Life Advocacy Briefing

Reinforcements

WE WELCOME THE ARRIVAL OF TWO NEW MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, elected last Tuesday in a pair of special elections in North Carolina.

In the 3^rd district, Dr. Greg Murphy (R) handily defeated Democrat Allen Thomas, 61:7% to 37.5%, succeeding the late Rep. Walter Jones (R), who passed away early this year. Rep.-elect Murphy had declared on his campaign website: “I am solidly pro-life and will do all within my power to protect the innocent unborn. As a Christian, I also will work to show compassion for those having to make this decision and provide as many alternatives as possible, including reducing barriers to adoption.”  Mr. Thomas had posted this declaration on his campaign website: “Women have the right to follow their convictions within the framework long established by the US Supreme Court over 40 years ago, and that should remain. A matter of long-settled law by the SCOTUS. The truth is, this is a state-by-state issue, and if it becomes a federal issue again, it will be settled by the courts.”

The race in the 9^th district was more closely followed by the national media. Last Tuesday’s election was precipitated by a judicial ruling invalidating the results of last November’s election because of claimed election interference by a candidate’s staff. Though the district has long been held by the GOP, month-old polls had shown Republican Dan Bishop significantly lagging behind his opponent, who had also campaigned for the seat in 2018. After last-minute campaigning by Pres. Donald Trump and Vice Pres. Mike Pence, then-State Rep. Bishop narrowly won the final tally, defeating military veteran Dan McCready, who had been endorsed in 2018 by NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, according to the website of Feminist Majority PAC.  Rep.-elect Bishop had posted on his campaign website: “Dan is pro-life and will fight extremist Democrats to stop infanticide and late-term abortion on demand.”

North Carolina’s voters have spoken. Amen.

The Unnerving Reality

TWO VERY PUBLIC VENUES LAST WEEK GAVE AMERICANS a look behind the asbestos curtain of the abortion industry: A California courtroom and the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington.

In California, the trial of investigative journalist David Daleiden and his co-defendant Sandra Merritt is proceeding day by day, with the result that court-embargoed videos are being shown in the courtroom, and the dirty, revolting truth about the abortion industry and its butchery of developing babies for the harvesting of their organs is being brought to public view. Near the close of this Life Advocacy Briefing, we reprint a commentary by Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins reporting on some of the revealing testimony and video revelations.

In Washington, the House Republicans, frustrated by daily rebuffs of their just as daily efforts to bring forth legislation to require medical personnel to treat abortion survivors the way they treat “wanted” newborns who are born in medical distress, staged a public – and publicized – hearing of their own last week, commandeering a room in the Capitol Visitors Center to present heartwrenching testimony from those who have experienced abortion survivals. We close this Life Advocacy Briefing with Mr. Perkins’s commentary on that hearing to furnish you the compelling details. We encourage our readers to share these reports with other, less well-informed citizens who need to learn the reality of what “a woman’s right to choose” actually means.

Candidate Watch

• SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (D/S-VT) CALLED FOR TAXPAYER FUNDING of international pogroms in the name of population control during a CNN-sponsored “climate change town hall” Sept. 4. Notes Dave Andrusko, staff writer for National Right to Life (NRL News), the candidate for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination “riffed on the Mexico City policy, which the Trump Administration reinstated and then amplified in its 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy. The objective,” explains Mr. Andrusko, “is to ensure that no US taxpayer money is funneled to foreign non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning. To Sanders,” declares Mr. Andrusko, “this is horrible. ‘And the Mexico City agreement [sic], which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that are – that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd.’” If that comment was not bad enough, consider this false declaration from the Senator, quoted from the same NRL News report and also reported on Fox News: “‘So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, it’s something that I very, very strongly support.’” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) commented, reports NRL News, “‘That’s horrifying.’” Said CNN host S.E. Cupp, whom Mr. Andrusko describes as a conservative, “‘Let’s just state for the record: talking about needing “population control” through abortion for the sake of climate is talking about eugenics. The fact that Bernie Sanders is willing to entertain this vile idea is not only disgusting, it should be disqualifying.’” It is also a complete misreading of the desires of women in the underdeveloped world, where children are cherished and are endangered by childhood diseases and poor medical care; the places Sen. Sanders would blanket with US-paid population suppressers are the very places where women most desire motherhood and where mothers and dads most prize as many babies as can be conceived and delivered.

• THOUGH CONSISTENTLY VOTING AGAINST PRO-LIFE MEASURES as a Member of Congress, US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), as a Democratic Presidential candidate “dissented slightly from the pro-abortion consensus over the weekend,” reports LifeSiteNews.com’s Calvin Freiburger, “by expressing support for banning at least some abortions in the third trimester.” In a Sept. 8 interview with libertarian commentator Dave Rubin, notes Mr. Freiburger, “she described her overall stance as a ‘more libertarian’ belief in government’s role, that ‘government really shouldn’t be in that place of dictating to a woman the choice that she should make. … I think that there should be some restrictions, though,’ she added,” according to LifeSiteNews. When the interviewer inquired about a “‘cutoff point,’” the 4^th-term Congresswoman answered, “‘I think the third trimester, unless a woman’s life or severe health consequences [are] at risk, then there shouldn’t be an abortion in the third trimester.’ [Rep.] Gabbard’s answer leaves significant wiggle room,” notes Mr. Freiburger, “as to whether she would support a meaningful late-term abortion ban, given how current Supreme Court precedent [in Doe v. Bolton] defines how ‘health’ is to be understood in the context of abortion. … Even so,” the LifeSiteNews writer opines, “[Rep.] Gabbard’s answer stands out amid the rest of the Democrat field, all of whom are running on a platform of effectively unlimited abortion at taxpayer expense, and several of whom have announced plans to enshrine and expand Roe in federal law, effectively banning states from passing any significant pro-life laws.”

In the States

• THE NEW TEXAS LAW took effect Sept. 1 barring tax funds being spent, reports Texas Right to Life (TRL), to “fund or benefit abortion providers or their affiliates in any capacity.” The pro-life group stresses “Any funding that the abortion industry receives, whether explicitly for the purpose of abortions or not, indirectly subsidizes abortions and forces [taxpayers] to fund the destruction of innocent human life.” This should be obvious, but it does require thinking, of which some of our public officials appear incapable. “The new law,” explains the grassroots group, “prohibits state, city and county governments in Texas from engaging in financial activities that benefit abortion providers or their affiliates. This includes leases, donations, contracts or any commercial exchanges with the abortion industry” – provisions which go beyond the typical taxpayer funding bans, which usually pertain only to state (or federal) government and which often are attached to specific appropriations, such as Medicaid. “The bill also bans local governments from lobbying on behalf of abortion providers and their affiliates,” notes TRL, “which will end the City of Austin’s current practice of lobbying for Planned Parenthood funding at the state level.” Unfortunately, the new law cannot impair current contracts, so the City of Austin’s $1-per-year lease of city property to Planned Parenthood will not be impaired until the expiration of the dastardly 20-year lease, entered into after the bill was developed but before the law became effective.

The Revolting Truth Is Coming Out

Sept. 9, 2019, Washington Update commentary by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins

            It was a partnership Planned Parenthood’s former president once bragged she was “proud” of. “Proud,” apparently, of cutting into tiny baby bodies when their hearts are still beating. “Proud,” it turns out, of putting women through riskier abortion procedures to get better, more valuable baby organs. And “proud,” most of all, that her medical directors were negotiating higher prices for the little livers, limbs and brains her business was harvesting.

            Four years later, pride is the last thing anyone felt at the courtroom where the gory details of Planned Parenthood’s baby butcher ring came tumbling out. While the country’s abortion industry continues to come after David Daleiden for exposing the black market for tiny organs, the real crimes are being laid out in sickening detail. StemExpress, one of the companies who sells these little human pieces like car parts from a dropdown menu, admitted that it sold fresh hearts and baby heads.

            In the undercover video, CEO Cate Dyer (known as Doe 12 [in the Daleiden trial court proceeding]), freely talks about the great demand for “raw fetal tissue” and that the “insanely fragile” neural or brain tissue is best shipped in a “whole calvarium” or head, whereupon Daleiden says, “Just make sure the eyes are closed.” “Yeah,” laughs Cate in response. “Tell the lab techs it’s coming … it’s almost like they don’t want to know what it is.”

            LifeSiteNews, who covered the preliminary hearing, reported that the group’s CEO went so far as to say that the baby’s head could be procured attached to the baby’s body or ‘could be torn away.’” When Peter Breen, Daleiden’s attorney from the Thomas More Society, pressed the StemExpress CEO about its connection with studies that require a beating heat, she hesitated. When the judge demanded an answer, she said reluctantly, “Yes, we have provided heart tissue to Stanford [University].”

            Afterward, Breen made sure the media understood the gravity of her answer. “That is an especially gruesome admission, but it begs the question: how did they get these fully intact human children? If you have a fetus with an intact head and an intact body and intact extremities, that is something that would indicate that child was born alive, and then had their organs cut out of them, or  that that child was the victim of an illegal partial-birth abortion. Both of these are violent acts.”

            They’re also acts, many of us would point out, that are grossly illegal. Planned Parenthood and StemExpress don’t see it that way. As far as they’re concerned, this baby-carving business is just “revenue diversification.” If that’s the case, it’s time for taxpayers to demand a little diversification of their own – away from groups who see unborn children as commodities to be bought and sold.

            Help us remind House Democrats the price of their alliance with organizations like Planned Parenthood. Send Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) a newborn baby hat as part of FRC’s End Birth Day Abortion campaign [Internet address: https://endbirthdayabortion.com/update]. Every life should be welcomed into the world and protected by law!

Heartbreaking Truth

Sept. 10, 2019, Washington Update commentary by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins

            It’s not every day that you see the GOP caucus conducting business in the House visitors center. But today wasn’t just any day. It wasn’t just a defining moment for the Republican Party but the Democratic Party as well. For the first time in years, the House Minority held a pro-life hearing in open defiance of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). They’d tried to schedule the event through regular order – but the answer was the same as the other 80 times they asked Democrats to help them stop infanticide: No.

            Even when House liberals refused to give them a committee room, Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) wasn’t deterred. His party would have held the event in the basement if it meant more Americans would finally know the truth about the killing of newborn babies. “One of the things you don’t really appreciate until you’re here,” Cong. Ron Estes (R-KA) told me on Monday’s Washington Watch, “is how much power the Speaker controls over what items get to the floor.” This was “a struggle,” he insisted. “Not only would [Democrats] not schedule a hearing, but they wouldn’t allow us to have a hearing room,” Estes explained. “But we’re pushing forward.”

            If Speaker Pelosi and Co. want to pretend that perfectly healthy infants aren’t being slaughtered in the name of “personal choice,” that’s her decision. But conservatives aren’t playing along. These are real human lives hanging in the balance – and this afternoon, listening to one chlling story after another, even Democrats couldn’t ignore it.

            “I am one of the lucky ones,” Melissa Ohden wrote in an emotional appeal, “to not only survive an abortion but to have someone fight to save me. But no one should have had to fight for me. They should have been expected and mandated to do so.” Most unborn babies are scalded by saline solution in the womb for three days during an abortion. Melissa, the medical records show, was poisoned for five. She wasn’t supposed to live – not through the procedure and certainly not through the complications of surviving it.

            But survive she did. “I’m alive today,” she says, “because life-saving medical care was right down the hallway for me – once someone decided they couldn’t leave me to die.” Not everyone, nurse Jill Stanek knows, is so lucky. During her time at Christ Hospital in Illinois, she heard and experienced countless horror stories of babies with beating hearts left to die, abandoned in dirty laundry rooms, or lying cold and naked on medical scales. With gut-wrenching clarity, she describes moms screaming for someone to help their babies when they survived. She remembers the excruciating moments when women realized their little children didn’t have the physical deformities their doctor had warned them about. And realizing, too late, that they were perfect.

            So many mothers, she shakes her head, had no idea their babies might be aborted alive. One mother was beside herself to see that her tiny son wasn’t just breathing, but that he didn’t have the disability she’d aborted him for. A nurse “rushed to call a neonatologist … but after the neonatologist examined the baby, he said that there was nothing he could do … [T]he little guy had been born too early. The mother was so traumatized that my friend had to give her a tranquilizer. The baby had to be held by his grandmother for the half-hour that he lived.”

            The refrain from the nurses was the same. “I can’t stop thinking about it,” they told Jill when another infant was left to die. And it’s no wonder. The nightmare was so common that the Chicago Sun-Times estimated “between 10% and 20%” of aborted babies “survive for short periods.” That means an hour, Jill insists, maybe two. Plenty of time, everyone knows, to save them.

            But Democrats like Gov. Ralph Northam (VA) and Speaker Pelosi aren’t interested in saving lives. They’re interested in keeping them “comfortable.” Maybe that’s why the governor’s words hit Jill so hard. She’s seen the lengths people take to dull their consciences. Now, instead of taking babies with beating hearts to a soiled utility room to die, they take them to the “Comfort Room,” complete with a “FirstFoto machine in case parents wanted pictures of their aborted babies, baptismal supplies if parents wanted their aborted babies baptized, and a foot printer and baby bracelets if parents wanted keepsakes of their aborted babies.” At her hospital, there was even a special chair to rock the newborns to death. “How far will doctors go to comfort themselves for letting abortion survivors die?” she asks. “Pretty far.”

            How far will America go? That’s up to Democrats. Republicans have asked every single day for Speaker Pelosi to at least let the House have an up-or-down vote on protecting innocent survivors like Melissa. They refuse, even as 70% of their own party begs them to reconsider. “You see in the media,” Whip Scalise told our listeners Monday, “they’re trying to act like this doesn’t even happen. Yes, it does happen.”

            Now is the time to stand up and say, “Enough.” Join FRC in calling on Speaker Pelosi to put politics aside and remember who we are as a nation. If you have a Democratic Representative, call them, e-mail them, even visit them. Remind them that the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act is more than just another piece of legislation. It’s our future. [Capitol switchboard: 1-202/224-3121]