Life Advocacy Briefing

Urgent: Senate to Vote on Hurwitz!

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER HARRY REID (D-NV) IS PRESSING FOR A VOTE today (Monday) on the nomination of Andrew Hurwitz to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Readers who receive Life Advocacy Briefing by electronic mail or fax are asked to call their two US Senators immediately via the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121 and urge them to vote “no” on Andrew Hurwitz.

“As a young law clerk, Hurwitz helped draft a lower court ruling that played a crucial influence in informing [Supreme Court Justice Harry] Blackmun’s landmark decision in Roe,” writes Family Research Council (FRC) president Tony Perkins in his June 8 Washington Update. (That’s Roe as in Roe v. Wade!) “Hurwitz has rushed to its defense,” notes Mr. Perkins, “recently authoring a law review article celebrating the ‘careful and meticulous analysis’ he helped craft in an opinion that has claimed the lives of tens of millions of unborn [children].”

Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, which monitors judicial nominees’ records, declared in an alert this morning, “In the 40 years since Roe, [Mr. Hurwitz] doesn’t seem to have learned anything about interpreting the Constitution in an intellectually honest fashion. … Long after ‘judicial activism’ became a bad word … [Mr.] Hurwitz goes on celebrating his role in one of the most activist Supreme Court decisions of all time. [He] never got the message that it’s no longer legally or publicly acceptable for judges to make stuff up and that pulling new rights from the constitutional ether is something judges deny, not brag about.”

Though Republicans have enough votes in the Senate to block cloture on the nomination (needing 60), defections are likely, so pro-life citizens must not take this for granted. Already both of Arizona’s GOP Senators, Jon Kyl and John McCain, are known to be backing the nominee from their state, according to The Blog of the Legal Times (BLT). GOP Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and Tom Coburn (OK) also joined Democrats and Sen. Kyl in voting the nomination out of the Committee on the Judiciary.

The panel’s ranking member, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) said at the time, reports BLT, “‘It is impossible to read Judge Hurwitz’s article and not conclude that he wholeheartedly embraces Roe and, importantly, the constitutional arguments supporting it. We’re not talking about an article this Justice published shortly after graduating law school; he published this 30 years after graduating from law school, when he was well established and a seasoned lawyer. In fact,’” noted Sen. Grassley, quoted by BLT, “‘he published this article shortly before joining the Arizona Supreme Court,’” to the shame of those who elevated him to that post.

“Even House Members like Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) understand the importance of this vote,” writes FRC’s Mr. Perkins, “and are taking the unusual step of drafting a letter from the House to the Senate urging the other chamber to vote ‘no’ on Hurwitz. ‘Seldom,’ they write,” quoted by Mr. Perkins, “‘does the Senate have the opportunity to review a nominee whose views on Roe v. Wade are so clearly known. Far more rarely do you as Senators have the opportunity to consider a judge who proudly claims [his] significant contributions to the creation of that opinion and the invention of “constitutional” protection for abortion. A nominee like Mr. Hurwitz, who played so notable a role in one of the most significant exercises of judicial activism in our nation’s history,’” write the House Members, “‘must not be confirmed.’”

Mr. Levey offers a list of Republican Senators he says “could use a reminder … to vote against cloture today.” In addition to Senators Kyl, McCain and Graham, he lists Senators Lisa Murkowski (AK), Saxby Chambliss (GA), Richard Lugar (IN), Susan Collins & Olympia Snowe (ME), Scott Brown (MA), John Thune (SC), Lamar Alexander (TN) and John Cornyn (TX).  Mr. Levey asks Montana citizens to remind Sen. Jon Tester (D) that their state is within the 9th Circuit; Mr. Tester is in a tight battle for re-election, and his voters would not take kindly to his embrace of an additional activist judge in their circuit.

Defending Military Integrity

A BATTLE IS BREWING IN THE SENATE to protect the US military from complicity in abortion.

Pro-life Senators will reportedly seek to excise from the Defense Authorization bill, which will come up for action by the end of this month, an amendment adopted in committee to require military medical facilities to offer – and taxpayers to underwrite – abortions on personnel claiming pregnancy by sex crime, broadening the long-standing “life of the mother” exception to an overall ban.

The amendment was offered in the Committee on Armed Services by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and backed in committee by GOP Senators John McCain (AZ), Susan Collins (ME) and Scott Brown (MA), as well as the panel’s Democratic members.

Readers should begin to call their Senators now (1-202/224-3121) to ask that they vote to restore the ban on military abortions when the Defense Authorization bill comes to the floor.

Religious Freedom Draws Patriots to the Streets

MORE THAN 50,000 PATRIOTS CONVENED in public squares across America Friday at noon for the second wave of Stand Up for Religious Freedom rallies, organized by Pro-Life Action League and Citizens for a Pro-Life Society. Similar rallies were held in more than 140 cities March 23.

This time, citizens rallied in some 164 cities, including Washington, DC, with the federal plaza in Chicago being the flagship site. Though the Chicago Tribune could be termed technically correct in reporting the crowd size at “more than 500,” the actual draw was some 3,600, up 40% from the 2,500 at the March rally. Cincinnati’s rally Friday drew 2,500, and Minneapolis and Santa Ana, California, tied for third place at 2,000.

As of this writing (Monday morning), rally captains from 118 cities had reported their counts, and organizer Eric Scheidler announced the count then totaled 51,703, while waiting for the balance of organizers to report in.

The rallies were spurred by the insistence of the Obama Regime in forcing religious employers – even overtly religious institutions – into including sterilization and contraception (including abortifacients) in their employee health benefit plans. Organizers are calling attention also to the conscience-trampling policies of the Obama Regime across a range of issues, including the Regime’s refusal to respect the conscience of military chaplains.

Walker Win Good for Babies

WHEN WISCONSIN VOTERS OVERWHELMINGLY AFFIRMED THE ELECTION of embattled GOP Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch last Tuesday, unborn children and their families were big winners over the abortion industry.

Though the attempted recall of the governor and other conservative state officials was spurred by the Walker Administration’s aggressive handling of the state’s budget woes and government employee benefit trims, the Walker record on abortion certainly contributed to his win.

“Gov. Walker has contributed more to building a culture of Life in Wisconsin than any other single public servant in our state’s history,” said Susan Armacost, political action director for Wisconsin Right to Life, who called him “a leader and courageous advocate for public policy initiatives that enhance the dignity of human life” and said Mrs. Kleefisch “has strongly advocated on behalf of legislation that would protect unborn children, pregnant women and the taxpayers of our great state.”

The man nominated by Democrats to take out the governor in last Tuesday’s recall, former Congressman Tom Barrett, compiled a radical record in support of the abortion cartel during his five terms in Congress from 1993 to 2003 and won endorsement in the recall election from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, while Gov. Walker enjoyed unified backing and robust volunteer efforts from the state’s various pro-life and pro-family organizations. Wisconsin Family Action’s Julaine Appling told LifeSiteNews.com that Mr. Barrett “‘is the opposite of Gov. Walker on every issue.’” He is also now the loser in one of this year’s most consequential contests.

Among Mr. Walker’s achievements in the 18 months he has served as governor: a ban on telemed abortions, exclusion of Planned Parenthood from a contract which was netting the abortion giant $130,000 in state funding and barring abortion coverage in state health exchanges under ObamaCare.

Louisiana Moves to Protect Life

LOUISIANA GOV. BOBBY JINDAL (R) LAST WEEK SIGNED “what he calls legislation to ‘protect the sanctity of human life,’” reports Dave Cohen for WWL.com, a New Orleans radio station.

“‘These new laws will help us foster a greater culture of life in Louisiana,’” Mr. Jindal said in a news release, quoted by Mr. Cohen, “‘and ensure that we continue to protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us.’”

One of the new laws “requires that women seeking abortions be given the option of hearing the fetal heartbeat,” writes Mr. Cohen, “and seeing ultrasound images prior to an abortion.”

A second measure, he reports, “creates a specific crime for performing an abortion … if the abortionist is not licensed to practice medicine in Louisiana. The legislation also,” writes Mr. Cohen, “creates the crime of ‘aggravated criminal abortion by dismemberment’ when the unborn child is dismembered in the course of a criminal abortion.’”

Sex Criminals in the Abortion Trade?

IN STATES WHICH PROTECT CITIZENS through licensing abortuaries, how about a bill to require such licensees to subject employees (including contractual workers) to criminal background checks – and to bar employment of those convicted of a sex crime?

Operation Rescue filed complaints last week against Capital Care, an abortion shop in Columbus, Ohio, over a series of botched abortions. In announcing the complaint, OR spokesman Cheryl Sullenger told OneNewsNow.com about the “‘checkered history’” of one of the shop’s abortionists, Thomas Michaelis, “‘who worked for another abortion clinic in Toledo,’” she noted in the ONN story.

The abortionist, she revealed, “‘has a conviction for attempted gross sexual imposition, voyeurism and public indecency when he tried to molest little girls who came over to his house to play with his daughter.”

It seems to us that pregnant mothers who are undergoing enough stress to take them to an abortuary are particularly vulnerable to the so-called medical personnel who attend to them for confidential, invasive “medical service” inevitably involving private body parts. It seems to us that the public would adopt that point of view if we bothered to bring the sensitivity of this “procedure” to their attention and that they would embrace the public policy of excluding sex convicts from such “sensitive” work.

It seems to us also that such legislation would offer the pro-life community an opportunity to expose this particular dirty big secret of the abortion industry: the cartel is rife with such bottom-feeders as the Ohio child molester. Such organizations as Operation Rescue and Life Dynamics could supply all the data needed to back up such a claim.

It is past time for America’s pro-life lawmakers to hang a warning sign on these shops of ill repute by exposing the alarming incidence of sex criminals working in abortuaries.

Shoddy Sponsor

PLANNED PARENTHOOD HAS LAUNCHED ‘MASSIVE AD BUYS’ in Florida, Iowa, Virginia and Washington, DC, complaining about GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney’s pro-life stand, reports Tony Perkins in his May 30 FRC-Action Update.

The amused Mr. Perkins notes Planned Parenthood’s statement to the New York Times: “‘This is a very small down-payment on what we intend to do to make sure people are very clear where the candidates stand.’ …

“Talk about a political miscalculation,” writes Mr. Perkins. “Days after Gallup said there have never been fewer pro-choicers in America, Planned Parenthood sinks its cash into a ‘pro-choice’ pitch. Obviously,” he observes, “[Planned Parenthood CEO] Cecile Richards is desperately trying to stay relevant in an increasingly pro-life society, but that will be tough in a country where less than 41% identify with her losing agenda.

“She can triple Planned Parenthood’s investment in the Obama campaign,” writes Mr. Perkins, “but Richards can no longer count on women’s blind support. After all,” he notes, “the majority of female voters (46%) align with Romney – not Obama (44%) – on abortion.”

Mr. Perkins concludes his remarks with this shot across Planned Parenthood’s bow: “Regardless of their ideologies, most voters would probably prefer to get their campaign information from organizations they can trust – you know,” writes Mr. Perkins, “the ones that haven’t been implicated in fraud (87,075 cases in Texas alone), government overbilling, criminal cover-ups, falsifying medical facts, safety violations, prostitution and sex trafficking assistance, medical malpractice, racist donations and gender discrimination.”

Nice Work, Life Decisions!

OUR COLLEAGUES AT LIFE DECISIONS INTERNATIONAL SCORED A BIG WIN with their boycott of a major corporation which had been funding Planned Parenthood.

Life Decisions decided to make an example of Bob Evans Farms, Inc., by issuing a specific call to LDI subscribers to focus on the restaurant chain, whose family-friendly, down-home, farm-style brand was clearly in conflict with its financial support to the nation’s chief purveyor of abortion.

LDI subscribers were given detailed contact information for the Bob Evans CEO and asked to contact him with their opinion of such a discordant use of the company’s resources. What made the tactic a boycott was the further message that the caller or writer would no longer be patronizing the company’s popular restaurants until the CEO pledged to break off its relationship with Planned Parenthood in a manner that would satisfy LDI.

It took less than a week. Patronizing Bob Evans restaurants no longer abets abortion, and the leadership of this corporation are now educated on what Planned Parenthood actually contributes to American decline. (“If you want them to see the light,” the late Sen. Everett Dirksen famously and wisely said, “you have to make them feel the heat.”)

Readers who wish to learn more about LDI and its Corporate Boycott project can find much information via the Internet at www.fightpp.org or may contact LDI’s Doug Scott at [email protected] or by telephone at 1-540/631-0380.

Planned Parenthood Endorses Guess Who

PLANNED PARENTHOOD ACTION FUND (P.P.A.F.) HAS OFFICIALLY ENDORSED the abortion President for re-election, saying, reports Jody Brown for OneNewsNow.com, that “Barack Obama has ‘stood with Planned Parenthood time and again when it mattered most.’” Truer words never passed the lips of the abortion giant’s leaders.

Action Fund president Cecile Richards, who is also CEO of Planned Parenthood itself, appears in a video endorsement, reports Ms. Brown, and “goes on the attack” against putative GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, “describing him as ‘out of touch.’” She goes on, writes Ms. Brown, to “reassur[e] Planned Parenthood supporters that Pres. Obama ‘has our back.’”

In its endorsement, PPAF declares, reports Ms. Brown, “‘[The President] has been a champion of women’s health, working to expand women’s access to affordable, quality care. … He’s done more for women’s health than any President in history.’”

“Women’s health” is PP code language for “abortion.”