Life Advocacy Briefing

Question of the Week

WHAT HAPPENED TO AMERICA since President Reagan said, as quoted near the close of this Life Advocacy Briefing, he “knew” the American people would affirm and embrace the right to life of children who face challenges in life?

Two More Federal Judges on the Way

THE SENATE TOOK ACTION last week on the nominations of two proposed federal district judges who were vigorously opposed by leftwing organizations on the basis, in part, of their legal work in defense of the right to life.

One, William Mercer, was confirmed over the objection of the so-called Alliance for Justice as “a staunch anti-abortion advocate seeking to restrict reproductive freedom at all costs.” Judge Mercer left a seat in the Montana state legislature for the federal appointment. Notes AfJ: “He voted for legislation that severely restricts access to abortion and contraception without any exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. If confirmed to the district court [and he has been], his extreme anti-choice record raises serious concerns about his ability to fairly uphold Montanans’ right to access essential reproductive health care and medication.” Aww.

Cloture was invoked – setting up a confirmation vote any day now – on the nomination of Chad Meredith to the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Writes the left-wing National Women’s Law Center, “News reporting on Meredith’s potential nomination and extremist anti-abortion record emerged in 2022. [That is why] many reproductive rights organizations coalesced to publicly oppose his potential nomination. Now three years later, … reproductive health, rights and justice organizations continue to oppose this harmful nominee.” And why pro-life citizens and Senators should support his nomination.

The screed against Mr. Meredith goes on to say: “As the Solicitor General of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Chief Deputy General Counsel to the [then] Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, [Mr.] Meredith demonstrated extreme hostility toward the rights of pregnant people [!] and abortion access. The legal arguments he advanced while defending Kentucky’s anti-abortion laws belittle the capacity of pregnant people [!] to make their own medical decisions, demonstrate an indifference to fair play, and evince a shocking disregard for the burden such laws impose on people [!] seeking abortion.”

A Key Reform in ObamaCare Reform Negotiations

SEN. JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO) FILED A BILL on Oct. 15 to bar ObamaCare coverage for abortions and body-mutilating procedures. S-3011 has yet to sport any co-sponsors and has been assigned to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions. The bill’s title is “Prohibiting Abortion & Transgender Procedures on the Exchanges Act.”

The proposal states, reports Calvin Freiburger for LifeSiteNews, “that an ‘Exchange may not make available any health plan offering excepted benefits’ that includes coverage for ‘abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest … .” (We find it unfortunate that Sen. Hawley, a true champion for Life, finds it necessary to offer rapists and incestors a path for destroying identifying evidence of their crimes.)

“‘It’s time to ban abortion and gender-transition procedures for minors on the healthcare exchanges. No more loopholes,’ declared [Sen.] Hawley,” as reported by LifeSiteNews. He “explained that the bill essentially takes the Hyde Amendment’s annual abortion constraints on federal budgets and applies them permanently to the exchanges established under the federal Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare.”

We doubt the bill will be taken up by the Senate during this Congress, but we applaud the Senator for introducing at this point a measure pointing toward using this lever in negotiations over reform of ObamaCare, a growing priority during the current government shutdown battle. The annual Hyde Amendment applies chiefly to appropriations for the Dept. of Health & Human Services; applying the Hyde principle to ObamaCare ought to be a high priority for the governing party in DC.

Preparing to Close

PLANNED PARENTHOOD HAS ANNOUNCED CLOSURE, effective Dec. 10, of five shops in California, all part of the cartel’s operations in Orange and SanBernardino counties.

Attributing his report to NBC-7 SanDiego, Calvin Freiburger of LifeSiteNews reports the coming shuttering of “locations in Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Mission Viejo, SantaAna, Westminster, SanBernardino and Upland, … laying off some 81 employees as a result of Pres. Donald Trump’s so-called ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ which contains a one-year ban on federal tax dollars going through Medicaid to entities that commit abortions for reasons other than rape, incest or supposed threats to the mother’s life.”

But Another One Opens

A NEW ABORTION SHOP HAS BEGUN SCHEDULING APPOINTMENTS in Boulder, Colorado, filling the bloody shoes of the notorious recently retired late-term-and-proud-abortionist Warren Hern.

“The RISE Collective began scheduling appointments two weeks ago for late-stage abortions,” reports Valerie Richardson for the Washington Times, “six months after the Boulder Abortion Clinic closed its doors with Dr. Hern’s retirement. … RISE, which stands for Reproductive Health, Inclusive Care, Support & Empowerment, becomes one of an estimated five US clinics offering abortions up to 34 weeks of gestation, or about 10 weeks after fetal viability.”

Why Use This Source?

WE CAN COUNT ON ONE HAND – maybe one finger – the times we have quoted from fundraising communications. But today we must. There is no better source – and no better way to express the facts about the killing of late-term babies for the harvesting of their organs – than David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress. It is his letter we quote below, under the title “It Doesn’t Get More Urgent Than This.”

We have two further questions, related to his report: When will the US House and Senate get serious about this horror, and, will the White House and Justice Department ever take the urgently needed action?

It Doesn’t Get More Urgent Than This

October fundraising letter introduction by David Daleiden, founder of The Center for Meical Progress

             Imagine you’re a healthy, growing baby in the middle of your sixth month in the womb.

             You don’t know your father yet, and your mother is your whole world. You feel her heartbeat. Her joy. Her anxiety. Her fear. And then, one day, something changes.

             You feel your mother’s body begin to cramp – hard. Over and over. The tight squeeze of labor contractions. But it’s not time yet. You’re only 23 weeks old!

             Then comes the blinding light, the rush of cold air, and gloved hands that don’t hold you … they drop you into a cold metal pan, not the warm waiting arms of your mother.

             You try to breathe. You try to cry. Your tiny lungs struggle to inflate.

             In a hospital NICU, doctors would be racing to save you, because babies born at 23 weeks have nearly a 60% chance of survival with proper care. But you’re not taken to the NICU. You’re being taken to a laboratory. Because this is not a delivery room. It’s a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. And instead of treating you like a human being, they’re treating you like property, a piece of meat.

             They’ve given your mother drugs to force labor – misoprostol, the same drug used in chemical abortions – to induce contractions and deliver you alive.

             You were born whole. Your heartbeat was still visible on ultrasound, according to the records. But instead of life-saving care, you were left to die in a “research” queue in the back of the clinic. And then you were dissected. For your heart. For your liver. For your brain. Your body was sold not to strangers on the black market but to taxpayer-funded scientists at the University of California at SanDiego. …

             Public records obtained by the Center for Medical Progress now show that Planned Parenthood supplied “viable, nonanomalous” 6-month-old fetuses from elective abortions to UC SanDiego.

             The babies had heartbeats. They were healthy. And they were sold not just for “research” but in exchange for ownership of any patents or intellectual property the university developed from experimenting on them. In other words, Planned Parenthood was trafficking the bodies of aborted children in return for future patent royalties.

             And that’s a felony under federal law. … [42 USC Sec. 289g-2]…

[There’s much more, but readers can get the point. And there is no indication that this horrendous practice has stopped even after exposure by Mr. Daleiden and his fellow investigators.]

A Fresh Look at Mifepristone

Part 2 of Oct. 10, 2025, The Washington Stand commentary by Dan Hart of Family Research Council; continued from last week, as promised

             On Wednesday, John Stemberger, president of Liberty Counsel Action, joined Washington Watch with Tony Perkins to unpack what his organization has discovered about the issue.

             “[Our research] document[s] the widespread contamination of our water from 700,000 women who are being instructed by abortion providers to deliver their babies in the toilet, which then goes [into] local city sewers [and] water plants,” he explained. “The contamination is there from not just the biohazard waste, which Students for Life estimates somewhere between 40 to 60 tons annually of waste is going into our water supply, but also mifepristone, which is not an organic drug. It doesn’t dissolve in the body like a Tylenol would. It [is a] synthetic drug, it has a half-life. So its therapeutic effect continues on after it exits the woman’s body and continues on in the water. … [There are] micro-doses of mifepristone that we’re bathing in or drinking … which is not being removed at all by normal water treatment plants. … It could be affecting miscarriages, could be affecting the infertility rate, and actually there [are] just a lot of questions we don’t even know because the EPA is not studying this. The FDA is not studying it.”

             Stemberger went on to express encouragement that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign announced that the EPA would be studying pharmaceutical contamination in the water supply but lamented how the abortion industry continues to escape scrutiny.

             “[I]f a hospital was dumping biohazard waste of any type regularly as a matter of course into their toilets instead of properly disposing of it as they should, it would be a national scandal, but yet the entire abortion industry is getting away with instructing mothers to just deliver dead babies in the toilet without regard to this,” he emphasized. “The problem is, when this was all approved in the year 2000, it was a very small percentage of overall abortions, so they estimated in their very weak environmental analysis, which really wasn’t analysis at all, that it’s going to [have a] minimal impact.

             “Well, now we’re talking about almost 70% of all abortions are these chemical abortions. So the amount of impact of both the biohazard waste … and also the mifepristone is exponentially more.”

             Stemberger further observed that the FDA’s recent approval of a generic form of mifepristone will likely “increase the amount of biohazard waste and … the drug in the water supply.” Stemberger concluded by urging the Trump administration to study how the abortion drug is affecting the water supply.

             “They’re studying microplastics,” he noted. “The EPA can switch and study any chemical in the water. But for some reason, we know that reason. This is just a sacrosanct issue. Whenever you touch abortion, the rules are always different. So proper environmental analysis [was] not done. Oversight is not being done. … [W]e are asking [the administration] to at [a] minimum, study this. You can’t ignore it. President Trump himself, [in] five different speeches, said, ‘I want crystal clear drinking water.’ Well, you can’t have crystal clear drinking water if you have contamination from chemical abortions in the water supply.”

Wisdom from the Great Communicator

EXCERPT #26 from Abortion & the Conscience of the Nation, 1983 treatise by then-President Ronald Reagan, published in Human Life Review, then as a hardcover book from Thomas Nelson Publishers

             I know that when the true issue of infanticide is placed before the American people, with all the facts openly aired, we will have no trouble deciding that a mentally or physically handicapped baby has the same intrinsic worth and right to life as the rest of us. As the New Jersey Supreme Court said two decades ago, in a decision upholding the sanctity of human life, “A child need not be perfect to have a worthwhile life.”

Senate Voting Records

Cloture Motion: William W. Mercer as District Judge (Montana) – Passed – 53-46 – Oct. 21, 2025 (Democrats in italics; “Independents” marked “I”)

Voting “yes” / pro-Life: Britt & Tuberville/AL, Murkowski & Sullivan/AK, Boozman & Cotton/AR, Moody & Scott/FL, Crapo & Risch/ID, Banks & Young/IN, Ernst & Grassley/IA, Marshall & Moran/KS, McConnell & Paul/KY, Cassidy & Kennedy/LA, Collins/ME, Hyde-Smith & Wicker/MS, Hawley & Schmitt/MO, Daines & Sheehy/MT, Fischer & Ricketts/NE, Budd & Tillis/NC, Cramer & Hoeven/ND, Husted & Moreno/OH, Lankford & Mullin/OK, McCormick/PA, Graham & Scott/SC, Rounds & Thune/SD, Blackburn & Hagerty/TN, Cornyn & Cruz/TX, Curtis & Lee/UT, Capito & Justice/WV, Johnson/WI, Barrasso & Lummis/WY.

Voting “no” / anti-Life: Gallego & Kelly/AZ, Padilla & Schiff/CA, Bennet & Hickenlooper/CO, Blumenthal & Murphy/CT, Blunt–Rochester & Coons/DE, Ossoff & Warnock/GA, Hirono & Schatz/HI, Durbin/IL, King(I)/ME, Alsobrooks & VanHollen/MD, Markey & Warren/MA, Peters & Slotkin/MI, Klobuchar & Smith/MN, Cortez–Masto & Rosen/NV, Hassan & Shaheen/NH, Booker & Kim/NJ, Heinrich & Lujan/NM, Gillibrand & Schumer/NY, Merkley & Wyden/OR, Fetterman/PA, Reed & Whitehouse/RI, Sanders(I) & Welch/VT, Kaine & Warner/VA, Cantwell & Murray/WA, Baldwin/WI.

Not voting: Duckworth/IL.

Confirmation of William Mercer as District Judge (Montana) – Confirmed – 52 to 45 – Oct. 22, 2025 (Democrats in italics; “Independents” marked “I”)

Voting “yes” / pro-Life: Britt & Tuberville/AL, Sullivan/AK, Boozman & Cotton/AR, Moody & Scott/FL, Crapo & Risch/ID, Banks & Young/IN, Ernst & Grassley/IA, Marshall & Moran/KS, McConnell & Paul/KY, Cassidy & Kennedy/LA, Collins/ME, Hyde-Smith & Wicker/MS, Hawley & Schmitt/MO, Daines & Sheehy/MT, Fischer & Ricketts/NE, Budd & Tillis/NC, Cramer & Hoeven/ND, Husted & Moreno/OH, Lankford & Mullin/OK, McCormick/PA, Graham & Scott/SC, Rounds & Thune/SD, Blackburn & Hagerty/TN, Cornyn & Cruz/TX, Curtis & Lee/UT, Capito & Justice/WV, Johnson/WI, Barrasso & Lummis/WY.

Voting “no” / anti-Life: Gallego & Kelly/AZ, Padilla & Schiff/CA, Bennet & Hickenlooper/CO, Blumenthal & Murphy/CT, Blunt–Rochester & Coons/DE, Ossoff & Warnock/GA, Hirono & Schatz/HI, Duckworth & Durbin/IL, King(I)/ME, Alsobrooks/MD, Markey & Warren/MA, Peters & Slotkin/MI, Klobuchar & Smith/MN, Cortez–Masto & Rosen/NV, Hassan & Shaheen/NH, Booker & Kim/NJ, Lujan/NM, Gillibrand & Schumer/NY, Merkley & Wyden/OR, Fetterman/PA, Reed & Whitehouse/RI, Sanders(I) & Welch/VT, Kaine & Warner/VA, Cantwell & Murray/WA, Baldwin/WI.

Not voting: Murkowski (AK), VanHollen/MD, Heinrich/NM.

Cloture Motion: Stephen Chad Meredith as District Judge (Eastern Kentucky) – Passed – 52-45 – Oct. 22, 2025 (Democrats in italics; “Independents” marked “I”)

Voting “yes” / pro-Life: Britt & Tuberville/AL, Sullivan/AK, Boozman & Cotton/AR, Moody & Scott/FL, Crapo & Risch/ID, Banks & Young/IN, Ernst & Grassley/IA, Marshall & Moran/KS, McConnell & Paul/KY, Cassidy & Kennedy/LA, Collins/ME, Hyde-Smith & Wicker/MS, Hawley & Schmitt/MO, Daines & Sheehy/MT, Fischer & Ricketts/NE, Budd & Tillis/NC, Cramer & Hoeven/ND, Husted & Moreno/OH, Lankford & Mullin/OK, McCormick/PA, Graham & Scott/SC, Rounds & Thune/SD, Blackburn & Hagerty/TN, Cornyn & Cruz/TX, Curtis & Lee/UT, Capito & Justice/WV, Johnson/WI, Barrasso & Lummis/WY.

Voting “no” / anti-Life: Gallego & Kelly/AZ, Padilla & Schiff/CA, Bennet & Hickenlooper/CO, Blumenthal & Murphy/CT, Blunt–Rochester & Coons/DE, Ossoff & Warnock/GA, Hirono & Schatz/HI, Duckworth & Durbin/IL, King(I)/ME, Alsobrooks/MD, Markey & Warren/MA, Peters & Slotkin/MI, Klobuchar & Smith/MN, Cortez–Masto & Rosen/NV, Hassan & Shaheen/NH, Booker & Kim/NJ, Heinrich & Lujan/NM, Schumer/NY, Merkley & Wyden/OR, Fetterman/PA, Reed & Whitehouse/RI, Sanders(I) & Welch/VT, Kaine & Warner/VA, Cantwell & Murray/WA, Baldwin/WI.

Not voting: Murkowski/AK, VanHollen/MD, Gillibrand/NY.