Proposition Eight, the California ballot initiative that declared marriage exists solely between one man and one woman, has been struck down by a federal court. President Obama is planning to compel religious institutions to pay for abortifacients and other contraceptives as part of their health insurance programs. New York City is about to prohibit churches from meeting in public schools.

Is the sky falling? Are the nation’s moral foundations so eroded that they are on the verge of collapse?

For two reasons, I will answer no. In the past year, in states across the country, there have been wonderful wins for the cause of life and family. Ultra-sound bills and abortion clinic regulations have been enacted and polls show that Americans are more troubled than ever by abortion-on-demand. There have even been some Supreme Court judicial rulings (e.g., Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC and Spencer v. World Vision) favorable to religious liberty.

These things should inspire us to keep working for faith, family, and freedom in the public square. Although the assaults on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, the very nature of the family, and the religious and economic liberty we cherish are manifold, not to fight them would be to surrender our biblical obligation to work for justice and stand for the oppressed (Proverbs 31:8-9). For the sake of the Just One Himself, this we must never do.

Second, Jesus Christ is Lord of time and eternity. He is Lord when we rejoice and when we weep. He is the sovereign before Whom every knee shall bow (Philippians 2:9-11). Who sustains all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:2). And according to the Psalmist, God is unthreatened by the machinations of political man: “(Though) the kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed … He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord scoffs at them” (2:2-4).

In other words, God is accomplishing His will in ways our limited human understanding might find puzzling but which are fully commensurate with His character and plan for humanity.

“The Most High rules in the realm of mankind,” we read in Daniel’s prophecy (4:2). He has called us to stand for righteousness and human dignity in every sphere of life. Whatever external wins or losses we might experience in the moment, these truths should sustain us in our efforts at all times.

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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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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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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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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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A judge’s decision to order the abortion of “a mentally ill woman’s unborn baby and sterilize her — if it meant she had to be ‘coaxed, bribed, or even enticed … by ruse’ into the procedure” has drawn appropriate fire from officials in the Bay State.

Judge Christina Harms, who retired from the bench last week, not only wanted to compel the woman known only as “Mary Moe” to have an abortion – a procedure the serious Catholic Ms. Moe said, explicitly, she did not want – but also to sterilize her. Thankfully, State Appellate Court Associate Justice Andrew R. Grainger has reversed Judge Harms’ ruling, stating that ‘No party requested this measure … and the judge appears to have simply produced the requirement out of thin air.” Justice Grainger has now given the case to another judge.

The forced sterilization of roughly 30,000 Americans occurred in our own country in the years leading up to World War II. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, “Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 people in twenty-nine states were sterilized, many of them unknowingly or against their will, while they were incarcerated in prisons or institutions for the mentally ill. Nearly half the operations were carried out in California. Advocates of sterilization policies in both Germany and the United States were influenced by eugenics. This sociobiological theory took Charles Darwin’s principle of natural selection and applied it to society. Eugenicists believed the human race could be improved by controlled breeding.”

The inherent injustice and cruelty of the practice was not only odious to most of our fellow citizens, but its barbarity was cast into horrible relief with the rise of Nazism in German. Hitler’s “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” (July 14, 1933) compelled “the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation (‘congenital feeble-mindedness’), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism.” In addition to the estimated 400,000 persons sterilized, by 1945 up to 250,000 people had been murdered for their real or perceived physical or mental problems.

Sadly, although mass murder in the name of “racial purity” did not occur in out country, as late as 1970, “The Nixon administration dramatically increase(d) Medicaid-funded sterilization of low-income Americans, primarily Americans of color. While these sterilizations (were) voluntary as a matter of policy, anecdotal evidence later suggest(ed) that they (were) often involuntary as a matter of practice as patients (were) often misinformed, or left uninformed, regarding the nature of the procedures that they … agreed to undergo.” (Source)

All of this poses a troubling question: Our society’s outrage over Judge Harms’ decision, while admirable, is much too muted when it comes to the ongoing death of more than 3,000 unborn children daily in the U.S., as is our culture’s compassion for their mothers, who often are “left uninformed” of the other, non-abortion related options they have.

At FRC, we work with dedicated people across the country to provide those better options. That’s why, on Monday, January 23, FRC will launch the second edition of our “A Passion to Serve: How Pregnancy Resource Centers Empower Women, Help Families, and Strengthen Communities.” Make sure to visit our website, A Passion to Serve, where you will be able to download your own free copy on January 23.

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At FRC we have been incredibly inspired by the outpouring of enthusiastic and creative submissions to our “I’m Pro-Life Because” campaign. There have been a number of truly remarkable and miraculous stories shared with us over the last few weeks.

We received one such story and image this past weekend. Sweet, energetic, bright three-year-old, Olivia Ohden, is holding a picture of her sonogram and is a vision of love and joy. The image is accompanied by the words “I’m Pro-life because my mom, Melissa Ohden, is an abortion survivor.”

In 1977 Olivia’s grandmother, Melissa Ohden’s mother, had a saline infusion abortion in a hospital in Iowa.  After her mother delivered the baby, Melissa was believed to be dead. But miraculously, a nurse saw signs of life and this little baby who should have died at six months of gestation survived and thrived…

Listen to Melissa’s story

If you have not yet submitted your story, please consider doing so! Here’s how:

*1.* Pose in a picture with your ultrasound (or first newborn photo) or have your children pose with their first photo.

*2.* Let us know in 140 characters or less why you are Pro-Life!

*3.* Chose two words to describe each individual pictured (examples: Musician, Son or Painter, Mother). And include your age of your infant picture, or the week of the pregnancy in your ultrasound.

*4.* Submit your words and photos (one photo per person, please) via email to: photos@frc.org

Over the next few weeks, we will showcase these powerful images to show the uniqueness and value of every human life.

Be creative in telling your story in a single image! Gather your children to take a group picture with their own ultrasounds or newborn photos, or take fun pictures of them playing happily with their ultrasound photos nearby. Take your own photo with your ultrasound or infant picture while at work or doing a favorite activity or hobby.

Take the pictures in settings that portray what you love, and what your life means. Some of the more poignant photos will be featured in FRC publications and advertisements.

Entries, selected by FRC’s staff, will be featured on the FRC website and our other publications, including Facebook. By submitting photos and/or your story to FRC you are granting FRC a free license and permission to publish, republish, and distribute all or portions of your photos and story, including your words and image, in any format it may choose, including in print, on the Internet, or in any other digital form.

Thanks for standing for life!

Click here to view our “I’m Pro-Life Because…” gallery.

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Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell yesterday approved new regulations that ”will make it more difficult for clinics providing abortions to operate and potentially close down most of the state’s 22 facilities” http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/capital-land/2011/12/mcdonnell-approves-sweeping-abortion-changes/2045296#ixzz1i3AQv7Gd.

The new health rules are not onerous: They require that facilities that perform abortion “to comply with standards for surgery centers constructed after 2010 — from expanding the width of hallways and the size of operating rooms to providing covered entrances and increasing the number of parking spaces at a facility … They also will require increased medical staffing and allow for unannounced inspections of the clinics and reviews of individual patients’ records” http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/virginia-politics/2011/sep/15/25/pro-choice-anti-abortion-advocates-address-regulat-ar-1312067/.

The necessity of these standards is demonstrated by the news that two physicians who practiced at a now-shuttered abortion clinic in Maryland have been “charged with multiple counts of murder under the state’s viable fetus law” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2-doctors-accused-of-performing-late-term-abortions-in-md-arrested-and-charged-with-murder/2011/12/30/gIQAfhXOQP_story.html).  The Washington Post reports that “the two doctors were indicted by a grand jury after a 16-month investigation (which) began in August 2010 after a botched procedure at Brigham’s Elkton clinic. An 18-year-old woman who was 21 weeks pregnant had her uterus ruptured and her bowel injured, and rather than call 911, Brigham and Riley drove her to a nearby hospital, where both were uncooperative and Brigham refused to give his name, authorities said. A search of the clinic after the botched abortion revealed a freezer with 35 late-term fetuses inside, including one believed to have been aborted at 36 weeks, authorities said.”

Christians need to be involved in all facets of culture: The arts, media, enterprise both large and small, church ministries, charities – and also politics.  Under former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, the State Board of Health – the majority of whose members are appointed by a sitting governor – would never have approved the new regulations.  The nine McDonnell appointees to the Board approved them, to a person.  The regulations themselves would never have been enacted unless first passed by socially conservative majorities in the Virginia House of Delegates and State Senate.  And if Gov. McDonnell and State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli had been defeated by their pro-abortion rights opponents in the 2009 election, the regulations would have been stultified in a never-land of litigation and/or inaction.

Politics cannot transform culture nor the hearts of those who compose it.  However, politics can encourage public virtue and constrain public evil.  That’s why elections matter.  Bob McDonnell and his pro-life colleagues in Virginia prove it.

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On December 27, 2011 Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) released it latest Annual Report for 2009-2010.

Here is some of the information included in the report:

- PPFA performed a total of 329,445 abortions during this time period.

- PPFA provided 841 adoption referrals during this same time (therefore for every adoption referral there were 391 abortions performed).

- PPFA had a total budget of 1.0482 billion dollars.

- PPFA had an excess of revenue over expenses of 18.5 million dollars (in other words, this billion dollar non-profit organizations profited 18.5 million during that time).

- 46 percent of the total PPFA budget comes from tax payer dollars in the form of government funding.

I encourage you to take time to read through the report in its entirety at: http://issuu.com/actionfund/docs/ppfa_financials_2010_122711_web_vf?mode=window&viewMode=doublePage.

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On November 25, 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its annual report with the most recent data and statistics on abortion in the United States, Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2008. 

The CDC has reported on abortion-related data annually since 1969. Generally these reports are very helpful and informative in terms of tracking and understanding larger trends and actual numbers related to abortion in the United States. The 2008 report is dense with information ranging from the ethnic background and age of the mother to the age of the baby when aborted, as well as the kind of abortion that took place. However, because states are not required to provide abortion data to the CDC, while the surveillance report offers important information and numbers about abortion in the U.S., it does not provide a complete and thorough depiction of abortion data in the U.S. By way of background, until 1998, every state annually reported abortion-related data to the CDC. But beginning in 1998, combinations of states began to refuse to submit abortion-related information to the CDC. Over the years non-reporting states have included California (1998-2008), New Hampshire (1998-2008), Oklahoma (1998-1999), Alaska (1998-2002), West Virginia (2003-2004), Louisiana (2005), and most recently, Maryland (2007-2008). Missing any state’s information is problematic, but in particular, because California has the most abortions in the U.S., not including their data significantly skews the overall picture.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that states that do submit data to the CDC may pick and choose which information they provide. “…the level of detail that CDC receives on the characteristics of women obtaining abortions varies considerably from year to year and among reporting areas….because the collection of abortion data is not federally mandated, reporting areas can develop their own forms and do not necessarily collect all of the information that CDC compiles.” (page 2) Since the CDC’s abortion surveillance reports have incomplete numbers, policy-makers and other interested groups and people must rely on the Guttmacher Institute’s statistics and analysis. However, research neutrality comes into question because Guttmacher was originally founded as the research arm of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, although they have since formally separated.

The CDC report reads “CDC is unable to obtain the total number of abortions performed in the United States. During 1999–2008, the total annual number of abortions recorded by CDC was 65%–69% of the number recorded by the Guttmacher Institute, which uses numerous active follow-up techniques to increase the completeness of the data obtained through its periodic national survey of abortion providers.” (page 6)  

Also as reported last year, the report is again missing the abortion fatality rate. Page 5 reads, “Although national case-fatality rates (the number of abortion-related deaths per 100,000 reported legal induced abortions) have been published for 1972–1997, this measure could not be calculated with CDC data for 1998–2007; because a substantial number of abortions have been documented in states that did not report to CDC during 1998-2007.”

One might consider that most statistical conclusions in the abortion surveillance reports since 1998 lacked some form of U.S. data. Therefore the claim that the abortion rate can not be estimated as other statistics have been does not appear to be reasonable. It would seem that the abortion rate should be able to be computed with the same limited information obtained by the states that other statistics are computed. The report has also not updated its latest abortion-related deaths from the previous report (with 2007 data).

Last year it was reported that for the states that reported data, in 2007, six women died in the U.S. as a result of complications related to abortion. (page 5) The updated 2008 number has not yet been released. However, while some information is missing, there is still much to be learned from what the data that is included in the report. Below are some basic statistics and numbers on abortion-related information in the U.S. in 2008.  

· More children were aborted in the U.S. (in reporting states) in 2008 than in 2007. “Among the 49 reporting areas that provided data for 2008, a total of 825,564 abortions were reported.” (page 3) In 2007, the total number of abortions as reported by the CDC was 810,582, an increase of close to 15,000.

· Most abortions were performed on women in their 20s. “Women aged 20-29 years accounted for the majority (57.1%) of all abortions in 2008. In 2008, women aged 20-29 years also had the highest abortion rates (29.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 20-24 years and 21.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 25-29 years).” (page 3)

· The report states that the majority of abortions are performed early in pregnancy. “For 2008, the majority (62.8%) of abortions were performed at ≤8 weeks’ gestation, and 91.4% were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation.” (Page 4) Few abortions (7.3%) were performed at 14-20 weeks’ gestation, and 1.3% were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation. (page 4)

· In 2008, approximately 14.6% of women used RU-486, the dangerous abortion drug, and that approximately 75.9% of abortions
were surgical (“curettage”) for abortion done at 13 weeks or earlier. (page 4)

· Non-Hispanic black women accounted for 35.5% of all abortion while making up approximately only 12.6% of the population according to the Census Bureau); Hispanic women accounted for 21.1% of all abortion, while making up 16.3% of the population according to the Census Bureau. Non-Hispanic white women accounted for 37.2% of abortions, while making up 72.4% of the population according to the Census Bureau.  (page 4)   The CDC annual abortion surveillance reports are very informative and helpful, albeit incomplete, to those interested in women’s health – both those women who are born, and those women (and men, too) who are unborn.

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Earlier this month, Elizabeth Vargas of ABC hosted a special report documenting the appalling practice of sex selection abortion in India. She traveled to India after hearing about the gendercide of girls in India.

“Six months ago, I traveled to India to see firsthand what the prime minister of that country calls a national shame. It is the systematic, widespread, shocking elimination of India’s baby girls. Some 50,000 female fetuses are aborted every month in India. Baby girls are often killed at birth, either thrown into rivers, or left to die in garbage dumps. Its estimated that one million girls in India “disappear” every year.”

Ms. Vargas describes what she calls the “dirty little secret” related to ultrasonography in India. “We walked down street after street and saw signs everywhere advertising ultrasound services. There are even technicians who pack portable ultrasounds and travel to villages offering their services. The dirty little secret is that many couples use the ultrasound to find out the sex of their baby.”

She explains the gendercide’s primary motivating factor: money.

“The reason so many Indians do this is financial. A family with a girl will pay a dowry to her husband’s family when she marries. It is a long cultural tradition in India that new laws cannot seem to break. So a girl means the family will lose money, property, or cattle on the wedding day. A boy means the family will gain those things. The illegal ultrasounds and the illegal gender abortions are used by India’s middle class to guarantee they get sons.

Poor women who cannot afford these services will simply kill or abandon their babies. Some will take their newborn girls to a drop box, usually in the middle of the night, and leave the baby there. One drop box is at a place called the Unique Orphanage in Punjab. We went from the village with no women, to the orphanage with no boys. There are only girls here…60 of them…all cared for by a wonderful woman who will raise each and every one. It is striking to see all those little faces, some two days old, others teenagers, all unwanted by their biological families. They are actually the lucky ones. Their parents didn’t kill them. They now have someone who loves them.”

Vargas also describes the disproportionate number of males to females in certain Indian localities. “50,000 girl fetuses are aborted every month in India. It is a staggering number. And it has created whole villages where there are hardly any women. We went to one such village in the province of Haryana. Everywhere we looked, we saw boys, young men, old men, but very, very few women. It was unsettling, especially because we knew this was not some freak of nature, but a result of the deliberate extermination of girls.”

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Bill McGurn formerly headed the Asia bureau of The Wall Street Journal. An experienced and perceptive journalist, he is also a pro-life writer. That’s interesting, since the vast majority of his professional colleagues are pro-choice.

In his most recent column, McGurn never mentions the “issue” of abortion. It’s not what he’s writing about when he scores New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for hizzoner’s feckless response to Occupy Wall Street.

What, for Heaven’s sake, does the trashing of Zucotti Park have to do with taking the lives of innocents in abortion? A lot. The first right we possess is the right to be free from bodily harm. The unborn child is that person with the greatest need for such protection.

Bill McGurn understands this. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Mayor Bloomberg, who has been a pro-abortion militant and who led the charge to abolish marriage in New York State, fails in his first duty: the protection of the lives and property of New Yorkers through the enforcement of just laws that safeguard the rights of all.

Anyone who has visited Lower Manhattan knows the many small shops and restaurants there. Donut shops. Coffee shops. Chinese take-outs. Pizza joints. There is a densely packed world of commerce taking place there at a frenetic pace. Lunch hour on Wall Street makes the yelling and shoving on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange look tame.

For all the noise and clamor, it is a fun place to go. I am thinking of all those employees of all those little shops and of the police and sanitation workers who have to contend with the spoiled brats of Occupy Wall Street.

A decade ago. I joined a group from FRC that went to New York City. We were there to urge the UN not to kick out the Vatican delegation from the world body. Cardinal Martino, the Vatican delegate to the UN, thanked Family Research Council warmly for our supportive statements. He was most gracious to us. And he seemed especially to appreciate the fact that most of us were—as Catholics term us—“separated brethren.”

We weren’t separated that day. We were fighting together to fend off a premeditated attack by international Planned Barrenhood and by the secular Left. The group urging the expulsion of the Vatican delegation even enlisted some front groups with “Catholic” in their name to cover their real designs.

Apart from our meeting with the Cardinal, what stands out most in my memory was the quiet encouragement we got from UN employees. One of them said the place was “Hillary’s sandbox” and it was about time we got there to represent “normal people.”

Those who work in the day-to-day operations of the UN are likely to be New Yorkers and Jerseyites, regular folks, “strap hangers” who have to contend with daily commutes in the Big Apple.

They are our natural allies in New York. They are the ones much more likely to be pro-life and pro-marriage. They are the ones who gave us high signs when they saw the simple message of our UN-blue buttons. The words The Family in white were all that our buttons said. It’s all they had to say.

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In a characteristically perceptive op-ed titled “Downward Mobility,” Washington Post economics writer Robert Samuelson notes that “for young Americans, the future could be dimmer.”  As he summarizes:

In 1990, there were 32 million Americans 65 and over; by 2040, that’s reckoned at 80 million. Rising costs for Social Security and Medicare have created a new political dynamic: If benefits for the elderly aren’t cut, burdens on the young will go up. Decaying infrastructure poses similar choices. Either pay for repairs or tolerate substandard roads and schools. If today’s weak recovery persists, the outlook darkens. Unemployment will remain high, say 7 percent to 9 percent. Wage increases will remain depressed. Young workers will have trouble finding jobs to develop the skills and contacts that lead to better jobs. Productivity growth might falter.

This is not a scenario anyone wants to contemplate, but contemplate it we must if we want our country to remain the economic engine and beacon of prosperity it for decades has been.

One thing Samuelson did not note, however, is that our economic crisis is significantly augmented by a lack of future employees.  As my colleagues Drs. Pat Fagan and Henry Potrykus have demonstrated in their important study, “Decline of Economic Growth: Human Capital and Population Change,” ”The slowdown of GDP growth is explained by the concentration of both population and human capital in the baby boom, which is now being replaced by lower human capital cohorts.”  In sum, they argue, “the historical balance of population growth, human capital development, and physical capital investment is the optimum national path to economic growth. Growing our human capital is critical to our future economic growth.”

We cannot have a growing economy with a shrinking labor pool.  Yet that is the grim demographic reality we are facing.  Even the most extraordinary gains in productivity cannot compensate for a lack of one indispensable resource: people.  Given that we are losing roughly 3,000 unborn children through abortion every day, is it any wonder that our economic future looks bleaker than ever?

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For years, Christians and other people of conscience have worked to undo the great damage done (53 million unborn lives lost, and countless women deeply scarred) by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling known as Roe v. Wade.

Thus far, we have been unsuccessful in correcting Roe, which is why, after nearly four decades, there are those who say we should evacuate the public square, abandon political activism, support our local pregnancy care centers, and admit legislative and jurisprudential defeat.  Focus on personal and ecclesial acts of charity, they say, but let politics alone.

Such an attitude betrays a weak understanding of the nature of political change.  Such change is almost always incremental, involving two steps forward and one step back, over and over again.  This process is tedious and sometimes discouraging.  It is also necessary and intrinsic to any system of representative self-government.

At some point in the future, a Supreme Court that honors life might end Roe’s legacy of death.  Until then, however, conservatives and champions of life will have continued opportunities to hem-in unrestricted access to abortion on demand.

For example, under President Bush, we were successful in enacting the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, a ban on partial-birth abortion, and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.  We ended U.S. funding for organizations that perform abortions in the developing world and prevented federal funding of embryo-destructive stem cell research.  Mr. Bush appointed a series of pro-life judges to the federal courts and actively fought efforts to clone human beings.  This is only a partial list.

Under President Obama, some of these have been reversed: Our country now funds groups that perform abortion abroad and subsidizes abortion at home.  The President’s most recent Supreme Court nominee was a leading advocate for the legalization of partial-birth abortion. Yet some of the progress under the previous President has not been, nor likely will be, reversed.

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Last week in Edmonton, Alberta, appellate court judge Joanne Veit issued a shocking decision regarding the fate of Katrina Effert who killed her newly born baby in 2005.

By law, the maximum amount of sentencing time in prison for infanticide is five years however the local media reported that “Effert will have to abide by conditions for the next three years but she won’t spend time behind bars for strangling her newborn son.”

In 2005, Effert, who was nineteen at the time, gave birth to a baby boy, strangled him with her underwear and then threw his body over the fence into a neighbor’s yard. Mark Steyn from National Review Online appropriately labeled this act a “Fourth Trimester Abortion” in a post earlier this week.

The Calgary Herald reports that “Veit called it a “classic infanticide case” and sentenced her to a three-year suspended sentence with probation.” Judge Joanne Veit also expressed sympathy for Effert. “[M]any Canadians . . . generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support…Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother.”

Ethicist Wesley Smith pointed out the irony that had Effert strangled a dog, she would have received no sympathy whatsoever. He’s right. Michael Vick received 23 months in jail for participating in dog fighting. So, in our culture as it stands you can participate in dog fighting (which I am not advocating, by the way – I love animals) and end up in the slammer for close to two years. But strangle your baby and you might be able to get off with a little community service time.  

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The Associated Press reportsthat China’s “one-child policy (is) a surprising boon” for that nation’s girls.

The remarkable story notes that “Since 1979, China’s family planning rules have barred nearly all urban families from having a second child in a bid to stem population growth. With no male heir competing for resources, parents have spent more on their daughters’ education and well-being.”

Only later in the piece do we learn the following:

With the arrival of sonogram technology in the 1980′s, some families no longer merely hoped for a boy, they were able to engineer a male heir by terminating pregnancies when the fetus was a girl.

“It is gendercide,” said Therese Hesketh, a University College London professor who has studied China‘s skewed sex ratio. “I don’t understand why China doesn’t just really penalize people who’ve had sex-selective abortions and the people who do them. The law exists but nobody enforces it.”

To combat the problem, China allows families in rural areas, where son preference is strongest, to have a second child if their first is a girl. The government has also launched education campaigns promoting girls and gives cash subsidies to rural families with daughters.

Still, 43 million girls have “disappeared” in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year.

Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF’s representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls “but they have to be born first.”

As Science Magazine writer Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men documents, the U.N. Population Fund has provided funding such that, in total, 160 million Asian women have been aborted in recent decades.

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Reading Internet stories about late-term Florida abortionist James Pendergraft is like walking through a funhouse mirror – only the warped, grotesque image is the one that’s true.

For over a decade, abortion defenders have propped up this man as a hero to their movement, lauding him in their blogs, inviting him to speak at their rallies.  This man, who aborts babies as old as 27 weeks gestation and who sends women home to have abortions in their toilets or to emergency rooms for unwanted hysterectomies, has managed to continue profiting from his chain of abortion clinics for over a decade despite numerous run-ins with authorities, including repeated suspensions of his medical license.  But a little disabled girl might finally be his undoing.

In 2001 he was convicted of federal extortion charges and put behind bars after threats he made against county officials were caught on tape.  The abortion-rights crowd rallied behind him and invited him to speak at their rallies.  (Source)  His conviction was later overturned.

His license to practice was later suspended, Florida Department of Health stating that he showed “a flagrant disregard for the laws of the state of Florida and a willingness to endanger the lives and health of pregnant patients.”  (Source:  LifeNews)

After the suspension ran its course, he was suspended again.  See Operation Rescue.

Now, a morbid lawsuit over a failed abortion brought on behalf of the little girl who barely survived it has resulted in a verdict of 36 million dollars.  See Jill Stanek’s Article and LifeSiteNews.

The mainstream media has not reported on this verdict, but other sources say that attorneys on behalf of a young girl who survived one of Pendergraft’s abortions filed a lawsuit seeking a lifetime of medical care for the child, and they have won a $36 million verdict.  In 2001, the plaintiff’s mother, Carol Howard, apparently paid one of Pendergraft’s clinics $1,300 to abort her baby at 22 weeks gestation.  She was given multiple doses of RU-486, according to a source, and after 12 hours of labor left the clinic upset and in pain, later to deliver the baby girl in a hospital.  The child weighed 1 lb 6 oz at birth, and suffers from cerebral palsy, lack of function on one side of her body, strokes and brain damage, physical, emotional and cognitive delays, lung damage, chronic lung disease, and seizure disorders.  According to pro-life witnesses inside the courtroom, the Florida jury verdict orders Pendergraft to pay Howard $18,255,000 in punitive damages, $18,000,000 in compensatory damages, and over $400,000 in court costs.

Will this finally stop him?

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One of highlights of the various 2011 state legislative sessions is the successful passage of many solid pro-life bills.  According to a recent report by Guttmacher, 80 bills restricting abortion were passed in 19 states, more than tripling the 23 passed last year.  This impressive number not only sets a record for the most life-affirming bills passed in one year, but it also more than doubles the previous record of 34 bills in 2005.

Some abortion advocates suggest that this is an example of legislators with extreme right-wing social ideologies “pushing” their agenda on the people in their state who likely do not agree with them on these issues.  They even go so far as to assert that there has been an all out “attack on women” by these state legislators. 

Now, thanks to Gallup poll data released today, we can check those assertions.  Are these pro-life legislators out of touch or do they reflect the feelings of the majority of Americans?  Are women feeling attacked and fighting back, or do they support and advocate bills that require their doctor to fully inform them of potential abortion risks, show them an ultrasound, and get parental consent for minors to receive an abortion?

Gallup says:

 “Of seven abortion restrictions tested in a July 15-17Galluppoll, informing women of certain risks of an abortion in advance of performing it is the most widely favored, at 87%. Seven in 10 Americans favor requiring parental consent for minors and establishing a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions. Nearly two-thirds favor making the specific procedure known as “partial birth abortion” illegal”

Data from this poll also affirms a striking consistency in polling data that abortion is not a man verses woman issue, with men pushing pro-life views on women who just want to make choices with their pregnancies.  To the contrary, four out of seven pro-life measures addressed in this poll scored a higher percentage of support among women than men!   

Read the Poll results in their entirety for yourself here.

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A summary of adverse event reports (AERS) recently released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and obtained through Sen. Orrin Hatch’s office reveal that in the span of almost eleven years since the approval of the abortion drug, popularly known as RU-486, in the United States, at least 11 women have died as a result of complications related to taking the drug.[1]  Internationally, the number of women who have died as a result of RU-486 is at least 17.[2]

That’s not all. The dangerous complications associated with this drug continue include hemorrhaging and infection. In the U.S., at least 612 women have been hospitalized after taking RU-486; and at least 339 women required blood transfusions as a result of serious blood loss after taking the abortion drug.

Clearly highlighting the need for more stringent medical oversight, the report also indicates that 58 women were prescribed RU-486 despite having ectopic pregnancies. Yet, “[a]dministration of mifepristone and misoprostol is contraindicated in patients with confirmed or suspected ectopic pregnancy.”[3] To state it more clearly, a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy and takes the RU486 regimen places her life in danger.

It is not only women in the U.S. who are suffering as a result of chemical abortion, it is a worldwide trend. A recent Australian health department audit of nearly 10,000 abortions performed in 2009 and 2010 compared the safety of RU-486 with surgical abortion, with the outcome being in the words of one major media outlet “The Abortion Pill ‘Less Safe than Surgery’”. The Australian report showed that 1 in 18 patients who used RU-486 had to be re-admitted to hospitals (a total of 5.7% of women vs. only .4% of surgical abortions.) The same study revealed that as many as 33% of women who had second trimester RU-486 abortions required some form of surgical intervention.[4]

Marketing the abortion drug as simple and painless, such as taking an aspirin, is dangerously misleading to women. RU-486 is in a class of drugs categorized as selective progesterone receptor modulators, which, in addition to blocking progesterone necessary for the developing baby, also suppresses a woman’s immune system. Additionally, it is sometimes the case that the remains of the pregnancy are not entirely expelled from a woman’s uterus, causing infection and other problems.

Despite the seriousness and intensity of adverse effects related to RU-486, use of this form of abortion is on the rise, and frequently the regimen is dispensed with less medical oversight than surgical abortion. Even more troubling, nationally and internationally, “telemed” dissemination of RU-486 is increasing.[5] Telemed abortions involved doctors proscribing RU-486 through skype or over the internet rather than during a patient visit.

The bottom line is that abortion drugs are not about improving women’s health but are more accurately about advancing a radical pro-abortion agenda regardless of the impact on women’s health, even when it proves deadly.

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