Life Advocacy Briefing
February 9, 2009
Call Now to Oppose ‘Justice’ Nominee / UNFPA Celebrates Family Breakdown / Voters Oppose Obama Order / Planned Parenthood Caught Again / Yet Another Twist / Hospital of Disrepute? / A Different Perspective / March for Life Speeches
Call Now to Oppose ‘Justice’ Nominee
PRES. OBAMA HAS CHOSEN A COMMITTED ENEMY OF LIFE as his nominee for Deputy Attorney General, a key policy-making post in the Justice Department.
David Ogden started his legal career as a law clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade edict, which Mr. Ogden is on record as supporting enthusiastically. He is described in an extensively researched memo circulated by Eagle Forum as “an abortion-on-demand absolutist [who] opposes commonsense restrictions on abortion, including policies that have significant support from the American people, such as parental notification by minors.”
Warns Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink: “[Mr.] Ogden has a record of supporting an almost unlimited right to abortion, providing legal counsel for groups like Planned Parenthood, National Organization for [sic] Women and People for the American Way. He argued,” notes CitizenLink in an electronic mail alert, “that ‘abortion rarely causes or exacerbates psychological or emotional problems,’ opposed parental notification for 14-year-olds and called spousal notification a ‘burden’ that ‘cannot be justified.’” Other past clients have included the American Civil Liberties Union and actual abortion mills.
Phone calls to Senators’ offices are needed urgently and may be placed by telephoning the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121. Those who cannot get through by phone may contact their Senators by electronic mail; their e-mail addresses can be ascertained from the Senate’s official Internet website at www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm. Additional calls to their state offices are much in order in view of the threat this nominee poses.
U.N.F.P.A. Celebrates Family Breakdown
A SPOKESMAN FOR THE UNITED NATIONS POPULATION FUND (UNFPA) claimed last month at a “colloquium” in Mexico City, reports Matthew Cullinan-Hoffman of LifeSiteNews.com, “that the breakdown of traditional families, far from being a ‘crisis’ is actually a triumph for human rights. …
“UNFPA representative Arie Hoekman denounced the idea,” writes Mr. Hoffman, “that high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births represent a social crisis, claiming that they represent instead the triumph of ‘human rights’ against ‘patriarchy.’”
This is the UN agency to which Pres. Obama and his fellow travelers in the House and Senate intend to award tens of millions of our taxpayer dollars. It is the same agency which has been caught abetting Red China’s depopulation pogrom.
Leonardo Casco, a Honduran member of the Pontifical Council for the Family, “told LifeSiteNews,” writes Mr. Hoffman, “that he wasn’t surprised that the UNFPA was denying the crisis in the family. ‘They definitely have to deny that there is a crisis in the family,’” said Mr. Casco, “‘because they have created the crisis.’” Mr,. Casco, writes Mr. Hoffman, called the UNFPA “‘bureaucrats at the service of death. … [He] observed that ‘after 45 years of birth control, disrespect for marriage, for the family, for children etc., this is the result. Because of that we have violence, war, lack of respect of women [and] children.’”
UNFPA, said Mr. Casco in the LifeSiteNews report, “has become ‘a birth control agency at the service of the most powerful countries.’ … UNFPA bureaucrats,” said Mr. Casco, “‘have invented a series of new “human rights … with which they wish to justify all of their actions.’”
Mr. Obama signaled his lifting of Pres. Bush’s UNFPA funding embargo as a note appended to his Jan. 23 message repealing the Mexico City Policy which has long protected US taxpayers from diversion of foreign development aid into the international abortion cabal.
Voters Oppose Obama Order
OF THE MANY ACTIONS ALREADY TAKEN BY THE OBAMA REGIME, the one receiving the most opposition from Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, is the new President’s decision to rescind the Reagan-initiated Mexico City Policy, which disqualified abortionists from US foreign aid under the Agency for International Development (USAID).
Though the late January poll showed Mr. Obama’s overall approval rating “hovering around 75%,” writes Kathleen Gilbert for LifeSiteNews.com, “the number plunged to 35% approving of his decision to provide US foreign aid for abortion groups. 58% said they opposed the move,” she reports, “leaving 7% undecided.” This strong response, especially in light of fawning mass media, suggests the US taxpayers understand this issue quite well, despite the mouthful required to explain what the “Mexico City Policy” is.
“The results appear to confirm the sentiments of Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ),” writes Ms. Gilbert, “who said the Mexico City Policy had represented ‘common ground,’ as it allowed funding for true family planning without encouraging the spread of abortion.” Mr. Smith has filed legislation to reinstate the policy; HR-708, which has 51 co-sponsors, has been referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Republican National Coalition for Life (RNC/Life) is backing the Smith bill and calling on its supporters to contact both House Members and Senators (1-202/224-3121) with the following message: “You want them to codify the Mexico City Policy. You want them to deny taxpayer funds to international organizations and agencies that promote or perform abortions overseas so that it will not have to be reconsidered each year during the appropriations process. You do not want to be forced into complicity with abortions through your tax dollars.” In the wake of the Gallup Poll news, this would indeed be a good time for such a phoning campaign.
Planned Parenthood Caught Again
U.C.L.A. JOURNALISM STUDENT LILA ROSE HAS STUNG another Planned Parenthood shop, this time in Tucson, Arizona, with her undercover camera and microphone. The resulting video appears on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJt3OVIdhUk and on Miss Rose’s website at www.liveaction.org.
Miss Rose was accompanied to Tucson’s “Margaret Sanger Center” by a friend posing as a 15-year-old girl seeking an abortion. After explaining “her boyfriend was 27,” reports Bob Unruh for WorldNetDaily.com (WND), she “was told how to go to court to obtain an abortion without having her parents notified and was encouraged not to have her 27-year-old ‘boyfriend’ along when she appeared in court.”
Arizona law identifies sexual intercourse between an adult and a 15-year-old as “a felony,” writes Mr. Unruh, quoting Miss Rose, “and ‘if an adult-child sexual relationship is revealed,’” said Miss Rose in the WND story, “‘law enforcement must be contacted immediately.’”
Instead, notes Mr. Unruh, when the putative abortion customer revealed her “boyfriend’s” age to the Planned Parenthood worker, the woman changed the subject, moving immediately, reports Mr. Unruh, into “describing abortion procedures and costs.”
The disturbing video is the third undercover expose’ of Planned Parenthood to be released by Live Action Films; the other two showed statutory rape cover-ups by PP shops in Indiana, whose attorney general has announced he is investigating practices at the abortion business.
“‘These videos demonstrate,’” said Miss Rose in the WND story, “that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, is entrenched in an organization-wide policy of circumventing state law and covering up the sexual abuse of young girls.’”
Yet Another Twist
A POLICY ANALYST FOR PLANNED PARENTHOOD’s “research arm,” the Alan Guttmacher Institute, tried to offer a defense for the contraception provision which Pres. Obama stripped from the “stimulus bill” (as we reported last week). In so doing, Adam Sonfield competed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for outrageous ideology.
“‘[The earmark] was there,’” Mr. Sonfield told Laura Tillman, reporting for the Brownsville (TX) Herald, “‘because it helps women to be part of the economy, it helps them finish school and continue to be part of the workforce when they can no longer afford birth control.’”
Hospital of Disrepute?
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN HOSPITAL BOARD HAS VOTED 11-to-3 to endorse establishment of a late-term abortuary at the Madison Surgery Center, using the December retirement of a Planned Parenthood late-term abortionist as a marketing opportunity for the university’s own business enterprise.
The board of the surgery center has the final say in the matter and was expected to vote on the question in a private meeting late last week. The university’s chairman of obstetrics and gynecology estimated the shop would kill around 125 preborn babies – of 19 to 22 weeks’ gestation – per year.
A Different Perspective
Feb. 3, 2009, report by Kathleen Gilbert for LifeSiteNews.com
According to the grandmother of octuplets born in California last week, rather than allow her leftover frozen embryos to be destroyed, dissected in a laboratory or frozen indefinitely, their mother chose to give them a chance at life by implanting them in her womb.
Little did she expect to give birth to eight relatively healthy babies or to be deluged first by congratulations, then by scorn, as critics questioned her choice not to selectively abort as a single mother of reportedly little means.
Nadya Suleman, anonymous at the time, made headlines last Monday when she gave birth to the longest-living set of octuplets on record at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in West Los Angeles. The babies, six boys and two girls, are reported to continue growing in strength. “My family and I are ecstatic about all of their arrivals,” said the mother in a statement following the births. The octuplets’ grandmother described the babies as “so tiny and so beautiful.”
Later it was revealed that Suleman, who is divorced and according to her mother unable to have children naturally, had already had six children via previous fertility treatments. Media attention turned sour as headlines changed to challenge the ethics of the situation.
“Suleman’s story transformed from a dream to a nightmare,” wrote a New York Daily News columnist. The story was called a “freak show,” “a tawdry nightmare” and “a seedy story of self-indulgence.” Some accused Suleman of giving birth as a means to fame and wealth. “If you want to find a way to be famous and to be, in your mind, a celebrity, there’s lots of ways to go about it,” says Cooper Lawrence, author of The Cult of Celebrity. “If you’re not a good singer and you can’t write books,” said Lawrence, “go have babies.”
Some questioned the ethics of allowing Suleman to undergo treatment again after already having six children, which was billed as the climax of an alleged obsession with children. Yet her mother said Suleman had merely implanted the children already conceived as excess products from her previous treatments. “She doesn’t have any more (frozen embryos), so it’s over now,” she said.
Another controversy erupted from ethicists who criticized Suleman’s anonymous doctor for implanting eight embryos at a time. However, according to her parents, Suleman was expecting one more child to result from her remaining embryos, which they say numbered far fewer than eight. The eight would have resulted from some of the embryos splitting into twins or triplets.
Typical IVF treatments implant as many as four embryos at a time, with the expectation that some will naturally miscarry or, if they continue to grow, will be killed in a standard procedure known as “selective reduction of pregnancy.”
Many criticized the mother for deviating from the norm of IVF treatment by refusing to abort some of the babies despite the risk to her health on top of her apparent money troubles. In an ABC interview, endocrinology expert Dr. Richard Paulson said that so many children at once are a problem to be avoided at all costs. “Patients who conceive octuplets would routinely be offered – even advised – selective reduction,” said Paulson. I have to assume that in this case, the patients [sic] decided to try and carry to viability, and they were lucky, plus they got some really good doctors.”
Angela Suleman said that was not an option for Nadya. “What do you suggest she should have done? She refused to have them killed,” the grandmother said. “That is a very painful thing.”
Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News’s senior judicial analyst, confirmed it was quite possible that the octuplets were an unexpected multiplication of fewer embryos and praised Nadya for choosing not to abort the unexpected lives.
“Notwithstanding all of the above, the mother has done a positive good by bringing these children into the world,” wrote Napolitano yesterday. “Life is superior to non-life. Human souls are eternal. Every human life is of potentially infinite value. The God Who gave us life reflects His glory through each one of us.”
March for Life Speeches
Transcribed by Life Advocacy Briefing from live coverage Jan. 22, 2009, on EWTN [Note: EWTN pre-empted certain of the speeches, opting instead for interviews with March participants. With no other source, Life Advocacy Briefing cannot present those speeches but, to the extent we were able to identify the pre-empted speakers, will list those whose speeches we cannot publish.]
Rep. Paul Broun MD (R-GA): I’m Dr. Paul Broun from Georgia, representing the Tenth Congressional District. I pledged that the first bill I would introduce once I came to Congress would be one that defines Life beginning at fertilization. It was the first bill. I’ve already [re]introduced the Sanctity of Human Life Act this year. God tells us in His Word, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. There are babies being destroyed for lack of knowledge that Life begins at fertilization. The Lord asks us, demands of us, expects of us to be salt and light, so we’ve got to educate the people across this nation that Life begins at fertilization. And that’s absolutely critical, because we can change America. We can save lives. Be the salt and light that the Lord Jesus Christ expects you to be. God bless you.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) … entirely preempted by EWTN interview …
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) … [partly preempted by EWTN interview] … Scripture tells us, O Lord, who may abide in Your tabernacle, who may dwell with You on the hill? It is he who walks with integrity, he who works with righteousness, and he who speaks the truth in his heart. And I thank you for coming here today and speaking the truth. After today, if you go up into the Capitol behind us, you may see a statue of a woman that comes from the great state of New Jersey – Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was an abolitionist who fought for women’s rights a hundred years ago, and you may think that she was on the side of abortion, but she was not. She wrote, back in 1873, speaking for women, “When we consider that women now are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” She would be shocked to see that we still treat these innocent children as unwanted nuisances today. I will close with this: I don’t know if you felt as I did during the Inaugural, for one brief shining moment, when the new President said, “We are all equal, we are all free, and we all deserve a chance to pursue that full measure of happiness.” Mr. President, even the very young and even the very small, they, too, deserve to pursue that freedom of happiness. God bless you for your truth. God bless you.