversible changes to their own bodies.
Letting Children Sterilize Themselves
A report from Florida Medicaid found that “Available medical literature provides insufficient evidence that sex reassignment through medical intervention is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria,” and “the available evidence demonstrates that these treatments cause irreversible physical changes and side effects that can affect long-term health.” As a result, Florida Medicaid found that experimental procedures like cross-sex hormones or surgeries were insufficiently safe for coverage.
The report also listed the irreversible or potentially irreversible effects of cross-sex hormones, including facial and body hair growth, male pattern baldness, a deepening voice, and an enlarged clitoris for females taking male hormones, and breast growth, infertility, and sexual dysfunction for males taking female hormones. The irreversible effects of surgical interventions, such as elective mastectomies or genital amputations, are obviously far higher.
But those concerning effects didn’t stop the Biden administration’s Justice Department from sending an ominous memo to state attorneys general, threatening legal violations for states that don’t offer various damaging interventions to children.
“A ban on gender-affirming procedures, therapy, or medication may be a form of discrimination against transgender persons,” the memo stated. It also had the arrogance to claim that “it is well established within the medical community that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not only appropriate but often necessary for their physical and mental health.”
The Biden Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs further spelled out just what is meant by “gender-affirming care,”including social treatment of a child as the opposite sex, puberty blockers, artificial pumps of hormones like testosterone or estrogen, or surgeries like elective mastectomies and amputation of reproductive body parts. OPA recommends“social affirmation” for“any age,” puberty blockers at any time during puberty, hormones beginning in early adolescence, and surgeries for adults or “case-by-case in adolescence.” Some parents try to claim their children “came out as trans” as toddlers.
But No Guns for Law-Abiding Young Adults!
These procedures threaten lifelong damage to children who undergo them, yet the Biden administration and other Democrats want unfettered access to them and punishments for health professionals and parents who question them. They also celebrate the idea of teenage girls taking the lives of their preborn babies, with no parental consent and with no consideration of whether a child has the mental maturity to make such a decision — never mind the fact that it’s an act of murder.
But Democrats are all too happy to further erode Americans’ Second Amendment rights by arbitrarily raising the minimum purchase age for a rifle from one adult age to another. Unlike committing an abortion or pumping your child full of hormones, the legal purchase or ownership of a gun does not cause anyone harm. On the contrary, it often protects against it.
Yet Democrats support letting pubescent children abuse themselves and adolescents kill their children, while insisting that an 18-year-old who passes a federal background check can be denied the constitutional right to self-defense. Are 18-year-olds too immature for constitutional rights? Are children and teenagers old enough for a concocted right to harm themselves and others? I would argue it’s neither — but it can’t be both.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt. | Facebook/ Governor Kevin Stitt
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a new law Wednesday that bans most abortions through all nine months of pregnancy, with the measure being enforced via litigation brought by private citizens. Stitt signed House Bill 4327, which was modeled off of a Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks into a pregnancy but uses private civil actions to enforce the legislation. While Stitt had previously signed a six-week abortion ban, this new law bars abortions through the entire length of a pregnancy, making it one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the United States. Exceptions include rape, incest and life-threatening medical emergency for the mother.
In a statement, Stitt said he promised to “sign every piece of pro-life legislation” that came across his desk.
“l and I am proud to keep that promise today,” he declared.
“From the moment life begins at conception is when we have a responsibility as human beings to do everything we can to protect that baby’s life and the life of the mother,” Stitt said.
“That is what I believe and that is what the majority of Oklahomans believe. If other states want to pass different laws, that is their right, but in Oklahoma, we will always stand up for life.”
The law allows for private individuals to sue abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” a woman seeking an abortion.
The Center for Reproductive Rights said in a statement that Oklahoma is the first state to enact a “citizen-enforced total ban on abortion.” A coalition of abortion providers and a “reproductive justice” organizations will imminently file a lawsuit hoping to block the law in court.
“Banning abortion after six weeks was not extreme enough for Oklahoma lawmakers,” Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northup said in a statement. “The goal of the anti-abortion movement is to ensure no one can access abortion at any point for any reason.”
The Oklahoma bill was denounced by the White House last week when it passed the state legislature. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called abortion a “fundamental right” and labeled HB 4327 “the most extreme effort to undo these fundamental rights we have seen to date.”
“In addition, it adopts Texas’ absurd plan to allow private citizens to sue their neighbors for providing reproductive health care and helping women to exercise their constitutional rights,” she continued.
“This is part of a growing effort by ultra MAGA officials across the country to roll back the freedoms we should not take for granted in this country.”
Last December, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case of Dobbs v. Jackson, which centers on a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks into a pregnancy. If the high court upholds Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, it could overturn or weaken the landmark 1973 opinion in Roe v. Wade, which prohibited laws restricting abortion before the unborn child attains viability.
Earlier this month, Politico published a leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs case, which indicated that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe and allow states to decide their abortion laws. Although Politico acknowledged that the draft opinion was not final and did not necessarily mean Roe would be overturned, the report nevertheless sparked numerous protests and several acts of vandalism against churches and pro-life pregnancy resource centers. A ruling is expected by the end of June. If Roe is overturned, 21 states would either ban or severely restrict abortion, 16 states will continue to allow abortion throughout most or all of pregnancy. Existing abortion restrictions would remain in effect in 10 states.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Leftists do not like legislative bodies and believe they should wield the least power precisely for the very reason Madison said: “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” Legislators are elected by the people, constantly stand for re-election (most state legislators are in cycle every two years), all the proceedings are publicized, there are several layers of public votes, and the process in every state (except Nebraska) is bicameral. This is why leftists instead love the courts and bureaucracies, because they can achieve their goals without the disinfecting power of public scrutiny and without the deterrent of public reprisal.
Anyone who supports democratic values should embrace the opportunity to steer contentious issues away from the courts and toward legislative bodies. Obviously, state legislatures are the best suited to deal with contentious issues – not only because they are the closest to the people but also because there are 50 states. We have a divided country and can easily sort out our divisions through a degree of political and even physical self-separating. The reality is that not a single Democrat-controlled state will vote to curtail abortions, because the Supreme Court did nothing but reverse the judicial interference in the issue to ensure that legislatures are free to deal with it.
In light of the fallout from the impending reversal of Roe, there is an uncanny and somewhat perverse political dichotomy unfolding between the two parties. Republicans seem to be defending the “independence” of the court and exalting it to this supreme status above the other branches. Democrats, on the other hand, are trying to delegitimize judicial power because of the perception that they will face a long-term conservative majority on the court. However, if both sides really placed democratic values over politics, they would agree to a grand bargain to devolve power on every contentious issue to the states. This would mean that all cases adjudicating novel rights that only leftists believe in would be dealt with in the respective states. But it would also mean that cases dealing with gun rights would be up to the states.
Don’t get me wrong, I fully believe that there is a difference between bogus rights and foundational rights spelled out in the federal Constitution, such as self-defense, and that should be binding on the states. Ideally, we have the right to petition a federal court for redress if our gun rights are infringed upon. But if that is going to allow courts to perpetuate judicial supremacy and use it as a cudgel over red states, I’m more than glad to devolve all these issues to the states.
Such an arrangement would unfortunately cement the status of blue states as incorrigible Marxist dictatorships, but they are already there anyway. The courts – including the so-called conservative Supreme Court – have barely laid a glove on the COVID fascist regime in blue states. And many courts have prevented red states from blocking these tyrannical laws, such as federal courts requiring red states and counties to have mask mandates.
Conservatives would be naive not to push for a grand bargain ending judicial supremacy. We would benefit so much more than we lose. At present, we rarely benefit from judicial oversight when blue states violate foundational rights, yet we get crushed in red states by the courts vitiating every commonsense policy by creating phantom rights. As of now, we have a “conservative” Supreme Court that has prevented red states from cleaning up homeless encampments, from defining marriage, from keeping the sexes separate in private bathrooms and dressing rooms, from keeping sports sperate, from enforcing immigration law, and from many aspects of fighting crime.
However, let us not forget that for those who still like judicial oversight over broadly political issues, it’s not like the state legislatures won’t have competition. Overshadowed in the politics of the U.S. Supreme Court is the fact that all 50 states have their own constitutions and state judiciaries, including courts of last resort. Let’s not forget, it wasn’t until 1875, in the twilight of the Reconstruction era, that Congress transferred authority over most constitutional questions from state courts to lower federal courts, and it wasn’t until 1914 that Congress granted the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over all cases heard by state supreme courts.
Thus, all these decisions we see from the federal courts creating phantom rights can still be done on the state level with regard to the state constitutions – for better or worse. If Democrats so fervently want to enshrine their morals and political aspirations into constitutions, they can do so in the states they control.
Except there is one difference. State judiciaries, for the most part, are elected either initially or through retention ballot. There are only seven states where the voters never get a crack at judicial selection: Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Most of them are solid blue states, and Rhode Island is the only state that mirrors the federal system, in which the judges are never subject to review by the voters and serve a lifetime tenure. In four of those states, the judges are subject to a specific term and must at least stand for re-nomination before the legislature, and New Hampshire and Massachusetts have an age tenure limit of 70.
Inevitably, given the polarization of our society, we disagree not only on policy but on the Constitution itself. This is why any case implicating a constitutional right will invariably be political. Thus, if we are going to place politics in the courts, it’s better to do it in the bodies that are elected and closer to the people.
Collectively, this will make state judicial elections great again and will make state legislatures more consequential and powerful. If we are going to have the courts decide every political and social issue, let’s at least have this debate at the local level. Yes, there will be times when the labyrinth of state laws and constitutionally protected rights might get confusing and even clash, but I’d rather a patchwork of law than uniformity of tyranny.
This is also a wake-up call to conservatives in red states. Many conservatives focus solely on congressional elections, but they need to pay attention to state judicial races. A lot of red states have non-partisan elections, which allows stealth leftists to glide into office. It might be a good idea to make these elections partisan. Let’s face it: There is nothing in politics that is not partisan, especially as it relates to the most consequential legal questions. Let’s be open about it and sort out our disagreements through the diversity of the 50 states. That is the only way to agree to disagree in an agreeable fashion.
Pro-life and pro-choice demonstrators gather in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 3, 2022. | BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
At 15 weeks, unborn babies have a heartbeat, can sense pain, respond to physical stimulation, taste, hiccup, move around, and open and close their hands. This is the basis of the Dobbs v. Jackson case that seeks to overturn Roe v. Wade and restrict abortions after 15 weeks.
While many celebrate this provision for life, others are working diligently to implement policies to keep access to abortions readily available. Examples of Uber and Lyft covering legal fees or companies paying travel expenses for employees to get abortions have been discussed. But one rapidly expanding loophole still lurking in the shadows is the newfound access to abortifacient drugs via direct mail that was made possible in 2021 due to telehealth extensions during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Abortifacient drugs, mifepristone, misoprostol, and levonorgestrel, are currently authorized before a baby reaches ten weeks’ gestation. But the question that has not been answered is how a doctor can verify gestational age without seeing their patient in person or how they can provide care for health complications that may arise from the drugs. The adage, “where there is a will, there is a way,” rings true as this loophole protects the profits for drug companies and doctors from the SCOTUS ruling, enabling them to collect their dues without seeing or treating their patients.
Sadly, we are seeing a significant shift in this direction. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 2020 was the first year that more than half (54%) of all abortions performed in the U.S. were done with drugs instead of instruments. This reality is alarming, but perhaps even more disturbing is that almost every pro-life investor is profiting from these abortifacient drugs through companies they hold in their portfolios. Meaning that those who are advocating for life are unknowingly profiting from death. Let that sink in… Grieve over this, but do not despair. There is grace and mercy for our unknowing involvement.
However, healthy conviction and accountability come with learning the truth, and action is needed for every Christian to remove their investments and profits from companies that are manufacturing, distributing, and financially supporting the products that are responsible for ending the lives of tens of millions of unborn children.
So, who are these companies? Meet the Abortion Drug “Dirty Dozen” companies leading the charge in manufacturing and distributing the abortifacient drugs mifepristone, misoprostol, and levonorgestrel.
We cannot allow our influential dollars to remain invested in these companies and profit from their products that end life.
So what can we do?
1. Invest biblically. Screen your investments with Inspire Insight to find out if your 401k and other investments include any company engaging in the abortion industry. If you need help, Inspire Advisors can help give you a free impact report that will compare your current portfolio with a pro-life, biblically aligned equivalent.
2.Make connections. The abortion industry is not only found in your portfolios. It’s also in non-profit endowments, church retirement plans, and seminary scholarship funds. Are you an alum, donor, or have a professional relationship with a Christian university or ministry endowment? Please help us connect with the right people to start the conversation in transitioning them out.
3. Magnify the message. Spread the word to your friends, social media connections, church, and local communities. Too few know and understand the need for our investments to glorify God and align with our values.
4. Pray! Without the Lord, we labor in vain. We need to invoke the King of Kings to go before us, grant us success, and keep us faithful to His cause for His glory!
It is a tragedy and horror that pro-life Christians are invested in the abortion industry. But we do not have to be. If pro-lifers want to see an end to abortion in our time, we need to put our money where our mouth is. We need to hold ourselves and our institutions accountable to keep the dollars we invest and donate out of the abortion industry and close the doors to this loophole.
Robert Netzly is the CEO of Inspire Investing and frequent contributor on The Christian Post, FOX, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The New York Times and other major media. Read more from Robert in his #1 bestselling book Biblically Responsible Investing, available at Amazon.com and other major retailers.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
When the draft Supreme Court opinion overruling “Roe v. Wade” leaked on Monday, my first thought was: WHY COULDN’T THEY WAIT UNTIL NEXT YEAR? (“Roe” is in quotes because Planned Parenthood v. Casey already overruled Roe, but “Roe” is still used to describe the nonexistent right to abortion.)
Yes, it’s human life we’re talking about. Millions of babies are killed in their mothers’ wombs each year — it’s a massacre. On the other hand, I thought, ending late-terms might end the midterms.
But then I read Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion and was intellectually offended all over again by the idea that one of our precious constitutional rights, enshrined in a founding document, is the right to kill an unborn baby. Anyone complaining about the decision should be required to cite the exact parts Alito got wrong. Be specific. And keep in mind, no important discussion of constitutional law has ever begun with the words, “My vagina …”
The Nation magazine’s Elie Mystal took a stab at it by completely misstating Alito’s argument, then saying, “the Founding Fathers were racist, misogynist jerkfaces.” (I was planning on writing a scholarly and nuanced treatise on the framers, but Mystal just stole my title!)
I also noticed that, outside of the media, no one seems especially bothered by the decision. Or to have noticed it. In groups of liberal women, apolitical women, black and Puerto Rican women, no one is talking about the case.
They’re probably right. The end of a court-managed “constitutional” right to abortion isn’t going to produce the Roemageddon Democrats are predicting.
More than half of the country already lives in states where abortion will always be legal, subsidized and sacralized. For those who don’t, Harvard should set up an abortion scholarship program. Instead of spending $100 million “investigating” slavery, the university could buy bus tickets for girls who need to go to another state for an abortion.
The Mississippi law being upheld in this case — contrary to everything I’ve heard on MSNBC — is shockingly reasonable.
It states:
“Except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform or induce an abortion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.”
The Mississippi legislature provided a series of factual findings:
at eight weeks gestational age the “unborn human being begins to move in the womb”;
at nine weeks “all basic physiological functions are present”;
at 10 weeks “vital organs begin to function,” and “hair, fingernails, and toenails begin to form”;
at 11 weeks “an unborn human being’s diaphragm is developing,” and he or she “may move about freely in the womb;” and
at 12 weeks the “unborn human being” has “taken on the human form in all relevant respects.”
After 15 weeks, the legislature found, most abortions involve crushing and tearing the fetus apart.
Laws should always err on the side against the decision-maker, and the decision-maker on the length of gestation is going to be the abortionist. (Which is also why “rape” and “incest” exceptions swallow the whole law. By the way, whatever happened to the morning-after pill?)
So we’re really talking about four to five months.
That’s not enough time? Give me a break, you freaks. I don’t think voters are going to say, Ukraine, inflation, the border, crime, transgenders in kindergarten — OH MY GOD, I CAN ONLY GET AN ABORTION FOR FOUR MONTHS???
Some states will surely roll back the right to abortion more than 15 weeks. Oh well. The abortion ladies will have to travel to other states the same way gunners do now to practice their marksmanship, shoppers do to get plastic bags, or breathers do to take off their masks.
With a patchwork of laws, we’ll be able to see which regulations do best at reducing abortion, illegitimacy (which soared in lockstep with the legalization of abortion), venereal diseases, suicides and false claims of rape when women are pressured into having sex, undeterred by the risk of pregnancy. We’ll call it “federalism.”
Watching MSNBC’s reaction also reminded me that everybody hates the feminists. The ladies couldn’t even keep the “#MeToo” movement going. How long did that last? Fifteen minutes? And a lot of the cases were egregious. But a month later, transgenders were canceling J.K. Rowling and women’s sports.
Now they’re hysterically babbling about the court banning contraception, interracial marriages and requiring forced sterilizations. I guess they don’t think their arguments about the abortion ruling are particularly strong, so they have to warn about scary rulings to come.
Finally, President Joe Biden has put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the response to this decision. Previously, she was put in charge of the border, and then Ukraine. Any day now, we’ll find out she was in charge of the Challenger space shuttle.
Maybe I’m just in a cheery mood, what with the imminent conclusion to this hideous chapter in U.S history. Who knows? Let’s wait nine months and see.
I have only two absolutely definite predictions flowing from the leak of the abortion opinion:
1) Liberals are about to start claiming that black people not only are incapable of getting IDs to vote, but are also incapable of knowing that they’ve been pregnant for four months. (And then: NIGHTMARE! THEY’LL HAVE TO GET A BUS TO NEW YORK OR CALIFORNIA!)
2) As for the leaker, if the perp turns out to be a conservative who was trying to pressure Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Neil Gorsuch, he will be ruined for life. If he turns out to be a clerk for one of the liberals, he will get a book contract and a regular spot on MSNBC.
Joe Biden on Tuesday admitted abortion is murder in off-script remarks to reporters. Biden spoke to reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Tuesday morning as he was preparing to depart to Alabama to visit a Lockheed Martin facility. Reporters peppered Biden with questions about the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion revealing the highest court of the land is set to strike down Roe v Wade.
Biden was a bumbling mess and was unable to make a cogent point. However, in a major flub, Biden accidentally admitted abortion is murder.
“The idea that we’re gonna make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child based on a decision by the Supreme Court I think goes way overboard,” said Biden as his handlers whisked him away.
“Come on guys! Let’s go!” Biden’s handler shouted to reporters as Biden walked away.
Reminiscent of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s bratty “How dare you!” denunciation of world leaders, Vice President Kamala Harris railed against Republican leaders who she claimed are trying to “weaponize” the law against women on Tuesday evening. Speaking at an event for EMILY’s List, a political action committee that works to elect pro-abortion female candidates, Harris declared war on the Supreme Court over a draft opinion showing that a majority of justices are prepared to strike down the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
The document apparently was leaked to Politico, which reported on it Monday night. Harris’ speech had been scheduled prior to the report.
In her address, she expanded upon a brief statement she had released earlier in the day framing the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to “the rights of all Americans.”
“Women’s rights in America are under attack,” the vice president began.
“Roe v. Wade, in its power, has protected a woman’s right — her right — to make decisions about her own body for nearly half a century,” she said.
“If the court overturns Roe v. Wade, it will be a direct assault on freedom — on the fundamental right of self-determination to which all Americans are entitled.”
“Women in almost half the country could see their access to abortion severely limited,” Harris said. “In 13 of those states, women would lose access to abortion immediately and outright.”
“Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women,” she said, her anger rising, “Well we say, how dare they! How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body. How dare they! How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future! How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms.”
March 18 marks one year since pro-abortion radical Xavier Becerra was confirmed as President Joe Biden’s appointee for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Although both men claim to be faithful Catholics, they have launched unprecedented attacks on people of faith by eliminating vital conscience and religious freedom protections and funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to the abortion industry.
At the HHS Accountability Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., we have been keeping tabs on HHS personnel and policy. The oft-heard maxim “personnel is policy” is no exception for HHS, the largest federal agency by budget. While Becerra was AWOL on the Covid fight, he was outright zealous on culture war issues, leading HHS’s singular focus on pushing pro-abortion and anti-religion policies on the American people.
Here are the top 10 lowlights for year one.
1. Dismantling HHS’s Conscience and Religious Freedom Division
One of Becerra’s early acts as secretary was to strip the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of its independent ability to investigate violations of conscience and religious freedom laws. The division was created during the Trump administration to guarantee enforcement rather than neglect of laws that protect these fundamental and inalienable rights.
Becerra’s first budget proposal would have effectively eliminated this division as a standalone entity, despite Becerra having promised Congress that “the work [of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division] will not change.” He, along with OCR political staff (such as political ideologue Laura Durso), refused to even consult with the dedicated career professionals of the division while they methodically removed conscience and religious freedom protections from the American people.
These developments were foreshadowed by transgender activist Dr. Rachel Levine who, prior to being elevated to the number-three position at HHS, proclaimed the division should be “either disbanded or certainly redirected.”
2. Removing OCR’s First Amendment Enforcement Power
Becerra removed OCR’s authority to enforce conscience and religious projections under the bipartisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the First Amendment. A leaked memo revealed this move came at the request of Lisa Pino, the Biden-appointed director of OCR. She is tasked with enforcing civil rights protections in health and human services, not finding ways to remove them.
Remember, it was HHS under Obama that went after the Little Sisters of the Poor and lost under RFRA. Now Becerra has removed the only internal entity that would hold HHS accountable to the law.
3. Pushing a Ridiculously ‘Woke’ Budget
The Biden-Becerra HHS budget for fiscal year 2022 removed references to “conscience,” “religion,” and “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.” But don’t worry, the new budget replaces references to these constitutional and statutory rights HHS is responsible for enforcing with a bunch of woke terms like “equity” — the Biden administration’s preferred priority.
4. Backing Forcing Nuns to Pay for Abortion
While Becerra was attorney general of California before becoming HHS secretary, OCR issued two notices of violation against Becerra and his state for violating federal conscience protections by forcing nuns (and others) to provide insurance coverage of abortion. Apart from the clear conflict of interest with Becerra leading the very office that previously found him in violation of the law, OCR under Becerra “reassessed” the conscience violations, magically finding there were none.
5. Abandoning Nurse Illegally Forced to Participate in Abortion
In 2019, OCR found a hospital had violated a nurse’s conscience rights by forcing her to participate in an abortion over her known conscience objection. When the hospital refused to change its policies to comply with the law, the federal government sued the hospital in federal court.
But on Becerra’s watch and despite his many promises to continue enforcing federal conscience laws, the Biden administration quietly dismissed the case without any settlement, agreement, or compensation for the nurse. Because federal conscience protection laws do not provide a private right of action, she cannot sue on her own and the violating hospital has been let off with impunity.
6. Relentlessly Pushing Abortion With Federal Resources
In response to Texas’ law protecting unborn children with beating hearts from abortion, the Biden-Becerra HHS announced, despite prohibitions on federal funds going to abortion, ways the department could “bolster access to safe and legal abortions in Texas.” HHS is awarding $10 million in additional funding to increase access to abortifacients for those affected by the Texas law.
OCR issued pro-abortion guidance explaining how a federal conscience protection law can protect abortion providers and patients seeking abortions. If HHS’s actions weren’t clear enough, Becerra stated, “We are telling doctors and others involved in the provision of abortion care, that we have your back.” Becerra and OCR clearly don’t want to enforce the law for those who do not want to participate in abortion.
7. Directly Funding Big Abortion
Becerra, who has oddly and repeatedly refused to acknowledge that partial-birth abortion is illegal, led HHS’s charge to fund Big Abortion. In 2021, Planned Parenthood received more than $5.4 million in taxpayer funds from HHS, an amount that is sure to increase over the next three years.
In an effort to further fund Planned Parenthood, the Biden-Becerra HHS ignored democratic norms to rush through new Title X regulations. Title X is a federal program that provides grants for a range of family planning services, but per the statute, such services cannot include abortion.
The new regulations, however, remove the requirement of physical and financial separation between Title X projects and abortion services, require abortion counseling and referrals, and remove conscience protections for Title X providers. Planned Parenthood had dropped out of the Title X program under those regulations, forfeiting that funding stream, but under the new regulations the abortion giant is expected to receive significant Title X funding.
8. Comingling Insurance Payments for Abortion
Last summer, HHS rushed through new insurance regulations that, contrary to the text of the Affordable Care Act, no longer require separate insurance payments for abortion services, allowing those payments to be comingled with payments for other covered services. Besides violating the law, combined payments create a lack of transparency and accountability. Consumers with conscience objections to abortion will no longer be on notice that their insurance plan covers abortion or that they are subsidizing abortions, including for any adult children on their plan.
9. Rescinding Faith-Based Waivers
Prompting a congressional inquiry, the Biden-Becerra HHS gratuitously rescinded waivers previously issued to faith-based adoption and foster care agencies in Michigan, South Carolina, and Texas that allowed the agencies to qualify for HHS grants while operating in accordance with their deeply held religious beliefs. In the press release announcing the rescission, Becerra unironically stated: “At HHS, we treat any violation of civil rights or religious freedoms seriously.”
Please. This action comes on the heels of a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court affirming the constitutional right of foster-care agencies to act according to their religious beliefs on human sexuality in certifying foster parents.
10. Issuing Totalitarian Anti-Conscience Rules
HHS announced its new interpretation and enforcement of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act that would force health-care professionals to perform gender transition surgeries and provide minors with harmful and sterilizing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. A new rule codifying this interpretation is anticipated in April and would likely not exempt providers with medical or conscience objections. HHS is also planning to rescind conscience regulations that protect health-care professionals from being forced to assist with abortions and protect others from having to pay for abortions.
Rachel N. Morrison is an attorney and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she works on EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project.
A three-year battle in Vermont is coming to a head over Proposal 5, an amendment to the state constitution that would enshrine existing Vermont abortion “liberties” to terminate pregnancies up until birth.
Roe v. Wade established “viability” as the determinant of when state governments hold a “compelling” interest to protect children. The current challenge to Roe in the Supreme Court concerns a Mississippi law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks. Vermont’s Proposal 5 essentially defines fetal viability at 40 weeks (birth), ignoring both Roe and the science of human development.
The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wadesought to balance not just competing moral and political views, but the two lives at issue:
The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. She carries an embryo and, later, a fetus, if one accepts the medical definitions of the developing young in the human uterus… Each grows in substantiality as the woman approaches term and, at a point during pregnancy, each becomes ‘compelling.’ With respect to the state’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability.
Modern medicine has revealed the miracle of human development, increasing public awareness of that second person even acknowledged by Roe. This reality drives increased public opposition to late-term abortions: recent polls show 80 percent of Americans oppose them. Medical science is also clear about what the Supreme Court described as viability:
Periviability, also referred to as borderline viability, is defined as the earliest stage of fetal maturity (i.e., between 22 and 26 weeks gestation) when there is a reasonable chance, although not a high likelihood, of extrauterine survival.
The current Mississippi dispute, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, seeks to protect unborn children from abortion prior to current scientific consensus on viability, at 15 weeks. Abortion proponents portray that as restrictive, and indeed treat any objection to late-term abortions as moralizing religiosity, yet secular France is currently embroiled in a parliamentary dispute over whether to expand long-standing restrictions on abortions there from 12 weeks to 14.
Vermont’s Abortion Law
Vermont established “abortion protections” through delivery in 2019, in its “no-limits” H.57, overcoming Republican efforts to impose a 24-week limitation, or to exempt minor girls. Proposal 5 now seeks to cement those same horrors into the Vermont constitution, and compel conservative elected representatives to swear an oath to its abhorrent provisions.
Women and young girls around the nation and world (Vermont provides free abortions to unlawful entrants) who make last-minute decisions to terminate their pregnancies may have no place to turn for “rescue” except the ghoulish Green Mountain State.
Vermont has long embraced this barbaric extremism with regard to the unborn. Its leftist legislature has steadfastly avoided acknowledging fetal personhood at any age, which leaves pregnant women gravely unprotected from domestic abusers who murder their unborn children — there is no Vermont recognition of these as homicides, even if the child is viable.
In one heartbreaking case, a young mother lost her twins at six months’ gestation when she was struck by an impaired driver. The Vermont legislature has repeatedly refused to honor her loss, or protect other mothers whose children are similarly murdered. Instead of acknowledging Roe’s “compelling” interest to protect the constitutional rights of viable children, Vermont uses its laws to deny the acknowledgment such children ever lived.
Proposal 5 Is Even Worse
Proposal 5 tightens that noose: unborn children in Vermont are not safe from murder by abortion when viable, only when they pass their mother’s cervix and breath air on their own. Vermont’s Proposal 5 will legally deny the recognition of the existence of that person Roe federally acknowledged in its “viability” rule. Thus Vermont has scorned even Roe’s political, moral, and scientific balancing efforts.
The Vermont progressive minority that has belched forth this abominable legislation is hell-bent on “preserving” its obscene accomplishments in constitutional cement. Planned Parenthood has even improperly cooperated with the Vermont attorney general’s office. Progressives invoke the eugenics horrors and the 15-week Mississippi attack on Roe as justification for Proposal 5. Vermont also offers sterilizing transgender hormone therapies to minor children without parental consent, in the same hospital that performs the majority of the late-term “procedures” in the state.
Supreme Court Must Address this Inequity
Vermont progressives are inviting the fall of Roe they fear. If states refuse to protect that second life acknowledged by Roe, and public sentiment continues to escalate in revulsion to abortion because of growing scientific awareness of the miraculousness of fetal development, is it not appropriate for the U.S. Supreme Court to take the required next step? Certainly there is no state constitutional recourse in Vermont on behalf of tortured viable children if its Constitution is amended to preempt that very possibility.
Roe v. Wade concerned the constitutional right to privacy of women while acknowledging a constitutional right to human personhood in the unborn at viability. It established federal preemptive boundaries to protect the first class, but left it to states to protect the second — and Vermont isn’t.
It is illogical for the U.S. Supreme Court not to address this glaring jurisprudential inequity. Does the U.S. Constitution contain a “right” for women to privately murder viable children? Roe specifically held they do not. But Roe did not articulate federal boundaries of constitutional protection for that child. As Justice Potter Stewart noted in his concurrence:
….the protection of a person’s general right to privacy – his right to be let alone by other people – is like the protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of the individual States.
Many speculate that Mississippi’s law may be affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The New York Times proclaims“If the justices were to approve the law, Roe’s viability standard would no longer be the law of the land.” That does not bode well for Vermont’s extremist left minority.
The Supreme Court must declare that there is a gestation date beyond which women cannot constitutionally exterminate their young in the womb, and acknowledge what science proves: there is a separate human at issue, who must not be marginalized. Even if at a post-viable stage of 30 weeks, once federal fetal personhood is rightly acknowledged (much like when women and racial minorities were included in the Constitution’s protections), unconscionable laws like Proposal 5 will collapse under federal preemption.
Extremism such as Vermont’s demands federal rescue.
John Klar is an attorney, writer, pastor, and farmer who lives off-grid in Vermont. John blogs for Mother Earth News on agriculture issues, and maintains a weekly commentary in The Newport Daily Express.
In a victory for the pro-life movement, Planned Parenthood has dropped a lawsuit against the largest sanctuary city for the unborn in the United States.
On Thursday, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas Surgical Health Services, an affiliate of the largest abortion provider in the country, filed a motion to dismiss its lawsuit against the city of Lubbock, Texas, the most populous sanctuary city for the unborn in the U.S. In a referendum last year, Lubbock residents voted to outlaw abortion within the city limits, making the West Texas city of more than 250,000 people the largest “sanctuary city for the unborn” in the nation.
Planned Parenthood filed the lawsuit against the city of Lubbock in May 2021, about two weeks after a supermajority of the city’s residents (62.5%) voted in favor of a referendum that made it “unlawful for any person to procure or perform an abortion of any type and at any stage of pregnancy” within the city limits.
The motion to dismiss the lawsuit comes several months after a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Lubbock Division, upheld the ban, alleging that Planned Parenthood lacked the jurisdiction to file the lawsuit. Like the Texas Heartbeat Act that has found itself in litigation since taking effect in September, the Lubbock abortion ban leaves enforcement of the measure up to private citizens instead of city officials.
Planned Parenthood initially appealed the lower court decision but has now decided to pursue a new course of action by dropping the appeal. Attorneys for Planned Parenthood cited the lower court decision in their motion to dismiss and noted that Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 42(b) and Circuit Rule 42.1 gave them the right to do so. The rule states: “The circuit court may dismiss a docketed appeal if the parties file a signed dismissal agreement specifying how costs are to be paid and pay any fees that are due.”
Additionally, the rule establishes that “No mandate or other process may issue without a court order. An appeal may be dismissed on the appellant’s motion on terms agreed to by the parties or fixed on the court.” Planned Parenthood’s attorneys explained that both the plaintiffs and defendants in the case agreed that “the parties will bear their own costs for this appeal and for the proceedings in the court,” adding “no additional fees are due.”
The motion to dismiss the appeal was filed one day before the 49th annual March for Life, where pro-life protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., expressed optimism that Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, would soon be weakened or overturned when the justices rule on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.
Pro-life leaders in Texas cheered the apparent conclusion to the litigation against Lubbock’s pro-life ordinance.
Mark Lee Dickson, president of Right to Life of East Texas and the leading advocate for creating Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, reacted to the motion to dismiss in a Facebook post. “We have said from the beginning that the abortion bans we have drafted are bulletproof from court challenge, and we are pleased that the litigation over Lubbock’s ordinance has proven us right. We will continue our work to enact similar ordinances in other cities throughout the United States,” he vowed.
Dustin Burrows, a Republican who represents Lubbock in the Texas House of Representatives, described Planned Parenthood’s dropping of the appeal as “a major and historic victory for the right to life.” He rejoiced that the move will guarantee “that the ordinance will remain in effect.”
Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican who represents Lubbock, issued a statement congratulating “the city and the people of Lubbock on this historic victory — and for becoming the first jurisdiction in the United States to successfully defend an abortion ban in court since Roe v. Wade.”
After praising the development as “the answer to so many of our prayers,” he further reflected on the role the city of Lubbock and the state of Texas have played in the pro-life movement over the past year.
“With the Texas Heartbeat Act taking effect last September, and with Lubbock having outlawed abortion within city limits, the state of Texas is leading the way on protecting the unborn despite the continued existence of Roe v. Wade. Texas and Lubbock have shown how states and cities can ban or restrict abortion while immunizing their laws from pre-enforcement judicial review. I encourage other cities in Texas and throughout the United States to adopt similar ordinances.”
There are currently 41 sanctuary cities for the unborn in the U.S., with all but three of them located in Texas. Nebraska has two sanctuary cities for the unborn, while Ohio has one.
Pro-life demonstrators take part in the “March for Life” in Washington January 23, 2012. Nearly 100,000 protesters marched to the U.S. Supreme Court to mark the 39th anniversary of the Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. | REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
For the second year in a row, abortions have been the leading cause of death worldwide, with more than three times as many people losing their lives to abortion than the second leading cause of death.
Worldometer, a database that keeps track of statistics on health, the global population and other metrics in real time, determines the number of abortions performed worldwide based on data obtained from the World Health Organization. The last available snapshot of the Worldometer, as it appeared on New Year’s Eve, captured by the internet archive tool The Wayback Machine, revealed that approximately 42.6 million abortions were performed worldwide in 2021.
By contrast, only 13 million people perished of communicable diseases, the second-leading cause of death last year. The other leading causes of death paled in comparison to abortion, with 8.2 million people dying of cancer worldwide, nearly 5 million deaths caused by smoking, approximately 2.5 million alcohol-related deaths, nearly 1.7 million people succumbing to HIV/AIDS, more than 1.3 million people dying in traffic accidents, and nearly 1.1 million suicides worldwide.
Additionally, water-related diseases caused approximately 850,000 deaths, the seasonal flu killed nearly half a million people, nearly 400,000 perished because of malaria, and over 300,000 mothers lost their lives during childbirth last year. A separate set of coronavirus statistics also compiled by Worldometer revealed that 3,524,139 people died with complications from COVID-19 in 2021.
Approximately 58.7 million people died in 2021. That figure does not include those who died from abortion. If abortion as a cause of death was included, the number of deaths last year would have surpassed 100 million.
2021 is not the first year that abortions were the leading cause of death worldwide. Data from the Worldometer obtained by the Wayback Machine on New Year’s Eve 2020 revealed that more than 42.6 million abortions were performed that year. Once again, the number of abortions was three times the number of people who died of communicable diseases.
In 2019, Worldometer found that 42.4 million abortions occurred. As of Tuesday afternoon, just four days into 2022, more than 400,000 abortions had been carried out worldwide.
In addition to its status as the leading cause of death globally, abortion is also the leading cause of death in the United States. The Guttmacher Institute, an abortion advocacy group, reported that 862,320 abortions were performed in the U.S. in 2017.
That same year, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the leading cause of death in the U.S. besides abortion, heart disease, took the lives of 647,457 people. The total number of deaths in the U.S. in 2017, not including abortions, was 2,813,503. Including abortions increases the number of deaths to nearly 3.7 million.
In 2019, the CDC reported that 625,346 abortions were carried out in the U.S. However, that statistic only includes data from 47 of the 50 states and New York City. Additionally, the number of abortions reported did not include data from California, the nation’s most populous state.
The latest data about abortion comes as the issue has emerged front and center in American politics because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
In the Dobbs case, the justices will decide whether Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban violates the U.S. Constitution. A ruling in favor of the state of Mississippi, which is seeking to uphold the ban, would significantly weaken the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision determining that women have the right to an abortion.
In addition to the new developments surrounding the ongoing litigation over the Mississippi law, as well as a Texas law that bans abortions after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected, usually at around six weeks gestation, a multitude of pro-life laws passed at the state level in 2021.
The Guttmacher Institute published multiple reports expressing concern about the pro-life trend across the states, concluding with a year-end report describing 2021 as “the worst year for abortion rights in almost half a century.”
Self-absorbed congressional Democrats held a group therapy session on Capitol Hill on Thursday as they work tirelessly to immortalize Jan. 6 as an annual day of doom, but the rest of us are old enough to remember a few more times when riots and protests overwhelmed government buildings with no such theatrical response.
More than a few times, actually. The 2020 summer of rage was more or less “incited” by these same top Democrats, who race-baited as if their lives depended on it, and even our vice president, who helped bail violent rioters out of jail. It featured a number of these attacks on the government (which strangely weren’t called attacks on democracy at the time).
Not all of these demonstrations were allegedly a response to the Minnesota death of George Floyd, however. Left-wing demonstrators have long made a habit of attacking, infiltrating, and occupying government buildings. It started long before Jan. 6, 2021, and continued long after.
Didn’t think so. One of them was compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 by our vice president. The other one barely made the news and was referred to as a mere “sit-in.” Both were attacks by political activists on government buildings.
On Oct. 14, 2021, climate activists breached the Interior Department, with demonstrators who were left outside struggling with law enforcement officers as they reportedly tried to force their way in, shouting “Go inside! Go inside!” Some activists vandalized a building, while others pinned police against a wall. The ordeal resulted in a number of injuries, according to multiple sources, with a police officer being transported to the hospital.
2. President Moved to Bunker After White House Fence Breach
In June 2020, then-President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and their son Barron were reportedly rushed to a secure bunker when a group of protesters breached temporary barricades that had been set up around the White House complex.
Secret Service reportedly arrested and charged at least four protesters with unlawful entry at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
3. Wisconsin Capitol Overwhelmed
In 2011, thousands of people opposed to Republican Gov. Scott Walker filled the Wisconsin state Capitol, screaming in opposition to the governor’s budget repair bill.
4. Portland Federal Courthouse Overtaken by Violence
The federal courthouse in Portland has been a repeated target of violent Antifa rioters. In July 2020, a mob began setting fires inside the fence protecting the courthouse, shaking the fence, launching projectiles over it, and even trying to take it down. Several people even breached it, with rioters launching projectiles and flashing lasers at the federal police officers who responded.
The next month, the courthouse was shut down completely over domestic terrorism threats that someone might drive a vehicle filled with explosives into the building.
Antifa had previously attempted to menace people inside the federal courthouse on the afternoon of March 11, yelling “come outside,” “you don’t scare me b-tch,” “death to America,” and “f-ck the United States” while hurling water and other liquids inside the glass doors, banging on them, and attempting to get inside.
5. Democracy Halted at the Texas Capitol
In July 2013, an unruly mob of pro-abortion demonstrators interfered with the democratic process when thousands of them occupied the Texas Capitol and screamed at the top of their lungs, “grinding the Senate to a halt” with the noise.
6. SCOTUS Police Lines Breached, Senate Overwhelmed by Anti-Kavanaugh Activists
During the dustup over now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court, which was radically amplified thanks to the Christine Blasey Ford circus, demonstrators forced their way past law enforcement, breaching police lines at both the Senate and the Supreme Court, where they stormed the steps and beat on the doors.
After announcing that he planned to vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was accosted on an elevator by several women, who shouted in his face and wouldn’t let him move.
At the beginning of October, shortly before the Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh, a mob of protesters took over a part of the Hart Senate Office Building, which is part of the Capitol complex.
Some even made their way into the gallery during the final vote.
7. Senate Bombed by Left-Wing Terrorists
Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, two left-wing extremists, along with five others planted a bomb outside the Senate chamber inside the U.S. Capitol, where it detonated and caused $1 million in damage in 1983.
On his last day as president, Jan. 20, 2001, Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of the violent pair, spurred on by his Democrat buddy Jerry Nadler. As Tristan Justice wrote:
According to the New York Post in 2001, New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, who today serves as the House Judiciary Committee chairman, played a ‘crucial role’ in Clinton’s decision to commute Rosenberg’s sentence. Nadler’s rabbi, a Nadler spokesman at the time told the Post, gave ‘compelling information from [Rosenberg’s] parole hearing’ to the Manhattan congressman, who, in turn, passed on the material to the White House counsel’s office. That transfer, the Post reported, played a ‘key role’ in the president’s decision to include Rosenberg on his list of 140 last-minute pardons just moments before George W. Bush took the White House.
Each of the women served only 16 years of her long sentence. Rosenberg escaped 42 years of a 58-year sentence, and Evans trimmed 24 years off her 40-year sentence.
8. Senate Chamber Breached by Biden Himself
In now-President Joe Biden’s farewell address to the Senate in 2009, he claimed to have broken into the chamber and sat in the vice president’s chair when he was 21 years old. The first time he stood on the Senate floor was when he visited with friends in the early 1960s, he said.
“I remember vividly the first time I walked in this chamber. I walked through those doors, but I walked through those doors as a 21-year-old tourist,” Biden claimed. “In those days, you could literally drive right up to the front steps. … I drove up to the steps and there had been a rare Saturday session. It had just ended. So I walked up the steps, found myself in front of what we call the elevators, and I walked to the right to the Reception Room.”
“There was no one there. The glass doors, those French doors that lead behind the chamber, were open. There were no signs then. I just walked,” Biden continued. “…I sat in the presiding officer’s chair. I was mesmerized.”
He was then caught by a Capitol Police officer. I wonder if Biden thinks his self-guided Capitol tour “borders on sedition“?
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
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