Life Advocacy Briefing

March for Life Today

TODAY AT NOON, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of pro-life citizens will rally in Washington, DC, for the 39th annual March for Life, marking the anniversary of the Jan. 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton edicts of the US Supreme Court. The rally will gather this year on the National Mall west of 8th Street, near the Smithsonian Castle. Following a rally offering stirring presentations by Members of Congress, clergy and key leaders from the pro-life community, marchers will walk the traditional route down Constitution Avenue, ending at the Supreme Court building in the vicinity of Capitol Hill.

We expect to publish transcripts from Congressional speeches at the March in coming editions of Life Advocacy Briefing.

Another State Defunding Planned Parenthood

THE NEW HAMPSHIRE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES VOTED 207 to 147 last Thursday on legislation to bar Planned Parenthood from “all state-controlled taxpayer funds,” reports former US Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, now a project director for the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. Along with Americans United for Life, SBA crafted the legislation, which now goes to the New Hampshire Senate.

It is our practice to hold off reporting such state legislative news until a measure is about to become law. But we find the overwhelming vote in the lower house in New Hampshire to be noteworthy, because of the wide margin, because of the defiance it expresses to the Obama Regime and its bypassing of New Hampshire’s Executive Council-enacted ban last year, and because the action in New Hampshire advances the critical cause of Planned Parenthood defunding.

We applaud New Hampshire’s lawmakers for standing on principle in defiance of Regime threats to cut off several states from federal Medicaid funding. We urge the US Senate to bow to the will of the people and advance the House-passed Planned Parenthood funding bans. And we urge candidates for public office this year to raise this critical issue in their campaigns.

Planned Parenthood has earned lawmakers’ extraordinary attention to their deadly practices and ugly purposes. (Visit http://www.maafa21.com to learn about Planned Parenthood’s roots and motives.)

Off Mission? Girl Scouts U.S.A.

IT’S GIRL SCOUT COOKIE SEASON, when innocent little girls are sent out by the adults who manage the Girl Scouts’ business to raise operating funds from unsuspecting neighbors.

Unsuspecting? Unknowing, for the most part, about the anti-American practices which have crept into the long-respected institution … the admission of a boy to Girl Scouts because he prefers to think of himself as a girl, reported recently; the demand by a Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona office worker that an off-duty worker strip off her pro-life t-shirt when she merely visited the office, also cited recently in pro-life media.

And now comes a report by Charlie Butts in OneNewsNow.com, that various regional Girl Scouts councils, including the Southern Arizona operation, are listed by Planned Parenthood on its teens sex-ed website as partners in Planned Parenthood’s “Real Life, Real Talk” teen sex indoctrination program.

The Planned Parenthood connection has drawn attention from Christy Volanski, whose daughters, reports Mr. Butts, “co-founded SpeakNowGirlScouts.com,” an Internet site which characterizes itself as “speaking the truth about Girl Scouts.”

The Girl Scout-focused watchdog team have cited also, reports Mr. Butts, the Arizona council “partner[ing] with other abortion rights advocacy groups,” and we found a reference on the watchdog website to the Girl Scouts being listed by Planned Parenthood in the “pro-choice clergy” category.

Mrs. Volanski focused on the Planned Parenthood sex-ed program in her interview with Mr. Butts, saying, “‘In my opinion, it promotes promiscuity. They’ve distributed materials to children [that are] considered to be pornographic by government agencies,’” said Mrs. Volanski in OneNewsNow. “Planned Parenthood is basically grooming future abortion and birth-control clients,’ she conclude[d]” in the interview.

And apparently using hijacking the Girl Scouts to abet its contribution to the sexual delinquency of America’s young girls.

Force and the Right to Life

AS PROMISING AS MUCH OF TODAY’s NEWS IS for the cause of Life in America, some in our nation would still dominate and even use force in others’ Life decisions. Two reports have surfaced in recent days which fall into the domain of attempted force. The good news is, force appears to have failed in both.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court last Tuesday overruled a lower court’s attempt to force a mentally ill woman to undergo an abortion and to undergo sterilization against her will.

A Norfolk Family & Probate judge had ruled on Jan. 6, reports Ben Johnson for LifeSiteNews.com, “that the 32-year-old could be ‘coaxed, bribed or even enticed … by ruse’ until she was sedated for the procedures.”

Ironically, the five-month pregnant mother, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, had aborted her first child, causing some pro-life advocates to raise the question of whether her early abortion might have brought about her mental illnesses.

In any case, the near-victim of the family court judge opposes abortion, a conviction which the judge, according to Mr. Johnson, characterized as “stemm[ing] from her ‘substantial delusional beliefs.’” The judge ordered not only the abortion, which was sought by the Massachusetts Dept. of Mental Health, but also the forced sterilization, which no party to the case had sought.

In overturning the order, Appellate Court Associate Justice Andrew Grainer noted, reports Mr. Johnson, that the lower court’s order “contradicted a 1982 state supreme court ruling allowing all the right to procreate. He added that [the family court judge] ‘simply produced the [sterilization] requirement out of thin air.’”

Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman commented, reports Mr. Johnson, “‘The nation should take note at how close we are coming to the forced abortion policy of Communist China. … Can we now dispense with the “pro-choice” label?,’” he asked in a message sent to LifeSiteNews.com. “‘The abortion cartel has never wanted choice. They exist on an insatiable diet of more and more abortion.’”

In a Texas case, it is the parents of a 14-year-old girl who are seeking to force her into aborting her child. One of the girl’s relatives reportedly threw her into a car in a prone position and threatened to beat her until she decided to kill her progeny.

The matter is still in court, where a judge has issued and then extended a temporary restraining order, due to expire any day, against a forced abortion ordered by another judge in December on petition of her parents. A guardian ad litem has been appointed to advise the court.

The girl and her baby are being represented by the Texas Center for Defense of Life (TCDL).

Texas has been the focus of an education program advising minor girls of their right to litigate against any attempt by parents or other authorities to force them to abort.

Said TCDL chief counsel Stephen Casey, quoted by Ben Johnson in LifeSiteNews.com, “‘We don’t want to destroy families; we want to protect the rights of these mothers to carry their children to term. Roe works both ways.’” Or it ought to.

Another Medical Advance in Adult Stemcell Therapy

HE HAD TO TRAVEL TO SWEDEN FOR THE OPERATION, but a 30-year-old tracheal cancer victim is now back at home in Baltimore recuperating from implantation of an artificial trachea formed from his own adult stem cells.

Doctors in the US had declared his cancer inoperable, but Christopher Lyles learned of an Italian doctor, a visiting professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, reports Dr. David Prentice in an FRC Blog entry, who “has constructed and transplanted replacement tracheas using the patient’s own bone marrow adult stem cells to build the new tissue.”

“‘He went home in very good shape,’” said Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, the doctor cited by Dr. Prentice.

“Because his own adult stem cells were used,” notes Dr. Prentice, “there was no need for drugs to prevent his body from rejecting the transplanted windpipe. Use of anti-rejection drugs, which have numerous side effects,” writes Dr. Prentice, “is a common problem in transplants using donated organs.”

Dr. Prentice notes the surgery for Mr. Lyles “is the second synthetic transplant,” the first occurring in June of last year. Ironically, “the synthetic tracheal scaffold” used for Mr. Lyles’s rescue “was designed and built by a Columbus, Ohio, company,” reveals Dr. Prentice, “and the bioreactor used to initiate growth of the adult stem cells on the scaffold for two days was built by a Massachusetts company.” Yet Mr. Lyles had to go to Sweden to seek care from an Italian doctor in order to avail himself of the American-built medical technology which has saved his life.

We could not miss the irony of Mr. Lyles’s adult stemcell success story coinciding with the announcement by Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, that NIH has just approved four more embryonic stemcell lines for taxpayer-funded experimentation, bring the total of subsidized lines to 146. Not a single embryo stemcell experiment has produced a cure or treatment.

Good News as We Mark Roe+39

Jan. 12, 2012, BreakPoint commentary by Chuck Colson; copyright Prison Fellowship Ministries

This month marks the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s hideous decision to legalize abortion on demand in the United States. Since then, some 50 million unborn children have lost their lives. The constant killing, with the blessing of both the government and the media, has coarsened our national life and deadened the consciences of many.

And for those of us who believe in the sanctity of human life – and the Imago Dei being implanted in every human being, these 39 years have been full of frustration and anguish in our so-far unsuccessful efforts to overturn Roe.

Adding insult to injury, the Obama Administration is seeking to increase access to abortion through the federal Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act , otherwise known as ObamaCare. According to CitizenLink, “Under ObamaCare regulations, insurance policies would be required to cover free to women all contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures and reproductive counseling methods that the Food & Drug Administration has approved.”

Knowing all this, it would be easy to get discouraged. But I’m not, and you shouldn’t be either. First of all, as Christians we believe in the sovereignty of God. So despair is a sin! Never despair!

Secondly, the pro-life cause is gaining tremendous ground in the states. Let me list just some of the signs of progress. According to Americans United for Life (AUL), five states have reacted to ObamaCare by restricting insurance coverage of abortion: Florida, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Virginia. Good start.

In addition, more than 30 states have either introduced or are laying the groundwork to introduce an opt-out bill as soon as their legislative calendars allow. Many have already passed such legislation like Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Utah [and] Mississippi.

Meanwhile, AUL sees “an unprecedented level of pro-life activity in the states,” with 70 pro-life bills passed in 2011. In all, pro-lifers in 47 states got their legislators to consider 460 bills, and they’re keeping the pressure on daily.

In Kansas, pro-life lawmakers are seeking to bolster legal protections for doctors, pharmacists and other healthcare providers opposed to abortions or abortion-inducing drugs. These legislators hope to block even indirect taxpayer support for abortion.

In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich signed four bills into law last year that either put additional restrictions on abortion or benefited the pro-life movement. Says Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio  Right to Life, “Never in the history of the pro-life movement have we had so many legislative measures enacted in one year.”

These Ohio laws prohibit public hospitals from performing abortions and ban abortion coverage in the insurance plans of local public employees. Pro-life college groups now cannot be denied use of school funds or facilities. Kasich also signed a law that makes it harder for minors to get abortions without parental consent. And the polls continue to show us gaining in public support.

Okay, folks. 2011 was a good year for the pro-life cause. And no, we haven’t overturned Roe v. Wade – yet. And we face entrenched interests that will fight us tooth and nail. But that’s because the tide is turning!

So even as we mark 39 years of abortion on demand, hang in there! And keep fighting the good fight.

Getting to Them in Kindergarten

Jan. 18, 2012, Washington Update by Tony Perkins, president, Family Research Council

            When a prominent homosexual magazine vowed, “We will teach your kids the new norms,” they meant it. And a massive 45-page attack on your child’s innocence reveals how.

This week, a coalition of American “health” organizations released its “National Sexuality Education Standards,” a document meant to transform what public schools teach your kids about sex.

“Ideally, comprehensive sexuality education should start in kindergarten,” the groups (which count Planned Parenthood and the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network as its advisors) insist. In the proposed timetable, children should be able to “define sexual orientation as the romantic attraction of an individual to someone of the same gender or a different gender” by age 10 and “identify parents or other trusted adults of whom students can ask questions about sexual orientation.”

Of course, this is completely in line with what homosexual activists have been advocating all along. “We want educators to teach future generations of children to accept queer sexuality,” Daniel Villarreal wrote last year. “[O]ur very future depends on it. … Why would we push anti-bullying programs or social studies classes that teach kids about the historical contribution of famous queers unless we wanted to deliberately educate children to accept queer sexuality as normal?”

Educators should not be undermining the values that parents are trying to instill in their children at home. Instead of remaining neutral, public schools are opening the door to complete and utter indoctrination.

And we wonder why the US is falling so far behind other countries in math and science scores! It’s simple. Instead of emphasizing math and science, we’re emphasizing sex. Education is no longer about making children smart; it’s about making them politically correct.

If that’s ever going to change, parents have to lead the charge.