Hypocrisy from the Left: Who Would Jesus Abort?

Coffee spewer of the day: Nancy Pelosi claims she has to craft public policy that conforms to her Catholic faith, or something, which is a weird argument to make if you are a leftwinger. I mean, I thought liberals hate letting values affect one's vote. Not that any person with 2 brain cells believes Pelosi lets her WWJD bracelet change her mind about issues like, say, partial-birth abortion.

From Hot Air:

When conservatives talk about religious values informing public policy goals, the Left shrieks about the separation of church and state and usually refers to the Right as an American Taliban. Pelosi will get a pass, however, because she uses the religious language to argue for their pet causes. It’s a good idea to capture this moment anyway, for the next time someone argues that “Christianists” are attempting a theocratic takeover of America.

We have a word for this: Democrisy.

How Dare Pro-Lifers Call Themselves Feminists!

My earliest altercation with Amanda Marcotte was over a series of posts she did decrying Feminists for Life for having the audacity to say they are feminists who--gasp!--don't believe in abortion. At the time, I hadn't a clue that linking to Amanda's screed would garner so many nasty comments from women (it was a deluge), but it was quite informative to witness first hand the callous attitude such "women" have for life in general and the lives of both women and babies in particular.

It's nearly four years later, and Feminists for Life is still causing consternation among the pro-abort feminists. This time, Echidne of the Snakes has her rattles in a twist because this organization of obviously not feminists thinks that supporting women in "refusing to choose" abortion is a bad thing. The most peculiar thing about Echidne's arguments is something basically every feminist does: they assume women must have sex and that anything that doesn't prevent the typical consequence of sex (i.e., pregnancy) is actually oppression.

This has always seemed like such a strange argument to me, considering the same women usually rush on to explain how economically burdensome children are and that being forced to actually live with and raise the offspring one casually produced is just downright unfair. What makes this argument so peculiar is that we usually aren't talking about the hard cases--rape, incest, life of the mother--but rather, sex that the woman chose to engage in.

Most girls get the birds and bees talk around the age of 10, and are fully informed about contraception by 14 or 15. During that five years, girls have been exposed to so many pro-sex images, from pictures to text, that if they don't think having sex with whoever is normal, then they must really be sick.

But what if we didn't spend all that time and money convincing 14-year-olds that having sex with their 17-year-old boyfriends was normal and nothing to be ashamed of? What if we spent the time telling them that as children, they probably shouldn't be engaging in risky, life-changing behavior that could end them up with unintended pregnancies for which killing the children is really, really not a good thing to do? My guess would be that we could have fewer children f*cking if we spend at least the same amount of time explaining to the 14-year-olds about the lifetime consequences of having sex with someone just for fun as we do teaching them the joys of fisting, for example. But then, I guess, that would be "slut shaming," as feminists call it, and we certainly don't want girls to feel bad about having sex with guys that they love or like or just met. Because, you know, sex is fun and pregnancies can be terminated and you'll never, ever, ever feel bad about that 20 minute procedure.

This is the world feminists want us to live in, a world where having sex is a meaningless activity and pregnancy is a really weird coincidence, not a consequence. In this world, thinking girls and boys and men and women should refrain from having sex unless they are prepared to be tied to that person forever means you "hate sex," and loving sex means that you don't think it's any more significant than farting. But mostly, in this world, feminists can't tolerate the idea that some women would think equality is a cool thing for women after birth...and before. That's just anti-feminism. Or something.

Obama Administration: Policing the Border Equals Forced Abortions

Just when I think the nuts in the Obama administration can't do worse, we get word that they are equating Arizona's immigration law with China's human rights abuses.

Posner said in addition to talks on freedom of religion and expression, labor rights and rule of law, officials also discussed Chinese complaints about problems with U.S. human rights, which have included crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.

He said U.S. officials did not whitewash the American record and in fact raised on its own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person's immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally.

Because requiring people to legally enter the country is every bit as big a human rights violation as forced abortion, speech and religious suppression, gulags and possibly harvesting organs for money. I'm so glad the America haters are running the government. It's really gonna make China like us.

I Think Amanda Marcotte's Head Just Exploded...

after reading about Raquel Welch's new book.

Welch has written a book, "Raquel: Behind the Cleavage," which might just stand out on bookstore shelves. We need it to!...

Further, what she writes knocks the glimmer off the rose of so-called "sexual freedom." The concept, ushered in by the pill, she says, "has taken the caution and discernment out of choosing a sexual partner, which used to be the equivalent of choosing a life partner. Without a commitment, the trust and loyalty between couples of childbearing age is missing, and obviously leads to incidents of infidelity. No one seems immune."

I'm not one of those pro-lifers who is anticontraception. I think that contraception does give a woman a certain degree of control about when and whether to have children and that the power of that is important for women to get to do other things in their lives that they want to do.

But having said that, the sad truth is that the sexual revolution has done more to dehumanize women than anything of the last hundred years. The rise of sex without love or responsibility has caused women (and men) to do things with their bodies that the vast majority would never have thought about doing were it not for contraception and abortion.

I've been castigated repeatedly by the likes of Amanda Marcotte for suggesting that women can and should say "no" to sex when it is outside marriage, where both partners have a commitment to a lifelong relationship. To scratch the itch, then find oneself connected to a guy one doesn't know, must be a disgusting and nightmarish thing. But complaining that the contraception didn't work is childish and, frankly, the least of the woman's problems. Why have sex with a person that you don't want to be linked to for life? And this isn't even talking about divorced parents, which is an entirely different type of problem. How on earth can a person be so flippant with one's body as to give it to anyone who has the slightest appeal, or perhaps only convenience?

None of this is to excuse men for doing the same thing for centuries. But if men's biological history is any indication, not being responsible for bearing children tends to make a person less responsible with their sexuality than knowing that you could be bearing and caring for this person's children for decades to come. Most men aren't so irresponsible. They desire a wife and family. But our society seems to have evolved into a system supporting, through entertainment and politics, the very basest of instincts of mankind. For a presidential candidate to say he wouldn't want his children "punished" with a baby, and that that justifies killing the punishment, should have made most voters recoil. How can a man who says he wants citizens to trust him with so much power hold life in such contempt? And yet, 53% of Americans voted for this man, arguing that his philosophy was "centrist."

When Raquel Welch of all people is arguing that contraception has cheapened sex and dehumanized women, it should give us all pause. I'm sure feminists will howl that she only regrets what she's gotten the chance to do and that she now wants to stop others from having fun. But that's an argument any 14-year-old would make. Having "control of your body" should mean more than throwing it away.

Behind Those High Divorce Rates and High Out-of-Wedlock Birth Rates

For years, liberals have crowed about the stable marriages and low out-of-wedlock birth rates of blue states, but as Ross Douthat notes, there's nothing for blue staters to be proud of in their low out-of-wedlock birth rate numbers. That's because their high abortion rates mask that number.

More important, Cahn and Carbone also acknowledge one of the more polarizing aspects of the “blue family” model. Conservative states may have more teen births and more divorces, but liberal states have many more abortions.

Liberals sometimes argue that their preferred approach to family life reduces the need for abortion. In reality, it may depend on abortion to succeed. The teen pregnancy rate in blue Connecticut, for instance, is roughly identical to the teen pregnancy rate in red Montana. But in Connecticut, those pregnancies are half as likely to be carried to term. Over all, the abortion rate is twice as high in New York as in Texas and three times as high in Massachusetts as in Utah.

So it isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, both morally and practically, depending on who and where you are.

If, as Douthat says, the red state model looks dysfunctional in a modern society, it's possibly because it values life above creature comfort and death. That's something blue staters won't want to talk about. Or maybe they will, since they don't typically consider abortion to be something shameful or to be avoided.

Sex Education All Cleaned Up

After reading this paean to the birth control pill, I can't help but wonder why feminists feel compelled to doctor Margaret Sanger's birth control views?

One of his targets was Margaret Sanger, a nurse who wrote a sex education column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for a left-wing New York newspaper, The Call. When Comstock banned her column on venereal disease, the paper ran an empty space with the title: “What Every Girl Should Know: Nothing, by Order of the U.S. Post Office.”

Sanger was the first person to publish an evaluation of all the available forms of birth control. As a reward, she got a criminal obscenity charge. She fled to Europe to avoid going to jail, and her husband was imprisoned for passing out one of her pamphlets. In the end, he got 30 days, and Anthony Comstock got a chill during the trial that led to a fatal case of pneumonia.

Sanger was also a huge proponent of eugenics and forced sterilization of the mentally disabled. Oddly enough, feminists, while praising birth control, don't like to bring up its sordid history as a tool for eugenics and racists. I guess it sort of goes with Jessica Valenti's lament that MTV isn't showing teenagers getting abortions. You know, history doesn't make abortion sound so attractive.

Ultrasound Is Intrusive?

Really? Via Echidne of the Snakes is this article on proposed pro-life legislation.

Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry vetoed two abortion bills that he said are an unconstitutional attempt by the Legislature to insert government into the private lives and decisions of citizens.

One measure would have required women to undergo an intrusive ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting abortions. Henry said Friday that legislation is flawed because it does not allow rape and incest victims to be exempted.

"Intrusive ultrasound"? I've had all kinds of ultrasounds before, but never heard them described as "intrusive." Why is requiring an ultrasound before killing your baby heinous, which is the way this is being described?

Lawmakers who supported the vetoed measures promised an override vote in the House and Senate as early as next week. A national abortion rights group has said the ultrasound bill would have been among the strictest anti-abortion measures in the United States if it had been signed into law.

Henry said "it would be unconscionable to subject rape and incest victims to such treatment" because it would victimize a victim a second time.

So, undergoing an abortion isn't victimizing anyone--well, except the baby who gets killed, but that doesn't count, don't you know--but getting an ultrasound is victimizing? In other words, giving the patient full knowledge of what they're doing is "victimizing a victim for a second time," but letting her get an abortion without knowledge is ok?

"State policymakers should never mandate that a citizen be forced to undergo any medical procedure against his or her will, especially when such a procedure could cause physical or mental trauma. To do so amounts to an unconstitutional invasion of privacy," he said.

Wait. We have all kinds of laws on the books regarding medical procedures and what can and can't be done, and some of that can be pretty traumatizing. We have the new Obamacare bill which sure looks like legislation which will force patients to undergo all sorts of procedures--including procedures like long waits for care, for example--but that's ok because it's not making it more difficult to kill one's offspring? And having to wait weeks to get your cancer treatment or being unable to get treatment (since there won't be enough providers for all the "free" care the government will now be giving out) is pretty traumatizing mentally. But I guess that will be ok, provided taxpayers fund your abortions.

Under the ultrasound legislation, doctors would have been required to use a vaginal probe in cases where it would provide a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound. Doctors have said this is usually the case early in pregnancies, when most abortions are done.

Oh, so it's like having an annual exam. God knows that's really traumatizing. Certainly don't want women to know what they're getting rid of. That might look too much like your well woman exam.

Why are women perfectly capable of making major decisions with all kinds of information (according to feminists) but knowing that the products of conception are actually a human being makes them swoon?

The Ultimate Failure of Abortion Arguments

I don't spend much time arguing with trolls or other liberals anymore about issues like abortion because it's fairly obvious what their opinions are and that they aren't willing to be persuaded by logic. Take this post which gives the tired old argument that by wanting to get rid of abortion, pro-lifers are actually encouraging abortion.

The argument goes that being against killing babies legally means that you don't mind killing babies illegally because everybody's going to have sex anyway (since they can't control themselves) and that's going to mean pregnancy.

Now, it's true that sex leads to pregnancy (even though people like Amanda Marcotte argue that it doesn't), even though every individual sex act doesn't result in a pregnancy. The idea that, somehow, sex is simply for fun is nonsense, and anyone who approaches intercourse without considering the consequences of the act probably shouldn't be doin' the dirty anyway. If you know you have to drive home and you decide to go on a bender at the bar, you're responsible for the wrecks you may have on the way home. The fact that you don't always have one while driving drunk doesn't make it in any way less your fault when it does occur.

Because the consequences of having sex can be both dire (AIDS) and long-lasting (raising children), it's simply moronic to argue that it's "unfair" that women bear the burden of sex's consequences. Regardless of whether it is "fair," women are, indeed, the ones who become pregnant, which is why they have to be more concerned about whom they have sex with and when.

When pro-lifers argue that they want to end abortion on demand, it's not because they want more abortions (illegally). It's because killing babies en utero is still killing and having the sanction of the state to do it doesn't make it the morally right thing to do.

I don't think Roe v. Wade will be overturned simply because the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision made it clear that the Supreme Court considered this beastly procedure to be a fundamental right (although, with the changing makeup of the court, I could be wrong). But even if the SCOTUS overturned Roe, it would simply leave the decision about legalizing abortion up to the individual states. If California and New York want to be the abortion capitals of the United States, I'm ok with that. But if Utah and Texas don't want to support women's right to kill babies up to birth, that's ok, too.

For the pro-aborts, however, such democracy must be fought any way possible, which is why they argue hard cases (such as rape), as if those are the only times women get abortions.

Unintended Consequences of China's One Child Policy

Liberals love abortion, embracing it as a woman's "choice" and a way for poor women to get out of poverty. And since they see abortion as a universal good, they tend to ignore what abortion has done in places like China, where girls are so despised that the sex imbalance will have devastating consequences in the 21st century. How do feminists justify their support of abortion in places such as this?

I Know Where They Went

Asia 'missing' 96 million women: UN

Asia is "missing" about 96 million women -- the vast majority in China and India -- who died from discriminatory health care and neglect or who were never born at all, the UN estimated on Monday.

Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion have caused a severe gender imbalance in Asia, and the problem is worsening despite rapid economic growth in the region, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report said.

"The old mindset with its preference for male children has now combined with modern medical technology" that makes it easier to predict and abort unborn girls, said Anuradha Rajivan, the report's lead author.

"It is not just female infanticide but sex-selective abortion of unborn girls that cause so-called 'missing' females," she said, contrasting the issue with recent improvements in female life expectancy and education.

Pro-choicers can't even bring themselves to decry sex-selective abortion. After all, that's a "choice," too.

A Pro-Choicer Agrees With Tim Tebow

Sally Jenkins has an incredible column up about the flap over Tim Tebow's pro-life Super Bowl ad.

Jenkins is pro-choice but makes the argument that Tebow's ad is, in fact, pro-choice, because Pam Tebow had the choice to have an abortion and chose not to. As a pro-lifer, I think this is the uncomfortable stretch those who support abortion on demand have to make, but I'm even willing to accept it, provided those calling themselves pro-choice decide to support all women's choices, including the choice to have children others think they shouldn't.

Jenkins is one of them.

She also goes on to make excellent points about why NOW, Amanda Marcotte and the hysterical feminists are flat out wrong about Tebow.

Here's what we do need a lot more of: Tebows. Collegians who are selfless enough to choose not to spend summers poolside, but travel to impoverished countries to dispense medical care to children, as Tebow has every summer of his career. Athletes who believe in something other than themselves, and are willing to put their backbone where their mouth is. Celebrities who are self-possessed and self-controlled enough to use their wattage to advertise commitment over decadence.

You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren't embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions. See, the best way to deal with unwanted pregnancy is to not get the sperm in the egg and the egg implanted to begin with, and that is an issue for men, too -- and they should step up to that.

Emphasis mine.

Feminists hate talking about abstinence, whether it's simply telling people to keep their pants zipped till they are prepared to be parents or supporting abstinence education, which works better than comprehensive sex ed. This is because expecting people to show self-restraint is, somehow, the same as forcing women to wear burqas or chastity belts. The argument is that telling people not to act on every urge is evil or means you hate sex (quite the opposite, actually).

We need more feminists making the argument for abstinence because it creates fewer unwanted pregnancies. That means not hopping into bed with the guy you met tonight just because you're horny, but recognizing that if things go awry, you, as a woman, are the one left holding the bag, so to speak. This isn't "slut shaming," just biology.

Leftwing Speech Supporters Press CBS Not to Air Tim Tebow Pro-Life Ad

Yet another affirmation of their free speech bonifides here as leftwing groups pressure CBS not to air Tim Tebow's ad supporting life.

I guess when you can't come up with a pro-abortion message that doesn't sound like, "Yes, kill your baby because it's your choice," the only option you have available is to try to stop those supporting the babies from speaking out.

Pandagon Watch: The Unbelievably Stupid Jesse Taylor Editon

God bless Chuck Serio for monitoring Pandagon for me (since Amanda Marcotte not only doesn't want me commenting on her site; she blocked my IP address so I can't even see it), because without him, we wouldn't get to see the naked stupidity and unbelievable callousness of jerks like Jesse Taylor.

Apparently, Jesse's wound up because Tim Tebow is making a commercial with a pro-life message, and the commercial will air during the Super Bowl.

The former Florida quarterback and his mother will appear in a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl next month. The Christian group Focus on the Family says the Tebows will share a personal story centering on the theme “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.”

The group isn’t releasing details, but the commercial is likely to be an anti-abortion message chronicling Pam Tebow’s 1987 pregnancy. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child and gave birth to Tim.

Jesse's enraged that the football star and his mother actually think not killing your babies is a good thing! Can you imagine?! The doctors told this woman she would die if she had the baby...and she selfishly didn't die but gave birth to a healthy baby who then went on to do wonderful things and have a great life! How utterly selfish of her!

Jesse's upset that Pam and Bob Tebow (a) didn't do what the doctors told them to do and (b) actually found a doctor who agreed to care for her so she wouldn't die (that selfish bitch!) and that the baby wouldn't die (that more selfish bitch!)

What this teaches us is that abortion is evil, so long as you have around the clock medical care and are lucky enough to defy the odds, not die and not have your baby come out stillborn. That’s the major problem with us pro-choicers: we keep forcing women to make hard moral choices like “Do I want to chance my own death?” rather than just telling them to suck it up and face it like a man. Well, if a man was about to potentially pass a lump of dead biological matter through their nonexistent vaginas and potentially die in the process.

Yeah, Jesse. That's the message. It couldn't be a message more along the lines of, Lots of people will pressure a pregnant woman to do what they've decided is the best thing for her and kill her baby, because making her own choice--which is what they spend so much time telling us they are for--is evil. These people always support a woman choosing to kill her own child for any reason whatsoever. But risking one's life for one's children is just plain stupid, vile and, yes, morally wrong.
Here's Jesse's flippant response to my argument:

Pam Tebow made a decision based on her circumstances. She chose to take a risk, and it worked out. Good for her, she should have had that choice. But there’s a rare breed of woman, called “most of them”, who might not have an all-day, every-day doctor on call, or who might be in more danger than Pam Tebow, or who make a different calculation and don’t want to run the risk of being the dead mother of a dead baby. Fie on their monstrous asses, though. Fie!

See, the problem isn't that Pam Tebow defied her doctor, risked her life, and loved her child more than herself. It's that she and her husband sought and found medical care to help her. Oh, and she didn't die like she should have.

But wait, there's more! Most people won't have famous and athletic children, and you won't know anyway, so it's ok to kill your babies (not just the ones that are medically risky but the ones you decide you don't want just cuz).

There’s also the teensy problem of the presumption that every woman having an abortion is somehow ending the life of Football Jesus. You will never know who 99.99% of people in this world are. You won’t read the novels they don’t write, you won’t listen to the music they don’t produce. This is not to say that human life isn’t valuable. This is to say that if your case against abortion is that your future child could be a one in a several hundred million talent, you need a better case.

Of course, Tim Tebow is about to fail miserably in the NFL like most of the rest of us six billion-plus schmucks would, so maybe this is a better ad than I thought...

I'm not surprised in the least that Jesse Taylor put together such an outrageously insensitve and stupid post. Like Amanda, women having abortions to prove that they have a "choice" is far more important than women actually making principled choices that have longer term consequences. So-called pro-choicers like Jesse and Amanda let the mask slip every time they write things like this, because it shows that they don't support women's choices; they only support women having abortions. Because choosing to have medically risky babies or financially risky babies or life-altering, career-changing babies is just plain stupid or, at best, simply unnecessary risky behavior.

Obamacare and Maternity Health: What's Missing...

...from this article?

Perhaps the biggest loss for women's health reform is that with all the drama over abortion, maternity care has remained a huge blindspot — and a costly one, at that.

The US spent $86 billion on maternity care in 2006 and another $26 billion caring for babies born preterm, now also at a record high of 12 percent. Prematurity is a leading cause of infant death, yet the majority of premies are induced or surgically delivered too early. This over-medicalisation means that childbirth costs Americans more than twice per capita what other countries with better outcomes spend. Medicaid picks up nearly half the bill in the US. If we gave just a little attention to improving care, we could literally save billions.

"Improve quality and reduce costs" — this has been Obama's mantra for health reform. How is it that instead of addressing real threats to women's and babies' health, "reform" has led us toward rolling back abortion access? Advocacy groups have been defending "abortion rights" and, to a lesser extent, "birthing rights," but it's possible that such a single-issue focus has helped to marginalise. To what other bodily system or medical procedure do we attribute rights? We don't have endocrine rights or MRI rights; men don't have testicular rights or Viagra rights. Rights belong to human beings. We have rights.

Or do we? A society that would force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy would also force her to have major abdominal surgery. Women won't get real health reform until we reform this fundamental lack of respect for women. The bus stops here.

The author, an abortion supporter, notes that women's health care is about far more than abortion, even though that one procedure sucks all the oxygen out of any conversation. She then goes on to discuss the difficulty many women face trying to have a Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC).

The Vbac ban is only a subset of a much larger problem. Decades of research tell us that optimal maternity care is something very different from what most American women receive. Optimal care means that the physiological birth process is supported with minimal intervention: labour begins spontaneously, women are free to move around and push in upright positions, and providers avoid surgical intervention unless absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, the majority of labouring women are confined to hospital beds, strapped to mandatory but ineffective fetal monitors, induced or sped up with artificial hormones, and consequently experiencing unnecessary pelvic trauma and the highest cesarean section rate on record, at 32 percent (10-15 percent is considered the maximum we would expect for health reasons). If you question whether this has anything to do with women's bodily integrity, talk to a woman who's had an infected caesarian scar or an episiotomy that tore into her perineum.

But why do women face so many roadblocks to birth the way they want? The author doesn't address it, but the answer is simple: money and liability. Sites like this one help the prospective plaintiff look for a John Edwards-style ambulance chaser to help them get their jackpot justice. This forces doctors, hospitals and insurers to go to greater lengths to thwart lawsuits. That means forcing women to have cesareans rather than allowing them to determine the risks and rewards of vaginal births, pain medication, fetal monitors and so on.

Those really concerned about protecting women's bodily autonomy should include tort reform in any health care bills. I don't expect that to happen in the Democrats' Obamacare debates.

Abortion Increases Breast Cancer Risk?

Thanks to Chuck Serio for this link.

Less than two months since the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force issued new guidelines recommending against routine mammograms for women in their forties, a second breast cancer scandal involving a U.S. government panel of experts has come to light which has implications for healthcare reform.

An April 2009 study by Jessica Dolle et al. of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center examining the relationship between oral contraceptives (OCs) and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) in women under age 45 contained an admission from U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) researcher Louise Brinton and her colleagues (including Janet Daling) that abortion raises breast cancer risk by 40%. [1]

Additionally, Dolle's team showed that women who start OCs before age 18 multiply their risk of TNBC by 3.7 times and recent users of OCs within the last one to five years multiply their risk by 4.2 times. TNBC is an aggressive form of breast cancer associated with high mortality.

Given the push by feminists for more contraception earlier, I don't really expect to see any lefty bloggers (*cough* Amanda Marcotte *cough*) changing their minds about marketing The Pill to your 15-year-old. But they should, considering the risks.

Because We Wouldn't Want To Save Any More Babies Than Absolutely Necessary

Baltimore Law Aims to Undermine Charitable Work of Pregnancy Resource Centers, Say Pro-life Activists

A bill passed by the Baltimore City Council in November and signed into law on Dec. 4 will require pregnancy resource centers operating within the city to post signs stating what services the facilities do not offer. Signs -- to be posted outside the centers -- must state that they do not provide or give referrals for abortion or contraceptives.

Pro-life activists say this is the first time in the United States that a nonprofit service provider has been required to post such signage. They believe the law is intended to undermine their efforts to help women make an informed decision about an unplanned pregnancy. The signs will turn more women to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, they say.

Abortion supporters hate crisis pregnancy centers for "tricking" women into actually knowing enough about their babies not to kill them. "Tricking," of course, includes informed consent, sonograms and information about adoption.

Want a Greener Planet? Kill Babies!

That's China's recommendation: if you want to help the environment, institute a "one child" policy like China has, complete with forced abortions.

“The [Chinese] policy on family planning proves to be a great success,” Zhao was quoted by the official Xinhua news agency as saying in Copenhagen, where she is one of Beijing’s delegates at the U.N. climate conference.

“It not only contributes to reduction of global emission, but also provides experiences for other countries – developing countries in particular – in their pursuit for a coordinated and sustainable development.”...

A report on Zhao’s comments in the state-run China Daily said she acknowledged that the one-child policy was not without “consequences” – but the only ones she mentioned were the skewed gender balance and a rapidly ageing society.

“I’m not saying that what we have done is 100 percent right, but I’m sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited,” she said.

I'm sure many on the left would agree with this, given their rabid anti-child philosophies.

Good News

More than 2/3 of abortion clinics have closed since 1991.

Is that Amanda Marcotte I hear screaming?

It's Tough When You Try to Make a False Equivalency

An Immoderate Proposal

have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won't ever need such a pill. And anyway, it's no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn't mean they shouldn't have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections. (I don't think there's even been a Supreme Court ruling making wood a constitutional right. I might be wrong about that.)

Many of the men who are prescribed this medication are on Medicare, so I think it should be stripped out of that coverage as well. And unlike the payments for abortion, which actually lower overall medical costs (pregnancy obviously costs much, much more) banning tax dollars from covering any kind of Viagra would result in a substantial savings:

One first has to ask what the moral objections to erections are and why it is in the best interest of public policy to oppose them. The moral objections to abortion are pretty clear: abortion kills babies. As a matter of public policy, it's a very bad idea to use taxpayer funding to help kill future taxpayers (and U.S. citizens), and the moral objection to killing innocents is well codified in our law. There's no similar history of objecting to erections.

Moreover, the societal cost of abortion is high; the desensitization of Americans to the taking of life is more apparent that possibly at any time in our history. We, in fact, can see human life in the womb, through ultrasound, and even the awful Roe vs. Wade argued that snuffing out human life (or potential human life) is something that should be heavily restricted. There's no similar rational objection to erectile medications.

I suppose Digby is attempting to argue that stripping funding of abortions from the Democrats' health care proposals is simply a form of sexism. The problem, of course, is that here is possibly the best example we have where men and women are not interchangeable. Men don't get pregnant and have babies or kill babies in the claim that it is "their body." Only women do that. The right (or not) to have an erection comes nowhere close to the same societal implications.

I actually have no problem with the idea of restricting taxpayer-funded health care from paying for erectile dysfunction treatments. It's not a necessary service, and only the most basic care should be covered by the taxpayers. If you want Viagra, pay for it yourself. And if you want an abortion, pay for that yourself, as well.

This is the unintended consequence of Democrats' determination to take over the health care system. An intended consequence is a permanent, economically-enslaved majority.

"I just thought I can't do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that's it,"

Planned Parenthood director quits after viewing ultrasound

Planned Parenthood has been a part of Abby Johnson's life for the past eight years; that is until last month, when Abby resigned. Johnson said she realized she wanted to leave, after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure...

She handed in her resignation October 6. Johnson worked as the Bryan Planned Parenthood Director for two years.

According to Johnson, the non-profit was struggling under the weight of a tough economy, and changing it's business model from one that pushed prevention, to one that focused on abortion.

"It seemed like maybe that's not what a lot of people were believing any more because that's not where the money was. The money wasn't in family planning, the money wasn't in prevention, the money was in abortion and so I had a problem with that," said Johnson.

Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions, something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.

There's a reason pro-choicers don't want mandatory ultrasounds before abortions.