Life Advocacy Briefing

Deepening the Unholy Alliance

THOSE WHO HOPE FOR A MORE BI-PARTISAN PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT will be disappointed by a move taken last month by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (NY) announced the promotion of his House colleague Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA) to add “candidate services” to her role as “chairwoman of national recruiting,” reports Kathleen Gilbert for LifeSiteNews.com.

To note that the voting record of Rep. Schwartz has drawn a 100% pro-abortion rating by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) is only a fraction of the story. To grasp how deeply the best interests of the abortion cartel are ingrained in this fourth-term Congresswoman, one must look at her donors and at her past.

“EMILY’s List, which specifically aims to help elect pro-abortionwomen to public office,” writes Miss Gilbert, “has provided more to [Rep.] Schwartz’s career than any other group by far at over $470,000, according to the contribution tracking site OpenSecrets.org.” A spokesman for EMILY’s List, reports Miss Gilbert, crowed that Rep. Schwartz was “‘deeply involved’” in the passage of ObamaCare and the exclusion of language barring abortion coverage.

Reports Matthew Archbold of the Creative Minority Report Internet blog, cited as source by Miss Gilbert, Rep. Schwartz “has not only staunchly supported abortion but helped found [a Planned Parenthood-affiliated] abortion clinic called the Elizabeth Blackwell Center, where she served as executive director for 13 years, between 1975-1988. [Mr.] Archbold notes, too,” writes Miss Gilbert, “that the clinic has been hit with ‘an assortment of lawsuits’ for violations including assault, battery, negligence and even forced abortions, quoting a report from the Philadelphia Daily News.”

Rep. Schwartz was a state senator in Pennsylvania at the time her abortuary declared bankruptcy in 2002. Now she is a US Congresswoman and the Democratic Party’s chief contact with House candidates and prospects across the country.

Deep-Six Six!

THE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE IS CONSIDERING whether to advance the nomination of Steve Six to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, a powerful life-time appointment. The committee has completed a hearing on the nomination of the controversial former attorney general of Kansas but has not yet taken a vote.

Mr. Six was appointed to the top Kansas attorney post by then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D), an open ally of Wichita’s late notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller. He continued the campaign begun by his discredited predecessor Paul Morrison to smear Mr. Morrison’s predecessor Phill Kline, one of the most courageous, principled pro-life officials ever elected to a top law enforcement post; it was Mr. Kline, readers might remember, who brought charges against both Mr. Tiller and Planned Parenthood, charges which are still pending against the abortion cartel and, in the case of Mr. Tiller, had not been settled at the time of the abortionist’s death. The prosecution of Planned Parenthood flipped into the persecution of Phill Kline, and both cases continue to be litigated.

The people of America would not be well served by Senate confirmation of this controversial politician and apparent friend of the abortion industry. Readers are urged to contact Senators serving on the Judiciary Committee with a request that they vote against the nomination of Steve Six to the federal bench.

The Capitol switchboard number is 1-202/224-3121. We publish the Judiciary Committee roster below.

Senate Judiciary Committee

Chairman Patrick Leahy (VT) and Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein (CA), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Chris Coons (DE), Richard Durbin (IL), Al Franken & Amy Klobuchar (MN), Charles Schumer (NY), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Herb Kohl (WI).

Ranking Member Charles Grassley (IA) and Republican Senators Jeff Sessions (AL), Jon Kyl (AZ), Tom Coburn (OK), Lindsey Graham (SC), John Cornyn (TX), Orrin Hatch & Mike Lee (UT).

Nice Try

SOME PEOPLE DEAL IN REALITY, SOME DON’t. In the latter category, evidently, belong Rep. Louise Slaughter and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, both New York Democrats, who announced last Monday their introduction of legislation to “put servicewomen on par with other women who get federal funds for abortion services when they faces rapes, incest or life risks,” reports FoxNews.com.

And the Slaughter/Gillibrand bill, which could move for a while in the Senate but should have no chance in the House, “would also allow servicewomen to use private funds,” reports Fox, “to access abortion services at US military facilities.”

Translation: their proposal would force taxpayers to be complicit in certain military abortions and would force military medical personnel – whose mission is to preserve life – to “offer services” which instead target and kill innocent human beings.

Our favorite extremist-quote-of-the-day came from Sen. Gillibrand: “‘It is an outrage,’” she said, as reported by Fox, “‘that the women in our military do not have the same basic protections for reproductive health care as women across the US. We must,’” she said, “‘put an end to this egregious injustice to the women who serve our country so proudly each day.’” What a perspective! (Do they really believe this stuff, or are they simply “earning” the support they’ll be seeking in 2012?)

Marjorie Dannenfelser, who leads the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, has a different take on the issue, telling Fox, “‘It is time for the abortion industry to stop using the military as a place to advance its agenda. … Medical facilities serving our military are meant to preserve life, not destroy it,’” she said. “‘Yet this bill would turn military facilities into abortion clinics,’” she told Fox, “‘using personnel and equipment subsidized by taxpayers.’”

The House measure is HR-2085, annoyingly named “Military Access to Reproductive Care & Health for Military Women Act,” with the even more annoying nickname: “MARCH for Military Women Act.” It has been assigned to the House Committee on Armed Services, chaired by Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA). Its Senate companion appeared not to have been filed at our deadline.

Co-sponsors of HR-2085 are Democratic Representatives Raul Grijalva (AZ); Lois Capps, Susan Davis, Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Doris Matsui, Jackie Speier, Fortney Stark, Henry Waxman & Lynn Woolsey (all CA); Diana DeGette (CO); Rosa DeLauro (CT); Corrine Brown & Alcee Hastings (FL); Mike Quigley & Janice Schakowsky (both IL); Leonard Boswell, Bruce Braley & Dave Loebsack (all IA); Chellie Pingree (ME); Donna Edwards (MD); John Olver (MA); John Conyers (MI); Keith Ellison (MN); Shelley Berkley (NV); Rush Holt, Frank Pallone & Steven Rothman (all NJ); Gary Ackerman, Eliot Engel, Maurice Hinchey, Nita Lowey, Carolyn Maloney, Jerrold Nadler, Charles Rangel & Edolphus Towns (all NY); Marsha Fudge (OH); James Moran (VA); and Gwen Moore (WI).

Notre Dame Trustee Bows Out

THAT CONTROVERSIAL NEW NOTRE DAME TRUSTEE – alumna Roxanne Martino – has stepped down from the post to which she had recently been named.

The controversy over her selection resulted from a report by the Cardinal Newman Society, described by Kathleen Gilbert of LifeSiteNews.com as “a Catholic university watchdog group,” documenting Ms. Martino’s donations to such notable abortion backers as EMILY’s List, which funds campaigns for female Democratic candidates who back decriminalized abortion.

The Cardinal Newman report was picked up by alumnus William McGurn, who slammed the selection in his Wall Street Journal column, calling the situation created by the appointment “worse than the Obama invitation.” The University of Notre Dame has been under scrutiny by advocates of Life both among alumni and among the public generally since conferring an honorary degree on the abortion President months after he assumed his post and then pressing charges – only recently dropped – against some 88 citizen protesters.  Ms. Martino resigned within a week of the McGurn airing of the controversy.

Readers may recall Life Advocacy Briefing’s report of the scandalous appointment two weeks ago. We are pleased to see this Notre Dame brouhaha settled quickly and appropriately, though we are saddened by the entire episode.

Countering the Fallacy

June 6, 2011, commentary by Steve Mosher, president, Population Research Institute,www.pop.org

You will be glad to learn that we all have official permission from the UN people-counters to panic about “overpopulation” – yet again.

The UN Population Division [UNPD] apparently decided that its earlier predictions about world population growth were too restrained. So it upped the ante in its 2010 report, revising almost all of its numbers upwards. According to the new numbers, the world’s population will reach 9.3 billion by the time 2050 rolls around – or several hundred million higher than earlier predictions. Not only that, instead of beginning to fall at that point, the UN now claims that the numbers will continue to grow until the end of the century, reaching 10.1 billion in 2100.

But these new predictions fly in the face of all we know about human fertility. It turns out that every last one of the factors affecting fertility – with the sole exception of advances in reproductive technology – are moving in an anti-natal direction. Factors like age at marriage, age at first child-bearing, educational levels, etc., are all tending to lower fertility. Birthrates are falling everywhere, farther and faster than anyone thought possible several decades ago.

The UNPD itself admits that 79 countries, including several dozen in the less developed world, now have fertility rates that are below the level needed to ensure the long-term survival of the population. Most of the rest, everybody except the UN now seems to know, are likely to cross this demographic fault line over the next few decades.

Whistling in this looming demographic darkness, the UNPD blithely predicts that people in low fertility countries will suddenly become enamored of babies again. You got that right. They predict, without providing a shred of evidence, that birthrates will somehow gravitate to the replacement levels again.

What planet are they living on?

Many of today’s young adults in Europe, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere are too enamored of sex, the city and the single life to think about marriage, much less about replacing themselves. A single Swedish woman may eventually bear one child as her biological clock approaches midnight, of course, but she is unlikely to bear a second. What was supposed to be the perfect family – a boy for you and a girl for me and heaven help us if we have three – has been scorned by moderns on their way to extinction. The declining number of traditional families has been unable to fill the fertility gap thus created.

The UNPD is supposed to be objective in its predictions, but its latest batch of junk science suggests that it has become anything but. In fact, after the retirement of Director Joseph Chamie, its prognostications seem more and more driven by politics. At the very least, it has produced numbers that tend to show population growth as far more exuberant than it really is.

The reason for this, I fear, is that the UN Population Fund provides part of the UNPD budget – and the UNFPA is first, last and always a population control group. The UNFPA seems to be using its funding to “leverage” the UNPD into producing numbers that the UNFPA can in turn use to justify the continuation and expansion of population control and abortion.

There is a real population crisis, of course; I am speaking of the crisis of aging and dying populations, for which there seems to be no easy solution. It is a crisis that, by reducing the amount of human capital available, will have a dramatic and negative impact on every aspect of life. Peter Drucker, the late management guru, wrote way back in 1997 that, “The dominant factor for business in the next two decades – absent war, pestilence or collision with a comet – is not going to be economics or technology. It will be demographics.”

Drucker was particularly concerned with the “increasing underpopulation of the developed countries,” but a decade later this reproductive malaise has spread even to the less developed world and is a truly global phenomenon.

The UN needs to stop spending time, money and resources trying to solve a problem that we’ve never had. Science shows that the world’s population is due to fall dramatically, not rise uncontrollably. To recklessly seek to curb procreation in countries that are, or soon will be, dying will only compound the tragedy.

People are our greatest resource. Everyone, rich or poor, is a unique creation with something priceless to offer to the rest of us.

March for Life Speeches

Congressional speeches delivered at the Jan. 24, 2011, March for Life, transcribed by Life Advocacy Briefing from C-SPAN.org videocoverage; more to follow in future editions.

Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH): I’m Congresswoman Jean Schmidt from southern Ohio. Where’s southern Ohio? You know, ladies and gentlemen, this fight did not just start thirty-eight years ago when people like Barbara and Jack Willke from Cincinnati, Ohio, said, Everybody has the right to life, including the unborn. This fight actually started well over a hundred and fifty years ago when folks like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Victoria Woodall, Sarah Norton and Alice Paul – yeah, those folks that fought for women’s rights: the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to run for public office, and the right of the unborn to have life. Elections have consequences. You have given me girl power! We have eight new Republican pro-life women. Thank you! Keep up the fight. Two years from now we have another election. Let’s continue the pro-life trend and make this whole town pro-life. God bless you and the USA.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN): I’m Mike Pence. I’m from Indiana, and I’m pro-life. We gather to mark the 38th anniversary of the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott. But we gather with hope in the shadow of a new pro-life majority on Capitol Hill. These are trying times in the life of our nation. Our economy is struggling, and our national government is awash in a sea of debt. And amidst these struggles, some would have us focus our energy on jobs and spending. But as you attest today by your presence, we must not remain silent when great moral battles are being waged. Those who would have us ignore the battle being fought over Life have forgotten the lessons of history. As in the days of “A House Divided,” America’s darkest moments have come when economic arguments trump moral principles. A nation that will not stand for Life will not stand for long. You know there can be no lasting prosperity without a moral foundation in the law.

And as to focusing on spending, let me agree. And let’s start by denying all federal funding for abortion at home and abroad. And one more item on spending: The largest abortion provider in America should not also be the largest recipient of federal funding under Title Ten. The time has come to deny any and all funding to Planned Parenthood of America.

Thank you for braving the cold one more time and saying to the heart of our national government, “We will fight on for Life. We will fight on for the unborn and the brokenhearted. We will fight on because we know, as Thomas Jefferson said, ‘God who gave us life gave us liberty … and God is just, and His justice cannot sleep forever.’” And we know this: We will win this fight because the deepest desire of every mother and father is to protect their child, at any cost, even the cost of their lives, and the American people will make this right. We will restore the sanctity of Life to the center of American law, because every American knows in their heart, this is the greatest nation on earth because we acknowledge the God-given rights to liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the unalienable right to Life. Thank you, and God bless you.