A few weeks ago, FRC co-hosted a pro-life conference for medical students and health professionals on the topic of serious prenatal disability diagnosis. Throughout the day we heard from a number of well respected academics and medical professionals — a variety of researchers, medical doctors, registered nurses and other intellectuals, on the most up-to-date treatment options available as well as the latest in research findings. But perhaps the most powerful voices of the day were those who themselves received a poor prenatal diagnosis.

Kristal Dahlager, now a third year law student at Liberty University, has a remarkable story. Her mother was advised to essentially abort her because of a serious prenatally diagnosed problem. Yet Kristal, a thriving, beautiful and joyful young woman, survived and thrived. Click the ‘play’ button below to see to her tell the story:

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Today is my late mother’s 90^th birthday. We sometimes had words. For starters, she couldn’t abide George W. Bush. Of my last visit in 2005, however, my memories are sweet. I did not know how ill she was. She told me how my dad had proposed to her. They shared a love of poetry, especially Robert Burns. Praising the Scot’s lyrical “Mary Morison, Ma Jo (My Joy),” my father said: “If you marry me, your name will be Mary Morrison.” What poetry lover could resist?

My mother told me how she’d walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight during World War II. She crossed over walking arm-in-arm with her young sisters-in-law. The kicker: “I was carrying you then,” she said. We differed strongly on abortion, but I will always cherish those stories she gave me as her parting gifts.

Frieda was the mother of one of my best friends in high school. Often, I’d drop by their home, looking for my friend. I’d often linger talking politics with Frieda and her husband, Irv, even if my friend was not at home. Irv was a Democratic zone leader in our town. Frieda did not suffer from polio. She suffered from nothing. Her lively talk distracted me from the special shoes and hobbling gait that polio had inflicted on her. She was totally like her beloved FDR. He, too, used witty repartee to distract everyone from his polio. Frieda and Irv named their black Scottish terrier after FDR’s little dog, Fala, and they moved to his town of Hyde Park when they retired. Frieda and Irv instilled in me an indelible memory of the Holocaust and a deep concern for Israel.

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“We who hate your gaudy guts salute you”

William Allen White

Republican William Allen White, editor of Kansas’ Emporia Gazette, was often exasperated with President Franklin Roosevelt, but he recognized his great qualities of leadership. Recently, one of the callers to a popular conservative talk show was especially angry at Newt Gingrich: “Why, he said FDR was the greatest president of the twentieth century!”

A highly acclaimed recent book, The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes, argues that Roosevelt’s famous New Deal did not improve the stricken economy in the 1930s, and may even have slowed the recovery. It’s a commonplace among conservatives to argue—against the New Deal’s vast public works projects—that it was really the military buildup leading into the Second World War that got us out of the Great Depression. But that leads us inevitably to look at FDR’s wartime leadership. Columnist Pat Buchanan agrees with libertarian Ron Paul that we should never have entered the war against Hitler in 1941. Both of those gentlemen seem to have forgotten that it was Nazi Germany that declared war on the U.S.

As a conservative, I would not defend many of FDR’s New Deal policies, although we should note that his Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, the first woman of Cabinet rank, fought tirelessly to protect women from the hazards of coal mining, tunnel construction, and lumbering. Why? Because such jobs were hazardous to mothers. FDR’s backing of union demands was always linked to “a living wage” for the working man. It was assumed he was working to support a wife and children.

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The New York Times takes a firm stance against slavery. The “Gray Lady”—as the authoritative “newspaper of record” was once known–wants everyone to know that she won’t tolerate backsliding on the great moral issue of the nineteenth century.

I take no issue with the Times on slavery or on segregation. The liberal conscience of America—for so the editors see themselves—had an honorable record on those twin evils. In the American Civil War, the Times staunchly defended Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, during the modern Civil Rights era, the Gray Lady thundered daily against Jim Crow. It was for many of us the great moral issue of the twentieth century.

In the 1960s and 70s, I was a daily reader of the Times. But recently? Not so much.

And the reason is simply that I cannot abide the Times regularly railing against the defenders of human life. The Times routinely excoriates the Roman Catholic Church. Don’t even ask them about Evangelicals and Lutherans who speak up for the unborn.

Since that grim gray day in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was handed down, the Times has not found a single abortion it could not defend. Of 53,000,000 innocent lives lost, there is not one that should have been welcomed in life and protected by law. At least according to the Gray Lady.

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The Girl Scout Council of the National’s Capitol is handing out a statement to people who are inquiring about the charges I and others have made about the far-Left agenda at Girl Scouts HQ.  Let’s take a look:

Regarding the charge that the Girl Scouts’ official policy is to admit transgender toddlers, the statement reads:  “Our Council has not dealt with requests from families of transgender youth. Our focus remains on girls in kindergarten through…”  It does not say they will not admit transgender boys and in fact it is the national policy that they do so if ever there is a request.

More from their statement:  “And, contrary to rumors, we do not make donations to this group [Planned Parenthood]. The fact is that as a charitable organization we do not make donations to any other organization.”  We see your Straw Man, ladies!  Nobody is claiming that you donate money to Planned Parenthood, so disclaiming it gets you nowhere.  The charge is that you “partner with… Planned Parenthood organizations across the country,” in the words of Girl Scout CEO Kathy Cloninger on The Today Show.

More:  “Girl Scouts of the USA is one of the 145 Member Organizations of WAGGGS, which promotes mutual understanding and cross-cultural opportunities for girls around the world.”  Ah yes, they are touchy about the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, an aggressively pro-abortion organization which openly partners with the International Planned Parenthood Federation.  Girl Scouts USA often makes the point that they are just one of many member organizations; they don’t like to admit that Girl Scouts USA is the single largest national component of WAGGGS, making up over a third of its 10 million members.

More:  “the WAGGGS program is separate from our Girl Scout program, and your Girl Scout membership dues and cookie sales proceeds do not support WAGGGS.”  Not so fast.  Every little girl who signs up for the Girl Scouts is automatically made a member of WAGGGS, and there are apparently 6 different ways that Girls Scouts USA fund the radical WAGGGS.    If Girl Scouts of the Nation’s Capitol refrains from every one of these 6 funding streams, they should prove it.  Girl Scouts USA paid about 1.5 million dollars in “member quota” dues to WAGGGS in 2009.

Finally, a small change was in order to my blog on the Girl Scouts from yesterday.  In the 4^th FACT about Girl Scouts and abortion, I clarified that Girl Scout “councils” are regional and multi-county entities, since people tend to confuse troops with councils.

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Persecution of self-identified Christians has become a pandemic in the developing world.  For Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, Copts and others, making the simple assertion that they follow Jesus Christ can lead to abuse, eviction, disfigurement, and – far too often – death.

Today at FRC, we heard a remarkable and very probing lecture by Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, a profound theologian and himself a former Muslim, about the way the church is responding to the threat of radical Islam both abroad and here in the United States.

Dr. Sookhdeo drew a striking parallel between the church in Germany during the rise of Nazism and the way Christians should be responding to the Islamists who would undermine the very foundations of representative self-government and religious liberty.

Christians are called to love and minister to Muslims and also stand against an agenda which is inherently oppressive and even violent.  Dr. Sookhdeo offered wise counsel about how we can do both.  You can watch his lecture here.

In addition, there are excellent summaries of anti-Christian persecution worldwide in The Catholic Thing and the Voice of the Martyrs “newsroom.”

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Think of an iceberg and a ship. What comes to mind? The Titanic, of course. And if you don’t mentally picture the greatest luxury liner in history with her stern in the starry, moonless sky, about to break up and go under, you haven’t been to the movies. Unfortunately, Hollywood created a thoroughly dishonest account of that “night to remember.” The image of a bribed ship’s second officer who deliberately shot panicked civilians is only one of the many offenses against the well-documented truths of that night one hundred years ago.

I was researching an American history book several years ago when the subject of the Titanic came up in the text. Although some 1,500 lives were lost, she was not the greatest maritime disaster in history. So, what was the greatest? In those pre-Google days, I had to go hunting.

I learned that the greatest maritime disaster was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on January 11, 1945. That German vessel was evacuating terrified refugees from East Prussia. The Soviet Red Army was overrunning this Nazi territory, raping and murdering.

A Soviet submarine torpedoed the German ship and she went down with loss of 9,000 lives, mostly civilians, mostly women and children. The original name for the ship was to have been Adolf Hitler. Hitler, however, fearing the symbolism of any vessel bearing his name being sunk, had forbidden any such naming. So the vessel was named for the Nazi leader of Switzerland.

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Caitlin Flanagan recently released a new book, Girl Land, which takes a look at the world of today’s adolescent girls and the issues they are facing. Of course, Flanagan has again enraged feminists everywhere with her perspective.

In Girl Land, Flanagan looks at how culture has changed over time and how it has become focused on viewing girls as sexual objects and denying them the privacy, daydreams, and crushes that normal girlhood provides. In other words, they are losing their sense of self.

However, Girl Land is also drawing some criticism from those who might agree with Flanagan’s point of view. In a recent RealClearBooks op-ed by Heather Wilhelm, Girl Land received some criticism as painting things too broadly. Wilhelm brings up a great point that this book fosters ambiguity toward men, as well as making excuses for the “boys will be boys” mentality.

On one hand, Flanagan seems to buy into the “all men are predators” narrative, speaking of the pervy uncle and the drunk father hitting on the babysitter as if they are prototypes, not anomalies. Perhaps this stems from an assault Flanagan endured when she was younger, which she details in the book. But it’s an odd quirk, particularly in a girl culture better represented by the aggressive, love-struck babysitter in “Crazy, Stupid, Love” (in the movie, she harasses her charge’s clueless father, leading to mortifying results) than anything else.

But then, on the other hand, Girl Land exhibits a strange sense of “boys will be boys” that excuses even the crassest behavior. “If I were to learn that my children had engaged in oral sex — outside a romantic relationship, and as young adolescents — I would be sad,” Flanagan writes. “But I wouldn’t think that they had been damaged by the experience; I wouldn’t think I had failed catastrophically as a mother, or that they would need therapy. Because I don’t have daughters, I have sons.”

Wilhelm also argues that girls are facing a society that promotes promiscuity over abstinence. Girl Land did not mention anything about respect for this critical moral choice.

Kids need to know how their behaviors will impact them in the long run, and the implications of not making the right choices behaviorally. Shouldn’t Girl Land be focused on holding both sons and daughters to high moral standards? Our society needs these standards now more than ever.

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I recently opined in the Washington Times  that people should forgo the Thin Mints this year because of the far-left sociopolitical agenda pushed by Girl Scouts HQ. Others, too, have sounded the alarm. Feathers have been ruffled.

While their transgressions are sundry (forcing troops to admit cross-dressing boys being just one example), Girl Scout executives and their apologists seem most eager to defend the Scouts’ supposed “official neutrality” on abortion and “official non-partnership” with the nation’s abortion giant, Planned Parenthood.

Here are just five facts for the skeptic to consider:

FACT: On March 5, 2004 Girl Scouts CEO Kathy Cloninger admits on NBC’s The Today Show: “We partner with many organizations. We have relationships with…Planned Parenthood organizations across the country.” Watch her admit it here:

FACT: In January 2012, Girl Scouts employee Renise Rodriguez wears “Pray to End Abortion” t-shirt during off-duty visit to her Tucson Girl Scout office and is ordered to turn the shirt inside out or leave. See Renise in her t-shirt here.

FACT: For fourteen years the Girls Scouts in Waco, TX co-sponsor sex ed conference with Planned Parenthood. “It’s Perfectly Normal” book (written by Planned Parenthood executive) given to all children in attendance says abortion can be “a positive experience.” View the 2003 event brochure listing Girl Scouts as a cosponsor here [PDF].

FACT: In national survey, sixteen other regional, multi-county Girl Scout councils admit to partnering with Planned Parenthood; many other councils refuse to answer survey question. Watch interview about the survey on The O’Reilly Factor here.

FACT: In 2010-2011 Girls Scouts in New York partner with Planned Parenthood sex ed program, “Real Life. Real Talk.” The program website touts their partners: “Real Life. Real Talk. is proud to count the following organizations, faith communities and companies as partners: …Girl Scouts of NYPENN Pathways.” See screenshot of program web page showing Girls Scouts as partner here.

There are many other things to consider, especially for those for whom this is not an academic exercise (i.e., if you have a daughter in Girl Scouts). Please, please visit www.100questionsforthegirlscouts.org or any other of the Girl Scout watchdog sites proliferating on the Internet.

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As thousands were on the national mall in Washington, D.C. for the March for Life, Reuters reported on a study that suggests abortion is safer than giving birth.  I find it odd that the release of such a study was timed to coincide with an event that celebrates and vows to protect the sanctity of life.

There are some interesting findings from this study commissioned by the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  One is the fact that the authors of the study, Drs. Elizabeth Raymond and David Grimes, used estimates from the Guttmacher Institute, which is tied to Planned Parenthood.  Another finding that was particularly interesting is that they claim abortion is safer due to the amount of deaths that occurred during live childbirth.

There are some medical risks with childbirth, but the effects of abortion are much more dangerous and long-lasting.  Jeanne Monahan, Director, Center for Human Dignity at FRC, recently published an editorial that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which focused on abortion’s devastating impact on mental health.  According to Monahan:

In the fall, a meta-analysis was published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry. The report was the most extensive of its kind to date — the author looked at 22 published studies and data from more than 870,000 women. The results showed that women who have an abortion are at an 81 percent increased risk for mental health problems, including anxiety disorders, depression, drug abuse and suicidal behaviors. The study revealed the shocking statistic that close to 10 percent of all mental health problems in women can be directly attributed to abortion.

There are other impacts, as well, that are worth noting.  FRC also released a brochure, “The Top Ten Myths About Abortion,” which provided some insight into the medical complications from abortion.  A surgical abortion could impact whether a woman would be able to conceive and have a healthy pregnancy in the future.

Physical complications include cervical lacerations and injury, uterine perforations, bleeding, hemorrhage, serious infection, pain, and incomplete abortion. Risks of complications increase with gestational age and are dependent upon the abortion procedure.

Long-term physical consequences of abortion include future preterm birth and placenta previa (improper implantation of the placenta) in future pregnancies. Premature delivery is associated with higher rates of cerebral palsy, as well as respiratory, brain, and bowel abnormalities. Pregnancies complicated by placenta previa result in high rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, and perinatal death.

This does not include the physical complications from RU-486, which is prescribed to women who seek a chemical abortion.  These include:  hemorrhage, infection, and missed ectopic pregnancy.  The Food and Drug Administration recently reported that in the ten years since RU-486 was approved in the U.S., at least 11 women have died as a result of complications related to taking the drug.

Additionally, 612 women have been hospitalized, and 339 women required blood transfusions as a result of taking RU-486.  (Food and Drug Administration, “Mifepristone U.S. Postmarketing Adverse Events Summary through 04/30/2011”).

Additionally, government compiled statistics from Poland confirm that the number of abortion-related deaths significantly decreased when abortion was essentially outlawed. The fact that this study was released to coincide with the March for Life activities is not surprising, considering that the pro-choice lobby will do anything to ensure that abortion is in the forefront.

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[An original, shorter version of this post first appeared at Lifenews.com!]

Turning a blind eye toward both good science and good ethics, the embryonic stem cell and cloning company, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), has published a very preliminary online report regarding their first two patients injected with embryonic stem cell derivatives. The two patients, one who has age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness, and the other with a rare form of blindness called Stargardt’s disease, were injected with retinal cells made from human embryonic stem cells only 4 months before the report was submitted. This makes it far too early to know whether these embryonic stem cells will actually be safe or effective. In fact, it’s surprising that any reputable scientific journal would publish such very preliminary data, given the early stage of the clinical trial (which is supposed to last at least two years), the short period of time after the patients were injected, and the low numbers of patients and lack of controls.

Dr Martin Friedlander, Professor of Ophthalmology at Scripps Health in La Jolla, California pointed out the deficits and dangers of such early and incomplete reporting:

“To reach any conclusions on the safety or efficacy of two patients treated for four months without a control population for comparison is unreasonable. This is why anecdotal reports like this are not published. This falsely raises the hopes of millions of individuals suffering from these diseases.”

The paper published in the journal Lancet clearly reveals that the data are preliminary and uncertain. It mentions that one patient who showed improvement in her eye that was injected with the cells, also showed improvement in her eye that was NOT injected with the cells. The authors admit in the paper that there is a general lack of hard data:

“At present, we do not know if the transplanted cells have reduced immunogenicity or whether they will undergo rejection without immunosuppression in the long term. Similarly, we are uncertain at this point whether any of the visual gains we have recorded were due to the transplanted cells, the use of immunosuppressive drugs, or a placebo effect.”

First author Dr. Steven Schwartz has noted the likelihood of the placebo effect in several interviews. Dr. Schwartz conceded that it was “extremely unusual” for researchers to publish a study after treating only two patients out of a planned 24. But he said that was justified by the huge interest in the stem cells. ACT has been criticized in the past for overstating results, in part because it has been desperate to raise money to stay in business. The company’s stock rose 3.4 cents, or 23 percent, to 18 cents on Monday.

The safety of the patients is also still very much in question. Humans can take much longer to develop a tumor than lab mice, sometimes years. Previous research has shown that as few as two growing embryonic stem cells among millions of injected cells can lead to tumors, even if the cells are supposedly pre-differentiated. The concern regarding potential tumor formation and need for continued surveillance was noted by Dr. Sheng Ding of the Gladstone Institute:

If just a few undifferentiated stem cells are injected, “you may not see [an effect] at all, or you may be able to see it over a much longer period of time. The 4-month follow-up received by the trial patients thus far is “very short in this regard, and I think the patients need a much, much longer-term follow up to make sure there’s no tumor cells.”

It is indeed surprising that this paper was published. The preliminary nature of the paper reinforces the image of ACT noted in a recent story in Nature:

“Since the late 1990s, ACT has gained a reputation as a renegade company, accused of overhyping results to raise attention and money. Critics say that the company has damaged the field more than once with its high-profile, controversial announcements, such as one describing the company’s attempts to clone a human embryo in 2001…”

The embryonic stem cells (line MA09, currently pending review for NIH approval of taxpayer funding) used for injections into patients in the current trials are part of another embarrassing moment for ACT. Their derivation was described in a 2006 paper in which ACT claimed that they arose from single blastomeres that had been removed from human embryos, without destroying the embryos. However, the embryos had indeed been destroyed cell by cell, leading to several “corrections” to their published information. In a subsequent 2008 paper they again claimed to have accomplished derivation of embryonic stem cells without destroying an embryo, creating what they termed their NED (“no embryo destruction”) lines, but their own published data showed only 80-85% of the embryos survived the laboratory manipulation, falsifying their claim.

There are certainly better alternatives to embryonic stem cells. Similar stem cells–iPS cells–can be derived without any use of embryos; their potential is noted in the accompanying published comment. In fact, ACT scientist Bob Lanza has already said that they are planning to use iPS cells in the future, which potentially could remove the need for immunosuppressive drugs and provide an ethically-derived source of cells. However, since iPS cells are pluripotent, with a penchant to grow and make lots of cells, they face the same practical problem of tumor formation as embryonic stem cells.

A practical, as well as ethical solution, would be the use of adult stem cells. Preliminary work has shown that retinal repair could be accomplished using adult stem cells from bone marrow, or possibly even adult stem cells from within the patient’s own eye. Adult stem cells from the patient’s own eye have already been used successfully to treat corneal blindness in people.

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Recently the interim editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal made a radically pro-life proposal:  to ban the disclosure to parents of their baby’s sex before 30 weeks gestation in order to save baby girls from abortion.

“A pregnant woman being told the sex of the fetus at ultrasonography at a time when an unquestioned abortion is possible is the starting point of female feticide from a health care perspective,” writes Dr. Rajendra Kale.

Quelle surprise, I know.  Canada’s approach to abortion is nearly as extreme as the United States’ in everything but numbers of babies slaughtered.  Yet here’s the interim editor of Canada’s top medical journal sounding the alarm on female feticide and trying to fight back.  Even her admission that Canada allows “unquestioned abortion” before 30 weeks gestation is worthy of note.

The horrible practice of aborting baby girls due to a preference for sons has come to Canada with the immigrant communities who secretly practice it, though it is not thought to be widespread.

Still, “[s]mall numbers cannot be ignored when the issue is about discrimination against women in its most extreme form,” says Dr. Rajendra Kale, interim Editor-in-Chief of the journal. “This evil devalues women. How can it be curbed? The solution is to postpone the disclosure of medically irrelevant information to women until after about 30 weeks of pregnancy.”  Kale advocates that the policy banning sex disclosure before 30 weeks be adopted by the provincial colleges that govern doctors in Canada.

While my first reaction was pleasant surprise, my friend Wesley Smith was more cynical.  From his Secondhand Smoke blog:

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Yesterday, my pastor and friend Rev. Tom Joyce preached one of the finest messages on the biblical and scientific basis of the sanctity of life I’ve ever heard.  On this Sanctity of Life day, It is well worth taking 30 minutes to listen to Tom’s compelling sermon.  You can watch it here.

FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE from IBC on Vimeo.

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It’s March for Life day here in the nation’s capital, and FRC’s ProLifeCon is at hand. You can watch it all below:

Follow the conversation live on Twitter: #ProLifeCon.

Here’s the schedule:

• 8:30 – 8:35 a.m.: Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council
• 8:35 – 8:40 a.m.: Jill Stanek, JillStanek.com
• 8:40 – 9:05 a.m.: Michael Clancy, Photographer, “Hand of Hope” photo
  Julie and Samuel Armas, Subjects of the photo
• 9:05 – 9:20 a.m.: Gerard Nadal, Blogger, Coming Home
• 9:20 – 9:35 a.m.: Lila Rose, President, LiveAction
• 9:35 – 9:50 a.m.: Ryan Bomberger, Chief Creative Officer, The Radiance Foundation
• 9:50 – 10:00 a.m.: Intermission: ‘I’m Pro-Life Because’ photo montage
• 10:00 – 10:20 a.m.: Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.)
• 10:20 – 10:40 a.m.: Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.)
• 10:40 – 10:55 a.m.: Collin Raye, Spokesman, Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network
• 10:55 – 11:10 a.m.: Kristan Hawkins, Executive Director, Students for Life of America
• 11:10 – 11:25 a.m.: Jeanne Monahan, Director, Center for Human Dignity, Family Research Council, Karen Snuffer, Executive Director, CareNet Pregnancy Resource Centers: Manassas, Woodbridge, and Warrenton
• 11:25 – 11:30 a.m.: Tom McClusky, Senior Vice President, FRC Action

Special thanks to our cosponsoring bloggers:

• Liberty Generation
• Owen Strachan
• RJ Moeller
• Alexa Shrugged
• ChiselSeason.com
• Jill Stanek
• Remnant Culture
• The Radiance Foundation
• Little Bytes News
• Amanda Read
• Reagan Rex

Be sure to follow our featured Tweeters:

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Ask What They Mean By “Choice” was started last year as a response to NARAL’s “Blog for Choice Day.” Every year, NARAL uses the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision to praise the fact that women are allowed to have a “choice.”  Last year, the pro-life community on Twitter and blogs joined together to ask what do pro-choice activists mean by “choice.”

Does NARAL believe that “choice” means punishing a non-profit religious organization from receiving a grant that would aid victims of human trafficking?

In October, the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops (USCCB) received notification from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that the funding for their program to aid victims of human trafficking would be ending.  According to an article in the National Catholic Register, the decision fell on the hands of political appointees at HHS, who decided not to give the grant to USCCB due to their opposition of the Obama Administration’s stances on abortion and contraceptive mandates within the new health care law.

Since this decision was made, HHS has come under scrutiny.  The House Committee on Government Oversight held a hearing in December reviewing the politicization of grants by HHS.  You can read the testimony by clicking here.

If “choice” means cutting aid to victims of human trafficking over the core beliefs of an organization, then this is going against the very grain of ensuring human dignity and rights for women.  One would think that NARAL would be up-in-arms over the horrible acts of human trafficking, since many victims are women and young girls.

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ProLifeCon is only two days away.  Throughout this week, I have featured Ryan Bomberger, Lila Rose, Rep. Chris Smith, Michael Clancy, and Samuel Armas.  You can still register for ProLifeCon, and join other pro-life online activists throughout the country to hear our amazing lineup of speakers.

Collin Raye, country music superstar and spokesman for the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, will be one of our featured speakers at ProLifeCon.  Raye has sold over eight million albums and has been nominated five times as country music’s Male Vocalist of the Year.  In 2001, he was presented with the Humanitarian of the Year award by country music legend, Clint Black.

Raye, in his role as spokesman for the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, is focused on helping families and loved ones who are in the same situation as Terri Schiavo was in 2005.  Raye’s family has had their own experience with end-of-life issues, when his granddaughter died of an undiagnosed neurological condition in 2010.

There is no doubt that Raye will empower the audience with his story and the work of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network.

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Some anniversaries should not have to be celebrated because the events they mark should not have occurred.  January 22, 2012, the 39^th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, is one of them.  That decision is one of the greatest moral and legal tragedies in American history.

It is a moral tragedy in multiple ways, and they all stem from one inescapable fact.  Every abortion kills a living human being.  No word game, subject change, or political spin can change that fact.  There have been nearly 50 million abortions since 1973 and, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, the “decline in abortion incidence has stalled.”  More babies in America lose their lives to abortion every two days than American service members have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.

As President Ronald Reagan wrote on Roe‘s 10^th anniversary, the question is not when human life begins, but what is the value of human life?  That remains the question today.  Our Declaration of Independence says that every individual is created and given rights by God.  The federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on programs to help the poor, elderly, sick, or disabled.  Why?  It is nothing less than moral schizophrenia to say that the very same people who should be helped today could have been killed before they were born.

There is a glimmer of light peeking through this otherwise dark cloud.  After nearly four decades of pro-abortion propaganda and the drumbeat that abortion is a constitutional right, most Americans still oppose most abortions and a majority says that they are pro-life and that abortion is morally wrong.

Roe v. Wade is also a legal tragedy in the way it reached these morally tragic results.   Make no mistake, there is no right to abortion in the Constitution; the Supreme Court simply made it up.  Take a step back from the subject of abortion for a minute and think about what this means.  The Constitution is supposed to be the primary way that the people impose limits and rules on government.  The Constitution is written down so everyone will know what those limits and rules are.  George Washington said that the people’s control over the Constitution is literally the heart of our system of government.  Our freedom depends on it.  But when the Supreme Court changes the Constitution, as it did in Roe, it takes control of the Constitution away from the people, and their freedom along with it.

The phrase “judicial activism” gets tossed around a lot these days, as if it is nothing more than a label for any decision you do not like.  Judicial activism really means judges taking control of the law in order to produce certain results.  Claiming that there is a right to abortion in a Constitution that says no such thing, and using this made-up right to strike down state and federal laws, is as activist as it gets.

President Reagan wrote in his essay: “We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life – the unborn – without diminishing the value of all human life.”  Make no mistake about it; the end result of an activist judiciary that rejected our most cherished constitutional principles is the loss of 50 million innocent lives.  In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court used judicially tragic means to achieve a morally tragic end.  By highjacking the Constitution and creating this so-called right to abortion, the Supreme Court attacked not only the value of human life itself, but also the liberty of all Americans.  I hope that this decision has few anniversaries left.

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On Wednesday the Obama Administration again rejected the construction of an oil pipeline, the Keystone XL, that would have carried oil 1,700 miles from Canada to refineries in the United States.  The pipeline would have been the largest infrastructure project in the United States with an estimated cost of $7 billion.  It is estimated that Keystone XL would have created 10-20,000 jobs.

President Obama apparently indicated to the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, that the pipeline would be approved after the November election.  Environmentalists are a major constituency of the Democratic Party, and they oppose the pipeline for many reasons but primarily because they believe that killing the project will stop the production of unrefined oil from Canadian tar sands.  This is folly because the Chinese are more than willing to buy the oil, so the oil will be produced, and it will be consumed somewhere.

The United States imports dangerously large volumes of crude oil, but it also has massive resources that could be used to reduce our dependence on unfriendly governments who produce oil.  Yet, our current government has anti-energy policies that will inevitably lead to more importing and higher prices.

Oddly enough President Obama chose to go to Disney World on Thursday (1/19) to press the flesh and promote tourism in Florida.  Florida has an unemployment rate of 10.0%, and it depends greatly on tourism.  It has Disney World and all the nearby entertainment parks.  It has a large cruise ship industry, and it has a wonderful climate and beaches that people visit from all over the world (e.g., South Beach, Miami).

How do people get to Florida to enjoy these various tourist activities?  They consume a pretty substantial amount of fossil fuel like the stuff we won’t be getting from the Keystone XL pipeline.  As energy prices climb due to lack of production, the health of the vacation and entertainment industries will be imperiled.  I hope some Floridians asked the president about that.

Furthermore, the political Left hates energy production and the economic productivity it brings.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that one of the reasons our standard of living is so high is that we use these fuels to run engines that increase our real productivity.  Take a look at the History Channel’s program “Modern Marvels” sometime.  Almost all the episodes rely on the use of fuel or electricity to run machinery that expands human productivity enormously.

The environmental movement has a basic problem with this fact.  Remember that in 1992, Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance, that the internal combustion engine posed a greater threat to the United States than actual military enemies.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Engines of various kinds have been one of the factors that have allowed mankind to escape the grinding poverty it had known for millennia.

The United States has 55,000 miles of oil-carrying pipelines, and Keystone XL would have expanded that total only marginally.  That was not the problem for the environmentalists.  They just want to shut down all new energy production except for inefficient renewable energy (wind, solar) that has no hope of powering our economy.  The long-term continuation of policies like this will have profound effects on the ability of the United States to grow economically and increase the standard of living for American families.  More basically, it will help determine whether many families will be able to heat there homes economically.

The American people are going to have to choose the vision of reality they endorse.

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On Monday, ProLifeCon will be taking place at FRC. We have a pretty awesome lineup of speakers, and there is no doubt that you will not want to miss this event.  You can host ProLifeCon on your blog as well.  Just copy the code below the line, and you will be able to share ProLifeCon with your readers.

**The stream will be available on Monday, January 23rd beginning at 8:20 a.m. and the live stream will end at 11:30 a.m.**

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ProLifeCon is only three days away.  Throughout this week, I have featured Ryan Bomberger, Lila Rose, Reps. Chris Smith and Vicky Hartzler.  You can still register for ProLifeCon, and join other pro-life online activists throughout the country to hear our amazing lineup of speakers.

We are fortunate to have Michael Clancy, photographer of the famous “Hand of Hope” picture, and the baby featured in that photo, Samuel Armas, who is now twelve years old, and his mother, Julie Armas.  The “Hand of Hope” picture was captured in 1999, during a spina bifida corrective surgical procedure.  Samuel Armas was only 21 weeks in utero during that picture.  While Clancy was documenting this surgery for a USA Today feature, he had the opportunity to capture Samuel Armas reach his hand out into the world from the womb.  It is a powerful picture that has stirred emotion all over the world.

Clancy is the author of “Hand of Hope:  The Story Behind the Picture,” which will be available for purchase and signing at ProLifeCon.

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