Life Advocacy Briefing

Not Exactly ‘Gone Fishing’

OUR EDITOR WILL BE TRAVELING the next two weeks, taking along a laptop computer but uncertain about ability to keep up and to perform the tasks necessary to publish LifeAdvocacy Briefing. So the best we can predict is, we’ll try to continue to bring you “timely news you can use” during the next two weeks. If you do not receive a Life Advocacy Briefing before the June 11 edition, do not be concerned but please do forgive.

Calls Needed to Back Abstinence Policy

REP. NATHAN DEAL (R-GA) HAS FILED LEGISLATION to buy another three months’ time for the reauthorization of the federal government’s abstinence-until-marriage initiative.

Citizens are urged to request their Representatives in Congress toco-sponsor HR-2432, which would extend for three months the abstinence education grant program set to expire June 30. Calls may be placed via the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121.

Reauthorization of the program, known in Washington as “Title V” (Five), was left out of the massive reauthorization for Health & Human Services completed in January by the previous Congress. Title V usually is folded into legislation to authorize the Transitional Medical Assistance program, a transition from Medicaid for the working poor, but Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), chairman of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, vowed earlier this month that the TMA measure will move forward without Title V, declaring all-out war on the nation’s network of abstinence educators.

The sponsor of HR-2432, Rep. Deal, is the Ranking Republican Member on the Health Subcommittee and has signaled his intent to attempt to add Title V to TMA as an amendment to the TMA authorization measure when it is marked up in committee in June. Support for his legislation is currently the best focus for expressing support for abstinence-until-marriage education as an antidote to the outrageous hedonistic preaching of Planned Parenthood-style “comprehensive” sex education.

More Truly Informed Consent

GEORGIA GOV. SONNY PERDUE (R) SIGNED A NEW LAW last Wednesday requiring abortionists to offer their customers an opportunity to view sonograms of their developing sons and daughters before consenting to their abortion deaths.

The new law, which takes effect July 1, also requires abortionists to permit their customers to listen to the heartbeats of their unborn children. And it requires the mothers themselves to sign a document disclosing whether or not they had agreed to view the sonograms.

Here Comes Dr. Death

SUICIDE AFFICIONADO JACK KEVORKIAN IS SCHEDULED TO BE RELEASED from prison this Friday, June 1, after serving just eight years of his 10-to-25-year sentence for second-degree murder.

Though claiming he does not intend to resume his lawbreaking after his release, the maverick “doctor” told a Michigan television station he would “work,” reports Gudrun Schultz for LifeSiteNews.com, “towards getting assisted suicide legalized.” His celebrity status is already helping him resume his campaign.

“Known as Dr. Death for his record of assisting at least 130 known individuals with suicide, many of them with no diagnosed physical illness, [Mr.] Kevorkian is set to become something of a media celebrity upon his release,” reports LifeSiteNews. “He has already received several offers for speaking engagements at between $50,000 and $100,000 each, according to his lawyer Morganroth in a report carried by the Detroit News.”

CBS News has already booked a television interview with the celebrated killer to be aired next Sunday. Celebrity interviewers Barbara Walters and Larry King are also “vying for Kevorkian interviews,” according to LifeSiteNews.

Depopulation Crackdown Sparks Riots

THE BRUTAL AUTHORITIES IN RED CHINA are having to deal with a new phenomenon: riots breaking out in rural areas over the Communist regime’s lethal “one-child” depopulation pogrom.

“Word came down from the central government in Beijing,” writes Edward Cody for the Washington Post, “that it was time to strengthen enforcement of China’s one-child policy.”

Sources in Bobai, Guangxi Province in southwestern China, told the Post, writes Mr. Cody, “Birth control bureaucrats showed up in a half-dozen towns with sledgehammers and threatened to knock holes in the homes of people who had failed to pay fines imposed for having more than one child. Other family planning officials, backed by hired toughs,” writes Mr. Cody, “pushed their way into businesses owned by parents of more than one child and confiscated everything from sacks of rice to color televisions, [the sources] said.”

Farmers in the region “rose up against the collection teams, whom they decried as bandits,” writes Mr. Cody. “Backed by their sons,” the Post reports, “thousands of peasants and townspeople encircled government and birth control centers across surrounding Bobai County, … stoning riot police brought in to quell the unrest and, in some places, trashing local offices.”

The uprising appeared to come not only in response to fineenforcement but also in response to a crackdown on family formation itself. The “one-child” policy is enforced with varying degrees of fanaticism in varying parts of the country; enforcement in Guangxi has been somewhat lax until the recent directives from Beijing. Writing in the New York Times, Joseph Kahn reports, “According to villagers and witness accounts posted on the Internet, officials in several parts of Guangxi mobilized their largest effort in years to roll back population growth by instituting mandatory health checks for women and forcing pregnant women who did not have [government] approval to give birth to abort fetuses.”

A truck driver was quoted in the Post as saying there was “‘trouble in all the villages around here.’” A white banner was unfurled near the county building, reports Mr. Cody, calling for revenge on the local Communist Party boss by name.

“The disorder, which rolled from village to village between Thursday and Saturday,” reports the Post, “caused a number of injuries to police and protesters, according to witnesses. Townspeople and villagers, relaying unverified reports,” writes Mr. Cody, “said an unknown number of people were killed.”  Mr. Kahn’s report in the New York Times pegs the number of unverified deaths at five, including three “population control” workers.

“A witness in the nearby town of Dunbu,” writes Mr. Cody, “said two dozen officials dressed in uniforms and carrying electric cattle prods barged into a small store near his house Thursday evening and demanded the owner pay an overdue fine or his inventory would be carried off. Neighbors quickly gathered around, he said,” reports the Post, “and scores of police officers were brought in to back up the family planning officials. By the end of the evening,” writes Mr. Cody, “several thousand townspeople and hundreds of police were facing off near local government offices, he said, and the stones began to fly. …

“Similar outbreaks of violence were reported,” writes Mr. Cody, “in the towns of Yongan, Dadong and Shabo, where offices were reported ransacked and police cars burned.”

“‘China is developing economically,’” Population Research Institute (PRI) president Steven Mosher told Peter J. Smith for LifeSiteNews.com. “‘There is a growing desire on the part of Chinese for more freedom, and part of the freedom they would like to enjoy is the freedom to decide for themselves the number and spacing of their children.’”

But the Red Chinese government, said Mr. Mosher, quoted by LifeSiteNews, “responds more to the influence of the United Nations and International Planned Parenthood, which praise the one-child policy.” That policy, LifeSiteNews notes, “has led to more than 40 million men in [Red] China unable to find wives, and tens of millions of women and their unborn children harmed by forced abortions each year.

“‘The one-child policy will have to end sooner or later,’” said Mr. Mosher in the LifeSiteNews report, “‘because it has been a disaster for China. So far, 28 years into the policy,’” he said, government officials “‘show no signs of recognizing the obvious.’” Nor does the UN, Planned Parenthood or leftist elitists in the United States.

Planned Parenthood Caught Again

THE INDICTMENT OF A CONNECTICUT MAN FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT has opened a new front in the growing string of Planned Parenthood scandals.

The police investigation of the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, according to a news release from Life Dynamics, “has uncovered that the child was taken for abortions to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Norwich in April, July and September of 2006.”

Life Dynamics president Mark Crutcher cited his organization’s own probe of the widespread practice among abortion shops which showed 91% of the more than 800 facilities investigated had taken action to cover up the sexual exploitation of minors.

“Our investigation proved,” said Mr. Crutcher in the release, “that rapists who target under-age girls have no better ally than Planned Parenthood. If these people in Norwich had any sense of decency or any concern for this child, they would have reported this situation to the authorities the first time they saw her. Of course,” he added, “that would have cost them the profit from the next two abortions.”

Liberals Give Abstinence a Run for its Money

May 22, 2007, Washington Update by Tony Perkins, president, Family Research Council

The Congress that attached $74 million for peanut storage, $24 million for sugar beets and $13 million for sheep breeding to the war supplemental bill is balking at the $50 million renewal of federal abstinence-only funding.

For instance, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), an outspoken critic of abstinence programs, showed unusual compassion for the nation’s taxpayers, saying, “American[s] … have already paid more than $1 billion for [abstinence] programs [in the last 11 years].” Yet where is this same concern when the government spends over a quarter of a billion dollars each year in Title X [Ten] funds for groups like Planned Parenthood, which promote teen promiscuity, birth control without parental consent and, when that fails, abortion?

More importantly, what have Americans received for the government’s hefty investment in so-called “comprehensive” liberal sex education programs, other than a culture of rampant disease, poverty and out-of-wedlock births?

As Congress considers slashing funds for Title V programs that address these problems, Family Research Council hosted a breakfast this morning with Representatives Randy Forbes (R-VA) and Mike McIntyre (D-NC) for Abstinence Day on the Hill. Hundreds of students, abstinence educators and groups like Family Research Council flooded Congressional offices as part of the fight to reauthorize Title V funding so that the “save sex” message can build on its proven success.

To protect these programs from extinction, we need your help. Contact your Representatives and tell them that $50 million is a modest price to pay for programs that can dramatically reduce the rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. If Congress can defend a $100 million earmark for citrus fruit, surely it can justify spending half that for children whose futures will be brighter and healthier because of these valuable programs.

Catholics Respond to Pro-Abort ‘Gang of 18’

May 17, 2007, report by Peter J. Smith for LifeSiteNews, copyright LifeSiteNews.com

Two pro-life Catholic leaders came out swinging against the 18 pro-abortion Catholic Congressmen who rebuked Pope Benedict XVI last week for suggesting bishops could discipline politicians for advancing abortion, saying the group would do faithful Catholics a favor by leaving the Church or resigning from office.

Led by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the Congressmen had accused the Pope of offending “the very nature of the American experiment” for his statements “warning Catholic elected officials that they risk excommunication and would not receive communion for their pro-choice views.”

“Religious sanction in the political arena directly conflicts with our fundamental beliefs about the role and responsibility of democratic representatives in a pluralistic America,” the Congressmen stated. “It also clashes with freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution.”

Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, called the pro-abortion “gang of 18” both “ignorant of their faith” and in need of “a civics lesson. It is an embarrassment that a Catholic, much less a Member of Congress should make such an absurd statement,” said Fr. Euteneuer. “Even if this statement were true, the Holy Father answers to a Higher Power than Rep. DeLauro and the Gang of 18.

“The truth is,” [Fr.] Euteneuer continued, “nothing threatens the American experiment more than the legal but unjust killing of human beings by abortion, which stands in stark contrast to the very first right enumerated by our Declaration of Independence: the Right to Life. The humanity of the unborn child is no longer even debated. It is a scientific fact. Abortion is murder, and murder is against the law.”

The “Gang of 18” also had reaffirmed its February “Historic Statement of Principles,” which attempted to reconcile the Church’s defense of the sanctity of life with a pro-abortion position. They said they remain committed to reducing the “need” for abortion with legislation like “The Reducing the Need for Abortion & Supporting Parents Act” while keeping the practice entirely legal.

Fr. Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, criticized the Congressmen for stating that supporting abortion in any fashion could be consonant with their Catholic faith.

“Faithful Catholics, as well as those in the pro-life movement from every denomination, have had enough of this double-talk,” stated Fr. Pavone. “It is not possible to advance ‘respect for life and for the dignity of every human being’ while tolerating the dismemberment and decapitation of the human beings still in their mothers’ wombs.”

Fr. Pavone called upon the legislators to resign and end the public contradiction to their faith, while Fr. Euteneuer invited the pro-abortion Congressmen to leave the Church if they object so much to its teachings.

“This is what the Catholic Church teaches and what Catholics believe,” said [Fr.] Euteneuer. “If the Gang of 18 believes otherwise, honesty and integrity requires they find another church that tells them what they want to hear. If they have that much of a problem being Catholic, no one is forcing them to stay. We certainly don’t need their hypocrisy.”

[Life Advocacy Briefing editor’s note: LifeSiteNews.com goes on to list the 18 Members of Congress joining Rep. DeLauro in her rebuke to the Pope. We published that list in the May 21, 2007, edition of Life Advocacy Briefing.]