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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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Dozens attended a live reenactment of Jesus’ nativity scene held outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. on Thursday Dec. 2 2021. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
WASHINGTON — Dozens attended a live reenactment of Jesus’ nativity scene held outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building on Thursday, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could alter abortion law precedent nationwide.
The annual reenactment, organized by the Christian missionary and spiritual outreach organization Faith & Liberty, was held across the street from the East Façade of the Supreme Court.
The ceremonial event consisted of a little over a dozen impersonators dressed as biblical figures like Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, the three wise men, angels and more to shed light on the meaning of Christmas and spread the Gospel message.
Dozens attend a live reenactment of Jesus’ nativity scene held outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
The reenactment of the virgin birth that occurred over 2,000 years ago came less than 24 hours after the outside of the Supreme Court Building was crowded by thousands of pro-life and pro-choice demonstrators as the nation’s high court heard arguments for and against Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.
Many believe that with the current 6-3 conservative makeup of the court, the case, Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health, has the potential to change legal precedent on abortion set in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade.
At the nativity event, pro-lifers in attendance said it is a “blessing” that Jesus’ “unplanned” birth could be displayed the day after many pro-choice demonstrators openly proclaimed their belief that mothers should have the right to end an unplanned pregnancy.
A woman holds camel during a live nativity scene at the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. | The Christian Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
“Yesterday, the court talked about the shedding of innocent blood,” said Allan Parker, a pro-life attorney and the president of The Justice Foundation, a Christian public interest nonprofit litigation organization.
“And today, we are witnessing the reenactment of the most innocent blood in American history. Jesus shed His most innocent blood so that even murderers could be forgiven. We just have to humble ourselves and say: ‘Lord, forgive me.’”
Parker believes that the nativity scene “is cleansing the grounds that we stand on after yesterday’s event.”
Parker reasoned that because Mary was shocked to discover that she was chosen to give birth to Jesus, her pregnancy can be viewed as “unplanned” from the worldly perspective.
Actors reenact Jesus’ nativity scene outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
“Mary’s unplanned pregnancy led to the salvation of the whole world,” Parker told The Christian Post while standing outside on the stairs of the Supreme Court Building. “If Mary were alive today, Jesus might have been aborted, and then Jesus and the world would be in darkness instead of having a chance to step into the light.”
Many others in attendance believe that Jesus’ birth was “humble” because He came into the world as an infant and a servant when He could have come to earth as a king.
Nancy Claudio, an 81-year-old pro-life demonstrator who lives in Washington, D.C. and attended the nativity scene, said she thought the reenactment was “breathtaking and encouraging.”
Claudio felt led to attend the event because she loves Jesus. She said Jesus has been a part of her life as far back as she can remember. She told CP about how Jesus saved and delivered her before she began many years of work as a traveling missionary.
“I am Spirit-led and I live every day to please Jesus. And we all need to remember that Jesus came to a place that is not fancy, and He came because He loved the world and us,” Claudio said. “Events like this are so important because this happened 2,000 years ago, and we are still celebrating and living in the victory that Jesus brought us through his servant Heart. He was laid in a manger where cattle eat out of, and He came to serve, not be served.”
Judy Mcdonough attended the rally and the nativity scene in association with the Christian organization Intercessors For America. She told CP she believes it is “God’s timing” that both of the days spent at the Supreme Court are related to pregnancy.
“It’s all about the humanity of the baby in the womb, and every child is so innocent,” Mcdonough, a devoted pro-life Christian, told CP.
“I am all about praying, and the nativity scene today is a way that we can act, pray and exercise our constitutional right. Everything about Jesus goes against what we would naturally think about ourselves and who God should be. He’s the only God who came humbly, and He asks us to respond to Him humbly. He is unique because He came humbled, and at the same time, He says [to] bow before Him.”
Others who came to view the scene agreed that it is “necessary” to reenact the birth of Jesus in front of the Supreme Court in hopes elected officials cab develop a relationship with Jesus.
“This showing is desperately needed because the only hope we have is through the life of Jesus, who promises peace, and we have hope for reconciliation, and we were sent to be reconciled to Him and others,” attendee Becky Lyttle said.
“These elected officials need to know that corruption is not the answer because many are corrupt. People in ruling positions need the Word of God. We all desperately need the Lord.”
Attendees came from across the nation to view the nativity scene.
Coming from Chicago, Debra Smith, who identifies as a charismatic nondenominational Christian, said she attended the nativity scene because she felt led to pray in tongues on the premises of the Supreme Court Building. She had also prayed at the Supreme Court during the oral arguments the day before.
“His Holy Spirit lives with me, and He is always with me. Jesus is the best because He came as a helpless baby, and there are so many other helpless babies out there that desperately need saving,” she said.
Joel Enge traveled from Texas and is also a representative from the organization Intercessors of America. He attended both the rally and the nativity scene.
“We have killed millions in America because we have been pro-death, and this event shows us the life that Christ offers can move us from being a nation of death to life. This is amazing,” said Enge, who attends a Baptist church and is the founder and director of a private Christian school.
“Jesus’ entry into the world is very important because the Creator of the world came to His creation. Jesus became a zygote. He developed in Mary’s womb. He went through the same process that children being terminated went through. There’s no comparison. We can’t compare.”
Some in attendance said the scene brought them “relief” because it showed them that outward expressions of faith can still exist in similar settings.
“It was amazing. My whole life is built around the Christian faith,” said Paul Kope from Delaware. “Our country was founded on Christian beliefs and the right to worship. It shows we still have rights that they would do this demonstration.”
U.S. Supreme Court is seen in Washington, U.S., November 27, 2017. | (Photo: REUTERS/Yuri Gripas)
The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling against multiple religious employers seeking an exemption to a 2017 New York regulation requiring employers to provide healthcare plans that include coverage of medically necessary abortions. In an order released Monday morning, the nation’s high court vacated a lower court ruling in the case of Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, et al. v. Emani, Shiri, et al., remanding the case back to the New York Court of Appeals.
The Supreme Court cited its unanimous July decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia to justify the order. In that case, the high court ruled that Philadelphia officials could not exclude a Catholic charity from its foster program because the organization refused to place children with same-sex couples for religious reasons.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch voted to hear the charities’ appeal rather than send the case back to the lower courts.
Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, a legal nonprofit that represents the diocese, said in a statement that he is “thankful” for the order.
“New York clearly learned nothing from the federal government’s own attempts to force nuns to pay for contraceptives and is now needlessly threatening charities because they believe in the dignity and humanity of every human person,” stated Baxter.
“We are thankful that the Supreme Court won’t allow the New York Court of Appeals’ bad ruling to be the last word on the right of religious ministries to serve New Yorkers of all faiths.”
A group of religious organizations and orders, including multiple Roman Catholic dioceses, Catholic Charities, an Anglican order of nuns and multiple Protestant churches filed lawsuits against New York over its abortion coverage mandate.
“We believe that every person is made in the image of God,” said Mother Miriam of the Sisterhood of Saint Mary, the oldest Anglican religious order founded in America. “That’s why we believe in the sanctity of human life, and why we seek to serve those of all faiths — or no faith at all — in our community. We’re grateful that the Supreme Court has taken action in our case and hopeful that, this time around, the New York Court of Appeals will preserve our ability to serve and encourage our neighbors.”
The New York Codes, Rules and Regulations, Title 11, Section 52.16 (o) prohibits healthcare policies from limiting what it describes as “medically necessary” abortions.
“No policy delivered or issued for delivery in this State that provides hospital, surgical, or medical expense coverage shall limit or exclude coverage for abortions that are medically necessary,”the section reads.
“Coverage for in-network abortions that are medically necessary shall not be subject to copayments, or coinsurance, or annual deductibles, unless the policy is a high deductible health plan … in which case coverage for medically necessary abortions may be subject to the plan’s annual deductible.”
The New York mandate allows for a religious exemption, provided that the insurer for the religious employer “obtains an annual certification” confirming their status and that the insurer issues “a rider for coverage of medically necessary abortions.”
In section 52.2 of the New York Codes, a “religious employer” is defined as an entity that engages in the “inculcation of religious values,” “primarily employs persons who share the religious tenets of the entity,” “serves primarily persons who share the religious tenets of the entity” and “is a nonprofit organization.”
The plaintiffs contend that New York holds too narrow of a definition on what constitutes a religious employer and unlawfully restricts who can receive an exemption.
The U.S. Supreme Court has previously ruled in favor of Christian-owned businesses and religious groups that sued for an exemption to an Obamacare mandate that required employers to provide health plans that cover birth control.
How badly have we lost our way? It is an important question that many Americans, including this one, can no longer avoid asking just because we intuitively know we are going to be profoundly depressed with the answer.
Yes, we have lost our way as a nation in foundational ways. It will be difficult to find our way again without divine intervention. The moral compass of a significant number of our fellow citizens has been desensitized and demagnetized. Is it a plurality, a majority, or just a significant minority?
Does that really make much of a difference? I don’t think it does, really, because whatever the percentage is, it is enough to vitiate and blunt the basic Judeo-Christian morality upon which this nation was founded, and to which a majority of its citizens aspired to achieve. Eventually, even many of the blind spots resulting from their human frailty were confronted by the foundational ethos embedded in the founding document, their sine qua non as a nation, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
That is indeed a revolutionary credo that has impelled the nation to an evermore expansive understanding of the depth and breadth of that truth.
Tragically, somewhere along the way, America veered seriously off course and we are now confronted with a collapse into full-blown paganism.
What triggered this lugubrious conclusion? I have seldom been both as shocked and saddened as I was after reading the Rev. Rebecca Todd Peters’ op-ed in USA Today, “Faith Guided Our Decision on 2 Abortions.” Rev. Peters identifies herself as a Presbyterian minister (John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Peter Marshall, among others, would find that statement astounding considering the op-ed’s content.)
The Rev. Peters also states that she is “a wife and a mother of two” and that she has “also had two abortions.”
She immediately follows this by asserting, “I did not make my abortion decision despite my Christian identity and faith, but rather because of it.”
As my heart sank and my spirit was distraught, my mind immediately went to the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. There Paul describes the ever-downward spiral of human sin where one of the most distinguishable things about sin is its ability to generate ever greater sin and depravity (Rom. 1:18-32).
After all, the Apostle Paul confronted a Roman society that was as depraved, if not more so, than our own era. Even the pagans noticed and were offended. Seneca observed that it was an age “stricken with the agitations of a soul no longer master of itself.” Tacitus opined that “the greater the infamy, the wilder the delight.”
As the masterful New Testament scholar William Barclay so discerningly observed of the people of that time, “He has so erected an altar to himself in the center of things that he worships himself to the exclusion of God and man.”
Before we go any further, let us be clear — “Waterford crystal clear.” The Reverend Peters does not represent any historic form of the genuine Christian faith — Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.
The Roman civilization into which the Christian faith was birthed out of Judaism was one in which the life of the child was discounted and devalued perhaps more than ever before or since until the modern pro-abortion era in the West. Abortion was common, as was infanticide.
Will and Ariel Durant in their multi-volume The Story of Civilization report that when a child was born it was placed in front of the father. If the father picked up the child and acknowledged it, the baby lived. If the father turned away, the child was literally abandoned. This abandonment was commonplace.
The only real difference between then and now in the extreme pro-abortion regime in America is that in Rome it was the father who had absolute power of life and death over their child, and in modern America, it is the mother who wields such absolute power. By the way, the Durants reported that after the first girl was safely delivered in a family, 99 out of every 100 subsequent girl babies were discarded to die.
The Jewish civilization was the only ancient civilization in the Mediterranean Basin which did not routinely practice infanticide and abortion.
It was into this pro-death, anti-child milieu that Christianity burst forth in the first century AD with a courageous and uncompromising pro-life message. As Michael J. Gorman has pointed out in Abortion and the Early Church: “Writers of the first three centuries laid the theological and literary foundation for all subsequent early Christian writing on abortion…three important themes emerged during these centuries: the fetus is the creation of God; abortion is murder; and the judgment of God falls on those guilty of abortion.”
In fact, the Didache, the first widely acknowledged post-Apostolic teaching of the early church (circa 134 AD) vehemently condemned abortion and declared that it was beyond the pale for those identifying themselves as followers of Jesus Christ.
For the Reverend Peters to assert that “without a doubt…the two decisions we made to have children were far more morally significant than the decision to end two pregnancies” is quite literally blasphemous. Morally significant for whom? The two babies she killed would undoubtedly have pleaded with their mother to let them live.
We are talking about two babies, her babies, and she says killing them can be “a moral good.” Every abortion stops a beating human heart. In this case — two of her babies’ beating hearts.
In Paul’s analysis of the moral degeneracy of Roman civilization, he declares the downward spiritual spiral of degradational sin produces people “without natural affection” (Rom 1:31). The Greek root of that phrase is Storgē(astorgos), a special word in the Greek language, standing for “mother love” or “family love.”
In first-century Rome, as in 21st century America, the natural love a parent has for a child was in serious decline — a decline evidenced by Reverend Peters’ proud declaration of her “moral” decision-making. The Christian church, in all its historic traditions, until the last half of the 20th century, would rightly have declared the Rev. Peters’ theology “apostasy.”
In another part of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul warned of those bearing at least the name “Christian” and the consequence of teaching false doctrine leading to their consciences being “seared” or cauterized as if by “a hot iron” (I Tim 4:2).
I fear that the Rev. Peters is emblematic of far too many Americans who have had their consciences seared and deadened by the child sacrifice of at least 65 million of our unborn citizens.
The contrast with those who still have a sensitive and accurate moral compass was illustrated for me in a particularly dramatic way just a few days ago. Fox newscaster Ben Domenech was reporting on the resurgent pro-life movement while noting that America has one of the most radically extreme pro-abortion legal regimes in the world, keeping gruesome company with Communist China and North Korea.
In the course of his report, he began to relate an episode recounted by the remarkable Whittaker Chambers in his even more remarkable memoir, Witness. Chambers and his wife were Soviet Communist spies operating in the U.S. Chambers later became a Christian, turned away from Communism, exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, and authored a memoir, Witness, which had a huge influence on a large number of people, including Ronald Reagan.
Chambers records that in 1933 he and his wife discovered that they were pregnant. Realizing that this would be very different considering they were both Communist spies in America, Mrs. Chambers went to make arrangements to abort the child. When she came home a few hours later she was very subdued and quiet.
Chambers explained, “My wife came over to me, took my hands, and burst into tears.’
“‘Dear heart,’ she said in a pleading voice, “we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.’”
As Domenech’s voice broke and he teared up, he quoted Chambers’ response: “A wild joy swept me. Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and its theories, the wars and revolutions of the 20th century, crumbled at the touch of the child.”
Whittaker Chambers and his wife, while then atheists, had not had their consciences seared and neither has Mr. Domenech. The current struggle over killing our unborn babies at horrific rates will reveal just how cauterized and desensitized many Americans’ consciences have become as a consequence of having been submerged in the ever-burgeoning culture of death.
I pray to God that we have not been so fatally, morally impressed as a people that we cannot be convicted and moved “at the touch of the child.”
Aldous Huxley once observed, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that the other set of people are human.” Our unborn babies are human beings and God has a plan and purpose for each one of them and I tremble for my country when I think of the massive child sacrifice of our children which we have already allowed to be perpetrated.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
The National Sex Education Standards’ updated 2020 guidance is featuring what many parents may consider to be disturbing, indoctrinating sex-related information that public school districts are teaching children from very young ages. The new standards, according to the report, were conceived by the Future of Sex Education Initiative, a partnership between Advocates for Youth, Answer, and SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change that seeks to “create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote the institutionalization of quality sex education in public school.”
According to a Tuesday report from the Federalist‘s Nick Bell, the sex education “blueprint” is steeped in “extremist sexual ethics” that are “designed to destroy children’s innocence”as well as undermine their Christian faith.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a 2016 report noted that approximately 40% of school districts across the country adopted the National Sex Education Standards’ 2011 edition — a less extreme version of its 2020 successor.
“The 2020 standards unequivocally endorse abortion at any time, teach the topic starting in sixth grade, and even force teachers to provide information on local abortion clinics to students in ninth grade,” Bell wrote. “The standards also insist that children must be allowed to choose their own gender and false pronouns must ‘be respected by the adults in their lives.'”
According to the new standards, children as young as kindergarten age should learn about gender identity, while third-grade students should learn about the role of hormone blockers for transgender youth. Teachers should also be equipped to explain masturbation to students as young as just eight years old.
It gets worse from there: Bell noted that sixth-graders — who are often 11 and 12 years old — “must define oral, anal, and vaginal sex as well as the benefits of withdrawing one’s penis before ejaculation during intercourse.”
Sixth-graders, the groups said, should also learn that people ought not “assume that people with a penis are boys and people with a vagina are girls,” and that they should never assume another person’s sexual orientation. Students of this age group, according to the guidance, should also attend LGBTQ rallies and challenge themselves and others on ways to combat homophobia. Sixth-graders would also engage in a card game in which cards ask whether various sex acts — “oral sex (mouth on genitals),” “anal sex (penis to anus)” — are considered abstinence.
For seventh-graders, anything but “sperm in vagina” would constitute abstinence, the guidance added, and teachers would demonstrate how to put on a condom.
A lesson for eighth-graders, the guidance added, would encourage anal and oral sex over vaginal sex in order to avoid pregnancy.
The new standards, according to the organization, were “written with a trauma-informed lens; have been infused with principles of reproductive justice, racial justice, social justice, and equity; address social determinants of health and how these can lead to inequitable health outcomes; and take an intersectional approach. This edition uses less cis and heteronormative language that reflects a broader range of relationships and identities.”
The updated standards also appear to place parental consent on the back burner and encourage children to demand respect from the adults in their lives when it comes to sexual choice.
“No one else is qualified to label or judge another person’s sexual identity, including their sexual orientation or gender identity, and it is important that the language and terms young people use to identify themselves is respected by the adults in their lives,” a portion of the report added.
FILE – In this Sept. 1, 2021, file photo, women protest against the six-week abortion ban at the Capitol in Austin, Texas. A federal judge on Wednesday, Oct. 6 ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., which since September has banned most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., calling it an “offensive deprivation” of a constitutional right by banning most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state since September. The order by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman is the first legal blow to the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which until now had withstood a wave of early challenges. In the weeks since the restrictions took effect, Texas abortion providers say the impact has been “exactly what we feared.”
In a 113-page opinion, Pitman took Texas to task over the law, saying Republican lawmakers had “contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” by leaving enforcement solely in the hands of private citizens, who are entitled to collect $10,000 in damages if they bring successful lawsuits against abortion providers who violate the restrictions. The law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, prohibits abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which is usually around six weeks, before some women even know they are pregnant.
“From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution,” wrote Pitman, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama.
“That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”
But even with the law on hold, abortion services in Texas may not instantly resume because doctors still fear that they could be sued without a more permanent legal decision. Planned Parenthood said it was hopeful the order would allow clinics to resume abortion services as soon as possible.
Texas officials swiftly told the court of their intention to seek a reversal from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously allowed the restrictions to take effect.
The lawsuit was brought by the Biden administration, which has said the restrictions were enacted in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the order “a victory for women in Texas and for the rule of law.”
The law had been in effect since Sept. 1.
“For more than a month now, Texans have been deprived of abortion access because of an unconstitutional law that never should have gone into effect. The relief granted by the court today is overdue, and we are grateful that the Department of Justice moved quickly to seek it,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, said the order was not unexpected.
“This is ultimately the legacy of Roe v. Wade, that you have activist judges bending over backwards, bending precedent, bending the law, in order to cater to the abortion industry,” said Kimberlyn Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the group. “These activist judges will create their conclusion first: that abortion is a so-called constitutional right and then work backwards from there.”
Abortion providers say their fears have become reality in the short time the law has been in effect. Planned Parenthood says the number of patients from Texas at its clinics in the state decreased by nearly 80% in the two weeks after the law took effect. Some providers have said that Texas clinics are now in danger of closing while neighboring states struggle to keep up with a surge of patients who must drive hundreds of miles. Other women, they say, are being forced to carry pregnancies to term. Other states, mostly in the South, have passed similar laws that ban abortion within the early weeks of pregnancy, all of which judges have blocked. A 1992 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court prevented states from banning abortion before viability, the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
But Texas’ version had so far outmaneuvered the courts because it leaves enforcement to private citizens to file suits, not prosecutors, which critics say amounts to a bounty.
“This is not some kind of vigilante scheme,” said Will Thompson, counsel for the Texas Attorney General’s Office, while defending the law to Pitman last week. “This is a scheme that uses the normal, lawful process of justice in Texas.”
The Texas law is just one that has set up the biggest test of abortion rights in the U.S. in decades, and it is part of a broader push by Republicans nationwide to impose new restrictions on abortion.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court began a new term, which in December will include arguments in Mississippi’s bid to overturn 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion. Last month, the court did not rule on the constitutionality of the Texas law in allowing it to remain in place. But abortion providers took that 5-4 vote as an ominous sign about where the court might be heading on abortion after its conservative majority was fortified with three appointees of former President Donald Trump.
Ahead of the new Supreme Court term, Planned Parenthood on Friday released a report saying that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, 26 states are primed to ban abortion. This year alone, nearly 600 abortion restrictions have been introduced in statehouses nationwide, with more than 90 becoming law, according to Planned Parenthood.
Texas officials argued in court filings that even if the law were put on hold temporarily, providers could still face the threat of litigation over violations that might occur in the time between a permanent ruling.
At least one Texas abortion provider has admitted to violating the law and been sued — but not by abortion opponents. Former attorneys in Illinois and Arkansas say they sued a San Antonio doctor in hopes of getting a judge who would invalidate the law.
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Associated Press writer Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report
Progressive activists rally outside the United States Supreme Court to celebrate the launch of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, Oct. 1, 2021. | Patrick Marsh
WASHINGTON — A pro-life activist has launched a new organization seeking to “reclaim progressivism for life” as the abortion movement continues to hold immense power and influence in the Democratic Party and the progressive movement.
Terrisa Bukovinac, the former president of Democrats for Life of America who also serves as founder and president of Pro-Life San Francisco, launched the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, also known by its acronym PAAU, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court Friday night. The event took place the evening before pro-abortion protesters descended on the District of Columbia and cities across the country for the far-Left Women’s March.
Bukovinac addressed a crowd of dozens of pro-life activists, most of whom identified as Democrats and progressives, though conservative pro-lifers were also at the event. She made the case that contrary to what abortion activists claim, the pro-life position aligns with other priorities that progressives hold near and dear to their hearts.
“To be progressive, you must stand with the oppressed, never the oppressor. To be progressive, you must be in solidarity with low-income people and trust that they know their own needs. And to be progressive, you must stick up for the marginalized. But the abortion industrial complex twists all of that on its head,” she said.
“They’ll tell you that to be progressive, you must advocate for mass acts of violence against children in the womb who are utterly incapable of defending themselves,” Bukovinac added. “They’ll tell you that to be progressive, you must ignore the voices of low-income people who are more anti-abortion than the wealthy by huge margins. If it were up to those who make less than $40,000 a year, Roe v. Wade would be in the ash heap of history.’
“In this twisted version of progressivism, it’s the rich who know best,” she continued. “And they’ll tell you that to be progressive, you cannot, under any circumstances, advocate for the most … marginalized among us.”
Bukovinac also accused corporate America of engaging in pro-abortion activism in an effort to advance their economic self-interests.
“When I see giant corporations signing onto pro-choice letters, I have to wonder, what are their parental leave policies really like? How much are they counting on abortion to save them a buck and pad their bottom line?” she asked.
“Abortion is not progress,” she asserted. “Abortion is a regress to the pseudo-morality of might makes right and as progressives, we will not stand for it.”
“We are reclaiming progressivism for life,” Bukovinac declared.
Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, speaks outside the United States Supreme Court to announce the launch of her new organization, Oct. 1, 2021. | Patrick Marsh
The launch of PAAU followed by the Women’s March on Saturday come as the implementation of a pro-life law in Texas that bans abortions after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected is spurring outrage in progressive circles. The Supreme Court declined the request of abortion providers to block the law, which has now been in effect for over a month. The justices are scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Dec. 1. In this case, the court will rule on the constitutionality of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. A ruling in favor of the state of Mississippi, which is seeking to uphold the ban, would significantly weaken the precedent set by the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade and affirmed by the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. A decision is expected sometime next year, most likely by the end of June 2022. In the aforementioned cases, the court determined that states cannot prohibit abortions before the point of viability, where the unborn baby can survive outside the womb. Courts at all levels have frequently used those Supreme Court decisions when justifying the invalidation of states’ pro-life laws regulating abortions or implementing health and safety standards at abortion clinics.
CP interviewed some of the PAAU launch attendees to ask why they felt called to attend the rally and to share their views on the pro-life movement in the U.S. Michael New, a research associate at the Catholic University of America and a scholar at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, spoke at a Democrats for Life of America rally earlier this year that Bukovinac also attended. He went to the launch of PAAU to show solidarity with Bukovinac’s efforts.
Pro-life activists on both sides of the aisle gather in front of the United States Supreme Court to celebrate the launch of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, Oct. 1, 2021. | Patrick Marsh
“I think what she’s doing is very important. I think the pro-life movement needs to leave no stone unturned. I think that there are a lot of people out there who are politically liberal, who are pro-life, and I think her efforts to amplify and highlight … those voices is a great project and I’m happy to support her.”
Caroline Smith of Grand Rapids, Michigan, a pro-life Democrat who works with the group Protect Life Michigan, told CP that “it’s important to show the world that being pro-life is not equal to and always just being conservative. I think it’s important to show that there’s a lot of diversity in the pro-life movement and we need to acknowledge that and be able to accept everybody who believes abortion is wrong.”
Characterizing abortion as “the most important issue of our day,” Smith reflected on the “crucial moment” the pro-life movement finds itself in: “I’m feeling excited but also … nervous because I know that there’s going to be a lot of work to be done. Whatever happens next, we’ve got to keep pushing and fighting for the unborn.”
Smith briefly spoke at the event, detailing how she “drove over 11 hours” to take advantage of the “opportunity to expand the pro-life movement” and “make some noise for the unborn.”
Fr. Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, added: “I have, for a long time, stood side-by-side with people who are of different political persuasions, religious persuasions … and all kinds of philosophical persuasions to stand against the killing of babies because I’m convinced … one criterion alone is needed to be pro-life and that is to be alive.”
Pavone, who traveled to the nation’s capital from Florida, shared his desire to “support any of the efforts in the pro-life movement to show … how diverse it is.” During his speech, Pavone slammed President Joe Biden as “the most pro-abortion president ever” and “a sign of the problem that PAAU is proudly standing against.” He also accused Democratic leaders of having “abandoned the people that they claim to represent on this issue.”
Braedon Eckert from Indiana, one of many young activists who spoke before the crowd, told CP it was important for him to attend the event as a self-described pro-life feminist and someone who believes in “the right to life from conception until natural death.” Speaking about the state of the pro-life movement, Eckert contended that “the pro-life movement is … almost like a cup of tea. It’s like brewing right now and we’re ready. … We’re just waiting for that moment when we just know it’s time to take action. We are taking action.” Eckert characterized the national Democratic Party’s overwhelming pro-abortion bent as an example of how members of the party “don’t even stand for their own Democratic views.” Maintaining that “every party does something to violate the right to life,” he contended that “both the Republican and the Democratic Party violate human beings in some way.”
“[For] the Republican Party, it’s the dehumanization of immigrants in … some cases. [For] the Democratic Party, it’s abortion.”
Bukovinac also spoke with CP, elaborating on what motivated her to start the new organization and shared her thoughts about the state of the pro-life movement: “Pro-abortion Democrats control the presidency, the Senate and the House, and I felt like it’s the right time that we … have lost every Democratic pro-life member of Congress and that we need real direct action in this movement on the Left to address this extremism.”
“We’re in a position of strength,” she added, expressing optimism about the pro-life movement. “We’ve known all along that the abortion industry was going to come after us once they felt truly threatened. I think that we’re seeing that happen. But what we’re seeing in the stats is that people are just as anti-abortion now as they were before the Texas law and that they will continue to be anti-abortion.”
“PAAU is coming for the Biden-Harris administration and those that enable that kind of discrimination,” she warned. “This discrimination is lethal for a million human children every year and we recognize that the issue is between the Democratic establishment and the abortion industry, and our intention is to break that relationship.”
The relationship between the Democratic establishment and the abortion industry, specifically abortion provider Planned Parenthood, was a major focus of Bukovinac’s remarks. She vowed that “Wherever you find fake progressivism bought with blood money, we will be there and we will be loud. It is time for a progressive anti-abortion uprising!”
“People matter more than profit!” Bukovinac exclaimed. “Human lives matter more than money. That is the heart of progressivism.”
Against the backdrop of the sun disappearing below the horizon, Bukovinac remarked that “the sun is setting on the American abortion industrial complex and the world is watching.” She assured the crowd that “PAAU is taking our message to every blue city in America, every Democratic leader in Congress and to the Biden-Harris administration and ultimately, to the Democratic National Convention.”
Randall Terry, founder of the pro-life group Operation Rescue, who also spoke at the event, had a few choice words for Planned Parenthood. After telling the crowd to “have a reaction that is equal to the crime,” he insisted that “you must set out to create social tension.”
Pointing to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” as a source of inspiration, Terry recalled that he, himself, spent time in jail because he “created the social tension that helped give birth to a revitalized pro-life movement that helped bring about political change that helped give birth to crisis pregnancy centers.”
Lamenting that “we still have not prevailed,” he declared: “I do not want a place at the table with Planned Parenthood. I want to take their table and turn it into firewood.”
The firewood reference caused the crowd to erupt into applause. Terry doubled down on his remarks, restating his desire for “total, unequivocal victory.” He stressed that “if abortion really is murder, if it really is the destruction of an innocent human life, if someone was going to be killed standing right next to you, you wouldn’t say ‘Oh wow, can we dialogue about this?’” Terry suggested that rather than engage in dialogue in such a scenario, it would make more sense to “scream bloody murder.”
Another speaker, Catherine Glenn Foster, the president and CEO of Americans United for Life, cited the formation of PAAU as evidence that “we are coming together in solidarity to end legalized abortion.”
“We are coming together to make the Congress and the court stand for life,” she continued. “We are coming together to end a discriminatory, ageist, ableist, racist, sexist regime that tells us that for us to be equal in society, that we have to resort to legalized abortion, to killing our own children.”
Echoing Foster’s rhetoric about the pro-abortion narrative, Bukovinac emphasized that her organization was “about speaking truth to power, not destroying the powerless” and “about investing in families and children and not telling women and people who can become pregnant that they have to kill their babies to succeed in a cis-man’s world.”
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the 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 shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the 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 shared by President Donald Trump.
People gather for a reproductive rights rally at Brooklyn Borough Hall on September 01, 2021, in Downtown Brooklyn in New York City. NOW-NYC and Planned Parenthood of Greater New York Action Fund organized a rally for reproductive rights after a Texas law that has been dubbed the “Heartbeat Bill” went into effect. The law ends access to abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and would allow anyone to sue abortion providers and “aiders and abetters” in civil court. Abortion rights activists have asked the Supreme Court to block the law, but as of Wednesday morning the court has allowed the law to go into effect. In May, Supreme Court justices agreed to review a Mississippi case on the state’s ban on abortion procedures after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide. A ruling on that case is expected in 2022. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Ex-Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson called abortion “demonic” in a recent episode of her “Politely Rude” podcast as she unveiled her unequivocal reaction to Texas’ controversial new heartbeat law. Johnson, who is an outspoken and celebrated pro-life activist, started her show by expressing her elation over the Texas law, which bans most abortions around the six-week gestational period when cardiac activity can be detected.
“Today, babies with a detectable heartbeat in the womb must be protected,” Johnson said. “And that just thrills me to bits. … I’m just so excited.”
The outspoken pro-life icon was particularly disturbed by “sick” reports that some clinics were performing abortions up until 11:59 p.m. before the new law took effect on Sept. 1.
“How … gross that you’re like, ‘Gotta kill babies up until that last second,’” she said. “That’s how you know that abortion is just demonic. That’s how you know that we’re just dealing with evil here — that there’s like just, ‘Gotta kill them right up until the last second.’”
Johnson credited the heartbeat bill with helping eliminate “85 to 95 percent of abortions in the state of Texas,” and said it’s her goal to make abortion harder to attain.
“I want to make it super hard because I want your baby to live,” she said. “I don’t want you to live a lifetime of regret because of a decision that you made in haste … a decision that you made in crisis.”
Johnson said she has met many thousands of women who have come up to her at events to recount their regret over having an abortion.
“Women are living with lifelong regret because of these hasty decisions that they make inside of these abortion facilities each and every day,” she said.
Listen to Johnson’s full reaction to the Texas abortion law here.
A federal judge has struck down several pro-life laws in Indiana, dealing a blow to the momentum experienced by pro-life activists in the state following a previous court decision.
Judge Sarah Evans Barker, a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, originally appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, issued a lengthy ruling Tuesday weighing in on the constitutionality of several pro-life laws enacted in the state in recent years. Barker’s ruling follows a lawsuit filed by Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, All-Options, Inc., and Dr. Jeffrey Glazer seeking to challenge “Indiana’s statutory and regulatory restrictions on abortions.”
Barker’s ruling struck down several Indiana laws, including a requirement that abortionists schedule in-person visits with their patients before dispensing abortion pills, thus prohibiting clinics from dispensing the drugs to women via telemedicine appointments. It also struck down laws requiring that second-trimester abortions be performed in hospitals or surgical centers, and that abortion clinics meet basic health and safety standards. In addition, Barker ruled that mandatory disclosure requirements included in a perinatal hospice brochure informing women seeking abortions about a baby’s ability to feel pain, the fact that life begins at conception and the mental health risks associated with abortion were unconstitutional.
She contended that this information violated the “truthful and non-misleading standard” laid out in the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that upheld the right to obtain an abortion as determined by Roe v. Wade.
Under the aforementioned standard, Barker explained, “the state may enact measures aimed at ensuring that the woman’s choice [to have an abortion] is philosophically and socially informed and communicate its preference (if it has one) that the woman carry her pregnancy to term.” However, the measures must include information that is “truthful and not misleading.”
Barker cited testimony from Dr. Daniel Grossman, described by National Review as a “prominent abortionist and abortion advocate,” who argued that the brochure’s assertion that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm” did not live up to that standard because “there is no recognized medical definition for ‘human physical life,’ nor is there any scientific, medical consensus as to the moment in time or human biology when ‘life’ begins.”
While Barker did uphold some of Indiana’s abortion laws, pro-life groups and politicians characterized her ruling as a major disappointment. Indiana Right to Life CEO Mike Fichter slammed Barker’s ruling as “horrific,” warning in a statement that it will “lead to a massive expansion of chemical and late-term abortions in Indiana.”
“The sweeping blockage of these common sense laws jeopardizes the health and safety of women, [and] leaves women in the dark on issues of fetal pain and the development of human life,” he added. “This is judicial activism at its worst.”
Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., also released a statement in response to Barker’s ruling, and expressed disappointment that “the U.S. District Court struck down several common sense, pro-life provisions in Indiana state law that were designed to protect women and children.”
Walorski added, “The U.S. Constitution clearly safeguards life, and it’s my hope that this decision will be appealed.”
The laws Barker upheld include: Requiring that abortion facilities show the ultrasound image to mothers before deciding whether to go through with an abortion; that minors seeking an abortion obtain permission from a parent or guardian; that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital; abortion facilities collect detailed information about their patients and enter it into a database and undergo annual inspections by the state, as well as a law requiring that only licensed doctors perform first-trimester abortions.
Barker’s ruling comes less than two weeks after the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Indiana law requiring abortion facilities to report to the state any complications that arise from abortions performed at their clinics. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky had challenged the law as being “unconstitutionally vague.”
As Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita indicated in a statement, the Seventh Circuit also upheld the in-person counseling law that Barker struck down as part of her ruling. Rokita hinted that his office intends to appeal Barker’s ruling to the Seventh Circuit, vowing to “continue to fight to defend Indiana’s common sense laws and to build a culture of life in Indiana.”
In May we reported on the University of Pittsburgh’s program that included growing scalps from aborted babies on lab rodents. This is straight from a horror movie.
The scientists are using human baby fetal skin processed via removal of excess fat.
Now this… The NIH under the direction of Dr. Tony Fauci approved of funding and oversaw the experiments on the fetal organs.
The University of Pittsburgh targeted minority infant organs.
The federal government gave at least $2.7 million in taxpayer money to researchers who sought out minority babies who had been aborted in order to harvest their organs, according to internal documents released Tuesday.
The University of Pittsburgh targeted minorities in its request for infant organs—including those taken from full-term babies—to create a “pipeline” for fetal research. Researchers said they needed 50 percent of the donated fetuses to be minorities and specified that 25 percent must come from black women. The Pittsburgh metropolitan area is 85 percent white and 8 percent black. Researchers stressed the importance of maintaining organ blood flow in the request, which watchdogs say could violate federal law by asking doctors to illegally preserve organs during labor-inducing abortions.
The National Institutes of Health has overseen experiments on fetal organs at the University of Pittsburgh since 2015 in what the school claimed to be a “tissue hub.” Aborted babies used in this research ranged from 6 to 42 weeks of gestation, according to government documents. The grant request from the university to the government agency redacts key information, including how many fetuses were obtained and who provided them. Its language, however, raised troubling questions.
David Daleiden, founder and president of the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, called on the federal government to investigate the NIH and Pitt after obtaining more than 300 pages of information related to the program through a public records request.
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
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