Pity Right to Life of Michigan. For years, it endured the unrelenting serial killing by Jack Kevorkian, known as Dr. Death. Kevorkian assisted in the suicides of 130 patients in his home state of Michigan. Didn’t matter if they were terminally ill. Didn’t matter where they lived. Didn’t matter where the suicide took place. If they wanted death, Dr. Death was happy to oblige. Kevorkian helped people put bags over their heads in vans in parking lots. He hooked them up to machines where the patient could push a button and – voila – death-dealing drugs entered the bloodstream. Even the proponents of euthanasia squirmed at the mention of his name.
Kevorkian deftly defied laws and slipped out of the hands of prosecutors on many occasions. Finally, he overstepped his bounds and created a videotape in which he directly killed a patient. It was aired on national television and they got him. After serving eight years in prison, he was recently paroled. Kevorkian remains a deeply controversial figure as he collects speaking fees of up to $50,000 at universities which, for whatever reason, allow him to spread his message.
Here’s the real kicker. Kevorkian now plans to run for Congress in Michigan. Pity Right to Life of Michigan.
The right-to-life movement is not sorry to see Governor Eliot Spitzer leave public office. He is well-known as a zealot prosecutor, but few outside of New York know the zeal with which he pushed his pro-abortion views. Unborn children were less than zeroes in his view, and he wanted to do everything in his power to ensure that not a single protection was left for them.
At his January 9 State of the State address, Spitzer said: “Given the continued efforts at the federal level to dismantle protection for women’s reproductive health and privacy, I ask you to pass the ‘Reproductive Health and Privacy protection Act’”—known as RHAPP.
Here are some of the disastrous provisions of RHAPP:
Remove criminal penalties even from unlawful abortions.
Forbid any protections, such as parental notification, even for young teenagers
Effectively prevent even an unborn child who is the intended victim of a crime from being recognized as a victim
Mandate Medicaid funding for abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy
Redefine pregnancy as beginning at implantation – not fertilization
Negatively redefine fetal viability
Will Lt. Governor David Paterson be any better? Time will tell.
We all know that abortion is the deliberate destruction of the life of an unborn baby. What is not commonly known are the side effects to women who abort. One of them is that women who have one or more abortions face a drastically increased risk of having a premature baby or a low weight infant.
Scientists from VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity published a report late last year in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. After examining data of over 45,500 mothers giving birth in the U.S., they found that 11% of all women had low weight infants and 14% had premature births. Women who had one abortion were almost three times more likely to have a low weight infant. Women who had two prior abortions saw their risk increased to five times more likely to have a low weight infant. Three abortions carried nine times the risk.
Women with one prior abortion were 70% more likely to experience a premature birth. This risk was increased to two times more likely to have a premature birth with two prior abortions and three times more likely with three or more abortions.
The scientists concluded that: “Previous abortion is a significant risk factor for low birthweight and pre-term birth and the risk increases with the increasing number of previous abortions. Practitioners should consider previous abortion as a risk factor.”
Late last year, scientists in Japan and Wisconsin announced that they were able to use ordinary human skin cells to create iPS cells which appear to have the same capabilities as embryonic stem cells. The moral brilliance of this discovery is that they did not have to destroy embryos to obtain the cells. Other labs around the world have already replicated this process.
This discovery simply blew up the idea that we have to kill living human embryos to advance medical treatments. And, by taking cells from a specific human and treating that same person with their own cells, the rejection factor is eliminated. That blows up the idea that we need human cloning to address the rejection problem.
Some scientists dismissed the discovery, stating that the method used to create iPS cells had tumor-formation problems. Professor Shinya Yamanaka, the Japanese scientist who made the discovery, immediately solved that problem and is now moving ahead to create iPS cells from human patients suffering from ten different diseases. Great news indeed for morality in research and humanity in general!
Healthy Wisconsin, the state senate Democratic Party universal health care plan, has been resurrected in the waning days of this legislative session.
Many object to Healthy Wisconsin because of its cost. Wisconsin Right to Life has argued vigorously that Healthy Wisconsin, because it covers everyone for everything, would force taxpayers to pay for any abortion a woman wants. It could be the second, third, or fifth abortion. Or a coerced abortion. Or an abortion because the woman doesn’t want stretch marks.
True to form, when you don’t have the facts, you make them up. Authors of Healthy Wisconsin talk out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, they state that Healthy Wisconsin will allow all citizens to enjoy the same health care benefits as state employees. Then, they claim that Healthy Wisconsin doesn’t mean taxpayer-funded abortions even though we taxpayers have been paying for abortions for state employees for years.
A public hearing is being held today. Stay tuned for any further progress on Healthy Wisconsin before Thursday’s adjournment.
Planned Parenthood is airing radio ads right now falsely claiming that right-to-life Speaker Mike Huebsch, Rep. Jim Ott, Rep. Mark Honadel and Rep. Karl Van Roy want to send women who have abortions to prison.
Why all the distortion and at this time? For several important reasons:
The first is purely political. PP has targeted these four legislators for defeat in November and wants to “bloody them up” early and often.
PP is running scared. Essentially PP is admitting that the days of Roe v. Wade may be numbered. It knows that Wisconsin’s abortion ban will go into effect when Roe is gone and their abortions clinics will be shut down. Lots of abortion revenue at stake here.
The evident hypocrisy is that PP helped create and fully endorsed a statute in 1985 which negates penalties for women under Wisconsin’s abortion ban. Our guess is that in their zeal to score political points it forgot that messy little detail.
The tiny country of Luxembourg has legalized euthanasia, following in the footsteps of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. Although Luxembourg is not a major European country, any trend in this wrong direction is significant for other countries in Europe. Great Britain defeated an effort to legalize assisted suicide almost two years ago but the issue is still boiling there. Scotland is considering legalization.
The Netherlands has the longest-running euthanasia regime. The slippery slope has advanced so far that this country now has guidelines that allow the killing of newborn infants with disabilities, such as spina bifida. Their justification is to allow parents to have career choices. They even rationalize that by allowing the baby to be born, evaluated, and then killed reduces the number of abortions.
The United States is not immune to this ominous trend. Largely ignored by the media, attempts to legalize assisted suicide were defeated in 2007 in Hawaii, Vermont and California. In 2008, an initiative has begun in Washington to garner enough signatures for a November 4 ballot measure to legalize assisted suicide in that state. And, a motion has been filed in a Montana court attempting to override its state law specifically prohibiting assisted suicide by finding a right to die in the state constitution.
Wisconsin Right to Life has played a leadership role over the past six years in facilitating information and strategies to fight these battles in the U.S. Currently, Wisconsin Right to Life is the U.S. representative for an international coalition against assisted suicide.
The AmericanCollege of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) is working hard to force physicians to participate in abortion. The ACOG Ethics Committee issued an opinion in November of 2007 titled “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine.”
Don’t you love these fancy titles? It’s really a euphemism for a policy which would force OB-GYNs to either perform abortions as “standard practice” or refer women to abortion clinics. Failing to do so would constitute medical malpractice, according to the opinion. The ACOG opinion also urges legislators to create laws to conform to this opinion.
The Ethics Committee will meet again on March 17-18 to discuss, and possibly adopt, the opinion as official ACOG policy.
Fortunately, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) has drafted a powerful response and alerted its 2,500 members to this potential violation of conscience for those who believe their job is to care for and deliver babies, not kill them in the womb.
Last week’s enormous public hearing on legislation to repeal Wisconsin’s abortion ban is over. This effort overshadowed two significant victories in the Assembly in the wee hours of Friday morning.
*AB 710, a state partial-birth abortion ban. By a 59-38 bipartisan margin, AB 710 passed in the Assembly. Although there is a federal ban in place, it is important to have a state ban to give prosecutors the tools to prosecute those that violate the ban. The Senate is unlikely to take this measure up before the legislature’s March 13 adjournment.
*AB 770, legislation which creates tax credits and exemptions for research conducted in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Right to Life supported an amendment that passed in the Assembly which would prevent tax credits and exemptions from applying to businesses that are involved in the destruction of human embryos, the use of cells or tissue derived from the destruction of human embryos, the creation of human embryos for research purposes or the cloning of human embryos for any purpose. It is not clear if the Senate will take up this measure.
These bills were scheduled for the Assembly’s Thursday calendar. But, legislators like to talk in caucus and did not take up the calendar until 9:00pm. We were in the capitol until 3:30am on Friday morning to witness the completion of these two important measures. A long night in the capitol, but when all is said and done, it is worth it to have the kind of successes that occurred last week.
Last week’s public hearing on the proposed repeal of Wisconsin’s abortion ban had a very public side. But there were some fascinating things going on behind the scenes that didn’t make the news:
Over 500 right-to-lifers came to oppose SB 398, the proposed repeal of Wisconsin’s abortion ban. There were about 50 people in support. Seeing how outnumbered they were, Planned Parenthood and its allies were overheard in the hallway calling people and begging them to come to the capitol.
Several right-to-lifers brought their children. Representative Therese Berceau, one of the authors of the repeal, chastised the parents for inappropriately bringing children to such a hearing and using them as props.
After the hearing was over, Senator Jon Erpenbach, chair of the committee and a supporter of the repeal, was reminded that over 500 people were there in opposition. He remarked that the people who came were not representative of the state. Talk about dismissing hundreds of people who went out of their way to attend his hearing!
A 14-year-old young man who was just standing in the hallway wearing his “Save 940.40” button got a tongue-lashing from one of the supporters of the repeal. She repeatedly asked him why he was against women, why he wanted to hurt them.
Planned Parenthood had a video camera and filmed everyone who testified. A political ad in the making?
Barbara
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