Family Research Council

Can’t afford an abortion? Lie to a friend or family member to get their money or take on credit card debt.

by Anna Dorminey

May 17, 2013

If you don’t work in policy or the pro-life movement, or if you’re not particularly passionate about the issue of abortion, you may never have heard of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions (with the usual exceptions of cases of rape or incest or where a mother’s life is at risk).

Regardless of whether or not you’re familiar with the ins and outs of this federal policy, you probably appreciate the logic behind it. Many of us consider abortion nothing less than taking the life of an innocent person. Not using federal tax dollars to fund it is a no-brainer.

And then there is the National Network of Abortion Funds.

Apart from repealing Hyde, the folks over at NNAF have lots of suggestions for women who cannot afford to procure an abortion. Here are a choice few:

• Do I have a credit card? Does a friend or family member have one? (If I have time, can I apply for a new card? Could I request a limit increase, which can often take effect on the next business day? I can put just a portion of the cost on a credit card if my limit isn’t high enough.)
• Can I get a line of credit at my bank?
• Is there an emergency fund at my church?
• Can I use my cable bill money toward my abortion and then ask someone else for help with my cable bill?
• Are there people who might not help me cover the cost of an abortion, but would help me cover other costs? Am I comfortable lying to a friend or family member, telling them that I had an unexpectedly high electric bill or gas bill due to heating or A/C costs?
• Are there bills that I can pay late or skip this month? Can I talk to the electric company about changing the due date for my bill? (Note that it’s illegal for utilities to shut off the heat source for non-payment during the coldest winter months.)

So: there you have it. Taking on credit card debt, not paying your bills in the knowledge that your utility company may still have to supply you with their service, dipping into the emergency fund at your church (which may or may not strongly oppose abortion), or lying to a friend or family member are all acceptable solutions if you are struggling to pay for an abortion.

P.S. If you have a moment, consider contacting the NNAF’s board members and the organizations that these individuals represent to see if they’re actually comfortable encouraging women to use all these strategies. See the list below:

Sarah Audelo, Senior Manager, Domestic Policy, Advocates for Youth; Washington, D.C.

Veronica Bayetti Flores, Assistant Director, Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program, Hampshire College; Member, New Leadership Networking Initiative; Amherst, MA

Margaret Chapman Pomponio, Executive Director, WV FREE; Charleston, WV

Carol Cohan, Consultant, Women’s Emergency Network; Miami, FL

Marlene Gerber Fried, Senior Advisor to the President and Faculty Director of the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program, Hampshire College; Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts; Amherst, MA

D. Lynn Jackson (President), Assistant Professor/Field Coordinator, University of North Texas; Network National Case Manager; Texas Equal Access Fund; Dallas, TX

Karen Law, Executive Director, Pro-Choice Resources; Minneapolis, MN

Shanelle Matthews, Communications Manager, Forward Together; Oakland, CA

Eesha Pandit, Executive Director, Men Stopping Violence; Member, New Leadership Networking Initiative; Atlanta, GA

Sue Steketee (Secretary/Treasurer), Director of Surgical Services and Operations, Planned Parenthood of New Mexico; Abortion Assistance Fund of Planned Parenthood New Mexico; Albuquerque, NM

“Try to Discourage Her From Seeing the Baby”

by Robert Morrison

May 14, 2013

Pro-abortion groups are reacting to the Gosnell verdict with predictable spin. It’s all the fault of those anti-choice people, they say. If more women had greater access to free abortion, things like Gosnell’s abattoir would never have happened, they claim.

Brenda Pratt Shafer is a nurse who once worked in a facility that does late-term abortions. In 1996, she testified under oath before Congress about what a day is like in one of those well-appointed, well-lighted, clean, approved centers, the kind that are being offered to Americans today as the answer to Kermit Gosnell’s filthy house of horrors.

The abortionist in Nurse Shafer’s story did not want his patient to see what he had done to her unborn child. “Try to discourage her from seeing the baby,” he said.

The what? Didn’t he let his mask slip here? Isn’t he supposed to maintain the fiction that it is just a fetus? A mass of cells? A clump of tissue? Or is it alright to call it a baby after the unborn child’s dead body has been removed from the womb and thrown in a cold metal pan?

The late ABC News Anchor Peter Jennings once reminded us of how you are supposed to talk about such stories. In one of his evening broadcasts, Jenningsdescribed a new advance in pre-natal surgery. Through ultra-sound, it was determined that an unborn child had a condition known as hydrocephaly, water on the brain. Mr. Jennings said the fetus was surgically removed from the mother’s womb. A shunt was placed in the skull of the unborn child, relieving the pressure on that child’s developing brain. The unborn child was replaced in its mother’s womb. And the woman carried the fetus to term.

Fetus—Unborn child—Fetus, it all depends on where this baby is at the specific moment we are talking about him. In the following testimony, Nurse Brenda Shafer takes us inside a late-term abortion center, just like one of those facilities operated and approved by Planned Barrenhood and blessed by President Obama.

Nurse Shafer’s sworn testimony:

…This one particular lady didn’t want the abortion. She had this Downs Syndrome baby, she was unmarried, her boyfriend didn’t want the baby, and her parents didn’t want the baby. She cried the whole three days she was in there. So we did her first to get her over with. We brought her in, prepped her, started an I.V. of Valium to calm her down. We did not use a general anesthesia and knock her out. …We brought the ultrasound machine in and hooked it up to her stomach.
  

I could see the baby…

I could see the baby. I could see the heartbeat. And the doctor wanted me to stand right beside him, because he wanted me to see everything there was about partial-birth abortion. So I stood there. He went in, guided by ultrasound. He took a pair of forceps and went in and turned the baby because it wasn’t in this position at the time. He found a foot and he pulled the baby’s foot down through the birth canal, bringing it down and grabbed another foot, and literally started pulling the baby out, breech position, feet first. And he kept pulling it down, and I’m seeing this baby come pulled out of the mommy, his butt, his chest, and then, he delivered both these arms. And the lady’s in stirrups, just like you have a baby or just like you’re having an ob/gyn examination. And the baby, the only thing that was supporting the baby was the doctor was holding it in with his two fingers, holding the neck so the head was just inside the mommy.

And the baby was kicking his feet, hanging there, moving his little fingers and his little arms. I couldn’t believe — I don’t know what I thought killed it in three days, but he was moving and I kept watching that baby move. And I kept thinking to myself, this isn’t happening and I thought I was going to pass out. And I kept telling myself, I’m a professional, I can handle this, you know, this is right, this is supposed to be, and I supposed to handle this, I’m a nurse. He then took a pair of scissors and jammed them into the back of the baby’s head. And the baby jerked out, like a startle reflex, like a baby does if you throw him up a little bit and he jumps. And then the baby was real rigid. The doctor then opened up the scissors to make a hole. He took a high powered suction machine with a catheter and stuck it in that hole and suctioned the baby’s brains out. And the baby went completely limp.

I’ve seen that in my mind a thousand or more times…

And I have seen that in my mind a thousand or more times, of that baby, watching the life just drain out of it. And like I said before, I’ve seen babies die in my hands, I had people die in my hands. But it wasn’t anything like seeing that vision of watching this abortion. And I almost threw up all over the floor. I was literally just breathing and saying, “Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, you’re gonna be embarrassed if you do this.” So I tried not to.

He pulled the head out, he cut the umbilical cord and threw it in a pan, and delivered the placenta and threw it in the same pan, he covered it up and took it out. Well, this mommy wanted to see her baby. And the doctor told us ahead of time, he said, “Try to discourage her from seeing the baby.” He doesn’t like that. But she had the right to see it. So they cleaned it up and we cleaned her up, and we walked her out of the operating room, and took her to a room and handed her the baby.

The mother held her dead baby in her arms…

…She held that baby in her arms and she screamed and prayed to God…to forgive her, and for that baby to forgive her, and she held it and rocked it, and told him that she loved him. And I looked in that baby’s face, and he had the most angelic perfect face I’ve ever seen, and I just kept thinking, he’s an angel now, he’s in heaven. And I couldn’t take it. In all the years I’ve been a nurse, [for the first time] I lost it. And I pardoned myself and excused myself and I ran to the bathroom and I cried and prayed.

…I saw two more that day, about 25 weeks. But I was in shock. I stood there and I knew what was happening but I didn’t want to be there. I was walking on a beach in Hawaii somewhere, trying to get myself out of that room. …The other ones were perfectly healthy mothers with perfectly healthy babies. One was a 40 year old woman who had a 19 year old son and she was getting a divorce so she didn’t want the baby. The other was a teenage mom who hid the pregnancy from her parents…

The abortion technique described by Nurse Shafer in the above passages was outlawed by the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act passed by Congress in 2003 and signed by President George W. Bush. That law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 on a 5-4 vote.

That law was strongly supported by Family Research Council and the vast majority of Americans. Now, the law relies for its enforcement on the administration of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. The president is required by the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” We will see if there are any prosecutions under that law.

When he spoke to Planned Parenthood recently, President Obama did not see the baby. Or any of the 334,000 unborn children these traffickers tell us they killed in 2011. They went unmentioned and unseen in his lavish praise for the group.

Even now—especially now—the abortion forces and their liberal cohorts are trying to discourage all Americans from seeing the baby. What the Gosnell verdict does is to lift the bloody curtain and let us see.

Fox News: Tony Perkins on the Kermit Gosnell trial

by FRC Media Office

May 13, 2013

Yesterday, May 12 2013, Tony Perkins appeared on the Fox News show America’s HQ to discuss with host Shannon Bream the Kermit Gosnell trial:

Polls: Life and the Double Standard on Inevitability

by Nathan Oppman

May 13, 2013

A recent poll released by Gallup shows a strong majority of Americans oppose all or most abortions.  It’s even more interesting that young people are more likely to oppose abortion in all cases than any other group.  Over 40% of Democrats oppose abortion most of the time and 12% oppose it entirely.  What does this suggest?  Well if we apply the same standard to abortion that applies to marriage then it would suggest that the pro-life position is becoming the position of inevitability.  It would suggest that politicians should make sure they are on the right side of history, that the Democratic party is starting to fragment, and that both parties should cater to pro-life beliefs if they want to win over young people.  But of course the same standard will not be applied. 

There is a lesson to be learned.  If one continues to speak the truth people may listen, even if it takes years and even if the media does not report it.  So let’s keep up the pro-life momentum and make the end of abortion in America a reality!

The Business of Planned Parenthood

by Anna Higgins

May 7, 2013

The public perception of Planned Parenthood tends to be favorable, even among those who identify themselves as pro-life. However, when confronted with the actual practices of the $1.5 billion “non-profit,” those favorable opinions turn sour, for good reason.

Revealing the truth about the practices of Planned Parenthood is the goal of a new campaign by Alliance Defending Freedom. The campaign, “Pretty Ugly, Planned Parenthood’s deception of the American Public,” is focused around four little-known truths about Planned Parenthood: that they 1) promote sexual promiscuity to children to create a customer; 2) promote abortion and enforce abortion quotas to drive funding; 3) keep health standards and overhead low, putting women at risk, and 4) they commit fraud by wasting and abusing taxpayer dollars.

Planned Parenthood is a business. They promote sexual promiscuity through advertisements and sex education curriculum to create a customer at a young age, which ensures financial stability and growth down the line. As sexual activity among the young rises, they will need the services of Planned Parenthood even more – from STD testing and eventually abortion. Abortion is big business, especially at Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. Abortion, which costs $450/abortion (for first trimester abortion), makes up about half of Planned Parenthood’s revenue. As of 2013, every Planned Parenthood affiliate is required to provide abortions and is given a required quota to fulfill.

Because it is a business, Planned Parenthood is very much focused on the bottom line. Implementing minimum health and safety standards is not always a priority because compliance can be costly. Across the nation, Planned Parenthood affiliates have been cited for various health and safety violations. Additionally, there is evidence that Planned Parenthood, which received $542 million from the federal government last year, has manipulated its records, increasing government reimbursements.

The truth about Planned Parenthood isn’t pretty – in fact, it’s pretty ugly. They prey on the circumstances of vulnerable women and children to make a profit. Its time that Planned Parenthood is exposed for what they really are. Please visit www.ItsPrettyUgly.com to learn more and share the truth with others.

Plan B and the Demise of Parental Rights

by Anna Higgins

May 3, 2013

Parents are meant to be the fundamental guiding influence of a child’s life. They are responsible for nurturing, educating, protecting, and providing for their children. This system, established at creation by God, is the foundation of every stable, prosperous society.

However, our government has attempted to undermine parental rights and distance parents as much as possible from important decisions affecting their children. This is happening despite the fact that the Supreme Court has long upheld the highest standards of protection for the rights of parents to educate and bring up their children without interference. The latest blow to the traditional family structure has been leveled by “reproductive rights” groups, a federal judge, and the FDA – all of which support the availability of a high dose hormonal contraceptive over the counter to young girls without a prescription.

In 2011, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, denied a recommendation by the FDA that would have allowed over the counter access to Plan B, a high dose “emergency contraceptive,” for young girls. Both she and President Obama stated that the FDA did not present enough evidence to show that this hormone would be safe for girls.

In fact, there have been no studies on the effects of Plan B on teens. All safety studies have been done on adults and assume proper use. There is no reason to believe that young girls understand that this contraceptive should only be used once a month and that it is not meant to replace oral contraceptives.

Yet a federal judge, Edward Korman of the Eastern District of New York, unilaterally disposed of those concerns when he handed down a ruling last month requiring the FDA to provide over-the-counter access of Plan B to all girls of reproductive age without a prescription. Family Research Council authored a letter to Sebelius asking her to appeal this decision, and thankfully, the Department of Justice has decided to appeal the judge’s decision. In the midst of this controversy, however, the FDA issued an approval of over the counter access to Plan B to teens as young as 15 (the previous age limit was 17).

This decision is particularly disturbing because it allows Plan B to be sold on store shelves, not behind a pharmacy counter. Thus, the only thing standing in the way of a girl purchasing this product is the local drug store cashier, who supposedly is required to check the purchaser’s ID before selling the product. There is no indication that Sec. Sebelius will overturn this new FDA decision. In fact, President Obama, in an about face from his previous support of keeping Plan B off retail store shelves, came out in support of the FDA’s new decision.

This decision is troubling, to say the least. It will only serve to distance young girls most at risk for sexual abuse and sexually transmitted infections from medical care and parental guidance. The decision to exclude parents and doctors from dealing with the sexual behavior of underage girls and the administration of a serious drug is irresponsible and dangerous.

Parents have every right to be informed and to consent to any decision affecting their child’s health, education, or upbringing. It is important to encourage parent-teen communication regarding the moral and medical issues associated with pre-marital sexual activity, as the consequences of such activity are weighty.

Teenagers under the age of 17 cannot even be admitted to an R–rated movie and schools are required to obtain a parent’s permission to administer any type of medication to a child or teen, for good reason. The new Plan B decisions, made without regard to parental or medical concern, will only serve to endanger the health and safety of children. Parents should remain vigilant as this debate continues.

Gosnell Grand Jury Report

by Chris Gacek

April 19, 2013

While reading James Taranto’s excellent pieces (April 15 & April 18) on the Kermit Gosnell murder trial, I noticed a reference to a grand jury report in this case.  If you are interested in the case, the January 2011 grand jury report is easily available for download.  The document is about 280 pages in length.  Sohrab Ahmari’s interview of Dr. Leon Cass on Gosnell should be available here.  Thanks to the Wall Street Journal.

Legal Abortion—”Safety” was never the ultimate goal

by Anna Higgins

April 19, 2013

A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post discussing the reality of back-alley abortions 40 years after the legalization of abortion. The fact that abortion “clinics” are allowed to operate virtually unregulated in most states (either as a result of a lack of regulations or lack of enforcement) puts the health and lives of Americans in danger. In light of their demands that abortion be legalized for safety reasons, it is the ultimate form of hypocrisy that abortion advocates refuse to support regulations that would make facilities safer for women.

The Gosnell trial highlights one such horrific instance of a supposed “medical” facility allowed to operate unencumbered by regulation or inspection from 1993 until 2010 when a Federal drug raid revealed far more than prescription drug misuse. Planned Parenthood and others claim this is an isolated incident and that abortion facilities are safe for women. Absent the ability or will to inspect and maintain records on these facilities, how do they know enough to make any statement on the safety of abortion clinics? The fact is that there have been many instances of abortion facilities being reported for unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

Just last week, the Planned Parenthood in Wilmington, Delawarewas forced to close its doors when two of its employees reported the facility for violating health and safety standards. As LifeNews.com reported, “Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich and Joyce Vasikonis told WPVI-TV of a ‘meat-market style of assembly-line abortions where the abortionist refused to wear gloves, surgical instruments were reused without being cleaned, and bloody drainage remained on abortion tables between procedures, exposing women to blood-borne diseases.’ ‘It was just unsafe. I can’t tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was,’ said Mitchell-Werbrich.”

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, James Taranto notes that, “Safety is one of the most potent defenses of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that imposed a national policy of abortion on demand.” Yet, abortion clinics remain vastly unregulated and unsafe. In Pennsylvania, Gosnell was allowed to operate his “house of horrors” with impunity thanks to irresponsible and unjustifiable policies put in place by former Governor Tom Ridge. As Taranto noted, the grand jury report in the Gosnell case revealed that “Ridge administration officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased.’” This refusal by government officials to protect their own citizens is inexcusable and should be properly investigated. Imposing health and safety restrictions on any medical procedure hardly poses a “barrier” to medical care.

Taranto goes on to call the argument that Roe v. Wade made abortion safe for women, a “cruel hoax.” It is at the very least a hoax. At the heart of the issue, however, is that the Roe v. Wade “safety” argument served simply an excuse to perpetrate mass killing of “unwanted” or “undesirable” children merely for the sake of selfish convenience. It is time to admit how unsafe abortion really is, to confront the inherent wrongness of Roe, and stop all procedures intended to kill children.

Gosnell, the New York Times, and Moral Squalor

by Rob Schwarzwalder

April 19, 2013

Abortion champion Andrew Rosenthal, who happens to be editorial page editor of what historically has been the nation’s flagship daily, The New York Times, has written a peevish, “how dare you question the Great Oz”-type op-ed defending his paper’s insubstantial coverage of the Kermit Gosnell trial.

About his piece is the air of a young child, his hand stuck firmly in the cookie jar, who rather than regretting his error is infuriated at being caught.

Unable to bring himself to describe the crimes “Dr.” Gosnell committed – such things as snipping the necks of crying babies – instead, Rosenthal reduces these little persons to “viable fetuses.” How very medical, distant, pristine, and deadly.

Mr. Rosenthal indicts Gosnell for his “appalling crimes” (what makes them appalling, Mr. Rosenthal? You regard Dr. George Tiller, who did the same things as Gosnell only in unsoiled conditions, as a hero) and links to a piece about them. However, he cannot bring himself to describe these crimes. To do so would demand intellectual integrity and moral courage, since it would involve an acknowledgement of the humanness of the unborn baby – a bridge the stolid advocates of unrestricted access to abortion on demand cannot cross. The insistent recreation of moral reality means holding one’s ground, even if it is crumbling beneath his feet.

In the 1930s, Lady Astor confronted Stalin on his unimaginable enterprise of mass murder, asking him, “When are you going to stop killing people?” He responded, “When it is no longer necessary.” Read Mr. Rosenthal’s article and ask if this same spirit does not seem latent in every line. Abortion is, for him and those on his side, not the loss of a life or the scarring of a woman’s body. It is a post-modern rite, a baptism not of water or the Spirit but of death, an act of defiance and self-exaltation which does not represent purging from sin but the calcification of the soul.

Mr. Rosenthal’s concern is not for the unborn and born children slaughtered like chubby pigs by Gosnell and his minions, or the women whose lives were lost and health misshapen because of grotesque treatment they received. Rather, Mr. Rosenthal’s major complaint is the unsanitary conditions of Gosnell’s clinic.

It is nice to see Mr. Rosenthal’s mellifluous outrage over Gosnell’s inattention to the germ theory. I’m sure the good editor keeps Purell on his desk and sanitary wipes in his car.

With audacity so great it stifles the cry of honesty, Mr. Rosenthal goes on to write, “Last I checked, there’s no rule that a newspaper, or that paper’s editorial page, has to run one piece about a bad clinic for every piece celebrating a good one.”

Fair point. But I wonder why the Times, as it did with the trial of Tiller murderer George Roeder, did not cover such things as jury selection or pronounce endlessly on the assorted issues involved in the Gosnell case.

Finally, here is Rosenthal’s peroration:

Dr. Tiller was performing safe and legal abortions when he was gunned down in the foyer of his own church. The reopening of his clinic, which will not perform late-term abortions, is an act of courage on the part of Julie Burkhart, a former colleague of Dr. Tiller, and others. She is already receiving death threats from people who believe that murder is an acceptable way of protesting legal, constitutionally protected abortions. Through this sort of intimidation and through legitimate political action, anti-abortion forces have been alarmingly successful in restricting women’s access to reproductive health services, including birth control, cancer screening and other services. That is the real issue.

Making “this sort of intimidation” (which is roundly condemned by the pro-life movement and always has been) equivalent to “legitimate political action” is so inflatedly unctuous the reader is reminded of a passage in Wodehouse in which Jeeves is chided for burning Bertie Wooster’s toast. It’s sort of like saying, “cyanide and aspirin are both drugs,” technically accurate but essentially, and gravely, misleading.

“The real issue” is access to birth control, not the murder of children? As others have written, no one asks, “Is your fetus a boy or a girl? Have you given the fetus a name? Is the collection of blood and tissue and DNA growing in your womb your first?”

The term is baby. The issue is murder. The culprit is Kermit Gosnell, and not because he didn’t use clean forceps.

Calling an unborn child a “fetus” makes him or her no less human. Indignation over cleanliness (is it truly next to Godliness, Mr. Rosenthal?) and predation as one’s fundamental response to moral horror is like the man who was offended he couldn’t wear a hat to his hanging. It rather misses the point.

I am as troubled by Mr. Rosenthal’s stentorian resistance to calling murder “murder” as I am by the absolutist position he takes on abortion itself. When a public opinion-leader can stare at transparent evil and pronounce it benign, does “civilization” itself have any continued meaning?

Kermit Gosnell, Abortionist

by Robert Morrison

April 17, 2013

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented from the narrow Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart in 2007. She thought partial-birth abortions should continue and be regarded as a constitutionally-protected species of freedom of choice. Her fiery dissent describes intact dilation and extraction (D&E), her preferred name for partial-birth abortion, and contrasts that with routine D&E, in which the child in the womb is dismembered and brought out in parts—parts that look not unlike the victims of an improvised explosive device set off on a quiet street.

I remember especially the distinguished jurist’s complaint in her dissent about the federal law that refers to those who do these partial-birth abortions as “abortion doctors.” Madam Justice Ginsburg bristles at that phrase.

Throughout, the opinion [in Gonzales v. Carhart, 2007] refers to obstetrician-gynecologists and surgeons who perform abortions not by the titles of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label “abortion doctor.” Ante, at 14, 24, 25, 31, 33. A fetus is described as an “unborn child,” and as a “baby,” ante, at 3, 8;

I bristle at it, too. And this may be the only thing in this world where I agree with Justice Ginsburg. I also believe they should not be called abortion doctors. But that’s because I refer to those who do these acts as abortionists.

I have spent almost my entire life around hospitals. My mother was a most efficient telephone operator whose job required her to transmit verbal messages to doctors and nurses with speed and accuracy. As a young boy, I marveled at the way she could say “Dr. Talbot, our otolaryngologist…” What is that, I asked her? An ear, nose, and throat specialist.

Later, I married a medical administrator in the Navy. Medical specialties were her specialty, too: Internist, psychiatrist, neurologist, dermatologist, ophthalmologist, and cardiologist. We knew all the “ists” there were, or thought so.

So why, Justice Ginsburg, would you object if we call Kermit Gosnell an abortionist? What we are hearing in a Philadelphia courtroom about his so-called practice? Did he do anything else except abortions?

You believe there is nothing morally wrong with abortions. You have never expressed the slightest qualm about a single one of the 55,000,000 abortions done in Americasince Roe v. Wade in 1973. How can calling the person who does these acts and only these acts an abortionist possibly be “pejorative” in your eyes?

It seems you cannot bear even to hear other Americans express their revulsion at tearing unborn children limb-from-limb.

Justice Ginsburg’s angry dissent is a prime example of what the pro-abortion editors of California Medicine meant when they wrote their famous editorial prior to Roe.

Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.

Killing continues to be socially abhorrent, unless those socially impeccable folks want to call it “choice.” We have an entire political party, once my party that wins Olympic gold medals for semantic gymnastics by separating the idea of killing from the idea of abortion. They will wax indignant and accuse you of waging a “war on women” if you try to pass protective legislation. They rage against the Virginia regulations that say you ought to be able to get a gurney through their dark and narrow passageways of your abortion facility in case of an emergency. In case a woman has been so unfortunate as to submit herself to a practitioner like Kermit Gosnell.

Think of Gosnell’s slaughterhouse when you hear those semantic gymnasts howling about laws and regulations that protect mothers and their unborn children.

Abortion is nothing but the taking of a human life, an innocent human life. It is unjust. It is the very essence of injustice. Lincoln mildly said to the sophisticates of his day that if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. We all agree with that, now. But we say to the socially impeccables of our time that if abortion is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.

The tragedy of America today is that we have four and maybe five justices sitting on our Supreme Court who have no idea what justice is.