Life Advocacy Briefing

‘Winning with Life’

LIFE ADVOCACY OFFERS its Winning with Life communicator coaching session for pro-life officials, candidates and citizens on Saturday, Aug. 18, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Chicago-suburban Arlington Heights, Illinois. Presented by Life Advocacy’s president, former Illinois State Rep. Penny Pullen, and Texas-based strategist and marketer Kevin Burnette, the seminar is a staple of Life Advocacy Resource Project’s program of equipping the pro-life community for more effective, persuasive, strategic communication to advance the cause of Life.

Registration fee of $50 covers an extensive reference manual and catered lunch, in addition to the presentation and discussion. Send name, address, phone number and electronic mail address, along with registration fee check – or MasterCard/Visa number and expiration date – to Life Advocacy Seminar, 2004 E. Sherwood Road, Arlington Heights, IL 60004.

Fight Brewing over D.C. Abortion $

THE AUGUST CONGRESSIONAL RECESS INTERRUPTS an effort by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), to give the District of Columbia budgetary autonomy. (Delegate Norton is referred to by current Congressional leadership as “Representative” and is apparently being allowed to introduce legislation, despite the Constitution’s establishment of the House of Representatives as elected Members from the states of the Union.)

The House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), was marking up the measure during the flurry of House activity on Thursday, Aug. 1. Repeated interruptions for “floor votes” prompted Rep. Waxman to suspend consideration of HR-733 while a key pro-life amendment was pending.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) filed the amendment to make permanent the annually renewed ban on taxpayer funding of abortions in the District. Because the District uniquely depends annually on legislation approving not only the federal funds allocated to DC but also the capital district’s local spending as well, the funding ban is needed each year to protect taxpayers from subsidizing abortions which already beset the District at the rate of 37% of all pregnancies, among the highest rates in the nation.

Though it has received virtually no press coverage nor any attention we’ve seen from other pro-life lobbying groups, the Jordan Amendment to HR-733 is a must-pass priority for pro-life taxpayers.

The prospect of DC budgetary autonomy, coupled with the lack of an abortion subsidy ban, is a horrific proposition.

Calls to Members can be placed via the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121 or at their district offices, asking them to vote “yes” on the Jordan Amendment and “no” on HR-733. Priority should be given to those who serve on the committee.

In addition to Chairman Waxman, Del. Norton and Rep. Jordan, panel members are Democratic Representatives Tom Lantos & Diane Watson (CA); Christopher Murphy (CT); Danny Davis (IL); Bruce Braley (IA); John Yarmuth (KY); Elijah Cummings, John Sarbanes & Chris VanHollen (MD); Stephen Lynch & John Tierney (MA); Betty McCollum (MN); William Clay (MO); Paul Hodes (NH); Brian Higgins, Carolyn Maloney & Edolphus Towns (NY); Dennis Kucinich (OH); Paul Kanjorski (PA); Jim Cooper (TN); and Peter Welch (VT). Also Republican Representatives Brian Bilbray & Darrell Issa (CA), Christopher Shays (CT), John Mica (FL), Lynn Westmoreland (GA), Bill Sali (ID), Dan Burton & Mark Souder (IN), John McHugh (NY), Virginia Foxx & Patrick McHenry (NC), Michael Turner (OH), Todd Platts (PA), John Duncan (TN), Kenny Marchant (TX), Chris Cannon (UT) and Tom Davis (VA).

Make the Break Count for Youth

WITH CONGRESS IN RECESS, August is an opportune time for many citizens to meet with their elected officials either in their home offices or briefly at public events.

A top item to discuss with Members of Congress and Senators this summer is to urge them to back renewed federal funding for abstinence-until-marriage education; citizens should not accept a commitment to back “comprehensive abstinence education,” which is “safe-sex” how-to instruction in sheep’s clothing; the key is “abstinence until marriage.”

Such funding is due to expire Oct. 1 along with the current fiscal year, and with liberals in control of both houses, an extraordinary effort is needed to renew grants for an extensive network of abstinence-until-marriage educators across the country.

Besides the common-sense rule – “abstinence works 100%, every time it’s tried” – abstinence-until-marriage programs have the data to show that the strategy is working to drive down teen birth rates without a corresponding increase in abortions.

“Young African-American unmarried teens (ages 10-14) had the most drastic decrease, with their birth rates being the lowest in recorded history,” since abstinence-until-marriage programs became established, reports LifeSiteNews.com, citing a Project Reality analysis of government data. “The birth rates for all teens ages 10-14 are the lowest in 40 years.

“In addition, the birth rates for all teens ages 15-19 are the lowest in 20 years,” reports LifeSite/Project Reality. “Specifically, in 1995 and 1998, when abstinence education funding was significantly increased, the teen birth rate began its sharpest decline. During the past eight years, as funding for authentic abstinence education has increased,” reports LifeSite, “the young, unmarried teen birth rate has been cut in half.” Further information is available at www.projectreality.org/research.

Pharmacist Wins One

A FEDERAL JUDGE HAS RULED THAT A PHARMACIST’s LAWSUIT to secure his right not to dispense the “morning-after” pill can move forward, reports Dean Olsen, staff writer for the Springfield (IL) Journal-Register (J-R).

Though Judge Jeanne Scott did not issue a final ruling, her comments in rejecting the defendant Walgreens Company’s motion to dismiss the suit did give significant cause for hope in a good ruling.

Referring to the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act, Judge Scott wrote, quoted by Mr. Olsen, “‘The statute prohibits discrimination against any person for refusing to provide health care because of his conscience.’ She also wrote,” reports Mr. Olsen, “‘Providing medication … constitutes health-care services. Any person, including [plaintiff Ethan] Vandersand, who refuses to participate in any way in providing medication because of his conscience is protected by the Right of Conscience Act.’”

Though Illinois’s Conscience Act does not specify pharmacists, its definition of protected healthcare workers appears, on its face, to be inclusive.

A spokesman for Illinois Planned Parenthood Council “said she was troubled,” reports the J-R, “that [Judge] Scott’s ruling, if left unchanged, could be interpreted to mean the Right of Conscience Act protects a wide range of people … if they refuse to sell contraceptives based on moral views.” In typical hyperbole, PP’s Pam Sutherland used “even grocery-store clerks” as her ridiculous example of “healthcare workers.”

Mercy!

REP. CHRIS SMITH (R-NJ) HAS RE-INTRODUCED his Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, which gained a majority of House votes last December but fell short of the extraordinary majority required by the fast-track procedure used to bring it forward at the close of the 109th Congress.

The leader of the bipartisan House Pro-Life Caucus garnered 106 co-sponsors before introducing HR-3442, which mirrors S-356, filed in January by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and 28 co-sponsors.

Calls to pro-life lawmakers are in order via the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121, urging them to co-sponsor the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. With Congress in recess for the balance of August, calls to the Members’ local offices would also be helpful.

The proposal reflects a growing body of scientific knowledge showing that prenatal children aged at 20 gestational weeks or older can feel pain – indeed, may be more sensitive to pain than after they are born. The Smith/Brownback bill would require an abortionist to inform his customer about the potential for pain in his principal victim and the availability of pain relief medication.

“‘My bill is a modest but necessary expansion of informed consent,’” Rep. Smith told LifeSiteNews.com, “‘that seeks to ensure that before a child is killed by abortion, at least the facts about pain are conveyed. My hopes are, of course,’” he said, “‘that [the mother] will reconsider when these facts are presented.’” For those who want to “make abortion rare,” it’s a no-brainer.

Good Catch!

PRO-LIFE CITIZENS IN CINCINNATI, OHIO, HAVE CAUGHT a serious deficiency in Hamilton County’s proposed new contract for indigent care: The long-standing bar on using tax dollars for abortion-related services was missing.

Appealing to the two county commissioners in charge of the contract, active citizens succeeded in restoring the language for now. Commissioner Pat DeWine, who first noticed the defect, has filed a resolution to make the prohibition permanent. That resolution is expected to be heard at a county board meeting this Wednesday. Those wishing to aid Commr. DeWine in his resolution, which his two colleagues appear to be resisting, may contact Commissioners Todd Portune and David Pepper at 1-513/946-4401 and 946-4409 respectively.

Tiller Distracted from Killing Business

NOTORIOUS WICHITA ABORTIONIST GEORGE TILLER WAS ARRAIGNED on Friday, Aug. 3, on 19 misdemeanor counts of violating the Kansas abortion laws. The arraignment hearing had been scheduled for Aug. 7, but, according to Peter J. Smith, reporting for LifeSiteNews.com, the Tiller lawyers moved up the hearing date shortly after Operation Rescue (OR) announced it would host a prayer vigil outside the Sedgwick County courthouse Tuesday.

His late-term abortuary was closed during the past two weeks while he took care of his legal matters, prompting OR’s Troy Newman to exult, in a news release, “We are rejoicing that for two straight weeks, Wichita, Kansas, the nation’s abortion capital, will be abortion-free for the first time since abortions began here. Even during the 1991 Summer of Mercy [sustained demonstration and vigil],” he recalled, “Tiller was not closed that long. We pray that abortions will never resume.”

Last month, more than 500 people gathered in Wichita for concerted prayer in an OR event called “the Wichita Awakening,” praying for the closure of Mr. Tiller’s “Women’s Health Care Services.”

The late-term “specialist” is challenging the constitutionality of Kansas’s late-term abortion statute as part of his defense against charges that he “consulted” a financially connected colleague for the state-mandated “second opinions” which claimed to authorize the killing of 19 late-term prenatal babies.

Lawyers for Mr. Tiller and his second-opinion colleague “have argued,” writes Mr. Smith, “that [Mr.] Tiller did not technically pay [the second abortionist] since he did not give her a check. However, OR told LifeSiteNews.com that [Mr.] Tiller and [Ann Kristin Neuhaus] enjoyed a ‘symbiotic relationship.’ [Mr.] Tiller kept [Ms.] Neuhaus afloat by allowing her to use his office and equipment once a week to see her ‘patients,’” writes Mr. Smith, “and may have subsidized her transportation to his clinic” after her own abortion shop had to close. “In return,” reports LifeSite, “[Ms.] Neuhaus would sign off on late-term abortions,” making a mockery of the well-meaning but inadequate state law.

Painting Lipstick on a Pig

“Major US Newsweekly Offers Sanitized Version of Racist Margaret Sanger,” Aug. 7, 2007, analysis by Elizabeth O’Brien for LifeSiteNews.com

The third largest US newsweekly published a highly skewed historical account of Margaret Sanger, entirely omitting the racist motivation behind her vehement commitment to birth control, abortion and sterilization.

US News & World Report, a rival of Time magazine and Newsweek, published an article on Sunday [Aug. 5] entitled, “The Passions Behind the Pill, helping women in poverty is what drove the development of the oral contraceptive.” The story makes no hint of the fact that Margaret Sanger was a rabid racist who wanted the complete eradication of the black population. Rather it portrays the heroic struggle of a woman seeking to empower female victims of social circumstance.

The article begins by referring to the fact that Sanger was born into a penniless family of 11 children, and as a result, she felt a special calling “to help poor women have fewer children to be brought up.” It speaks of the resistance she received during the early 1900s, when she was accused of “obscenity” for mailing pamphlets on birth control. It also sardonically notes that she was “rewarded” for her efforts by 30 days in jail for spreading information about contraceptives.

The article also fails to mention the fact that this warrior for women’s so-called rights was also connected with the Nazi fascist regime with which she shared her ideas on eugenics in the 1930s. In fact, she changed her organization’s original name from the Birth Control League to Planned Parenthood in order to better maintain the illusion that her goals were much more family “friendly” than the publicly condemned Nazi policies.

Rooted in the philosophy of sexual liberation and Social Darwinism, Sanger viewed the physically and mentally handicapped, illiterates and poor people as hereditarily “tainted” people who must be removed from society. In addition, referring to the black communities in the Southern United States as a “dysgenic horror,” she also believed that black people were subhuman and must be eradicated.

In the “Negro Project” of 1939, for example, Sanger encouraged black ministers to propagate the pill in their own communities – in essence, to unknowingly wipe out their own people. She is quoted as saying, “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the Minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their rebellious members.”

Through this movement of massive deceit and manipulation, clinics that provided the pill and offered family “planning” information spread rapidly throughout the American black communities.

The US News story describes some of the social and political hurdles that Sanger overcame, including the Pope’s condemnation of contraception in the 1960s. The article further states, “Because the pill’s popularity coincided with the beginnings of the feminist movement, it became a symbol of the sexual revolution.”

Quoting historian Elizabeth Watkins, the article continues, the “pill alone didn’t cause the sexual revolution, but … it did cause a contraception revolution.” It then goes on to describe the pill’s great impact that “forever changed the lives of American women.”

Finally, the article concludes without any mention of the fact that as foundress of the world’s largest eugenics movement, Sanger advocated not only the widespread use of contraception but also the legalization of abortion and sterilization in order to wipe out those who were considered “unfit” for normal human society. In this way, by participating in the deception that has surrounded Sanger and her movement for decades, the article omits any reference to the main ideology that fueled her life’s career.