VICTORY!!!

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Breaking News

Today, Live Action released a new undercover video showing a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Austin, TX encouraging a woman to obtain a late-term abortion because she was purportedly carrying a girl and wanted to have a boy. The video is first in a new series titled “Gendercide: Sex-Selection in America,” exposing the practice of sex-selective abortion in the United States and how Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry facilitate the selective elimination of baby girls in the womb.

“I see that you’re saying that you want to terminate if it’s a girl, so are you just wanting to continue the pregnancy in the meantime?” a counselor named “Rebecca” offers the woman, who is purportedly still in her first trimester and cannot be certain about the gender. “The abortion covers you up until 23 weeks,” explains Rebecca, “and usually at 5 months is usually (sic) when they detect, you know, whether or not it’s a boy or a girl.” Doctors agree that the later in term a doctor performs an abortion, the greater the risk of complications.

The Planned Parenthood staffer suggests that the woman get on Medicaid in order to pay for an ultrasound to determine the gender of her baby, even though she plans to use the knowledge for an elective abortion. She also tells the woman to “just continue and try again” for the desired gender after aborting a girl, and adds, “Good luck, and I hope that you do get your boy.”

“The search-and-destroy targeting of baby girls through prenatal testing and abortion is a pandemic that is spreading across the globe,” notes Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action. “Research proves that sex-selective abortion has now come to America. The abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood, is a willing participant.”

Less is more

How has access to contraception and abortion altered the way people think about sex and pregnancy? And in what ways has the availability of abortion changed the way people think about and use contraception?

The most common methods of contraception are barrier methods such as condoms and diaphragms, hormonal contraceptives such as the pill, the patch, and intrauterine devices (IUDs), as well as spermicides and sterilization. Nearly 40 percent of the most common contraceptives are abortifacients. These include IUDs, the pill, the patch, and emergency contraception. All act to prevent implantation onto the uterine wall of some fertilized eggs, distinct human beings. Contraceptives are widely and cheaply available throughout the United States. The government has subsidized contraceptives for low-income women for more than 50 years, through programs such as Medicaid and Title X...

Among sexually active Americans who do not use contraception, only a small percentage fails to do so because of lack of access to contraceptives. In a 2001 study, the Guttmacher Institute (GI), a public policy organization that analyzes reproductive trends, surveyed 10,000 women who had abortions. Of those who were not using contraception at the time they conceived, 2 percent said they did not know where to obtain contraception, and 8 percent said they could not afford it. 

Despite the pervasiveness of contraception, nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of those end in abortion, according to GI and the CDC. Part of the problem is contraceptive failure—all methods sometimes fail to prevent pregnancy. 

But a more significant problem is that most sexually active people who use contraception use it inconsistently. According to a GI study, a majority of women (54 percent) who had abortions used a contraceptive method (usually a condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Another GI analysis found that nearly half of women seeking to avoid pregnancy had periods of nonuse of birth control (15 percent) or used their method inconsistently or incorrectly (27 percent). 

Erratic contraceptive use is often rooted in ambivalence about pregnancy. Another GI study found that nearly one in four women who were not trying to become pregnant said they would be very pleased if they found out they were pregnant.

...As Rachel Jones, a GI senior research associate, put it to the New York Times, “[T]he high rate of unwed pregnancy and abortion among poor women is a sign of ambivalence. They are torn between the desire to have a baby and the realization that it would be hard to bring up a child as a single mother.” 

Reproductive decision-making is complicated further by the availability of induced abortion. Statistics suggest that though it is marketed as a method of birth control used only when other measures fail, abortion has become a method of birth control used in place of other measures. 

Few people would admit to using abortion as birth control, but the evidence is in the data. After Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion nationally, pregnancies grew by 30 percent even as births decreased by 6 percent. After Roe, which suddenly made abortion much easier to obtain, many Americans began using contraceptives less consistently. 

The results are seen in the number of women who have multiple abortions. Consider that of the more than 1.3 million women who obtained abortions in 2001, about half (650,000 women) had had at least one previous abortion. About a quarter (325,000 women) had obtained at least two previous abortions. And roughly 15 percent (195,000 women) had already obtained at least three abortions. 

Those numbers haven’t changed all that much. Of the 1.21 million abortions performed in 2008, half were performed on women who had already had at least one abortion. These disturbing statistics highlight the moral hazard of abortion. The wide availability of abortion diminishes the expected cost of sexual intercourse, because the pregnancy can be aborted in the event of unwanted conception, thus avoiding many of the costs associated with unwanted pregnancy. 

So, by giving men and women a relatively safe and inexpensive way to eliminate the unintended outcome of risky sexual behavior, liberal abortion laws encourage more and riskier sexual behavior. In other words, the wide availability of abortion discourages people from using contraceptives. 

...In 1979, Malcolm Potts, former medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, predicted, “as people turn to contraception, there will be a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate.” 

A couple that uses contraception establishes a “contraceptive mindset,” so that even if a child is conceived that child is unintended and thus unwelcome. The US Supreme Court came close to acknowledging this idea in its 1992 decision upholding the right to abortion. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court stated, “In some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception. For two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”

Read all about it

Who are we shutting out?

While not every woman who uses contraception would have an abortion or even necessarily supports the pro-choice movement, it became clear that, on a society-wide level, the widespread acceptance of contraception makes people feel like abortion is necessary. When women are told to go ahead and participate in the act that creates babies, even if they are certain that they are in no position to have a child, babies become the enemy, and women begin to feel like the only way they can have real control over their bodies is through the services of their local abortion facility.

But that was only the beginning.

The more I studied the Theology of the Body and took a look at human sexuality through the lens of millenia-old Christian teaching, the more the problems of contraceptive culture came into relief. I noticed that with abstinence-based methods of child spacing like Natural Family Planning, there remains a mental and physical openness to the potential for new life. Couples may try to avoid pregnancy, and may even be able to do so with a high degree of accuracy, but there is always an acceptance that new life could be created, an ever-present understanding that an inherent part of this most sacred of human acts is a willingness to care for any new family members God may give you through it. And, because it involves abstinence, there is an inherent element of personal sacrifice. You live daily with the reminder that life isn't about doing whatever you want, whenever you want.

In contrast, I began to see that contraception tempts us to value human life according to how it impacts us. Contraceptive culture tells us that we're entitled to the pleasurable aspects of sexuality, even if we reject any new life that could be created. It tells married couples that we can and should exercise complete control over our fertility so that we only add children to our families when we are one-hundred percent certain that we want them  -- in other words, to value other human beings according to how they impact our own lives. Columnist Mark Steyn summed up this mindset well when he wrote in a 2006 article:

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life a matter of "choice," it made it easier to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren't...But it's foolish to think you can raise entire populations to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn't and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The "right to choose" is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience conception to convenience euthanasia is a short one, and the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia shorter still.

Though he was speaking specifically about abortion, this mentality of "convenience conception" is rooted in the acceptance of contraception. And we only need to look at history to see where this line of thinking goes: Any time a society accepts it as true that it is okay to value other human beings according to how much we want to deal with them, there will always be death. At a minimum, it leads to spiritual death, when people begin to live their lives closed to deep connections with other humans, but there is usually also bodily death, as those who cramp the lifestyles of those who are more powerful are gotten out of the way once and for all. And thus we end up in a "culture of death."

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jennifer-fulwiler/why-do-we-call-it-a-culture-of-death#ixzz1tJ2Dv400

Ms. Nomer

But what is “reproductive justice”? To help answer that question, perhaps we should first ask: Who is guilty of the injustice? For Fluke, it’s her school that “creates untenable burdens that impede our academic success.” But of course it’s unfair to say that an institution, by not covering the cost of some product, implicitly creates burdens for its female students. My employer, by not covering my preferred allergy medicine, doesn’t create my burden of allergies. My allergy problems are internal to myself. They are, so to speak, natural problems I live with, ones I cannot label as someone else’s fault. Unless I were futilely to blame, say, God or nature.

But I would argue that underneath it all, advocates of “reproductive justice” do blame nature. Nature is the true obstacle to these women’s idea of justice.

Fluke might not put it this way, but radical feminists who cling to terms like “reproductive justice” and “reproductive freedom” are really trying to beat the cards that nature dealt them. They want sexual license outside the scope of what nature provides as the healthiest course—sex with one person for a lifetime. They object to the reality that sex can naturally lead to babies, creating burdens that research shows they’d be best suited to bear with the help of a husband. Underneath sexual liberationists’ wish to overthrow patriarchal traditions of marriage and religious institutions’ principles of sexual ethics, there seems to be a wish to overthrow the most stubborn foundation of all—nature herself.

 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/04/5242

What speaks louder?

Ms. Johnson had worked for Planned Parenthood for years, eventually becoming director of the clinic.  One day, while helping during an ultrasound-guided abortion, she witnessed the end of life.  Witnessing it with her own eyes was the day of her conversion.  She quit her job and joined the Coalition for Life.  It’s an amazing and emotional story.  But what struck me most was that the Coalition for Life had, for years, loved and prayed for her.  It was this love and these prayers that guided her eventual change of heart.  Had they been angry, violently standing up for what was right, she likely would have shut them out.  But their love in the face of her opposition was remarkable.  True charity.

Charity doesn’t mean you don’t stand up for what is right.  But we must be wise in the words we choose and the way we choose to say them.  Those Coalition for Life volunteers praying at the abortion clinic— just praying, not debating, or arguing, or accusing— spoke clearly.  They spoke not just opposition to abortion, but also love for all that walked through the clinic doors—love for the unborn child, women in crisis pregnancies, as well as and those that worked at the clinic.  This surely is what Christ was speaking of in his call to love and prayer.

So here is Christ’s challenge to us all:  Pray for those who persecute us.  Say I love you anyway and will be there if you need help.  Can we demonstrate the love of Christ in such a way that, in spite of opposition, our actions stop people in their tracks and make them wonder at our love?  What feeds this love, what motivates this love?  I have a feeling that this love will inspire more conversions of heart than anything else we can do.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/charity-in-the-face-of-oposition

Forgiveness

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