Life Advocacy Briefing

Voters Are Speaking

VOTER DISCONTENT WITH OBAMA-CARE IS CREDITED BY THE MEDIA with a stunning win last Tuesday in a special Congressional election in the St. Petersburg area.

Los Angeles Times writer David Lauter called the win for now-Rep. David Jolly “a significant victory [for Republicans], … holding onto a seat in a swing district in Florida that Democrats had high hopes of capturing after a campaign that focused heavily on Pres. Obama’s healthcare law. …

“The Republican theory in this case,” writes Mr. Lauter, “was that a heavy emphasis on ObamaCare would motivate conservative voters to head to the polls, making up for [Mr.] Jolly’s drawbacks as a candidate, which included his current profession – Washington lobbyist – and his relative lack of money. Although both sides cautioned in advance against over-interpreting the results of special elections,” he continues, “that Republican bet paid off. That’s bad news for Democrats and probably will set off a new round of nervousness among party strategists and officeholders as they look ahead to the fall.”

Though Democrats have, since the election, pointed out repeatedly that the district has been held for decades by a Republican, the late Rep. Bill Young, Mr. Lauter notes that Pres. Obama carried this district in both 2008 and 2012 – no doubt among the reasons his party was predicting victory and investing huge sums behind their candidate, a woman who had run for governor in 2010.

Notable Quote

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-SanFrancisco), appearing before the press March 13 after the Florida GOP special election victory: “I’m very proud of our House Democrats and how they have not only embraced the Affordable Care Act that they helped create it, but how proud they are of it. I think that the Republicans are wasting their time using that as their electoral issue, and they will find that out.” Right.

Carried Away, Ms. Richards?

PLANNED PARENTHOOD C.E.O. CECILE RICHARDS CALLED HER OUTFIT “‘a lifeline for folks in this state,’” during a fundraiser in Montana for a US Senate candidate last week, reports LifeSite’s Ben Johnson, citing the Montana Standard as source.

The Butte newspaper, writes Mr. Johnson, “did not provide a direct quotation” but reported Ms. Richards “said Planned Parenthood has helped sign up 27 million women in the country for free health insurance through [the Affordable Care Act]” – a rather surprising claim.

“What is indisputable,” notes Mr. Johnson, “is that Planned Parenthood employees are actively seeking ObamaCare enrollees nationwide. Teams of employees,” he reports, “are active in eight states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Roughly half of their canvassing,” he reports, “has been done in Spanish.”

The LifeSiteNews report further quotes Planned Parenthood from a “press release [stating] that its loyalists ‘are knocking on an average of 20,000 doors a day.’ The New York Times followed the abortion industry’s employees around Florida last month,” reports Mr. Johnson, “as they scurried to add uninsured people to the rolls. That day,” he writes, “they contacted 2,623 people and enrolled only 25, less than one in 100. To enroll 27 million Americans at that rate,” he writes, “they would have had to contact 2,842,105,263 Americans (approximately nine times the entire US population).”

Funny as that claim is, Mr. Johnson soberly adds, “Much of that activism is funded by US taxpayers. Planned Parenthood Montana, where [Ms.] Richards was speaking, is one of three of the abortion industry’s affiliates to receive more than $655,000 in taxpayer funds from the Obama Administration to hire ‘navigators,’ employees who are supposed to assist people signing up for plans through ObamaCare health exchanges.” The population of Montana in 2013, according to the US Census Bureau, was estimated at 1,005,292.

‘Waking Up’ to Life?

ACTUAL CHANGE REMAINS TO BE SEEN, but we were encouraged last week to read a report, by LifeSiteNews.com writer Dustin Siggins, on a meeting between “a group of bloggers and reporters” and Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus during the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

“‘I think that sometimes we spend too much [time] talking about where we’re weak,’” Mr. Priebus told LifeSiteNews, according to the Siggins report. “‘Our party has to grow where we’re weak; … we also have to grow where we’re strong,’” Mr. Priebus said concerning his decision in January to take his fellow RNC members to the March for Life in Washington. “‘We wanted to remind people about where we stand on Life, [so] we went to the March for Life, as an RNC.’”

He went on to say, writes Mr. Siggins, “‘The RNC going to the March for Life, for me, was a little bit of a wake-up call for me as chairman.’”

The RNC proceeded, after attending the March, to adopt a resolution encouraging candidates and consultants to speak up on Life. We previously published the text of that resolution and have made it available to Life Advocacy’s support team.

Too Late?

FORMER REP. BART STUPAK HAS RESURFACED with an op-ed in USA Today headlined “Contraception Mandate Doublecross.”

Readers may recall the Michigan Democrat, who retired shortly after delivering the deciding votes to pass ObamaCare after claiming to have achieved a compromise with the President on coverage of contraception and abortion.

Still expressing pride in having voted for the law as supposedly “providing 32 million Americans with access to quality, affordable health care,” Mr. Stupak declares: “Today, as a private citizen, I’m proud to stand with the Green and Hahn families and their corporations, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, in seeking to uphold our most cherished beliefs that we, as American citizens, should not be required to relinquish our conscience and moral convictions in order to implement the Affordable Care Act.”

Welcome, Mr. Stupak, to Barack Obama’s America. And thank you for stepping forward as the Supreme Court prepares, just days from now on March 25, to hear oral arguments in the Green and Hahn challenges to the contraceptive mandate you thought the President had promised you would never happen.

‘POLST’ Popping Up at State Level

THAT EUTHANASIA-ADVANCING BILL we wrote about in last week’s Life Advocacy Briefing has now surfaced not only in Congress as HR-1173 but now also at the state level in the Illinois State Senate (as SB-3076).

We urge our Illinois readers to weigh in against the measure, which is in the state senate’s Committee on Public Health, by contacting the Illinois Federation for Right to Life at 1-217/544-9700. More information on the “Illinois Physician’s Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment” Act is available on the IFRL Internet website at www.ifrl.org/ifrl/index.html.

We urge readers in other states to contact their local right-to-life or pro-family organizations to ascertain whether this dangerous legislation is pending in other state capitols as well.

And we renew our request for readers to call their Member of Congress to ask for a “no” vote on HR-1173, the “Blumenauer POLST” bill.

Shameful Ruling

THOUGH THE ABORTION INDUSTRY HAS LOST much support among an awakening public, the industry’s fellow travelers in the judiciary continue to thwart justice and public protection when faced with decisions involving the death purveyors.

The latest example is Shawnee County (Kansas) District Judge Franklin Theis, who last week overturned the conscientious revocation of the medical license of Tiller abettor Ann Kristin Neuhaus.

Her medical license was revoked “for incompetency,” reports Kirsten Andersen for LifeSiteNews.com – not even just suspended – by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts after “she was unable to prove she had given required mental health exams to 11 pregnant girls aged 10 to 18 prior to referring them back to [the late, notorious George] Tiller’s facility for late-term abortions. Without [Ms.] Neuhaus’s second opinions confirming severe mental distress,” notes Ms. Andersen, “[Mr.] Tiller would have been legally barred from performing abortions on the girls.”

The medical licensing board opened an investigation of Ms. Neuhaus in 2006, notes Ms. Andersen, “after Cheryl Sullenger of pro-life watchdog group Operation Rescue filed a complaint alleging the doctor had fraudulently authorized 11 minors’ late-term abortions for Tiller … under Kansas’s ‘health of the mother’ exception.

“In her complaint, [Ms.] Sullenger noted that [Ms.] Neuhaus had no psychological training whatsoever,” writes Ms. Andersen, “and what limited records she passed on to Tiller were created with an online ‘answer tree’ program called ‘PsychManager Lite’ and took no more than two to three minutes to complete.’” Ms. Sullenger, at the time, declared, “‘If she’s ever allowed to practice medicine again, it will be a travesty.’”

Enter Judge Theis, who ruled that the state’s medical licensing board had “jumped to conclusions,” reports Ms. Andersen, “based ‘solely on an inference’ that [Ms.] Neuhaus’s lack of records meant she had not actually performed the required exams. While [Judge] Theis admitted that Neuhaus’s record keeping fell far short of ‘any reasonably required standard of care for their maintenance,’ he said that alone was not enough to justify revoking her license. Just because Neuhaus could not prove she had performed the mental health exams, he argued,” writes Ms. Andersen, “did not mean that they were not done.”

The judge used up 186 pages in issuing such a mockery of justice, a ruling which we hope the Board will appeal.

Given that so few medical licensing boards in the US are willing ever to take appropriate action against the bottomfeeders that infect the medical profession through the abortion industry, it would be a shame if the Kansas board, after investing “six years and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to finally revoke [the Neuhaus] license,” as reported by LifeSiteNews, does not prevail in its efforts to fulfill its duty to protect the public.

Quoteworthy

Charmaine Yoest, PhD, president and CEO of Americans United for Life, quoted in an AUL media alert responding to a CNN poll showing strong opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion: “Politically insulated and coddled by powerful, partisan friends and allies, the abortion lobby and its business interests have prospered on taxpayer funds and subsidies. Consider this, the nation’s largest abortion provider Planned Parenthood received more than $540 million in taxpayer monies, nearly half of its $1.2 billion in revenue. How many people realize that so many millions in taxpayer monies support the abortion industry leader? And how many people understand that coercive policies in ObamaCare compel the support of a life-ending agenda, such as the HHS mandate?”

Abortion Hurts Women, Too

Commentary by Dr. Alveda King, circulated via the Christian Newswire

When Rolling Stone magazine published Lauren Rankin’s “The Seven Most Common Lies About Abortion,” what we discovered was a misstatement of the position of the reasonable voices of proponents of life and natural women’s health. Among the so called “lies” the article lists are “Abortion causes breast cancer,” “Most women regret having an abortion,” and “Abortion is psychologically damaging to women.”

If you read the article, you will discover that there is a lot of pain and frustration on both sides of the line. The pro-choice voices believe that they represent the reproductive rights of the women who go there to the abortion clinic to be rid of the lives in their wombs. The pro-life voices believe that they are there to protect the women and their babies. One thing that both sides get right; women need respect and protection; but from what? And where are the civil rights for the babies and even the fathers? Most importantly, where is the love?

Here is the truthful platform of pro-life combined with pro-women advocacy groups:

• Many women regret abortions. I am one of the women who experienced abortion and live to regret it.

• Abortion and carcinogenic birth control – more appropriately termed “fertility blockers” – are linked to breast cancer.

• In many cases, abortion has been found to be linked to cases of suicide, depression and other psychological disorders.

• In many cases where physical and psychological issues are noted in post-abortive women, it is often also noted that no such issues were present in the lives of these mothers prior to their abortions.

• Added to these facts [is] the truth that fathers also suffer damaging psychological effects after their children are aborted.

In her book Recall Abortion, Janet Morana uncovers the duplicitous agenda of the pro-abortion industry, debunking lies such as those told by Rolling Stone and Planned Parenthood.

SNMA spokesman Kevin Burke and Oil of Joy Ministries have documented case studies of links to abortion and incarceration.

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, is often behind many reports and studies such as this one by Rolling Stone.

What Planned Parenthood and their advocates refuse to admit is that abortion numbers in New York and Mississippi are upside down with more African American babies being aborted than born. In 2010 in Georgia, my home state, 53% of all abortions were on Black mothers and babies; with a distant 23% on Hispanic minorities, and 24% on Caucasian and “others.”

Finally, let’s remember that the driving force behind the HHS mandate, which seeks to force taxpayers and the working class to fund fertility blockers and easy access to abortion, is Planned Parenthood’s never satisfied lust for our money and our blood.

These lies of the abortion industry hide behind clever promises to end poverty and improve our quality of life. As Fr. Frank Pavone often asks: “How can killing the poor serve the poor?” He has been reminding us for years that “we are our brothers’ keepers.” I add that we are also our sisters’ and our daughters’ keepers. I don’t know about you, but my daughters and granddaughters, my sons and grandsons need good jobs and good education, not the pain and suffering that are often linked to abortion and carcinogenic birth control.

Let’s end the word games and face the facts. Abortion kills babies and hurts mothers and fathers. Stop the lies. Defund Planned Parenthood. Stop the HHS Mandate. Recall abortion. Let’s make love and life, not war on the wombs of women.