Life Advocacy Briefing

Honoring Motherhood All The Time

WE EXTEND TO ALL OUR READERS – to those who are mothers and to those who seek and work to protect mothers and their babies and to those who regret lost motherhood but who know their baby lives today with Jesus – a blessed Mothers Day week. The official Mothers Day commemoration was yesterday, May 11, but glows on in our hearts.

Please Stop the Abuse!

A LETTER SIGNED BY NEARLY 80 CONSERVATIVE GROUPS was sent to the White House last Tuesday requesting Pres. George W. Bush to “reinstitute regulations that would strip federal funding for family planning groups,” reports Alexander Bolton for The Hill, “if they refer patients to abortion doctors or share facilities with abortion providers.

Life Advocacy Resource Project is among the signers of the letter, which was circulated by Family Research Council.

“We respectfully ask that you make the necessary changes to the Title X [Ten] regulations so that US taxpayer funds are not used to promote and facilitate abortion,” stated the letter.

Reinstatement of rules issued more than 20 years ago by Pres. Ronald Reagan would be a long overdue setback for Planned Parenthood, which receives the lion’s share of the federal government’s near-$300-million Title X “family planning” funding.

PP routinely combines its comprehensive sex clinics with abortion facilities; in fact, PP is engaged in a facilities consolidation program, building megabortuaries, which include other functions, in various cities such as Chicago-suburban Aurora, Illinois, and Denver, Colorado. Their facilities draw customers in with birth control, sexually transmitted disease treatment and pregnancy tests and then sell those carrying babies on PP’s abortion “services.” The requested regulations would, in effect, force Planned Parenthood to choose between their current marketing plan and their long-accustomed siphoning of federal tax funds.

The original regulations “were upheld by the Supreme Court,” notes Mr. Bolton, “but were then rescinded soon after former Pres. Bill Clinton took office in 1993. Conservative leaders say,” reports The Hill, “… that [Mr.] Bush could re-implement the regulations through a simple order that would go into effect after a brief public comment period.”

Sick

PLANNED PARENTHOOD PRESIDENT CECILE RICHARDS HAD THE GALL to send an electronic message to the outfit’s backers last week “us[ing] Mother’s Day as a rallying cry for abortion rights,” reports Family Research Council’s (FRC’s) Tony Perkins in his Washington Update.

The e-mail related how “proud” Miss Richards is to “carry on her mom’s legacy of ‘defending women’s rights,’” notes Mr. Perkins, but went on to whine about the letter to the President, originated by FRC and signed by nearly 80 groups, asking Mr. Bush essentially to defund or force reform of Planned Parenthood.

The good news, notes Mr. Perkins, is that “the e-mail shows her significant concern over your participation [as an active pro-life citizen] in the effort to defund Planned Parenthood’s abortion operations.”

Setbacks for the Babykillers

THE ABORTION INDUSTRY TOOK A COMPOUND LOSS last week in the Kansas Supreme Court.

The state high court upheld a state law invoked by citizens convening a grand jury investigating the business of Wichita’s notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller, who had sought to have the citizen-initiated grand jury law invalidated in the midst of the probe. The grand jury will expire on July 8.

The Kansas Supreme Court also handed the abortion industry a setback in protracted litigation over determination by Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline (R) to bring 107 criminal charges against the Planned Parenthood shop in the county. The court unsealed the proceedings in the litigation, which PP had sought to keep secret, and upheld Mr. Kline’s authority to use identity-redacted PP records which the court agreed he had obtained legitimately.

Former state Atty. Gen. Paul Morrison (D) had, before resigning the office in disgrace, petitioned the state high court to bar Mr. Kline from using evidence he had secured against the PP shop while he was attorney general before being defeated by Mr. Morrison in 2006. Mr. Kline had obtained a court order authorizing him to transfer the evidence to the Johnson County attorney’s office, to which he was then being appointed, both to continue his probe of Planned Parenthood and to protect the evidence from Mr. Morrison, who had enjoyed substantial backing from PP during his campaign.

“‘It is wrong that the subject of a criminal investigation should be allowed to misuse secret proceedings to harass a prosecutor with falsehoods and spurious personal attack, as Planned Parenthood has done,’” declared Operation Rescue (OR) director Troy Newman, quoted by LifeSiteNews.com. “‘Now that this case has been unsealed,’” remarked Mr. Newman, “‘we trust that the truth of Planned Parenthood’s wrongdoing and the obstructionist attitude of the Attorney General’s office will finally come out.’”

Betrayal?

A DELEGATION OF PRO-LIFE LEADERS FROM BACK HOME paid a “surprise visit” May 1 to Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) in his Capitol Hill office, urging him to reconsider his endorsement of Steve Howe for Johnson County District Attorney while the current DA, pro-life champion Phill Kline, is reconsidering an earlier announcement he would not seek election to the post to which he was appointed about 18 months ago after losing his 2006 re-election bid as Kansas attorney general.

Mr. Kline is known to be considering running after all in order to pursue his prosecution of the county’s Planned Parenthood shop on 107 charges for which he has secured evidence; the case has been delayed persistently for some five years via various PP lawsuits but took a step forward in late April with a ruling by the state supreme court validating his possession and use of the evidence.

Mr. Kline is preferred by the Kansas pro-life leaders over Mr. Howe, who has made no public commitment to carry forward Mr. Kline’s heroic, sustained battle against Planned Parenthood.  Mr. Howe carries the disturbing endorsement of pro-abortion activist Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a former US Senator, and his campaign co-chairman is known to be pro-abortion, according to Jill Stanek, who reports the Brownback/Howe situation in her May 7 WorldNetDaily.com column titled “Is Brownback Betraying Pro-Lifers?” Ominously, Mr. Howe, she reports, “refused to sign a petition to launch a [citizen-initiated] grand jury investigation against Planned Parenthood in his own county. …

“There is no explanation,” notes Mrs. Stanek, “for pro-aborts to support [Mr.] Howe other than they expect him to drop [Mr.] Kline’s investigation.”

Phill Kline, on the other hand, is “the only DA in the country with a pending criminal case against a Planned Parenthood [outfit],” writes Mrs. Stanek, “and is likely the only DA in the country with the intestinal fortitude to stick with such an investigation. …

“[Sen.] Brownback knows pro-lifers are encouraging [Mr.] Kline to stay,” writes Mrs. Stanek. “He knows because many influential pro-lifers called him and asked him to wait for [DA] Kline to decide before endorsing. There was no hurry,” she notes. “The filing deadline is still over a month away, June 10. But [Sen.] Brownback, known as a stalwart pro-lifer not only in Kansas but across the US after his recent run for President, endorsed [Mr.] Howe anyway.”

And his response to the pro-life delegation? “He did not commit” to correct his earlier assertion that the DA seat is “open” within his Republican Party. But “over the weekend,” writes Mrs. Stanek, “the Howe campaign called the [pro-life] ladies and accused them of being ‘mean’ to [Mr.] Brownback” in their private Capitol Hill meeting. “How did the [Howe] campaign know” about the meeting? asks Mrs. Stanek.

Sen. Brownback is “widely expected to run for governor in 2010” when incumbent Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) is forced to leave office by the state’s term-limit regime. “Whose help does [Mr.] Brownback want” in that potential race for governor? asks Mrs. Stanek. “RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] and hacks,” she writes, “want the Planned Parenthood investigation ended. They fear a run by [Phill] Kline will stir more Democrats to vote than might otherwise.”

But, she notes, the better course for “influential Republicans” would be to “mak[e] some calls to get [DA] Kline’s case to proceed. If [Mr.] Kline’s investigation were freed up,” she writes, “talk of his running for DA wouldn’t even be an issue.”

Planting Foolishness

THE OTHER SHOE HAS DROPPED. The government of Switzerland has taken the secular ethic of human un-exceptionalism to its [il]logical conclusion. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology has conferred“human rights” on plants.

In a story the Weekly Standard calls “The Silent Scream of the Asparagus,” legitimate ethicist Wesley J. Smith reports the Swiss panel “has weighed in on the ‘dignity’ of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax,” he writes. “The concept of what could be called ‘plant rights,’” notes Mr. Smith, “is being seriously debated.”

The report of the ethics panel, called “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is “enough,” opines Mr. Smith in the Weekly Standard, “to short-circuit the brain.

“A ‘clear majority’ of the panel adopted what it called a ‘biocentric’ moral view,” writes Mr. Smith, “meaning that ‘living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.’ Thus,” writes Mr. Smith, “the panel determined that we cannot claim ‘absolute ownership’ over plants and, moreover, that ‘individual plants have an inherent worth.’ This means,” writes Mr. Smith, “that ‘we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community [!] is not in danger or if our actions do not endanger the species or if we are not acting arbitrarily.’”

Mr. Smith relates an example the report offers as an indication of the, uh, thinking of the panel. “A farmer mows his field,” relates Mr. Smith citing the report. “But then, while walking home, he casually ‘decapitates some wildflowers with his scythe. The panel,” notes Mr. Smith, “decries this act as immoral … .”

Silly as it is, the report has chilling implications for the human beings whom it implicitly and to some extent explicitly devalues. “Leading bioethicists argue that for a human,” writes Mr. Smith, “value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a ‘person.’ This,” notes the ethicist, “excludes the unborn, the newborn and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity.

“This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals,” notes Mr. Smith, “of using profoundly brain-impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.” It is also a root of the “ethic” of abortion on demand.

Mr. Smith calls the report “Switzerland’s enshrining of ‘plant dignity’” and asserts it is “a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically,” opines Mr. Smith, “and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. … Why is this happening?” he asks. “Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian worldview, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal,” he notes, “it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights. …

“We live in a time of cornucopian abundance and plenty,” observes Mr. Smith, “yet countless human beings are malnourished, even starving. In the face of this cruel paradox, worry about the purported rights of plants is the true immorality.”

Challenging the Suppressors

STEVEN MOSHER HAS WRITTEN A NEW BOOK on demographic economics, Population Control—Real Costs, Illusory Benefits—published by Transaction Press and available via the Population Research Institute’s bookstore within the PRI Internet website, www.pop.org or via www.amazon.com.

Mr. Mosher is president of Population Research Institute and first came to the attention of the pro-life community more than 25 years ago when his credentials as a university graduate student were withdrawn in response to his eyewitness exposé of Red China’s brutal one-child pogrom in a thesis which became a book, Broken Earth, still in print and available via www.amazon.com. He has made exposure of the depopulation lobby his lifelong work and is world-renowned as an expert in demography.

The news release announcing publication of his new book states, “From its origins in racial hysteria and demographic ignorance to its state-sanctioned and -funded rise to the mainstream, [Mr.] Mosher describes the population control movement as it really is: as the world’s Number One violator of human rights.”

A Campaign for Healing

May 5, 2008, BreakPoint with Charles Colson, commentary delivered by PFM president Mark Earley, copyright Prison Fellowship Ministries

I have a difficult subject to talk to you about today, but the fact that it is difficult to talk about – and so many people avoid it – makes it all the more important.

You have heard us speak before on this broadcast about the sanctity and dignity of human life. But while it is easy to debate the issues surrounding abortion, it is less frequent that we stop and really think about the women and men who have been touched by it – or even think about how we can offer our compassion and help.

One newly developed outreach is doing just that. The campaign is called Abortion Changes You, and the purpose is to reach out to all those who have been impacted by abortion: from the woman who chose to abort and is still struggling with difficult emotions to the man who was her partner, to the mom or dad who would have been grandparents but instead suffer a silent loss and to the boys or girls who later learn that they will never meet one of their siblings.

Here is the sad fact: One in three women in this country will have chosen to have an abortion by the age of 45. That’s right – one in three. Given that, it is likely that you know someone who has been impacted by abortion. That is why I am grateful that AbortionChangesYou.com and the companion book Changed are now available to begin to offer direct help for these hurting women, men and children. Both website and book offer help in a way that is non-threatening and non-political, making them accessible to women and men from every walk of life. The book includes testimonies of people who have all been profoundly changed by abortion.

Rarely have I been as moved emotionally as I have been by reading these stories.

There is the teenage girl whose parents insisted she have an abortion; the husband who drove his wife to the abortion clinic against his own better judgment and later watche[d] his marriage unravel. One is about a grandmother who each year, as the date nears of her daughter’s abortion, silently mourns the loss of the grandchild she never knew. These stories will change you. They will make you look at this issue differently, just as the experience has changed the people involved.

The founder of the Abortion Changes You movement and author of the book Changed knows full well. Michaelene Fredenburg shares her own experience in the book. She says, “There are still many times that are painful for me. Mother’s Day is particularly difficult. The year my child would have graduated from high school was filled with pain. … If my child had gone to college, she would have graduated this year. This child would now be a young woman with gifts and abilities, hopes and dreams, her whole life ahead of her. There will always be a hole in my heart,” she says, “a hole in the fabric of our family and our community.”

Some of you will be impacted by these words because abortion has touched your life in a deeply personal way; others of you may be moved to compassion to help others contemplating an abortion or dealing with its aftermath.