Life Advocacy Briefing

Blessings to You

WE AT LIFE ADVOCACY WISH OUR READERS A BLESSED CHRISTMAS and a joyful and somehow prosperous new year.

In celebrating Christmas and spending time with our families, we anticipate our next publication – the first for our 18th year – will be the Jan. 10, 2011, edition.

During the two-week holiday, though, we will continue to watch events and will publish an off-schedule edition if news warrants. (A big thank-you to those Senators who made clear they would not vote to impose abortion on the military; we cannot publish their names, because there was no roll call, but we know they are there, and we appreciate the relief from that threat.)

Watching the continual Congress, we will be praying and urge our readers to join us in appealing to Divine Providence for relief from the chaos on Capitol Hill.

Another Loss for the Abortion Lobby?

AS WE WERE APPROACHING DEADLINE, the US House was preparing to pass a Defense Authorization bill which does not hold any of the land mines in the failed Senate version. No change in the long-standing prohibition on abortions at US military facilities. That nightmare appears to be over. If the bill turns sour, our e-subscribers will likely receive a bulletin from us, but at this writing, we’re hopeful the abortion-related elements of the outrageous lame-duck session are behind us.

Bullets Dodged

HERE ARE A FEW OF THE ‘ORNAMENTS’ which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had hung on the 1,900-page trillion-dollar-plus “Christmas Tree” omnibus appropriation measure which he had to abandon last week:

• Congressionally appropriated local tax funding of abortions in the District of Columbia
• $10 million increase over last year’s funding for Title X (Ten), Planned Parenthood’s chief source of federal largesse
• $62 million hike in subsidies for “international family planning/reproductive health”
• Office of Global Women’s Issues at the State Department, headed by an ambassador, and a USAID post of Gender Integration & Development Advisor
• Affirmation of the unratified UN treaty on women’s “rights” (CEDAW)

Unwelcome Operator

LATE-TERM ABORTIONIST LeROY CARHART APPEARS ABOUT AS WELCOME in Iowa as a tarantula under the bedcovers.

The Bellevue, Nebraska, abortionist announced recently he would plant businesses in Iowa, Indiana and Maryland, in the wake of Nebraska’s new statute outlawing the killing of babies old enough to experience pain. (Evidently the lead plaintiff in the litigation challenging the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban is seeking to get out of the kitchen.)

But the openness of laws in his targeted states does not have to continue, and state lawmakers in Iowa are scrambling to tighten their statutes before Mr. Carhart gets too comfortable in Council Bluffs, site of his current intentions, located just across the Missouri River from Omaha, some five to 10 miles from his Bellevue shop.

“With Republicans having taken control of the Iowa House and narrowed the gap in the Senate,” writes Peter Smith for LifeSiteNews.com, “pro-life legislators are seeking to take advantage of the opportunity to pass pro-life legislation, with the immediate concern being [Mr.] Carhart.

“‘I’m taking on the fight of Dr. LeRoy Carhart to keep him out of my state,’ Rep. Matt Windschitl (R-Missouri Valley), who is helping to craft the proposed law, told the Associated Press [AP],” writes Mr. Smith, who added, “[Rep.] Windschitl stressed that he wanted abortion abolished completely, but he thinks the fetal pain abortion ban is a good way to keep moving that agenda forward. …

 “‘If I had a magic wand, one of the things I would do is to stop abortion in the state of Iowa,’ continued [Mr.] Windschitl” in the AP story quoted by Mr. Smith. “‘But it is a step-by-step process.’”

The Council Bluffs city council isn’t happy either about its intended new business operator, voting to deny Mr. Carhart an opportunity to purchase city-owned land for his new shop; the council, however, appears not to have the authority to exclude him from operating on privately purchased property.

Nebraska’s “not wanted” sign took effect Oct. 15, without the usual near-automatic court challenge from the abortion industry and its pals in the American Civil Liberties Union.

While wrangling in Iowa, Mr. Carhart is ahead of the game in Maryland. After obtaining a redacted copy of his medical license application there, Operation Rescue president Troy Newman charges he “intentionally concealed the true nature of his risky late-term abortion practice from the Maryland Board of Physicians. Looking at his Maryland medical license application,” remarks Mr. Newman in an OR news release, “there is no mention of abortion anywhere. One is led to believe that [Mr.] Carhart is an emergency room physician and university professor. There is no indication on that application,” Mr. Newman notes, “that he is the most notorious late-term abortionist in the nation.”

Mr. Carhart even, according to Mr. Newman, used a “dummy corporation [name] instead of the actual name of his abortion business” in Bellevue. “It is obvious,” says Mr. Newman, “that [Mr.] Carhart attempted to deceive without technically lying. It shows a devious attitude,” he says, “that poses a danger in the field of medicine.”

Mr. Carhart has already followed through on his threat to abort babies in Maryland’s Germantown, in the general area of the nation’s capital. “On opening day at the Germantown facility,” reports LifeSiteNews.com, “hundreds of pro-life advocates and Christian pastors gathered, pledging to pray for [Mr.] Carhart’s conversion and to employ peaceful and legal means to oppose his deadly … business.”

Victory in Wisconsin

PERSISTENCE & PRAYER BROUGHT AN EARLY CHRISTMAS GIFT to Wisconsin pro-life citizens last week, when University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics officials announced UWHC was abandoning its two-year plan to begin committing second-trimester abortions in its Madison Surgery Center (MSC). Documents had shown, reports Kathleen Gilbert of LifeSiteNews.com, that the policy change was part of a plan to “supply the school with fresh fetal body parts” for its Nazistic “research” programs. UW is notorious as a leader in Frankensteinian experimentation.

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek quotes the Badger Herald: “UW Hospital & Clinics halted efforts … citing the safety and privacy of patients as the main reason, officials announced [last] Monday.” The UW Health spokesman Lisa Brunette said in the Badger Herald the plan for “‘second-trimester procedures’, which she said are not late-term abortions,” was being abandoned “to make sure all patients entering the clinic, regardless of what they are at MSC for, are not harmed by activists. …

“‘We want to make sure anyone going into that building is safe from harm and has their privacy respected,’ [Ms.] Brunette said,” in the Badger Herald story. Translation: Thanks to those pesky pro-life crime prevention interventionists who insist on their right to pray and assemble, killing babies turns out to be bad public relations for an institution that is supposed to be saving lives and promoting health. And the boycott of MSC’s medical services was not exactly boosting the bottom line.

Pro-Life Wisconsin’s Peggy Hamill shared credit with many, including members of the MSC staff. “‘We applaud the pro-life medical staff of the Madison Surgery Center who spoke in public opposition to this plan,’” she said, quoted by LifeSite’s Miss Gilbert. “‘Wisconsinites oppose dragging our publicly funded state university even further into the abortion business,’” she said.

Do-Gooders Doing Evil

WE’ve LONG KNOWN that Red China’s vicious “one-child” policy was creating a population imbalance because of the agrarian preference for boys. Now the fallout of its near-copycat policy is showing up in its southeast Asian neighbor. And the United Nations must come in for its share of the blame.

“After decades of involvement in coercive population control measures including abortion, contraception and sterilization of women,” writes Matthew Cullinan Hoffman for LifeSiteNews.com, “the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is admitting that policies it has championed are causing a serious imbalance in the ratio of male to female births in Viet Nam. …

“As LifeSiteNews reported in March,” writes Mr. Hoffman, “Viet Nam’s own statistics indicate that about 112 boys are being born for every 100 girls, with localized increases to between 115 to 123 boys for every 100 girls in some areas.”

The country’s Communist government, reports Mr. Hoffman, “actively encourages abortion with a coercively imposed two-child limit … . The overall abortion rate in Viet Nam is skyrocketing,” he writes, “and women now have an average of more than three abortions during their lifetime.”

Perhaps shedding crocodile tears (or maybe even wringing his hands), a UNFPA official involved in Viet Nam, Bruce Campbell, “laments,” writes Mr. Hoffman, “that the imbalanced sex ratio ‘could fuel the sex work trade as well as trafficking.’”

The Basics

LIFE ISSUES INSTITUTE’s BRADLEY MATTES HAS PRODUCED another outstanding video pro-life primer, this time on the abortion cartel’s marketing tactics. It’s part of LII’s “Facing Life Head On” series, designed for airing on television. If you’re one who has wondered how the abortion industry could grow so huge in a country whose very charter affirms the right to Life, watch interviews with former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino, former abortuary owner Carol Everett, former abortion mill administrator Abby Johnson and author David Kupelian by tuning in, via the Internet, to www.facinglife.tv/episode/season_5/episode_5/episode_505_video_full.htm.

Planned Parenthood’s Brag Book

Analysis authored by a key Capitol Hill source concerning the just-released 2008-2009 annual report of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). Much of the analysis is directly quoted from the chilling rhetoric of the PP report itself.

PPFA has released their 2008-2009 Annual Report. In prior years the Annual Report has listed the number of abortions conducted as well as the number of adoption referrals and prenatal clients. This year the report does not contain that information. However, a fact sheet released in September indicates that the number of abortions provided by PP in 2008 increased to 324,008. …

You may be interested in the following examples of information contained in the annual report:

• Planned Parenthood received $363 million in government grants and contracts. Note the report does not specify what portion of the $363 million was received from the federal government. …

• “Planned Parenthood affiliates undertook more than 80 research projects on such subjects as … advances in abortion service delivery.”

• “… [T]he upgrade of video surveillance at several health centers, which PPFA made possible with security grants during 2008-2009, now allows staff of local Planned Parenthood health centers to view, off-site or on-site, activities by opponents of legal abortion inside and outside buildings.”

• Planned Parenthood pregnancy prevention activities included a redesign of their online sex ed information site with “a contemporary look and feel that connects with the way young people ‘live’ online.”

• The report outlines PPFA’s domestic agenda for 2008-2009 including –

• “Achieve affordable, quality, comprehensive reproductive health care as part of healthcare reform.
• “Ensure that doctors, nurses and pharmacists who oppose contraception and abortion cannot deny patients vital healthcare information and services based on their personal biases.
• “Increase government funding for family planning program

• The report highlights international activities in nations around the world, including –

• “In Kenya, we worked with advocates who developed a grassroots campaign to increase public support for decriminalizing abortion.
• “[In] Latin America and the Caribbean, we offered training for health center security and tracking groups hostile to women’s health and family planning.
• “In northern Nigeria, we overcame the reluctance of a large religious organization to introduce basic reproductive health care through its more than 100 health centers. Now, more than 60 of those centers offer birth control and refer women to private medical providers if they need a safe abortion.
• “We worked with the Obama Administration to protect women’s health and promote sexual and reproductive rights around the world, including overturning the global gag rule [Mexico City Policy] and restoring US reproductive health and safe motherhood funding to the United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA]. We also began work on removing abstinence-only requirements in overseas AIDS funding and increas[ing] US foreign assistance for reproductive health, including $1 billion for family planning.”

Celebrating a Court Victory

Dec. 9, 2010, news release from House GOP Leader John Boehner (R-OH)

US House Speaker-designate John Boehner today commended the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas for upholding an Ohio law requiring a 24-hour reflection period before a woman can obtain an abortion. The decision, issued [Dec. 8], found that Planned Parenthood violated Ohio’s “informed consent” law in a 2004 case involving an abortion performed on a 14-year-old girl. Boehner issued the following statement:

“This is a critical victory in the fight to advance women’s health and defend the sanctity of unborn life. Women – especially minors – need to know about the risks of and alternatives to abortion. I commend the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas for its decision to uphold Ohio law, and I’ll continue to stand with all who seek to have a positive and meaningful impact in defending the right to life.”

Note: In 2008 Boehner and Ohio Reps. Steve Chabot, Bob Latta, Jim Jordan and Jean Schmidt joined Americans United for Life in an amicus brief with the Ohio Supreme Court against Planned Parenthood in the notification case. An additional ruling determining whether Planned Parenthood broke the law in failing to notify the girl’s parents before the abortion will follow an expected Feb. 7 trial.

Permission granted to quote with attribution. Reproduction rights granted only by express authorization.