Archive for the 'Abortion' Category

On the same day when Nancy Pelosi holds a press conference and dances around a question about the difference between late-term abortions and the babies born alive and then killed by Kermit Gosnell, Live Action has released the latest installment in their Inhuman: Undercover in America’s Late-Term Abortion Industry video series.

Among the highlights:

• Abortionist Laura Mercer says a baby/fetus at 23 weeks “doesn’t even look like a baby yet”
• Abortionist Leroy Carhart says “life begins when the mother thinks it begins, not when anybody else thinks it begins”
• Abortionist Carmen Landau says that aborting a baby at 27 weeks with a lethal injection of digoxin is “like a flu shot”

Watch the whole thing:

The closing arguments are being made in the grisly murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. The case leads us to wonder, how has “reproductive care” come to this – the murder of newborn infants by snipping their spinal cords?

Perhaps the root cause can be found in America’s glorification of sex. Not sex within marriage, but promiscuity, hook-ups, pornography, and lust. The culture of licentiousness has people convinced that sex is all about pleasure and should be “consequence-free”. Society is forgetting about the selfless love of spouses. Instead, lust leads to the objectification of one’s sexual “partner”.

Once the door has opened to allow the objectification of human persons and stripping of their dignity, why stop there?
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Yesterday Live Action released the first video in a new series, “Inhuman: Undercover in America’s Late-Term Abortion Industry”:

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This past Sunday at Mass, Catholics heard the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11).

One thing I find amazing about this Gospel passage is that it almost didn’t make it into the Bible. In fact, before the Bible was assembled the way it is today, some versions of John’s Gospel didn’t include this story.

St. Augustine tells us that many early Christians were afraid of keeping this story in John’s Gospel since it showed Jesus as being so merciful that they thought it might lead people to think that the reality of sin wasn’t as big of a deal as the Church made it out to be.

Apparently, the Holy Spirit wasn’t concerned about this, since He made sure the story was kept in there.

The story of the woman caught in adultery was the inspiration behind a post-abortion healing brochure [PDF] the Pro-Life Action League designed a few years ago. On the front is an image of Jesus and the woman, and the words “Neither do I condemn you.” On the back is information on where to find help dealing with post-abortion aftermath, and the message, “Please give this card to someone who needs it.” (more…)

Would you be willing to ride three hours, one way, on a bus, so you could pray outside an abortion clinic?

The students at St. John’s Catholic High School in Beloit, Kansas have done just that — and not just once, but numerous times, most recently last month.

I spoke yesterday with Andrew Niewald, a theology teacher at the school, who is eager to share the story of his students’ courageous pro-life witness in the hope that other Catholic schools will be willing to provide similar opportunities for their students to put their pro-life beliefs into action out in the world.

The students at St. John’s have been the subject of several feature articles recently, including one at LifeSite by Rita Diller of STOPP.

In it, Andrew is quoted as saying:

We tried all sorts of things, including watching The Silent Scream and other abortion videos, but that did not have the impact we needed. Once the students were out there, three or four feet from the girls coming in to have abortions, begging them not to go in, it made it so much more real. …

We could take the students to the World War II museum, let them see the memorabilia behind glass doors, but that does not have the same impact as taking them to the front lines. We take them, instead, to the battle lines, and the conviction they walk away with is tremendous.

The importance of Andrew’s observations here cannot be overstated. (more…)

This weekend, downtown Chicago was rocked by the presence of over 85 college students from 16 Midwestern colleges in the annual Students for Life of Illinois Conference at Loyola University. Keynote speakers shared personal struggles and years of wisdom in their presentations on how we can become effective pro-life leaders.

Students were inspired by Melissa Ohden, a saline abortion survivor who has dedicated her life to showing the trauma of abortion on families. Marko Culjak, a freshman in the UIUC business school, says, “If you’re on the fence about abortion, you would be inspired by Melissa Ohden’s talk.” Ohden and the other speakers brought a powerful personal note to the emotionally charged conference as we were compelled to seriously examine why we are pro-life, and how to spread the message across our campuses. (more…)

There’s a great pro-life event beginning tomorrow in over 300 cities across the country: the 40 Days for Life prayer campaign.

From September 26th through November 4th, 40 Days for Life prayer vigils will be held outside abortion clinics in 316 locations in the U.S., Canada, Australia, England, Spain, and Uganda.

This will be the eleventh 40 Days for Life campaign, and the results of the first ten have been amazing:

• MORE THAN 525,000 PEOPLE of all ages have joined together to
  pray and fast for an end to abortion
• At least 5,928 BABIES HAVE BEEN SAVED from abortion—and those
  are just the ones we know about
• 69 abortion workers have QUIT THEIR JOBS and walked away from
  the abortion industry
• 24 abortion facilities COMPLETELY SHUT DOWN following local 40
  Days for Life vigils

And this fall’s 40 Days will be the biggest one yet — more babies will be saved, more parents will be spared a lifetime of regrets, and more abortion workers will have their hearts touched and leave their jobs.

I hope you won’t want to miss the chance to take part in this historic pro-life prayer campaign. You can find the 40 Days site nearest you here.

With our summer “Face the Truth” Tour getting ready to hit the streets July 6-14, the Pro-Life Action League — GFL’s parent organization — is proud to present an exciting video explaining the Face the Truth approach to pro-life activism and why we believe it’s one of the most important tools in fighting abortion:

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The Christian faith has been the most prominent voice in the pro-life movement since abortion came into public scrutiny.

It’s amazing how one single issue like abortion has managed to unite multiple Christian churches in an ecumenical movement history has seldom seen. Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Baptists, Mormons, and a mix of other denominations have taken a stand against the killing of the unborn. Even non-Christian faiths like Judaism and Buddhism have pro-life communities.

But seldom is a word heard from atheism. Surely someone who doesn’t believe in God would subsequently have no problem with the killing of an unborn child? Thankfully, that isn’t the case, and there is an astounding presence of atheists in the pro-life community that emphasizes secular reasoning as the key to a pro-life stance.

Secular Pro-Life attended the recent American Atheist Convention, causing a (mostly positive) stir among respectful atheists and religious pro-lifers alike. (more…)

Check out this touching video produced by the International Down Syndrome Coalition for Life to celebrate World Down Syndrome Day — which is today, March 21:

Did you know that 80% of babies diagnosed in utero with Down Syndrome are aborted?

And did you know that individuals with Down Syndrome themselves oppose prenatal detection testing for this very reason?

And did you know that for every 50 children with Down’s Syndrome identified and killed by abortion, 160 non-affected babies are lost by miscarriage after the test?

Christina Dunigan has an eye-opening post on this topic titled “An Acceptable Level of Collateral Damage”. You can read it here.

I recently heard for the first time a powerful speech given in 2008 by abortion survivor Gianna Jessen to the Victoria, Australia Parliament.

I heard about it from an Illinois high school student who is using Jessen’s address in competition for her high school’s speech team—even though she was initially advised against doing so by her coaches!

Gianna Jessen’s address is definitely worth sharing, so I’ve included the video below, which is followed by the written version.

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It’s 5:50am on a cold and damp Monday morning. Monday, January 23rd to be precise. Seven busloads of students from Franciscan University of Steubenville, along with throngs of high schoolers and young adults, are waiting outside the Verizon Center in D.C. for the Catholic Youth rally before the March for Life.

The doors don’t open until 7, but even though I’m huddled in a group trying to stay warm and asking myself how much, if any, sleep I got on the six-hour bus ride from Steubenville, the general atmosphere on this wet morning is one of enthusiasm and energy. Teens shout out Pro-Life chants and cheers, and a yellow balloon imprinted with ‘LIFE’ is bounced back and forth like a beach ball.
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Two basic tenets of the pro-life position are: (1) abortion destroys the life of a genetically distinct, whole human being; and (2) abortion is psychologically harmful to women.

On the other hand, two basic tenets of the “pro-choice” position are: (1) abortion does not destroy the life of a genetically distinct, whole human being; and (2) abortion is not psychologically harmful to women.

With this in mind, I was interested to read this recent post by Jill Filipovic at the “pro-choice” blog Feministe, in which she starts off referring to some “fun facts” from Jena Pincott’s book Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?, as highlighted in the popular mom blog Mommyish:

Well here are some fun facts: Pregnant women’s bodies are basically swimming with the cells of their fetuses. And even when they give birth, some cells remain. By the end of the first trimester of pregnancy, cells from the fetus account for one in every 50,000 cells in the woman’s body. Further along in the pregnancy, it increases to one in 1,000. Six percent of the DNA in her blood plasma also comes from the fetus. Which is interesting given some standard pro-life arguments like this:

Here is the “standard pro-life argument” Jill linked to: (more…)

We found out recently about a new campaign called My Abortion, My Life.

Based in Cleveland, they’ve recently placed ads on the city’s buses as part of their effort to start the “long process of de-stigmatizing abortion in our society.”

Campaigns like this that set out to normalize abortion are doomed to fail.

Why? Because they’ve always failed. And there’s no reason to believe things won’t be different this time.

“I Had an Abortion” T-Shirts: An Idea That Never Caught On

Remember the “I Had an Abortion” T-shirts released in 2004?

If you don’t, you’re not alone. Even after a big publicity splash when they were introduced, they were — to the surprise of exactly no one — never very popular. (And, what’s more, the online store that once sold them is no longer accessible.)

Then, two years later, Ms. Magazine tried a similar campaign. It, too, was a flop.  (more…)

A postcard (shown at right) that appeared this weekend on the popular website PostSecret served as yet another reminder that far from being a means of women’s liberation, abortion is actually a means of women’s oppression.

The text reads:

I told my work that I will be attending an out-of-state funeral for a few days next week.

Im actually (quietly) having an abortion that only my boyfriend knows about it.

I’ve never felt so alone.

Reading this, I was reminded of these words spoken recently by Linda Couri, a former Planned Parenthood counselor who spoke at our TeenSpeak conference earlier this year. Linda herself had an abortion, but is now pro-life: “There is nothing joyful about abortion. Some women are complacent, but most just bare-knuckle their way through it.” (more…)