PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO0LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE PRO-LIFE
LEGAL ISSUES
PRO-LIFE
The Declaration of Independence, written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
(Except when the U. S. Supreme Court holds that it is above our Creator and deems that millions of persons can be declared unworthy of what the Creator has endowed those persons with.)
PRO-LIFE
14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.The U. S. Supreme Court declared in the Roe vs Wade decision that a person in the womb is not a citizen and therefore has no civil rights and that person may be killed.In 1857 the U. S. Supreme Court declared in the Dred Scott decision that a person of African descent imported into the U. S. was not a citizen and therefore had no civil rights and that person could be enslaved.
The Gospel according to Obama
By Charles Krauthammer, February 9, 2012
At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, seeking theological underpinning for his drive to raise taxes on the rich, President Obama invoked the highest possible authority. His policy, he testified “as a Christian,” “coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’ ”
Now, I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man.
The Judeo-Christian tradition commands personal generosity as represented, for example, by the biblical injunction against retrieving any sheaf left behind while harvesting one’s own field. That is for the gleaners — “the poor and the alien”(Leviticus 19:10). Like Ruth in the field of Boaz. As far as I can tell, that charitable transaction involved no mediation by the IRS.
But no matter. Let’s assume that Obama has biblical authority for hiking the marginal tax rate exactly 4.6 points for couples making more than $250,000 (depending, of course, on the prevailing shekel-to-dollar exchange rate). Let’s stipulate that Obama’s prayer-breakfast invocation of religion as vindicating his politics was not, God forbid, crass, hypocritical, self-serving electioneering, but a sincere expression of a social-gospel Christianity that sees good works as central to the very concept of religiosity.
Fine. But this Gospel according to Obama has a rival — the newly revealed Gospel according to Sebelius, over which has erupted quite a contretemps. By some peculiar logic, it falls to the health and human services secretary to promulgate the definition of “religious” — for the purposes, for example, of exempting religious institutions from certain regulatory dictates.
Such exemptions are granted in grudging recognition that, whereas the rest of civil society may be broken to the will of the state’s regulators, our quaint Constitution grants special autonomy to religious institutions.
Accordingly, it would be a mockery of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment if, for example, the Catholic Church were required by law to freely provide such “health care services” (in secularist parlance) as contraception, sterilization and pharmacological abortion — to which Catholicism is doctrinally opposed as a grave contravention of its teachings about the sanctity of life.
Ah. But there would be no such Free Exercise violation if the institutions so mandated are deemed, by regulatory fiat,not religious.
And thus, the word came forth from Sebelius decreeing the exact criteria required (a) to meet her definition of “religious” and thus (b) to qualify for a modicum of independence from newly enacted state control of American health care, under which the aforementioned Sebelius and her phalanx of experts determine everything — from who is to be covered, to which treatments are to be guaranteed free of charge.
Criterion 1: A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.
Criterion 2: Any exempt institution must be one that “primarily employs” and “primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.
Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.
This all would be merely the story of contradictory theologies, except for this: Sebelius is Obama’s appointee. She works for him. These regulations were his call. Obama authored both gospels.
Therefore: To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.
Most Basic Choice is Choosing Life
by Star Parker Jan 23, 2012
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas gave good reason for celebration for the hundreds of thousands who will arrive in Washington on Monday for the 39th annual March for Life.
The Court upheld last week the constitutionality of a new law in Texas requiring that abortion providers provide ultrasound exams and that women listen to the physician’s description of her unborn child and to the heartbeat before deciding to abort.
The law, signed by Gov. Rick Perry in May, was blocked by a federal district court in August which argued that the law impinged on free speech rights of abortion providers.
Now Texas may become not just the nation’s largest creator of jobs, but the nation’s best protector of human life.
Ultrasound images of unborn children are turning the abortion game around and it is why abortion providers and organizations such as Planned Parenthood that promote the barbarous abortion regime are so on edge about it.
There is a wide range of estimates on the percentages of woman who intended to abort that change their mind after seeing an ultrasound image of their child, but all these estimates show they have a major impact.
My own anecdotal surveys from crisis pregnancy centers around the country that I work with indicate anywhere from 62% to 95% of women who intended to abort change their mind after seeing these images.
Focus on the Family reports that 84% do. Focus on the Family also operates a generous program called Operation Ultrasound through which they provide ultrasound equipment and training to crisis pregnancy centers that apply.
According to Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is challenging the Texas law, “If this decision stands, it opens the floodgates for other states to insert themselves in an inappropriate way between doctors and women seeking medical care.”
What can you possibly conclude from a movement that labels itself “pro-choice” that opposes ensuring that women who make a decision as serious and grave as abortion have as much vital information as possible before making that choice?
Good information is the oxygen that enables good decision making.
The answer to the question is that the movement that labels itself “pro-choice” is not about promoting choice at all. It is about promoting abortion.
It is why the so called “pro-choice” movement opposes efforts to better provide women - disproportionately young, poor, minority women – with information that raises their awareness and understanding of what they are doing.
We might recall the impact that television images had after Hurricane Katrina when the reality of poverty in America suddenly was out there for all to see. No one could turn their eyes from this ugly and unpleasant truth.
Including our politicians. Our nation’s capital has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Any member of congress can see it by just walking a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol Building. But suddenly, when the images were on national television, the politicians were out there pontificating.
An ultrasound image of an unborn child is the same type of media event. Suddenly the mother-to-be sees what she didn’t know or perhaps knew and wanted to avoid confronting. That she is the bearer of human life and that she is close to murdering that very life that she chose to help create.
According to Americans United for Life, 460 pieces of legislation were considered in state legislatures around the nation last year.
The forces promoting ignorance are losing and light is shining through.
It is reason for optimism that increasingly more Americans are grasping that for a free country to function, we need informed and responsible citizens.
We need appreciation that our choices matter. And that the most important choice, as we learn in Deuteronomy, is to choose life.
by Star Parker Jan 23, 2012
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas gave good reason for celebration for the hundreds of thousands who will arrive in Washington on Monday for the 39th annual March for Life.
The Court upheld last week the constitutionality of a new law in Texas requiring that abortion providers provide ultrasound exams and that women listen to the physician’s description of her unborn child and to the heartbeat before deciding to abort.
The law, signed by Gov. Rick Perry in May, was blocked by a federal district court in August which argued that the law impinged on free speech rights of abortion providers.
Now Texas may become not just the nation’s largest creator of jobs, but the nation’s best protector of human life.
Ultrasound images of unborn children are turning the abortion game around and it is why abortion providers and organizations such as Planned Parenthood that promote the barbarous abortion regime are so on edge about it.
There is a wide range of estimates on the percentages of woman who intended to abort that change their mind after seeing an ultrasound image of their child, but all these estimates show they have a major impact.
My own anecdotal surveys from crisis pregnancy centers around the country that I work with indicate anywhere from 62% to 95% of women who intended to abort change their mind after seeing these images.
Focus on the Family reports that 84% do. Focus on the Family also operates a generous program called Operation Ultrasound through which they provide ultrasound equipment and training to crisis pregnancy centers that apply.
According to Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is challenging the Texas law, “If this decision stands, it opens the floodgates for other states to insert themselves in an inappropriate way between doctors and women seeking medical care.”
What can you possibly conclude from a movement that labels itself “pro-choice” that opposes ensuring that women who make a decision as serious and grave as abortion have as much vital information as possible before making that choice?
Good information is the oxygen that enables good decision making.
The answer to the question is that the movement that labels itself “pro-choice” is not about promoting choice at all. It is about promoting abortion.
It is why the so called “pro-choice” movement opposes efforts to better provide women - disproportionately young, poor, minority women – with information that raises their awareness and understanding of what they are doing.
We might recall the impact that television images had after Hurricane Katrina when the reality of poverty in America suddenly was out there for all to see. No one could turn their eyes from this ugly and unpleasant truth.
Including our politicians. Our nation’s capital has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Any member of congress can see it by just walking a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol Building. But suddenly, when the images were on national television, the politicians were out there pontificating.
An ultrasound image of an unborn child is the same type of media event. Suddenly the mother-to-be sees what she didn’t know or perhaps knew and wanted to avoid confronting. That she is the bearer of human life and that she is close to murdering that very life that she chose to help create.
According to Americans United for Life, 460 pieces of legislation were considered in state legislatures around the nation last year.
The forces promoting ignorance are losing and light is shining through.
It is reason for optimism that increasingly more Americans are grasping that for a free country to function, we need informed and responsible citizens.
We need appreciation that our choices matter. And that the most important choice, as we learn in Deuteronomy, is to choose life.
Practitioner Must Pay Survivor of Failed Abortion $36 Million
by Steven Ertelt LifeNews.com 7/25/11
In a legal case that has received no mainstream media attention, a Florida abortion practitioner has been ordered by a court to pay the survivor of a failed abortion $36 million in damages for injuries she suffered from the abortion.
James Pendergraft is the owner of five abortion facilities in Florida and a late-term clinic in D.C. “specializing” in abortions past the 24th week of pregnancy. He has had his medical license suspended four times for botched abortions, illegal late-term abortions, and dispensing drugs without a license. He has also faced legal and disciplinary actions for making up false threats from pro-life advocates and “reporting” them to authorities.
The plan was for the daughter, identified as JH in court documents according to a pro-life advocate familiar with the case, to be delivered stillborn into a toilet. After 12 hours of labor, the mother left the abortion clinic very upset and went to a nearby hospital because the process was taking too long. There, she gave birth to a girl weighing 1 lb 6 oz, who is now 10-years-old. She has cerebral palsy, no function on the left side of her body, strokes and brain damage, physical, emotional and cognitive delays, lung damage, chronic lung disease and seizure disorders.
Pendergraft was found liable for damages and, according to pro-life advocate Kelly Clinger, who had multiple abortions done by Pendergraft years ago, Pendergraft was ordered to pay Howard $18,255,000 in punitive damages, $18,000,000 in compensatory damages and over $400,000 in court costs.
Clinger tells LifeNews that she feels some redemption that Pendergraft has to compensate the victim for the damages she received as a result of the abortion.
“I must admit that, in a way, this feels like a glimpse of redemption for me and like a small beam of light piercing through the darkness,” Clinger says. “Pendergraft is a convicted felon with no medical license who is still making massive amounts of money off of child killing. I am praying that this will be the thing that brings down the empire of death that Pendergraft has built.”
Pendergraft, who runs the Orlando Women’s Center abortion business, has had his medical license repeatedly revoked for botched abortions, illegal late-term abortions, and dispensing drugs without a license. In January, he was exposed by the pro-life group Operation Rescue as reportedly setting up shop in a secret late-term abortion business somewhere in or near the nation’s capital where late-term abortions are being only partially completed.
He also opened a new web site, LateTermAbortion.net, that describes in detail how his new office is soliciting women nationwide and from other countries for “intracardiac injection of medication into the fetal heart,” which kills the unborn child. Pendergraft describes how his new abortion center uses long spinal needs to pierce the pregnant abdomen and inject the hearts of late-term unborn babies in the womb with poison or air.
Pendergraft makes it clear on the web site that he does not complete the abortion process at his new location but discharges patients 15 minutes after the injection and leaves them to go to their own personal physician or find a medical center nearby or in their home state to remove the body of the deceased unborn child. Without treatment women in this condition can die.
Operation Rescue president Troy Newman informed LifeNews.com of the new Pendergraft center, which he says is purposefully designed to evade Florida law and compel the participation of legitimate physicians and medical staff in the abortion process. He notes how the web site describes how Pendergraft will discuss the injection over the phone with women and how they will be met privately and escorted to the secret location for the baby’s fatal injection.
“While Pendergraft attempts to convince the reader this is about security, it is more likely about evading law enforcement, because this dangerous process is highly unethical and likely illegal since he holds no active medical license whatsoever,” Newman said.
Pendergraft faced previous suspensions, one as recently as January, 2010, for botched legal abortions and illegal late-term abortions, and dispensing drugs without a license.
The first suspension was the result of a complaint filed April 14, 2008, that states Pendergraft illegally prescribed controlled substances without proper DEA licensing. The board also said Pendergraft committed medical malpractice in a botched abortion of a 19-week-old unborn child in February 2006.
The botched abortion saw Pendergraft inadequately dilating a patient’s cervix for a D&E abortion. He then ruptured her uterus and shoved the unborn child’s body into the abdominal cavity.
The mother was rushed to the hospital where she received an emergency hysterectomy along with the removal of the dead unborn child, who was missing an arm after the abortion attempt. OR indicates the arm was later found at Pendergraft’s EPOC abortion clinic. The pro-life group maintains that Pendergraft’s not reporting that he had removed the arm caused a delay in her care at the hospital as surgeons futilely attempted to locate the missing appendage.
While on suspension, his abortion centers continue to operate with other abortion practitioners, at least one of which has had his own problems with the law.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and theHealth Care and Education Reconciliation Act Signed by President Obama 3/23/2010 authorizes $5,000,000,000 in federal funds which will pay for insurance plans covering 400,000 people.
These plans are allowed to cover and hence pay for abortions.
In July the administration awarded $160,000,000 to Pennsylvania and $37,000,000 to New Mexico where insurance plans do cover abortion.
House Republican Leader John Boehner stated:
This is the boldest admission yet from the Obama administration that the President’s Executive Order on taxpayer-funded abortion was a sham. The fact that the high-risk pool insurance program in Pennsylvania will use federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortions is unconscionable.
Just last month at the White House I asked President Obama to provide the American people with a progress report on the implementation of his Executive Order, which purports to ban taxpayer-funding of abortions. Unfortunately, the President provided no information, and the American people are still waiting for answers.
Federal Court affirms "human physical life" begins at conception.
On Friday, June 24, a federal court temporarily suspended portions of Indiana’s House Bill 1210, which contained a provision aimed at defunding abortionist organizations, like Planned Parenthood, within the state. And although this suspension was disappointing, other aspects of the court’s decision were a boon for pro-life groups in Indiana and the whole nation. The reason is because the court upheld a key portion of the bill that requires women seeking abortions to be informed that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.”
In other words, human physical life begins at conception.
And the news gets even better: the court’s ruling came after Lee M. Silver, expert witness for Planned Parenthood, argued that “‘human physical life’ is meaningless” because “it is not a scientific term.”
Silver, a Princeton University professor and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the court he had considered the opinions of Catholic theologians and bishops who believed life begins at conception but rejected them because they were belief-based. He said the position was “an understandable religious position” but not a scientific one. (Silver was not pressed to explain why he believed it was belief-based.) Silver told us much about the hole which many scientists have dug and fallen into regarding abortion, the beginning of life, and the nature of being human, when he said, “The scientific community does not accept the ‘fact’ that a fertilized egg, let alone a fetus, is human physical life.”
So Silver willingly jumps from the claim that scientific consensus does not recognize human physical life as beginning at conception, and he bolsters the point by claiming the scientific community also rejects life as present in “a fetus.” (For those of you who are not accustomed to talking in the covert jargon the left uses to cover its tracks, “a fetus” is a baby: it’s what you were before your mother went into labor.)
Therefore, Silver’s expert testimony boiled down to this: “human physical life” does not begin at conception nor is it present in a baby.
Wow, science has come a long way hasn’t it?
Fortunately, the court did not concur with Silver’s arguments, ruling instead that Indiana could insist that an expectant mother understand that they already nurture a human being in the womb, so that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, she will “apprehend the full consequences of her decision” so that she may not “come to regret [her] choice to abort the infant life [she] once created and sustained.” This is great news for everyone who enjoys “human physical life,” but especially for those who remain unseen and vulnerable in their earliest stages of life.
On January 7, 2011, Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) introduced H.R. 217, the "Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act." H.R. 217 would prohibit the Secretary of Health and Human Services from providing federal family planning assistance to any entity that performs abortions. The bill provides exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. It has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.
I believe life begins at conception and, as a Member of Congress, it is incumbent upon me to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. That is why I cosponsored H.R. 3, the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," which prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars for abortions. You can trust that I will vote in favor of policies that protect the sanctity of life and human dignity and continuously oppose attempts to use federal dollars to fund abortions.
Thank you again for contacting me to express your thoughts about H.R. 217. Please continue to keep me informed of the issues that are important to you and be sure to visit my website, womack.house.gov, for more information and to sign up for my newsletter.
Sincerely,
Congressman Sreve Womack
Member of Congress
Fetal Pain Abortion Law Takes Effect in Nebraska
Could Set National Trend
by Steven Ertelt LifeNews.com Editor October 15, 2010
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A new fetal pain law is taking effect today in Nebraska that targets late-term abortions based on the pain an unborn baby will likely feel during the abortion procedure. The law could set a national trend of other states and Congress considering such measures and could lead to a Supreme Court battle.
The Nebraska law, Legislative Bill 1103, relies on significant medical research and expert testimony to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy on the basis that unborn children feel pain.
The legislation has been hailed by pro-life advocates across the country for its innovative approach and focusing the public's attention on unborn babies who have been medically documented as pain capable at 20 weeks gestation.
“This will take off like wildfire,” Julie Schmit-Albin, executive director of Nebraska Right to Life, predicted in comments to the Omaha World-Herald newspaper.
The Nebraska bill has already inspired Sen. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican, to press for a similar measure on the national level -- and he used it to challenge pro-abortion president Barack Obama.
“How does anybody -- pro-life or pro-choice -- oppose this?” asked Johanns. “If the baby feels pain ... then it is an issue of human compassion.”
The expected opposition -- in the form of lawsuits from pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood or the Center for Reproductive Rights, have yet to materialize.
Mary Spaulding Balch, a pro-life attorney who is the state legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, says abortion advocates may not want to have a national discussion on the pain unborn children feel because it draws attention to their humanity and need for legal protection.
But Janet Crepps, deputy director of the New York-based CRR law firm, told the newspaper to expect a legal battle.
“National Right to Life Committee can speculate as much as they want, but it is just that — speculation,” she said. "We will file a challenge to this unconstitutional law when the circumstances are appropriate. We will not, however, discuss our decision-making process publicly.”
The pro-abortion law firm worked with late-term abortion practitioner LeRoy Carhart, who operates out of the Omaha area, to challenge the state's partial-birth abortion ban in 2000. That case ultimately resulted in the first Supreme Court opinion saying such bans are unconstitutional. The high court later reversed itself and upheld a national ban Congress passed during the Bush administration.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland confirmed to the Omaha paper that it would not file a lawsuit against the new law.
But a lawsuit, Balch told LifeNews.com previously, would give the pro-life movement a chance to push back against prior Supreme Court opinion on abortion.
Balch says the law could make its way to the Supreme Court to alter national abortion law further and set a wide-ranging precedent.
"Although it will be a case of first impression, there are strong grounds to believe that five members of the current U.S. Supreme Court would give serious consideration to Nebraska’s assertion of a compelling state interest in preserving the life of an unborn child whom substantial medical evidence indicates is capable of feeling pain during an abortion," she said.
The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act could see the same group of five members of the Supreme Court who backed the partial-birth abortion ban uphold it as constitutional and allow more abortions to be prohibited.
Balch says the genius of the measure is the scientific fact that unborn children can feel pain.
"By 20 weeks after fertilization, unborn children have pain receptors throughout their body, and nerves link these to the brain," she told LifeNews.com. "These unborn children recoil from painful stimulation, which also dramatically increases their release of stress hormones. Doctors performing fetal surgery at and after 20 weeks now routinely use fetal anesthesia."
A first of its kind in the United States, the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act prohibits abortion after 20 weeks gestation except when the mother "has a condition which so complicates her medical condition as to necessitate the abortion of her pregnancy to avert death or to avert serious risk of substantial or irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function or...it is necessary to preserve the life of an unborn child."
When looking at abortion case law, NRLC says it hopes a new analysis can be established that would ultimately lead to overturning Roe.
Balch says the pro-life group wants the Supreme Court to redraw the line away from the viability standard about when abortions can be prohibited.
“What I would like to bring to the attention of the court is, there is another line,” Balch said. “This new knowledge is something the court has not looked at before and should look at.”
Fetal pain is not a new concept and the leading national expert on the topic confirms unborn children definitely have the capacity to feel intense pain during an abortion.
Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand of the University of Arkansas Medical Center has said he and other specialists in development of unborn children have shown that babies feel pain before birth as early as 20 weeks into the pregnancy.
Anand said many medical studies conclude that unborn babies are "very likely" to be "extremely sensitive to pain during the gestation of 20 to 30 weeks."
"This is based on multiple lines of evidence," Dr. Anand said. "Not just the lack of descending inhibitory fibers, but also the number of receptors in the skin, the level of expression of various chemicals, neurotransmitters, receptors, and things like that."
Anand explained that later-term abortion procedures, such as a partial-birth abortion "would be likely to cause severe pain."
Dr. Jean Wright, an anesthesiologist specializing in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, has also confirmed the existence of fetal pain during Congressional testimony.
“[A]n unborn fetus after 20 weeks of gestation, has all the prerequisite anatomy, physiology, hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical current to close the loop and create the conditions needed to perceive pain. In a fashion similar to explaining the electrical wiring to a new house, we would explain that the circuit is complete from skin to brain and back," she said.
And Dr. Richard T.F. Schmidt, past President of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, confirms, “It can be clearly demonstrated that fetuses seek to evade certain stimuli in a manner which an infant or an adult would be interpreted as a reaction to pain.”
An April 2004 Zogby poll shows that 77% of Americans back "laws requiring that women who are 20 weeks or more along in their pregnancy be given information about fetal pain before having an abortion."
Only 16 percent disagreed with such a proposal, according to the poll, commissioned by the National Right to Life Committee.
Abortion Takes Flight
Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and the law.
Irish law prohibits all abortions except those necessary to save a woman’s life, and as a practical matter it imposes daunting obstacles to terminating life-threatening pregnancies as well. In a secularized Europe, Ireland is noticeably out of step. Of the 47 countries covered by the European Convention on Human Rights, only in the fairytale countries of Andorra, Malta and San Marino, where all abortions are illegal, is the law any stricter.
So a decision earlier this month from the European Court of Human Rights in the Case of A, B, and C v. Ireland, promised to be of more than routine interest. A challenge to the Irish law brought by three women asserting rights under the European Convention, it held the potential to express a Continent-wide consensus that abortion rights are human rights.
Indeed, the initial news reports in this country, at least in headlines, indicated that this is what had happened. The European court awarded 15,000 euros, about $20,000, to Plaintiff C, a cancer patient who feared that her life was at risk from an unintended pregnancy and who, like Plaintiffs A and B and thousands of other Irish women every year, had to leave the country to obtain an abortion.
But a closer reading of the 40,000-word decision tells a different story. The Strasbourg, France, court — which 30 years ago interpreted the Convention to protect gay rights — actually made clear that it was not recognizing a right to abortion. On behalf of Plaintiff C, who could not find an Irish doctor willing to help her even assess her risks, it was simply telling Ireland that if the country chose to offer a life-saving exception to its abortion ban, it had to give women “an accessible and effective procedure” to demonstrate that they qualified. Article 8 of the Convention, entitling individuals to “the right to respect” for their “private and family life,” required at least that. (The court noted that in the absence of such a procedure, the existing penalty of life in prison for both woman and doctor for an abortion that turned out to have been illegal imposed “a significant chilling factor” on doctor-patient consultation.)
The other two plaintiffs had not claimed to come within the life-saving exception. Their argument was that they had strong personal reasons for wanting to end their pregnancies, and that they should not have had to endure the financial and psychological burden of fleeing their own country in order to do so. (A public referendum in 1992 lifted the previous criminal prohibition on leaving Ireland to get an abortion.) These women came away from the lawsuit with nothing. Plaintiff A was single, living in poverty and suffering from clinical depression, with four children in foster care. She was trying to get her children back and was afraid that her effort would fail if the social workers knew she was pregnant. She traveled secretly to England for the abortion after borrowing nearly $1,000 at a high interest rate.
As I read the European court’s opinion, I had the eerie feeling that I was peering into an American future.
laintiff B became pregnant despite having taken a “morning after” pill after unprotected intercourse and was warned by two doctors that the medication put her at risk of a dangerous ectopic pregnancy (a common but incorrect belief). She borrowed a friend’s credit card and made arrangements to go to England. Although her pregnancy turned out to be normal, she felt she was not in a position to care for a child and went ahead with the abortion.
No right under the Convention was violated in these two instances, the court said by a vote of 11 to 6. Granted, “the process of traveling abroad for an abortion was psychologically and physically arduous” for these women. And granted also that in their particular circumstances, they could have obtained legal abortions in 35 to 40 other countries covered by the Convention. But because Ireland’s law is based “on the profound moral views of the Irish people as to the nature of life,” the court said, Ireland was entitled to an extra “margin of appreciation.” This phrase expresses a measure of deference toward a country’s right within the framework of international law to chart its own domestic course. With its extra margin, Irish law prevailed.
The women’s lawyers had asked the court to take account of the strong trend toward liberalizing European abortion laws, demonstrating, they argued, the existence of a consensus on a matter of international human rights.
The court did take the European consensus into account. But, perversely, it used that fact not on the women’s behalf, but against them, emphasizing Irish women’s ability to travel to any of dozens of countries, with “no legal impediment,” to end their pregnancies. Given that ability, the court concluded, Irish law “struck a fair balance.”
So this is the bottom line for abortion rights in Ireland — rich women and poor can sleep under the same bridge board the same plane.
Ordinarily I would not devote a column to the decision of a non-U.S. court, in the jurisprudence of which I claim no particular expertise. But as I finished reading this opinion, I had the eerie feeling that I was peering into a domestic future.
As Robert Pear of The Times noted recently, the political climate in Congress has grown much more hostile to abortion rights since the November election. Representative Joe Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican, will be in charge of a House subcommittee with jurisdiction over many abortion-relevant subjects, including private health insurance, Medicaid, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. He is one of the leading opponents of abortion on Capitol Hill and was put forward for his new position by the National Right to Life Committee.
And as Robert Barnes of The Washington Post observed in a long article this week, states are erecting new obstacles to abortion in the expectation that the current Supreme Court is likely to uphold at least some of them. States are moving to ban abortion even before fetal viability, a direct challenge to existing Supreme Court precedent. In the name of “informed consent,” some states now require doctors to “inform” women that abortion has negative psychological effects and increases the risk of breast cancer, both of which are untrue. (Recall that Dr. C. Everett Koop, the Reagan administration’s surgeon general and a strong opponent of abortion, was given the task of with finding evidence of a psychological “post-abortion syndrome” and reported back to the White House that there was none.)
Obviously, not all states would choose to join the anti-abortion bandwagon, even if they had the Supreme Court’s permission. California, New York, the District of Columbia, Connecticut and Massachusetts (once two of the most anti-abortion states, but times change) would remain places of refuge for desperate women, Englands to the Irelands that are Wyoming (which has no abortion provider), the Dakotas, or the Deep South, where a shrinking handful of doctors provide abortions in a hostile regulatory climate. More than a third of all women live in counties without an abortion provider, and that number is growing. Long-distance travel is made more onerous in the half of the states that require 24-hour waiting periods after “counseling,” necessitating two trips or an overnight stay.
Yet abortion remains one of the most common of all medical procedures. Nearly a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion; put another way, nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended, and of those, 40 percent are terminated. One out of every three American women will have an abortion by the age of 45.
And if they can’t get the care they seek at home, where will they go? As the European Court of Human Rights seems to assume, there is always the airport.
April 19, 2016
Today is the second anniversary of the election of our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, to the supreme pontificate. Let us keep him in our prayers, that God will bless him with sanctity, wisdom, courage, and stamina to continue this greatest of all ministries in the Church and the world.
And today, we have the joy of learning that yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down the decision upholding the federal statute that bans the so-called “partial-birth abortion,” in which a child is killed in the very act of being born. Those pro-abortion advocates are wailing over the fact that this decision is a threat to women’s health. I would like to remind them that a female child is a woman, and to kill her is indeed a VERY GREAT THREAT to her health. In fact, it is the total destruction of it. But of course, our adversaries will not admit that a child in the womb is a human being. By some nonsensical magic in their minds, the child only becomes a human being upon emergence from the womb into the light of day. As long as the baby is still in the womb, they contend that he or she is only “embryonic or fetal tissue,” and may therefore be cut to pieces or vacuumed out or expelled from the life-nurturing womb by any chemical or mechanical means at hand.
In the article which I read today, I was told that “only a few thousand of the roughly 1.3 million procedures performed each year in the United States” fall into the category forbidden by the statute affirmed by the new Supreme Court decision. But wait: let’s analyze this statement carefully. First, it doesn’t speak of “abortions”; it speaks of “procedures.” And the pro-abortion crowd NEVER speak of a child in the womb as a human being, a child, or a baby. They are very careful in the selection of their terms. Then the article speaks of “only a few thousand.” Only a few thousand people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. But we don’t use the word “only” in that connection. Only 32 were killed on Monday of this week at Virginia Tech. But we don’t use the word “only” there either. You are only one person; I am only one person. And there is only one God; he tells us “You shall not kill.” And he is a majority of one. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.
Federal Law, The Bald and Golden Eagle Act, (6 U.S.C. 668c; 50 CFR 22.3) makes it illegal to destroy an egg. The punishment is a fine of $250,000.00 and 2 years in prison.
