Filibuster On Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act Says A Lot About Opponents

I’m sorry I’ve abandoned the blog for a month.  Now it’s back.  There’s way too much to talk about.  Sorry for going away.  In the meantime, I was doing a lot of pro-life advocacy.

The BIG news is that The Senate was unable to get enough votes for cloture to end the filibuster on the Child Interstate Notification Abortion Act before the Congress recessed.  The bill would have required any abortionist in any state to notify a parent before performing an abortion on a minor from another state.  It would also have prohibited transportation of minors across state lines to obtain abortions to evade the parent's right to be notified in the home state.  60 votes were needed. The vote to end the filibuster was 57-42.  51 of 55 Republican Senators, along with 6 of 45 Democrats, voted to end the filibuster.  8 of the 14 Democrats, who voted for the legislation in a previous form, switched their vote and supported the filibuster.

Here are a few things to note.  Most kids who get pregnant, a little over 60 percent, become pregnant by adults, not their peers.  Statutory rapists routinely use abortion clinics to cover up their sexual crimes.  Abortion clinics are notorious for not reporting. 

Mark Crutcher and Life Dynamics called over 800 abortion clinics a few years ago.  A woman pretending to be a 13 year old girl fearing that she was pregnant by her 22 year old boyfriend-whom she said she wanted to protect, was told by over 90 percent of these clinics that they would not tell, did not have to report the boyfriend, or they would counsel her on how to evade parental notification laws.  Crutcher told our radio audience that it is clear from the calls and abortion clinic literature that these calls are not unusual to abortion clinics and they know how to handle them.  There’s big bucks to be made from teen and pre-teen girls who may or may not be pregnant.  They are not going to tell.  The senators know this.  But 42 voted against it.

The failure to vote for cloture and vote on the bill says a lot.  It says that for a large group of people (not all or even most pro-choice identified people), the most important thing is not the safety of the child or the well being of the family, but the fact that she got an abortion.  If your kid is afraid you’ll be mad, or embarrassed, or she is being manipulated by a man or the boy’s mother, too bad.  Don’t depend on the authorities.  It’s your fault.  You don't have a right to know.

This isn’t about choice or kid’s health.  It’s about making sure that we don’t have a bunch of “unwanted” kids running wild through our cities with teenage mothers.

How else do you explain the votes?  There were exceptions for health emergencies, for one parent not notifying another, a judicial bypass and if she said she was sexually or physically abused by her parents or neglected by them, the abortionist would have to notify authorities in her home state, not tell the parents.  All the objections were met.  The senators chose to shill for the financial interests of the abortion industry instead of standing for families and child safety.

When Does Pregnancy Start? Can Abortion Occur Without Terminating Pregnancy?

These questions sound bizarre, but it shows how distorted the abortion debate has become and how abortion advocates mislead the public.  Advocates of the Plan B/Early Contraception/Morning after pill say that the pill will not terminate pregnancy.  This leaves the hearer with the impression that Plan B does not take a human life.

It is true that the common medical definition of when pregnancy begins is when the newly conceived human being implants him or herself into the womb.  This definition means that you existed for a few or for several days before making your mother pregnant!

This definition is used to evade an important point. It is a biological fact that each human life begins at conception, not at implantation. This is true even if pregnancy is technically defined as beginning at implantation of the unborn into the womb.   This explains how abortion advocates can make it appear that the Plan B/Morning After/Early Contraception pill does not cause an abortion because it technically does not "terminate pregnancy" under this definition.  It leaves the impression that no life exists prior to implantation.

Whether or not pregnancy is defined as beginning when the unborn implants into his or her mother's womb does not change the fact that a unique human being exists several days before implantation. A chemical abortion of a newly created human's life can occur by using Plan B without "terminating pregnancy" or before pregnancy occurs. 

This illustrates the absurdity of the abortion debate and how abortion advocates mislead the public to keep them from knowing that Plan B does sometimes cause an abortion and that forcing pharmacists to fill Plan B prescriptions makes them participants in ending the life of a new person.

This fact must matter and abortion advocates must know that, otherwise they would not try to evade this point. Unfortunately yesterday's RGJ editorial uses this same logic to say that the Plan B pill does not cause an abortion.

Does The Morning After Pill Cause Abortions? Sometimes

Today's Reno Gazette Journal editorial is either uninformed or disingenuous.  The RGJ says "This contraception pill does not interrupt a pregnancy but prevents fertilization, if taken soon enough, within 72 hours. It does not cause abortion."

They need to tell that to the manufacturer.  They say that the Plan B/Emergency Contraception/Morning After Pill works to prevent contraception, and it works to kill the newly formed human being after conception has occurred and on the way to implantation in the womb.  It also works to make the womb inhospitable to the unborn.  So does this pill cause abortion?  Of course it does.  Not all the time, but sometimes it does. This is public information.  If the RGJ doesn't know this after having a former Planned Parenthood rep on their board, then they need to quit opining on it.

The RGJ also complains about the politicization of this pill.  If they don't know how the pill works or are unwilling to tell the public how it really works, then their complaints about politicizing this are hollow.

1.3 Million Abortions And 98 Percent Of US Women Use BC?

NARAL Pro-Choice America says that 98 percent of American women use contraception.  Something's wrong here.  Why do we have 1.3 million abortions every year when 98 percent of women use contraception?  See my previous post at http://nevadalifeissues.typepad.com/files/2006/07/13_million_abor.html#comments

FDA Succumbs To Political Pressure Again.

Just before the 2000 elections, President Clinton got the FDA to approve RU-486 before necessary trials were finished.  Even the notorious Reno abortionist Damon Stutes says that he won’t give out RU-486 because of health concerns.

This week history repeated itself.  In the face of intense political pressure from Hillary Clinton, the FDA has approved over the counter (OTC) use of the Plan B/Morning After/Emergency Contraception pill for women 18 and over.  Barr Pharmaceuticals and Planned Parenthood still want it to be available to all women, even young teens.

Plan B is a glorified oral contraceptive about 15 times the dosage of oral contraceptives.  Senator Tom Coburn, MD (R-OK) notes how bizarre this is.  Oral contraceptives require a prescription.  The FDA has never approved a drug for OTC use when a prescription was required for a lower dose.

Well, why would pro-lifers oppose OTC use of Plan B?  Sometimes it functions as an abortifacient.  In addition to preventing conception, it also works by killing newly conceived human beings on the way to being implanted in the womb and by making the womb inhospitable. Both cause abortions.

Abortion advocates argue that if pro-lifers were really interested in stopping abortion, they’d support Plan B.  They are also pushing Plan B to keep people from talking about abortion… Well, well, well…. Their own study out of UCSF shows that availability of Plan B did not reduce abortion or “unintended pregnancy.” Concerned Women of America’s Wendy Wright notes that Scotland, which made the morning-after pill nonprescription in 1999, reported its highest number of abortions since abortion was legalized in 1967, in 2005.

Wright also says that in England, abortions increased from 176,000 in 2002 to 185,400 in 2004. In four years, chlamydia went up 76 percent. Gonorrhea went up 55 percent. Syphilis went up 54 percent. Genital warts went up 20 percent.  Human Life of Washington reports that · “The British Government issued a warning to doctors to be especially aware of a potential complication of ectopic pregnancies following emergency contraception use. The post marketing surveillance experience in the United Kingdom, with specific reference to 201 emergency contraception failures, found 12 ectopic pregnancies, or a 6% rate‹triple the expected rate for both the UK and the US. (See: CMO update #35, dated 4-2-03, content # 20 at HERE)

So much for that argument.  But then again, if you are an abortion zealot, who cares?  As long as you keep as many of those little unwanted babies from off the street and mucking up society and going on welfare, an uptick in STDs is an acceptable cost to them.

You don’t have to be a pro-lifer to know that it’s not going to be hard to get this into the hands of young women.

When I think about abortion advocates opposition to parental notification laws in the face of our statutory rape epidemic, their unwillingness to root out third rate and sometimes sexual harassing doctors from the industry, their opposition to women’s right to know laws, their unwillingness to acknowledge (and warn) that many, many women suffer physical, spiritual and emotional by abortion, their covering up of abortion deaths and their willingness to expose girls to Plan B and etc, I think that they believe that a certain women, or a certain amount of women are expendable for their ends and goals.  At the end of the day, it is the pro-life advocate who is looking out for women, not the self anointed abortion feminist woman’s advocate.  We'll take the fight with abortion advocates over who is most pro-woman any day.

Embryonic Stem Cell Story Blowing Up On The Media

Embryonic stem cell research claims are blowing up in the face of the media-again. On Wednesday, headlines around the world trumpeted news that Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) had been able to take a single embryonic stem cell (a blastomere) from 8-10 cell embryos without killing the embryos and at the same time grow embryonic stem cells lines from those single cells. That IS news.

Well, that’s what ACT reported in their press release to the media. That press release announced these as results of a study of their experiment in the science journal Nature. The media should have checked the actual study because the Nature article tells a different story. Not only were all of the human embryos killed, ACT scientists used 4-7 stem cells from each embryo, not just one. ACT grew 2 stem cell lines, but not from single cells plucked off an embryo. Another experiment suggests that it may not be possible to grow human embryonic stem cells from just one blastomere.

Embryonic stem cell research and reporting is increasingly fraudulent. Last year Science, a leading scientific periodical, published peer reviewed claims of South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk that he had cloned human embryos and had developed human embryonic stem cell lines from those cloned embryos. Woo-suk’s claims were completely fabricated.

Embryonic stem cell research is increasingly politicizing science. Even The New England Journal of Medicine has announced it will publish in the area of stem cell research with an eye to impacting the political debate. This is inappropriate and diminishes The NEJM’s reliability.

Urban Legend Resurfaces: Abortion Up Under Bush

An urban legend that says abortion rates have gone up under President Bush's term in office keeps poking up its head.  In today's Reno Gazette Journal, letter writer Lynda Allan of Reno says, "Abortion rates are directly tied to the economic state of the country. That's why abortions have gone up during Bush's presidency, and went down during Clinton's."

Fortunately Allan is wrong.  Abortion is still going down. Factcheck.org and abortion leader Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute say that abortion has continued to decline under the Bush administration.  Factcheck.org also tells where this legend originated.

Allan is sort of on the right track when she says that "If people in this country want to stop abortion, then make your elected representatives raise the minimum wage instead of giving themselves raises. Reinvest in school lunch and breakfast programs. Teach more sex education, not less, and make inexpensive birth control methods available to everyone."

I don't know if any of that is going to help, especially birth control and sex ed. Abortion clinics say that more than 50 percent of women aborting are on BC and over 80 percent know how to use it. NARAL says 98 percent of women use it. So BC is not stopping abortion.  Kids taking comprehensive sex ed become more sexually active.

But she's right that we should do what we can to make sure that women do not have to choose between their careers/education and their kids.

Feminists for Life says that colleges need to start being more pregnancy friendly. They say that one in five abortions is done on college women.  College girls only have one choice, abort or drop out. We need to make it easier. Start by having changing rooms, day care, telecommuting, pregnancy insurance, special housing and etc.

Fiscal conservatives might object, but when we consider the long term health and emotional as well as economic impact of abortion, fiscal conservatives may see this as a good expenditure.  It is in our nation's best interest for the college women to have their kids (not abort) and we do not want them to drop out of school.