The ninth abortion clinic has closed in the state of Michigan in the last two years — and the sixth abortion business has closed in the state since just seven months ago.

That’s the good news the pro-life group Citizens for a Pro-Life Society relayed to LifeNews today in announcing the American Family Planning abortion center, , owned and operated by 73-year-old Korean-born abortion practitioner Noon-Nahm Ann for over 20 years, has permanently closed.

“The clinic’s last day was Friday April 12, 2013.  The store-front clinic was located in a run-down section of East Dearborn, Michigan and primarily attracted women from impoverished minority groups desperate enough to seek its ‘services,’” the group told LifeNews via email.

The director of the group called AFP on Thursday, April 11th and was told by a clinic staff member that Ann was retiring and the clinic was closing on Friday.

“The AFP clinic was the constant focus of pro-life opposition particularly from pro-life activist Chris Coatney who literally stood outside of this clinic every day it was opened for the last 11 years—attempting to talk women out of abortions as they arrived for their appointments,” Citizens for a Pro-Life Society said. “Members of Guadalupe Partners, headed by Edmund Miller, talked women out of abortions at AFP for six years. This group saved many babies who otherwise would have been aborted by Ann.”

“Members of a local Catholic group prayed the rosary outside of the clinic for many years and, more recently, a 40 Days for Life campaign was conducted at the clinic, the last event in February and March 2013,” it added. “The closing of AFP marks the 6th abortion center to close its doors in Michigan since last September 2012 and the 9th abortion center to close, or be kept from opening in Michigan in the last 18 months!  In addition, the retirement of Ann means that 3 major Michigan abortionists have retired this year—namely the notorious Alberto Hodari, as well as Enrique Gerbi.”

It may be possible to add a 4th abortionist who appears to have left the abortion practice, Robert Alexander. The group made a call to him four weeks ago and he confirmed that he was no longer doing abortions.  At one time Alexander owned four abortion clinics in Michigan but his last clinic was shut down last December 2012 by order of the Muskegon fire marshal due to unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

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The Michigan abortion centers that have closed in the last 7 months are:

American Family Planning, East Dearborn (Ann)

Woman Care, Livonia (Hodari)

Women’s Advisory, Livonia (Reginald Sharpe)

Sharpe’s Family Planning, Detroit (Reginald Sharpe)

Women’s Medical Services, Bloomfield (Reginald Sharpe)

Woman’s Choice Clinic, Muskegon (Robert Alexander)

Add to this the closings, by order of the Michigan Attorney General, due to efforts of CPLS, RTL of Michigan and activist Chris Veneklase:

Woman’s Choice Clinic, Lansing

Woman’s Choice Clinic, Saginaw

Most people following the grisly story of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell know of the raid on his abortion clinic, the gruesome abortions-infanticides he performed and even his disgusting habit of saving the bodies of aborted babies.

But what some people may not know is that Gosnell’s abortion practice dates back decades and he once gave a “pro-life” reason to justify the abortions he performed.

He told the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper in October 1972: “As a physician, I am very concerned about the sanctity of life. But it is for this precise reason that I provide abortions for women who want and need them.”

Gosnell also indicated in that interview he wouldn’t want to abort his own baby.

“I personally would never agree to have an abortion performed on any woman bearing my child,” Gosnell said at the time.

The newspaper provides more background on Gosnell’s abortion practice at the time the Supreme Court overturned pro-life laws nationwide protecting unborn children.

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It was an era of transition for abortion law. More states were loosening restrictions, foreshadowing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that declared abortion legal up to the point of fetal viability – about 24 weeks. Many states with tough statutes, meanwhile, were in a sort of limbo because of legal challenges; Pennsylvania’s law had been struck down as unconstitutionally vague.

At that time, Gosnell, a 1966 graduate of Jefferson Medical College, said he was doing about 500 abortions a year. That is less than half the number of procedures he does annually now, according to state records.

The 1972 Inquirer article said Gosnell was a “respected man” in his community, a finalist for the Junior Chamber of Commerce’s “Young Philadelphian of the Year” because of his work directing the Mantua Halfway House, a rehab clinic for drug addicts. (By the late 1980s, public records show, state tax liens were piling up against the halfway house, and the abortion clinic had a $41,000 federal tax lien.)

Gosnell was also known in the world of abortion-rights activists. Then and now, he advertised his willingness to perform abortions beyond the 12-week limit set by most clinics.

Doctors have announced that the woman that received a womb transplant is now pregnant.

From RedOrbit:

The Turkish woman who, two years ago, became the first person in the world to have a successful womb transplant from a deceased donor is pregnant, various media outlets are reporting.

Twenty-two-year-old Derya Sert, who was born without a womb, had been receiving in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments since the successful transplant, which took place in August 2011 at Akdeniz University Hospital in Turkey’s southern province of Antalya, the AFP news agency reported on Friday.

According to Reuters, the hospital released a statement stating early test results were “consistent with pregnancy” and that Sert was “in good health.”

Now it is time to pray for that child. Pray that he or she is born healthy with no complications. We need to pray because even the doctors admit that things may go wrong:

“Experts however warn the pregnancy carries several health risks to the patient as well as to the baby, including birth defects due to the use of immunosuppressive drugs as well as preterm delivery.”

I think herein lies the problem. This child is the experiment, not part of an experiment, but is the actual experiment. Why else would you transplant a uterus to a woman who was born without one? It is not so she can menstruate for a few years. It is so she can gestate a baby. A baby that had his or her start in a laboratory not in a loving embrace.

The idea of a child as the experiment is not new. We have been experimenting with the next generation without their consent for a long time. We are still experimenting on them. The fact is we have no idea what the long-term physical and emotional effects of IVF, PGD, ICSI or other artificial reproductive technologies (ART) even are and yet we continue on. This uterus transplant is no different.

The avant-garde attitude toward the creation of children will continue on with the health and well-being of the children produced as an after-thought. Case in point, Dr. Robert Sparrow’s paper “In vitro eugenics” in the Journal of Medical Ethics where he explores possibility of creating embryos in the lab, then using the stem cells from those embryos to create egg and sperm cells, and then using those gametes to create more embryos. Essentially, this would take human reproduction into the laboratory not just for one generation, but for generation after generation. These embryos would be “orphaned at conception.” Unfortunately, this technology of producing egg and sperm from stem cells is no longer science fiction. Scientists have already accomplished this in mice and are discussing and developing strategies to doing the same in humans.

Sparrow points out that safety concerns for the children produced with “in vitro eugenics” will likely not prevent the practice because frankly we have had little concern for safety in any previous ART technique. Sparrow writes:

However, there are a number of reasons to believe that concerns about safety and risk are unlikely to prove an insurmountable barrier to the ethical creation of designer babies by in vitro eugenics. To begin with, as I noted above, these concerns arise regarding every new reproductive technology involving the manipulation of embryos. Until a generation of children produced by IVF (or intracytoplasmic sperm injection or cytoplasmic transfer) have lived out their natural lifespan, we will not know whether IVF (or any of these other technologies) is safe—and we certainly did not know this at the time at which those technologies were first trialled. Thus, in vitro eugenics would not raise any issues we have not confronted before.

I think we can add uterus transplant from a deceased donor to his list of techniques where we did not know the whether the technique was “safe” before we tried it.

Let me provide an alternative way to view children. A view where children are to be treated with the utmost respect, not just from birth, but from conception. A view of children as the beautiful fruit of the love between a husband and wife not as the product of technological intervention. Let me quote Donum Vitae:

The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered as an object of ownership: rather, a child is a gift, “the supreme gift” and the most gratuitous gift of marriage, and is a living testimony of the mutual giving of his parents.

And then Charter for Health Care Workers:

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“The desire for a child, sincere and intense though it be, by the spouses, does not legitimize recourse to techniques which are contrary to the truth of human procreation and to the dignity of the new human being. The desire for a child gives no right to have a child. The latter is a person, with the dignity of a ‘subject.’ As such, it cannot be desired as an ‘object.’ The fact is that the child is a subject of rights: the child has the right to be conceived only with full respect for its personhood.”

I think it time we listen to the wisdom of the Catholic Church on procreation. Otherwise “in vitro eugenics” may only be the first in the long line of unethical techniques that treat children as objects and not as the gifts that they truly are.

During the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell, jurors heard grisly tales about the bodies of the aborted babies he kept. But the most gruesome story may involve a 28-week baby Gosnell killed and kept.

Joseph Slobodzian, a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has more on the story and how it set off a firestorm between prosecutors and Gosnell’s lawyer.

He is known only as “Baby Boy B,” a fetus estimated to be 28 weeks old, found frozen in an altered one-gallon plastic water jug in Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s West Philadelphia abortion clinic.

His passing went unnoticed and undocumented, but on Monday, prosecution and defense lawyers struggled to get Philadelphia’s chief medical examiner to say whether he was stillborn or killed by Gosnell after being born alive during an abortion.

“Based on the totality of the evidence . . . you cannot testify to anyone that this fetus was born alive?” Gosnell lawyer Jack McMahon asked Medical Examiner Sam Gulino.

“No I cannot,” replied Gulino.

Then Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron flipped around McMahon’s question: “Can you think of any reason why the neck was severed if that baby was not born alive?”

Again, Gulino agreed. McMahon tried to salvage his first answer, only to be interrupted by Cameron.

McMahon exploded in anger, but was topped by Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart.

“Mr. McMahon, behave yourself!” yelled Minehart. “Act like a lawyer.”

McMahon, who once worked with Minehart and Cameron in the District Attorney’s Office, sat down, seething, and said nothing more.

Gulino testified about the difficult task of examining the remains of 47 frozen fetuses discovered in Gosnell’s clinic during a Feb. 18, 2010, raid by a federal-state prescription drug-abuse task force.

Gulino called it “unprecedented.”

“This was something that in 15 to 16 years . . . I had never been asked to do,” Gulino testified.

“There was no guidance on how to proceed,” Gulino testified, adding that he asked fellow coroners, medical examiners, and forensic pathologists, who were as stumped as he.

Gulino said he finally opened the red and blue plastic bags from Gosnell’s freezer, tagged the remains, and slowly let them thaw, to minimize decomposition.

The 47 aborted fetuses ranged in age from 12 weeks – the end of the first trimester – to late second trimester, and included two that looked beyond the 24-week limit for legal abortions in Pennsylvania.

With these kinds of horrors, why would the mainstream media take so long to report on the Gosnell murder trial? The editors at National Review have an answer:  because reporters are not pro-life and don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation.

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“Television networks and major newspapers have been slow to cover this case; they are turning to it only now, after having been browbeaten by pro-life critics. The defense some journalists are making for ignoring the story — that conservative media outlets have paid it little attention either — is both false (we have given it plenty of coverage) and rather damning (the Washington Post may not be what it once was, but surely it has a few more resources to deploy than does NR),” they write. “Another defense, that the story is too disgusting for reporters or the news-consuming public, would have weight if nobody had covered, for example, the Sandusky crimes.”

“One obvious explanation for the media’s silence is that most reporters favor legal abortion, and this story is uncomfortable for that side of the abortion debate. People who are “pro-choice,” especially, don’t want to think about it. The unconvincing spin from the most devoted supporters of the abortion license is that the Gosnell case shows that abortion law needs to be liberalized further: If Pennsylvania not only refrained from enforcing its late-term abortion law but also took it off the books, none of this would have happened,” they add.

But most reporters fall in line with the position taken by President Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood — abortion legal for any reason throughout pregnancy.

In 1995, Stanley Rothman and Amy Black polled the news media elite – nearly all of the media elite (97 percent) agreed that “it is a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have an abortion,” and five out of six (84 percent) agreed strongly.

A 1992 Media Studies Journal poll found more than half of journalists (51%) said abortion should be “legal under any circumstances,” compared to just 4 percent who thought abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances.”

Back to the trial, another abortion practitioner that even his horrific “snipping” procedure for killing babies in abortions/infanticides didn’t necessarily end their lives.

Gosnell’s defense lawyer, Jack McMahon, claims none of the babies were born alive but were dead before birth due to a lethal drug injection and that Gosnell and his staff “snipped” their necks after “birth.” McMahon claims no babies were ever killed in the gruesome abortion process, which involved “snipping” the spinal cords of the children by jabbing medical scissors into the backs of their necks, because the babies were supposedly already dead.

That’s not what two staffers for Gosnell admitted in court — with one saying she heard a baby scream and another saying the baby “jumped” when the newborn was stabbed in the neck with the scissors.

McMahon is attempting to get the jury to buy a story that Gosnell used a drug called Digoxin to kill the baby in utero and then to deliver a dead child. He claims Gosnell just wanted to “snip” the spinal cords to ensure the baby was dead already. The Gosnell staffer admitted that’s what the abortion practitioner told her he was doing.

Although the defense attorney claimed the babies were dead and that jabbing them in the neck with scissors was needed to make sure that was the case, Gosnell staffers also told the court one at least two occasions that the babies were not dead when their necks were stabbed.

However expert witnesses testified there was no medical reason for Gosnell to cut the spines of aborted fetuses.

Determining if the children were alive or dead at the time their spinal cords were “snipped” is crucial to prosecuting Gosnell and his staff.

Gosnell faces 43 criminal counts, including eight counts of murder in the death of one patient, Karnamaya Monger, and seven newborn infants. Additional charges include conspiracy, drug delivery resulting in death, infanticide, corruption of minors, evidence tampering, theft by deception, abuse of corpse, and corruption. Gosnell could face the death penalty if convicted and he faces a mandatory minimum 20 years.

The trial of the abortion practitioner has been so gruesome and vivid in its accounts of the late-term and live-birth abortions that it has shocked the conscience of the nation, despite a relative lack of media coverage outside of local media and conservative and pro-life news outlets.

Gosnell, whose squalid “house of horrors” abortion clinic has surprised even investigative officials, has had almost flippant attitude toward his macabre abortion practices shocked the nation.

“The Gosnell case is a watershed moment for the issue of abortion,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Nation. “The discovery of his horrific practices helped shed light on an abortion industry that has run amok without oversight or accountability for decades, and has prompted significant changes in abortion laws and attitudes toward enforcement in several states.”

Previously, Gosnell’s wife Pearl pleaded guilty to assisting her husband at his Philadelphia abortion center where he killed a woman in a botched abortion and has killed hundreds of babies in abortion-infanticides.

Pearl Gosnell was considering a plea deal similar to the one several of Gosnell’s former abortion center employees have made where they have pleaded guilty to receive a lesser sentence in exchange for testifying against Gosnell. Pearl also worked at the abortion center Gosnell ran that had him kill and injure women in failed abortions and kill perhaps hundreds of babies in grisly infanticides by birthing them and “snipping” their spinal cords.

She worked at the Women’s Medical Society abortion business her husband ran as a full-time medical assistant from 1982 until she married Kermit Gosnell in 1990, when she switched to only working on Sundays. At that time, the abortion business was officially closed but would do its latest-term abortions possible.

The grand jury report indicates Pearl Gosnell testified that she alone helped Kermit do abortions on Sundays when she would “help do the instruments” in the operating room despite no medical training.

Previously, Judge Lerner ruled two other former employees, Eileen O’Neill and Madeline Joe, are not allowed to have their cases separated from that of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Neither O’Neill nor Joe are charged with killing babies in infanticides and, although their attorneys argued the horrifying allegations against Gosnell could unfairly taint their cases, they were not allowed to plead guilty in deals as was the case with six other former employees.

The murder charges also came in connection with the botched abortion death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, who died at Gosnell’s abortion clinic after a failed abortion. Mongar died November 20, 2009, after overdosing on anesthetics prescribed by the doctor. Mongar’s family filed a lawsuit against Gosnell’s abortion business seeking damages.

Gosnell and several staffers at his abortion center, including Pearl, were arrested in January after a grand jury indicted them on multiple charges after officials raided his abortion business following a woman’s death and discovered a “shop of horrors” filled with bags of bodies and body parts of deceased unborn children and babies killed in infanticides. Pearl Gosnell, Kermit’s 49-year-old wife who has no medical license, faces a charge of providing an abortion at 24 or more weeks and conspiracy and other charges.

Gosnell has been denied bail while the case against him moves forward. Women have spoken out about their treatment and one woman says she was drugged and tied up and forced to have an abortion.

Authorities searching the facility last year found bags and bottles holding aborted babies scattered around the building, jars containing babies’ severed feet lining a shelf, as well as filthy, unsanitary furniture and equipment.

The grand jury investigation also shows state officials did nothing when reports came in about problems at Gosnell’s abortion center, which has upset incoming pro-life Governor Tom Corbett.

Gosnell’s abortion center was inspected only after a federal drug raid in 2010.  It was the first time the facility had been inspected in 17 years because state officials ignored complaints and failed to visit Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society for years.

The abortion industry has been forced to suspend two abortion businesses that employed embattled abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell, who has been the subject of national controversy over his abortion business in Philadelphia.

Following revelations that Gosnell is associated with two other abortion centers in Louisiana and Delaware, the National Abortion Federation made the decision to suspend the memberships of both. Atlantic Women’s Medical Services, the Delaware abortion business that employed Gosnell one day a week to do abortions, and the Delta Clinic abortion center of Baton Rouge, have both had their memberships suspended. Leroy Brinkley owns both abortion businesses. Atlantic operates abortion centers in Wilmington and Dover.

The NAACP has filed a countersuit against a black pro-life leader who exposed its pro-abortion views in an article appearing at LifeNews.com.

In February, the NAACP threatened to sue LifeNews.com and Ryan Bomberger, a LifeNews blogger (left), for a column that took the civil rights organization to task over its abortion position. The NAACP is upset about a column Bomberger wrote at LifeNews titled, “NAACP: National Association for the Abortion of Colored People,” which notes the organization’s 44th Annual Image Awards.

Following the piece, the NAACP sent Bomberger, the director of the Radiance Foundation, and LifeNews a threatening letter claiming infringement on its name and logo for including it in the opinion column. The letter accuses Bomberger and his group, the Radiance Foundation, of “trademark infringement” over an ad campaign that exposes the NAACP’s pro-abortion position.

Stating that while “you are certainly entitled to express your viewpoint, you cannot do so in connection with a name that infringes on the NAACP’s rights,” the letter demands a response within a self-imposed time period.

In response to the letter, Bomberger asked a federal court to declare that the First Amendment protects his and the Radiance Foundation’s exercise of free speech and that his speech does not infringe on any of the NAACP’s trademarks or other rights. The lawsuit does not seek any damages.

In its countersuit, the NAACP’s counterclaim denies that the NAACP is pro-­-abortion or has even taken a position on the issue.

“The damage done is the loss of over 15 million black lives to abortion,” says Bomberger, an adoptee and adoptive father. “How can the NAACP possibly claim neutrality over the abortion issue if they’re financially profiting from annual sponsorship from the nation’s largest abortion chain?”

Bomberger points out that the NAACP’s website reveals that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s biggest abortion business, has been a corporate sponsor of the NAACP’s Annual Convention for years.

Bomberger tells LifeNews the NAACP has not acknowledged that more black babies are aborted in New York City, the home of Planned Parenthood, than are born alive. Instead, NAACP NY State Conference and NAACP Syracuse/Onondaga support an alarming bill (championed by NY Governor Andrew Cuomo) called the “Reproductive Health Act” (RHA). This abortion bill will remove abortion language entirely from the state’s homicide criminal codes, allow abortions through the entire pregnancy, and declare abortion a “human right” thereby stripping any current or future attempts at regulating abortion clinics.

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He said Philadelphia’s gruesome Gosnell case reveals what happens when regulations are not enforced. NAACP joins a massive coalition of radical pro-­-abortion groups including NARAL Pro-­-Choice New York, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Ms. Foundation and Planned Parenthood.

Despite the NAACP suit, Bomberger says the Radiance Foundation’s www.TooManyAborted.com abortion awareness campaign will continue to expose failed leadership in the black community on the issue of abortion.

Alliance Defending Freedom allied attorney Charles M. Allen with the Glen Allen, Va. firm Goodman, Allen & Filetti PLLC is defending Bomberger and Radiance in U.S. District Court in The Radiance Foundation v. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk Division.

Last week, I wrote a column entitled “Brutality in the Brave New World” discussing an appalling movement within the scientific community in which researchers are exploring the “therapeutic” potential of the eggs of aborted baby girls. In a similar vein, a bioethicist writing for the Huffington Post in 2009 famously suggested that pregnant women wanting abortions be paid to remain pregnant longer so that their aborted babies yield more “useful” body parts. In the face of such moral depravity, the only conclusion to be drawn was that mankind has given itself over utterly to the appetites of ambition and avarice, and Heaven help those who find themselves the object of these appetites unchecked by moral standards.

As if to emphasize the point, the nation is currently bearing witness to one of the most horrifying cases of slaughterhouse medicine in recent memory. Dr. Kermit Gosnell has been charged with the murder of seven newborn babies and one young woman after law enforcement raided his “clinic” on a hunt for illegal prescription drugs. The chamber of horrors they discovered is almost too gruesome for words, yet an excruciating account of Gosnell’s butchery is exactly what the grand jury in this case had to produce. The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf featured some of the testimony in his article “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story”:

“Public health officials inspected the surgery rooms. ‘Instruments were not sterile,’ the grand jury states. ‘Equipment was rusty and outdated. Oxygen equipment was covered with dust, and had not been inspected. The same corroded suction tubing used for abortions was the only tubing available for oral airways if assistance for breathing was needed. There was no functioning resuscitation or even monitoring equipment, except for a single blood pressure cuff.’ Upon further inspection, ‘the search team discovered fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic – in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers.’

And ‘Gosnell admitted to Detective Wood that at least 10 to 20 percent of the fetuses were probably older than 24 weeks in gestation – even though Pennsylvania law prohibits abortions after 24 weeks. In some instances, surgical incisions had been made at the base of the fetal skulls.’”

The sickening evidence in this trial shows abortion for exactly what it is: the deliberate killing of an innocent child. Abortion apologists can agonize and split hairs about the “complexity” of the issue ’til the cows come home. It will never change this irrefutable fact: There can be no doubt about the humanity of an unborn child. With every new advance in medical technology, the evidence of life in the womb only grows. Dr. Gosnell’s victims were no less people in their mother’s wombs than they were when they were delivered alive and their spines were snipped with scissors by Gosnell or one of his teenaged assistants. The change in their location did not change their humanity.

There simply is no way to put a gloss on this. Dr. Gosnell is a product of a culture in which the rhetoric of choice has too long gone unchallenged. He is the product of a political climate in which fear of offending the pro-abortion lobby led our president (while an IL senator) to oppose giving medical treatment to infants that survive abortion. Gosnell’s ghoulish practice of killing abortion survivors is the logical extension of such a policy.

Gosnell could not have done what he did without a complicit government. His clinic had not been inspected in years. Why? Politics, plain and simple. Abortion is a sacrament embraced by the Left, and though they are generally champions of regulation, in this one area they favor a “hands-off” approach. And the regulators acted accordingly, turning a blind eye to the carnage right under their noses. Thousands of women passed through the doors of Gosnell’s pigsty. They came from the neighborhood, they came neighboring states, they came from around the country, but somehow the American people are expected to believe that no one knew what was happening. Teenagers were employed there as Gosnell’s henchmen, but somehow they never told anyone what they were participating in. Is such willful blindness not reminiscent of those Germans who smelled and saw the smoke of the crematoria and said “we didn’t know”?

And, of course, the mainstream media has largely ignored the story. They don’t want to know – and they don’t want you to know – where their logic leads, and so they too have cast a blind eye and a deaf ear to the abhorrent facts of this case. Their silence is a tacit endorsement of Gosnell’s practice. Indeed, the editorial board of the New York Times apparently thought that this would be the perfect time to pen an article celebrating the opening of an abortion clinic in the same building that once housed late-term abortionist George Tiller’s offices. The editors lauded the “perseverance and courage” of those who spearheaded the effort, calling the project “inspiring and instructive.” Those who opposed the clinic, of course, are denounced as anti-constitutional, anti-woman extremists.

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To say we’ve fallen down a dark and dreadful rabbit hole is an understatement. Powerful forces are arrayed against those who champion the protection of innocent life. The culture has betrayed us, the media is in bed with the doctors of death and their radical feminist apologists, and the courts are well on their way down the same path. Nonetheless, the protectors of life must never give up. They must endure whatever insults, ridicule, and threats that come their way for the sake of the children who are being slaughtered and their mothers who are being exploited, and for the sake of a culture which is spiraling into the depths of depravity.

May God help us all.

LifeNews.com Note:  Ken Connor is the chairman of the Center for a Just Society and co-author of “Sinful Silence: When Christians Neglect Their Civic Duty.” A pro-life attorney, he was intimately involved in the fight to save Terri Schiavo and is the former president of the Family Research Council.

A judge has prevented a new pro-life law from being used to close the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi.

The last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has received notice from the Health Department that it intends to revoke the clinic’s operating license after an inspection found that it is has not complied with a state law that requires that all abortion practitioners maintain local hospital privileges.

Closure of the clinic was delayed so a hearing could be held and a formal revocation could take place.

But a judge granted a temporary reprieve from closure on Monday by blocking enforcement of the state law that required its doctors to have the right to admit patients to local hospitals. Mississippi is one of several states that require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals so women can be treated when they are victimized by botched abortions.

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization sued the state over the law and yesterday it won a temporary injunction from U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III, who stopped the state from closing the clinic. Only one of the abortion clinic’s doctors holds admitting privileges and the two who do the vast majority of abortions do not.

Jordan enjoined Mississippi from enforcing the admitting privileges requirement while the clinic’s lawsuit proceeds.

“While the women of Mississippi may be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief today, this fight is far from over,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents the clinic, said in a statement.

Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Nation, said, “If that abortion clinic’s abortionists are so bad that no hospital will have them, then the clinic is just too dangerous to operate.”

Newman continued, “Women deserve better than to be left to fend for themselves in the event of abortion complications while the abortionist flies off to another state leaving others to clean up his mess. Without an abortion clinic preying on women while they are vulnerable, women will have the opportunity to seek legitimate medical services and other community resources readily available to them that will not leave them suffering in an ER without proper continuity of care.”

Clinic owner Diane Derzis is certainly no stranger to legal problems. Last year she was ordered to shut down her New Woman All Women abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, after inspectors found 76 pages of violations following the hospitalization of three patients in one day for abortion complications.

As she was in the process of losing her dangerous Birmingham clinic, Derzis filed suit to block the new Mississippi law. She received an injunction that extended the deadline for compliance while she sought hospital privileges for her three out-of-state abortionists. That deadline passed on January 11, 2012, without JWHO’s abortionists obtaining hospital privileges.

On January 16, state inspectors visited JWCO and found them in non-compliance. The Derzis received a letter Friday, January 25, from the Health Department notifying her that the State planned to revoke its operating license.

The Jackson area has seven hospitals where JWHO’s three out-of-state abortionists could seek privileges. Those abortionists are Willie Parker of Washington, D.C., Bruce Elliot Norman of South Carolina, and Gary Burks Broadnax of Georgia. The trio did not apply at two facilities because those hospitals are operated by religious groups that were unlikely to grand privileges to abortionists. The other five hospitals rejected their applications.

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A fourth abortionist employed by the abortion clinic had hospital privileges, but those expired July 27, 2012, and have not been renewed.

A Health Department hearing is expected within a month. Meanwhile, Derzis continues to challenge the Constitutionality of the law, a desperate effort that is not expected to succeed.

“Essentially, when we boil things down beyond the rhetoric, Derzis is fighting to keep abortion dangerous. That is an appalling betrayal of women, who will be better off without this predatory clinic in their midst,” said Newman.

I believe that language plays a huge role in the abortion debate. And while the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” have been analyzed to death (no pun intended) by countless authors, there are many words and phrases, used in everyday life, that affect our cause in more subtle ways. Many are unwittingly used by pro-life advocates who don’t realize how it undermines our message. Without further ado, I present my top life-related linguistic pet peeves.

“First days/weeks/months of life” (referring to newborns)
This one is pervasive, and I’ve heard it from awesome pro-life people who should know better. If a baby boy was born three weeks ago, he is not in the “first weeks” of life; he’s in about the 43rd week of life. The life of a human individual begins at fertilization, and those months in the womb should count.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. If you catch yourself about to say this, just change “of life” to “after birth.” Speaking about the first days, weeks, or months after birth is perfectly accurate, doesn’t sound weird, and doesn’t erase the prenatal period of life.

“Rapist’s child”
This phrase bothers me in a specific context: “It’s so brave of you to raise your rapist’s child.” Really? Did the rapist help change the child’s diapers? Sing the child to sleep? Take the child to soccer practice? Yes, of course the rapist is a biological father. But the child also has a mother, who is clearly the superior influence. The phrase “rapist’s child” is degrading.

We absolutely should honor women who choose life in the difficult situation of a pregnancy caused by rape. All I’m saying is that we need to do so in a way that does not suggest that the child “belongs” only to the scumbag rapist source of sperm.

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“Expectant parent/going to be a parent”
This is a fine phrase for people who are trying to conceive or adopt. It is a very poor phrase for people who are pregnant or whose partner is pregnant. If life begins at fertilization, so does motherhood and fatherhood. This also applies to other family members; siblings are siblings at conception (no “You’re going to be a big brother,” tell him he IS a big brother); aunts and uncles are aunts and uncles at conception, and so on.

LifeNews.com Note:  Kelsey Hazzard is the president of Secular Pro-Life, an organization that uses non-religious arguments to promote the pro-life perspective.

The fifth week of Kermit Gosnell’s capital murder trial resumed Monday with graphic testimony from Dr. Sam Gulino, Chief Medical Examiner for the City of Philadelphia, who discussed his examination of the remains of 47 fetuses seized by law enforcement authorities from his “House of Horrors” abortion clinic. Dr. Gulino testified that this case was unprecedented and he could not find a colleague who had ever dealt with a case involving frozen fetal remains of this nature.

For the first time, photos of Karnamaya Mongar’s dead baby were shown to the jury. Mongar died from an overdose of Demerol during a second trimester abortion done by Gosnell.

Mongar’s baby was estimated to be 16-19 weeks gestation. The baby’s skin was bright red, (a condition later described as the early stages of decomposition), and sported a head of dark brown hair. The Medical Examiner found no fetal anomalies when he examined the baby’s body. A photo of the back of the child showed a deep gash approximately an inch long in the back of the baby’s neck. Mongar’s abortion took place in 2007, meaning that those remains had been stored in a freezer at the clinic for three years.

Jury Sees More Dead Baby Photos

The bodies of a baby boy and a baby girl with similar neck gashes were also shown in grisly color on a large screen opposite the jury box. The remains on one baby, which was not shown to the jury, was described as missing both feet severed above the ankle and a right hand severed above the wrist.

Dr. Gulino testified that he received three batches of remains from Gosnell’s clinic, the largest of which contained the remains of 42 babies. The remains were frozen and stored in a variety of containers, including milk jugs, cat food cans, and even a cherry lime-ade container. The containers were each in bags and those bags were found in three large red bio-hazard bags. Several containers contained the “fragmented” remains of several babies. Ages were estimated from 12 weeks or less up to 22 weeks. He found that two of the babies were “possibly viable.”

It took Dr. Gulino five days just to catalog the contents before examinations could even be done.

Mystery of the Fetal Feet

He also later received five jars containing fetal feet and first trimester abortion remains that had been preserved in formaldehyde. The jars were labeled with the patient’s name and date of the abortions, which ranged from December 5-9, 2009. Two of the jars were from the same patient and contained a right and left foot of the same baby. Using the measurement of the feet, Dr. Gulino estimated the fetal ages to be 14-19 weeks gestation.

Gosnell’s defense attorney implied that the extremities were preserved in the event that DNA evidence was needed and as proof of fetal age, however, the severing of both feet and a hand would be unnecessary even if this were the case, Gulino testified. The prosecution believes that the feet and hands were taken as trophies by Gosnell, just as serial killers often engage in the practice of taking mementos from victims they kill.

Frozen Remains Present Challenges

Because the aborted baby remains had been frozen and thawed for examination, a tricky process, according to the medical examiner, the tissue samples were damaged to some extent, making testing to determine whether a baby breathed air inconclusive. Because of this, there was no way he could say for sure that any of the babies were actually born alive. However, he testified that it is possible that they were alive at birth or had been birthed into water such as into a toilet. Several former employees testified that they saw babies born into toilets at Gosnell’s clinic. There would be no reason to sever the baby’s spinal cords if they were dead prior to birth, as the defense claims.

The subject of viability was a touchy one on which McMahon aggressively questioned Dr. Gulino. Shockingly, McMahon marched to the jury box and dramatically asked Dr. Gulino, “If the baby is dead, it can’t be viable, can it?”

McMahon suggested that any movements by a baby after birth were simply a condition known as cadaveric spasm, which was described as movement of muscle groups as the result of the rapid onset of rigor mortis. The medical examiner indicated that was unlikely due to the under-developed nature of muscles at the gestational ages being discussed.

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Testimony ended when a shouting match broke out between McMahon and prosecutor Edward Cameron over whether the babies were born alive. Cameron was conducting questioning on re-direct when McMahon angrily blurted out a question out of turn. The two men began shouting at each other, and both were shouted down by Judge Jeffery Minehart, who rebuked McMahon and told him to “act lake a lawyer.” The argument ended questioning for the day.

Planned Parenthood Abortionist Testifies

Earlier in the morning, testimony was heard from Charles David Benjamin, an abortionist who works for Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia. Benjamin was presented as an abortion expert over the objections of Gosnell’s attorney Jack McMahon.

Benjamin, a stocky, balding middle-aged man, stated that he is a Doctor of Osteopathy who trains residents as part of his staff duties at Albert Einstein hospital in Philadelphia. He admitted to having done 40,000 abortions over his 30 years in practice.

Benjamin testified concerning Gosnell’s grossly outdated sonogram machine, his use of drugs in abortion procedures, and the dispensing of pain and sedation drugs by Gosnell’s unqualified workers in his absence.

Benjamin Admits to Missing Drugs

Benjamin told the court that his clinic’s crash cart is inspected monthly and admitted that he has had emergency drugs tampered with or missing, which was discovered during inspections. The only crash cart Gosnell apparently owned was not stored at his clinic, but found by police under his bed at his residence.

As for Gosnell’s use of digoxin to kill the pre-born baby prior to a late-term abortion, Benjamin testified that amounts recorded on Gosnell’s charts represented more than 500 times the normal dosage. Testimony given earlier in the trial indicated that there was no physical evidence that digoxin was ever used on the babies he is charged with murdering.

The trial will resume tomorrow morning with the family of Karnamaya expected to testify. Operation Rescue will be reporting from the trial all week.

LifeNews.com Note: Cheryl Sullenger is a leader of Operation Rescue, a Kansas-based pro-life that monitors abortion practitioners and exposes their illegal and unethical practices. The group is known for serving as a watchdog of Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses.

Although President Obama had no trouble commenting on the ongoing Trayvon Martin case, White House spokesperson Jay Carney said today Obama wouldn’t be commenting on the Kermit Gosnell mass murder case because he “cannot take a position on an ongoing trial” or “comment further on an ongoing legal proceeding”…

Of course the White House wants to avoid this topic. What a disaster Gosnell is for Obama.

Gosnell first brings to Obama’s door the uncomfortable topic of infanticide. Obama is well known to have voted four times against the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act as state senator, which sought to protect abortion survivors.

But Obama also opposed two companion bills to BAIPA, one of which brings him zero degrees of separation from Gosnell. I was impressed with Fox’s Ed Henry, who went there in his questions to Carney today.

On April 4, 2002, Obama testified against Senate Bill 1663, which required abortionists to provide “reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice” to abortion survivors and to plan to have a second physician present if there was a “reasonable likelihood” that the abortion would result “in a live born child.”

You can read the entire transcript here, pages 28-35, but the gist of Obama’s opposition was that he had full faith in abortionists:

The only plausible rationale, to my mind, of this legislation would be if you had a suspicion that a doctor… (a) is going to make the wrong assessment, and (b) if the physician discovered, after the labor had been induced, that, in fact, he made an error… and… would not try to exercise the sort of medical measures and practices that would be involved in saving that child.

Now, if you think that there are possibilities that doctors would not do that, then maybe this bill make sense, but I… feel…  an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician….

[I]f these are children who are being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they’re looked after.

Obama could not fathom that an abortionist who had been paid to kill a baby wouldn’t turn around and try to save a viable baby’s life in the event of a botch.

Kermit Gosnell would have been one of the abortionists in which Obama had “confidence.” Most know by now Gosnell is on trial for murdering seven abortion survivors and one mother.

Gosnell was committing abortions in Pennsylvania at the very time this bill was being debated in Illinois. Who knows, perhaps Gosnell was “snipping” the spinal cord of an abortion survivor at the moment Obama testified to his sterling character. After all, the grand jury report stated Gosnell likely killed “hundreds” of abortion survivors during the three decades he was in business.

Barack Obama has stated on record that he stands with the Kermit Gosnells of America. He can’t walk that back without opening the door to regulations such as he rejected as state senator. So he’s stuck….

LifeNews.com Note: Jill Stanek fought to stop “live birth abortions” after witnessing one as an RN at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. That led to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act legislation, signed by President Bush, that would ensure that proper medical care be given to unborn children who survive botched abortion attempts.

By Holt International
Eugene based charity

Join Holt and Voice for Adoption in sending messages to legislators — thanking them for making the adoption tax credit permanent, and also urging them to reinstate the refundable provision of the adoption tax credit.

Here’s the message we need to communicate: Nationally, nearly half  (46%) of families adopting from foster care are at or below 200% of the poverty level, meaning many do not have a tax liability and cannot use a non-refundable tax credit.

Whether families adopt domestically or internationally, the refundable provision of the adoption tax credit is not a minor issue. It makes an enormous difference in the number of families who are able to claim it! When more families can claim this vital credit, more families can afford to adopt — enabling more children to join loving homes. It’s as simple as that! We need your help to let Congress know they can help more children join loving families of their own. We ask that you join us in urging Congress to reinstate the refundable provision — as it was in both 2010 and 2011 — so that all adoptive families can benefit from the adoption tax credit.

For legislator contact information and a sample letter template, click here.

Together, we made it permanent. Now let’s make it refundable!

Credit Joe Scarborough not just for devoting a significant Morning Joe segment to the Gosnell abortion-murder trial today–but for declaring that he will have a reporter covering the trial–Joe Slobodzian of the Philadelphia Inquirer–back again tomorrow and throughout the week.

Ed Rendell—who was governor of Pennsylvania from 2003-10 while many of the horrors unfolded and the clinic went uninspected—was on today’s Morning Joe panel.  Scarborough questioned Rendell as to how this could have happened on his watch. Rendell claimed he knew nothing of the goings-on in the abortion clinic, that it was a question of bureaucratic bungling, and that he came under no pressure from abortion advocates to look the other way.

Kudos to Scarborough for covering the trial and questioning Rendell.  As for the ex-gov: it was typical blame-shifting from a politician caught on the spot.

WILLIE GEIST: Joe, It’s Willie Geist here. The obvious question, as you read through this grand jury report, and you see how long this was allegedly going on is where was the Pennsylvania Department of Health in all this? We know they made a visit there, maybe a couple of visits. How did they not identify this? If this was as well-known and widespread and people coming in out of state to guess these abortions as was reported, where was the Department of Health?

JOE SLOBODZIAN: According to what the grand jury has said and prosecutors have said it in the trial, they were AWOL. They had not been in to inspect the clinic in more than ten years.

. . .

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Joe, I thank you for this. You’ve obviously been covering this from the beginning and would love to have you back tomorrow, if that’s OK, throughout the week if you have time just to stay up on this and see what is going on.

SLOBODZIAN: My pleasure.

SCARBOROUGH: Thank you so much. Ed, this is a coincidence, but this was happening before you were governor, during you were governor, after you were governor. I got to ask you a tough question here. The grand jury and the prosecutor has said one of the reasons why this clinic wasn’t investigated is because there is political pressures. Whenever somebody wants to go in and investigate an abortion clinic or do tough regulations on it, suddenly, people start screaming and yelling that somebody is trying to take away their constitutional rights. What happened here?

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ED RENDELL: Again, I think it was more bureaucratic incompetence than that, Joe. I never heard anything about that. When I was district attorney I actually prosecuted a doctor for doing exactly what Dr. Gosnell did.

SCARBOROUGH: What years were you governor?

RENDELL: 2003 to 2010.

SCARBOROUGH: So you never once heard anything about this?

RENDELL: Never.

LifeNews.com Note: Mark Finkelstein has a B.S. from Cornell University, an Ed.M. and a J.D. magna cum laude from SUNY Buffalo, and an LL.M. from Harvard. He lives in Ithaca, NY where he hosts “Right Angle,” a local political talk show. Finkelstein is a Contributing Editor at MRC’s NewsBusters blog, where this article originally appeared.

Lawmakers in Pennsylvania gave pro-life advocates some good news today when they voted for House Bill 818, which would ensure that Pennsylvania opts out of abortion funding under the health insurance exchange created by the federal health care law, also known as Obamacare.

From a report:

The Health Committee voted 15-9 in favor of the proposal that provides exceptions only for victims of rape and incest or when the mother’s life is in peril. One Democrat voted for it.

A Democratic sponsored amendment that would have added an exception for the mother’s health was defeated along party lines.

Committee chairman Matt Baker, R-Bradford, said the health exception would represent a substantial change from the state’s longstanding public policy that does not permit public funding of abortions under most circumstances.

He said the health exception amendment was too vague, as doctors’ “good faith clinical judgment” can be a subjective matter.

“I do not believe health care should include killing babies,” Baker said, drawing applause from some of his fellow GOP lawmakers. He argued the exchange will be supported with public money.

Last week, a similar bill got a positive vote in the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee. Legislation on the same topic passed both chambers during the last two-year legislative session but died when the House and Senate were unable to resolve differences.

Now that the bill is reported out of committee, it can now go to the full Pennsylvania House for a vote.

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The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation supports the measure.

“The Affordable Care Act, also known as the federal health care law, contains a provision which allows states to opt out of abortion funding in the new health insurance exchanges operating in their state as a result of “health care reform.”  Twenty-one states have already passed legislation to opt out of this abortion funding,” it says.

The pro-life group continued: “House Bill 818 simply continues Pennsylvania’s long-standing policy of banning public funding of abortion.  National public opinion polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.  Research has also shown that abortion rates rise dramatically when public funding of abortion occurs.”

You can’t get anything past those intrepid newshounds at CNN. CBS, MSNBC and The Washington Post, too. A month into the trial of Kermit Gosnell for the alleged murders of seven infants and one woman in his “house of horrors” abortion clinic, they’ve finally discovered the story. This Philadelphia courtroom drama, with barbarous crimes committed in conditions the sickest Hollywood horror maven couldn’t have conjured, somehow escaped the notice of a 24-hour news network, all three broadcast networks and one of the biggest American newspapers for nearly five weeks.

It isn’t that the networks are shy about reporting on abortion. Since the Gosnell trial began in mid March, ABC CBS and NBC have reported on abortion 20 times. CBS finally got around to the story this morning, April 15. CNN’s silence was particularly incriminating, since it’s not as though Gosnell’s alleged crimes weren’t unknown at the network. CNN’s website ran a 666-word (fittingly) article on March 4, and Jake Tapper gave the case 24 seconds on March 21, noting that “The evidence in the case is so gruesome some jurors have been seen covering their mouths.”

But last Friday, April 12, Tapper opened the flood gates. MRC’s public demands backed by some striking CMI research, along with a conservative Twitter initiative to shame the media into covering Gosnell, had borne fruit. CNN’s Erin Burnett (almost) admitted as much Friday night, saying The Gosnell trial “came to my attention on Twitter this week. Some of you said look at this story.”

Burnett’s colleague Anderson Cooper tweeted on Friday “Reading the grand jury report on the #Gosnellcase. Where was the state oversight of this house of horrors? Details tonight on @AC360 8p/10p” We could all relax. Cooper was finally on the case.

Since then, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” covered it, and CBS “This Morning” had a report. The Washington Post ran an article by Paul Farhi. On Monday, reporters from The Wall Street Journal and USA Today were spotted in the Gosnell courtroom’s heretofore deserted press benches.

On Friday, Tapper interviewed Joseph Slobodzian of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The host introduced the segment, calling it “Our ‘Buried Lead.’ This is a story that we think is not getting enough attention. We covered this case when it began in March [that would be the 24 seconds of coverage] and after a week of horrifying testimony we’re coming back to it.” Tapper noted without apparent irony that Slobodzian “has been sitting in the courtroom every day of this excruciating trial.”Excruciating and lonely.

Cooper and Burnett each discussed the media blackout, each professing ignorance as to why such an important story had been buried. “And frankly, it hasn’t gotten much attention in the media at all it seems. A lot of people are asking why.”

Yes, it’s a real puzzler. And one best hashed out with a panel of liberals eager to divert attention from dead babies, leavened by the non-confrontational presence of a domesticated “conservative.” CNN contributor Reihan Salam, the supposed conservative, told Burnett “a lot of folks who cover reproductive rights have actually been aware of the story for while.” But, “here is a situation which low income, poor, extremely vulnerable women were just not considered much of a story.” This would become one of the standard media excuses.

Burnett then lobbed a slow, giant softball to Salon.com writer Irin Carmon, asking how she’d respond to conservative charges that the media buried the story, Carmon hit an class- and culture-war homerun. “I would tell them, you know … We’re talking about health disparities all the time,” she said. “The reason that women went to this clinic is because they did not have – they felt they didn’t have an alternative. Even though abortion is legal, it cannot be covered by Medicaid. As a result, even though, you know, abortion is safer and cheaper when it takes place early in gestation, these women felt they had no choice but to go to an unsafe provider. Again this is a story about health care.”

Liberal Donna Brazile said she rejected it because, “The mainstream right-wing media with all of their various platforms online and other places, Breitbart was only online institution that covered it.” Not true, but its neat to be there at the birth of a liberal talking point– one that spent some formative time with CNN’s Howard Kurtz before coming of age Monday in the Washington Post’s “Style” section.

There, writer Paul Farhi denied liberal bias, said conservatives weren’t covering it either, and let his boss Martin Baron, executive editor of one of the nation’s most important newspapers, claim to have been unaware of the story until Thursday night. It’s an interesting defense, one his health reporter Sarah Kliff should have thought of on Thursday, instead of dismissing Gosnell as a “local crime” unworthy of her time as someone who writes on policy, and further outraging conservatives on Twitter.

Back at CNN Friday, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin pooh-poohed the notion of an ideological blackout. “Well, the people making those criticisms by and large are conservatives, who are saying the liberal media is trying to protect abortion rights by not showing this horror show. I don’t buy that at all,” Toobin sniffed.

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CBS “This Morning” had reporter Jan Crawford warning that “some of the details you are about to hear are very disturbing” and “there are almost no words” to describe what witnesses said happened in the clinic. One quote in the story had a man saying “the grand jury went to the scene wearing Hazmat suits.”

That’s pretty sensational. You might get ratings from stories like that.

While CBS acknowledged there was a debate over the media coverage, it leaned on the fact that it had covered Gosnell’s initial arrest in 2011, and leaving out how CBS had ignored the story ever since, admitting “his trial has received little national news coverage.”

Yes, better late than never. But the sight of so many elite media types scratching their heads over how Gosnell eluded their attention is laughably dishonest and insulting to their audience.

LifeNews.com Note: Matthew Philbin writes for the Media Research Center and this originally appeared at its Newsbusters web site. It is reprinted with permission.

A military policeman on a two week leave from Afghanistan has pleaded guilty in the murders of a twenty year old woman and her unborn child.

Phillip C. Parish, from Missouri, shot Tabitha Buckingham in May 2011 because he thought she was pregnant with his baby, which would have damaged his standing in the armed forces. Both Buckingham and her four month old baby died. The body was not found for three days, and her two year old daughter was found dehydrated and hungry but otherwise unharmed beside her.

In a sad detail, the unborn baby turned out not to have been fathered by Parish.

Parish had gone to the murder scene with a friend, who allegedly stayed outside while he committed the murders. He has not been implicated in the crimes. Later, however, he told the friend what he had done. This confession, as well as the Parrish’s other suspicious activities, led the police to arrest him. Parrish had attempted to get rid of his cell phone, possibly to hide his connection to Buckingham. He had also thrown out the shirt he was wearing that day, which may have had forensic evidence.

Parish agreed to a plea bargain which lessoned the charges he is facing. The charges of first degree murder were downgraded to two counts of second degree murder, which would bring a 30 year sentence for each count.

According to an interview with the Assistant Prosecuting Attorney John Quarenghi, more than 40 friends and family members of Buckingham attended the court hearing. He said, “They were just very saddened by her loss, very upset. They all realized, as we did, that it was pointless killing.”

The death of the four month old unborn child earned Parish a separate murder charge, but roughly  420 abortions between four and five months happen every week, with  almost 15,000 a year.

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Sources:

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/military-police-officer-admits-to-killing-st-louis-county-woman/article_71d8a046-1d45-5cb0-981f-b6ec7fb7dfb1.html

http://www.stjosephpost.com/2013/04/12/soldier-on-leave-pleads-guilty-to-murder-of-woman-unborn-child/

http://clinicquotes.com/when-in-pregnancy-abortions-are-performed/

LifeNews.com Note: Sarah Terzo is a pro-life liberal who runs ClinicQuotes.com, a web site devoted to exposing the abortion industry. She is a member of the pro-life groups PLAGAL and Secular Pro-Life.

Montana has defeated a bill, House Bill 505, to protect Montana citizens from assisted suicide. The measure was defeated today in the Montana Senate on a 27-23 vote.

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, who was monitoring the vote, told LifeNews that euthanasia activists spent heavily to influence legislators.

“The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition thanks the Montanans Against Assisted Suicide, Bradley Williams and Margaret Dore for organizing an amazing campaign,” he said. “In the end, we lost because of the last minute money spent by Compassion & Choices on misleading advertising.”

Schadenberg talked more about the legislation and the assisted suicide situation in Montana:

For the past several years Montana has faced a confusing legal situation with respect to assisted suicide.

In 2009, the Baxter court decision declared that Montana citizens had a right to assisted suicide. This decision was appealed to the Supreme Court in Montana that decided that Montana citizens do not have a right to assisted suicide, they did not overturn statute that protected Montana citizens from assisted suicide, but they did grant a tightly worded defense of consent, if a physician was prosecuted for assisted suicide.

This mean’t that assisted suicide remained illegal in Montana, but if prosecuted, a physician could use the defense of consent. Link: Assisted Suicide is not legal in Montana.

During the 2013 Montana legislative session, Compassion & Choices, a lobby group that promotes assisted suicide, supported Bill SB 220, that would have legalized assisted suicide in Montana. Bill SB 220 was defeated in the Senate Judiciary committee in mid-February. Link: Assisted Suicide bill SB 220 defeated in Montana Judiciary Committee.

At the same time, the Montanans Against Assisted Suicide were promoting Bill HB 505, a bill that clarified the law and protected Montana citizens from assisted suicide. HB 505 was sponsored by Rep. Krayton Kerns. Link: House Bill 505.

In late February HB 505 passed in the Montana House by a vote of 51 to 46 and was sent to the Montana Senate for approval. Link: HB 505 passes.

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Since that time, a group of 112 physicians has organized to support HB 505 and oppose assisted suicide in Montana. Link: 112 Physicians support HB 505.
Diane Coleman, the leader of the disability rights group, Not Dead Yet supports HB 505.

On March 26, the Senate Judiciary committee held public hearings on Bill HB 505, listening to interventions from people supporting both sides of the debate.

Dr. Eric Kress, a doctor in Missoula Montana, admitted to intentionally prescribing three people a lethal dose, to assist their suicide.

Today Students for Life of America begins a 2 week bus tour exposing Planned Parenthood on college campuses. “The Planned Parenthood Project” (studentsforlife.org/plannedparenthood) will educate students on Planned Parenthood’s real agenda and plans for them.

The tour will begin at the University of Cincinnati where 915 “Planned Parenthood pink” crosses will be lined up to represent the 915 innocent, pre-born lives lost at the hands of Planned Parenthood every day. Pro-life students will be on hand at each campus to discuss the display and hand out information on Planned Parenthood’s plans for students. The tour schedule is as follows, with each display up between 8am-2pm:

April
15 University of Cincinnati
16 Franciscan University of Steubenville
17 Seton Hall University
18 American University
22 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
24 University of Alabama-Birmingham
25 Tulane University

According to our research, 59 percent of 18-24 year olds do not know that Planned Parenthood commits abortions, but that their negativity towards the abortion Goliath increases when they find out the truth. We need to expose the fact that Planned Parenthood is the number one abortion business in the United States, performing almost 335,000 abortions annually.

While receiving $542 million in taxpayer funding, Planned Parenthood made over $150 million in revenue from the 333,965 abortions they performed in just the 2011-2012 fiscal year alone. They are an abortion business, plain and simple. The sad truth is that 44 percent of abortions are performed on women 18-24 years old, so Planned Parenthood has a financial interest in marketing to their best customers. Planned Parenthood targets students with almost 80 percent of their facilities located within 5 miles of a college or university campus. We need to reach these students and inform them of Planned Parenthood’s dirty practices before Planned Parenthood can lure them in.

With the late-term abortionist/infant serial killer Kermit Gosnell trial happening right now in Philadelphia, ‘The Planned Parenthood Project’ is especially relevant. The gruesome crimes of Gosnell are not an isolated incident, Planned Parenthood, which holds itself up as a clean, safe, women-friendly environment, engages in the same disgusting practices.

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Last week a Planned Parenthood in Delaware that has sent 5 women to the emergency room since January had to stop doing abortions because of unsafe and unsanitary conditions similar to the ones found at Gosnell’s abortion mill. One nurse said of the operating room, “It’s not washed down, it’s not even cleaned off. It has bloody drainage on it.” She also said patients “could be at risk of getting hepatitis, even AIDS.”

Two weeks ago, a Planned Parenthood official from Florida testified that a baby born alive during an abortion should be allowed to be killed, saying, “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.” Gosnell routinely killed babies born alive after an abortion — often by cutting their spinal cords. Apparently that’s a decision Planned Parenthood supports a physician like Gosnell making.

In 2008, a New Jersey Planned Parenthood nurse told me to my face that with an abortion after 22 weeks, the baby is delivered and can survive an abortion: “It does happen, where it’s still alive…but it wouldn’t be able to survive on its own, so eventually the baby does die.” Again, Planned Parenthood knows and supports abortions that result in babies born alive but left to die, as happened in Gosnell’s facility.

‘The Planned Parenthood Project’ will expose Planned Parenthood and change the tide on American campuses.

The jury in the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell was told this morning that the embattled abortion practitioner kept at least 47 babies in odd places at his clinic such as cat food jars and other containers.

Charles Benjamin testified during this morning’s hearing and said he is one of a handful of abortion practitioners left in the Philadelphia area now that Gosnell’s “house of horrors” has been closed down.

Jurors heard from him and about how he did illegal late-term abortions and ran a dangerously outdated clinic staffed by untrained workers. He did testify under cross-examintion that he did have a patient die from a botched abortion, who contracted sepsis as a result of the abortin procedure.

Benjamin said he would never sedate or give cytotec without being present while Gosnell allows others to give meds outside his presence. Benjamin said Gosnell gave 500 times more digoxin than recommended for ‘fetal demise.’

But the most shocking portion of today’s hearing revolved around Gosnell’s habit of storing the bodies of babies he butchered in abortions.

“This morning’s testimony from the medical examiner discussed remains of 47 babies found in cat food and cherry lime ade containers,” says Cheryl Sullenger of Operation Rescue, who is in the courtroom listening to the trial. “All containers contained bloody fluid and human remains.”

She said it took the medical examiner, Dr. Gulino, five days just to catalog the containers of fetal parts and the examiner also examined feet and lower extremity found in jars of formaldehyde belonging to five babies Gosnell killed. The ages of the unborn children ranged from first trimester to 22 weeks and the latter baby was possibly viable.

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“Most fetuses he examined were found in cat food, other containers. Frozen in red plastic bags,” Sullenger said. “He never encountered situation before and attempted to get guidance. This case was “unprecedented” he said.”

Baldwin testified Thursday that even his horrific “snipping” procedure for killing babies in abortions/infanticides didn’t necessarily end their lives.

Gosnell’s defense lawyer, Jack McMahon, claims none of the babies were born alive but were dead before birth due to a lethal drug injection and that Gosnell and his staff “snipped” their necks after “birth.” McMahon claims no babies were ever killed in the gruesome abortion process, which involved “snipping” the spinal cords of the children by jabbing medical scissors into the backs of their necks, because the babies were supposedly already dead.

That’s not what two staffers for Gosnell admitted in court — with one saying she heard a baby scream and another saying the baby “jumped” when the newborn was stabbed in the neck with the scissors.

McMahon is attempting to get the jury to buy a story that Gosnell used a drug called Digoxin to kill the baby in utero and then to deliver a dead child. He claims Gosnell just wanted to “snip” the spinal cords to ensure the baby was dead already. The Gosnell staffer admitted that’s what the abortion practitioner told her he was doing.

Although the defense attorney claimed the babies were dead and that jabbing them in the neck with scissors was needed to make sure that was the case, Gosnell staffers also told the court one at least two occasions that the babies were not dead when their necks were stabbed.

However expert witnesses testified there was no medical reason for Gosnell to cut the spines of aborted fetuses.

Determining if the children were alive or dead at the time their spinal cords were “snipped” is crucial to prosecuting Gosnell and his staff.

Gosnell faces 43 criminal counts, including eight counts of murder in the death of one patient, Karnamaya Monger, and seven newborn infants. Additional charges include conspiracy, drug delivery resulting in death, infanticide, corruption of minors, evidence tampering, theft by deception, abuse of corpse, and corruption. Gosnell could face the death penalty if convicted and he faces a mandatory minimum 20 years.

The trial of the abortion practitioner has been so gruesome and vivid in its accounts of the late-term and live-birth abortions that it has shocked the conscience of the nation, despite a relative lack of media coverage outside of local media and conservative and pro-life news outlets.

Gosnell, whose squalid “house of horrors” abortion clinic has surprised even investigative officials, has had almost flippant attitude toward his macabre abortion practices shocked the nation.

“The Gosnell case is a watershed moment for the issue of abortion,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Nation. “The discovery of his horrific practices helped shed light on an abortion industry that has run amok without oversight or accountability for decades, and has prompted significant changes in abortion laws and attitudes toward enforcement in several states.”

Previously, Gosnell’s wife Pearl pleaded guilty to assisting her husband at his Philadelphia abortion center where he killed a woman in a botched abortion and has killed hundreds of babies in abortion-infanticides.

Pearl Gosnell was considering a plea deal similar to the one several of Gosnell’s former abortion center employees have made where they have pleaded guilty to receive a lesser sentence in exchange for testifying against Gosnell. Pearl also worked at the abortion center Gosnell ran that had him kill and injure women in failed abortions and kill perhaps hundreds of babies in grisly infanticides by birthing them and “snipping” their spinal cords.

She worked at the Women’s Medical Society abortion business her husband ran as a full-time medical assistant from 1982 until she married Kermit Gosnell in 1990, when she switched to only working on Sundays. At that time, the abortion business was officially closed but would do its latest-term abortions possible.

The grand jury report indicates Pearl Gosnell testified that she alone helped Kermit do abortions on Sundays when she would “help do the instruments” in the operating room despite no medical training.

Previously, Judge Lerner ruled two other former employees, Eileen O’Neill and Madeline Joe, are not allowed to have their cases separated from that of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Neither O’Neill nor Joe are charged with killing babies in infanticides and, although their attorneys argued the horrifying allegations against Gosnell could unfairly taint their cases, they were not allowed to plead guilty in deals as was the case with six other former employees.

The murder charges also came in connection with the botched abortion death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, who died at Gosnell’s abortion clinic after a failed abortion. Mongar died November 20, 2009, after overdosing on anesthetics prescribed by the doctor. Mongar’s family filed a lawsuit against Gosnell’s abortion business seeking damages.

Gosnell and several staffers at his abortion center, including Pearl, were arrested in January after a grand jury indicted them on multiple charges after officials raided his abortion business following a woman’s death and discovered a “shop of horrors” filled with bags of bodies and body parts of deceased unborn children and babies killed in infanticides. Pearl Gosnell, Kermit’s 49-year-old wife who has no medical license, faces a charge of providing an abortion at 24 or more weeks and conspiracy and other charges.

Gosnell has been denied bail while the case against him moves forward. Women have spoken out about their treatment and one woman says she was drugged and tied up and forced to have an abortion.

Authorities searching the facility last year found bags and bottles holding aborted babies scattered around the building, jars containing babies’ severed feet lining a shelf, as well as filthy, unsanitary furniture and equipment.

The grand jury investigation also shows state officials did nothing when reports came in about problems at Gosnell’s abortion center, which has upset incoming pro-life Governor Tom Corbett.

Gosnell’s abortion center was inspected only after a federal drug raid in 2010.  It was the first time the facility had been inspected in 17 years because state officials ignored complaints and failed to visit Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society for years.

The abortion industry has been forced to suspend two abortion businesses that employed embattled abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell, who has been the subject of national controversy over his abortion business in Philadelphia.

Following revelations that Gosnell is associated with two other abortion centers in Louisiana and Delaware, the National Abortion Federation made the decision to suspend the memberships of both. Atlantic Women’s Medical Services, the Delaware abortion business that employed Gosnell one day a week to do abortions, and the Delta Clinic abortion center of Baton Rouge, have both had their memberships suspended. Leroy Brinkley owns both abortion businesses. Atlantic operates abortion centers in Wilmington and Dover.

On March 26, Live Action published an article on how women who are told that their children will be disabled are often pressured to abort.

Marie Ideson found out firsthand how great this pressure can be when she found herself 16 weeks pregnant with a baby who had Down syndrome. Ideson, who was 46, had been told that amniocentesis was a routine part of prenatal care. Although she had not expressed the desire to abort a handicapped baby, she underwent the procedure, and doctors told her that the baby would have Down syndrome.

According to Ideson, she originally wanted to keep her baby. She recounts hearing the news that her baby would be handicapped:

A woman said, “I’m sorry to say your baby has Down.” It was devastating. My first thought was, how will we cope?

I told Allan [her husband] I wanted to keep the baby and he agreed.

But Ideson was about to experience intense pressure to abort. She had hoped that the doctor she was seeing would support the decision to keep the baby. Instead:

… doctors said she could be born needing emergency heart surgery and have bowel and muscle tone problems – and that was if she survived. At no time did anyone suggest we might keep our baby. A termination was presented as the only way forward.

A nurse said not aborting my baby would cause it to suffer, and she’d only become a burden on society if I went ahead. She even said, “99 per cent of women in your situation wouldn’t want the baby.” Having it would be a burden on our other children, too, she said, especially if it was likely to need many operations throughout its life.

Our children were at the hospital with us. I looked at them and thought the medical staff must be right.

Ideson was not told that 99% of adults with Down syndrome report being happy with their lives. Seventy-nine percent of parents who have their babies with Down syndrome consider “their outlook in life to be more positive” because of their children, and 97% of siblings of children with Down syndrome who are 12 and older express feelings of pride for their brother or sister, while 88% of these siblings believe that they are better people because of their relationship with their brothers or sisters.

Instead, Ideson was faced with negativity. She gave in to pressure to abort. She swallowed the tablet that would kill her child:

I felt numb as I swallowed the tablet. I remember saying to Allan, “I just want to keep my baby.” But he just kept saying, “But they must think the baby’s really bad, Marie – it’s for the best.”

It wasn’t until Ideson delivered her stillborn baby girl that she was faced with the horror of what she had done:

She was so small, but otherwise perfect. I started sobbing uncontrollably. What had I done? I realized I’d been bullied into taking that first pill. I felt overwhelmed by anger. I should’ve been sent home to think about all the options. It should’ve been pointed out that having my baby was an option and that, with medical advances, most Down babies go on to live happy lives.

Ideson named her child Lillie and mourned deeply for her. She said:

I was bullied into going ahead with an abortion…I only wish I could turn back the clock. I think of the daughter I never had every day. I’ll always regret it.

Ideson came to resent her husband for encouraging her to abort, and the abortion eventually tore apart their marriage.

I knew he was devastated, too, but I was angry he’d allowed staff to rush me into getting rid of her. The feeling he didn’t support me when I needed him most festered between us.

The final straw came when I was in labor with Reuben [her next baby]. We were at home and the midwives wanted me to go to the hospital, but I told them I couldn’t go back to where I’d terminated Lillie. Allan tried to persuade me to go and, in the end, I had no choice. I felt, again, Allan hadn’t spoken up for me when I was at my most vulnerable. I couldn’t find it in my heart to forgive him.

The marriage did not survive. Ideson went on to say:

My eldest sons are 25 now. When I was pregnant with them, I knew of women who had babies with Down syndrome. Today, I never see mums with Down babies. I can’t believe that everyone who finds out their baby has Down syndrome willingly chooses to abort it. I can’t help feeling that other women must be having abortions they don’t want.

When radio show host Dr. Laura took a call from a woman who had aborted her child after finding out that the child would be handicapped, a number of parents of disabled children wrote letters in protest. One letter that was read on the air said the following:

Dear Dr. Laura,

… I had to respond to a call I heard today that was from a woman who justified killing her 20 week old fetus because they found out that the baby had down syndrome. She felt it was more humane to kill her child than to allow the child to experience life with Down Syndrome.

I am sad she feels that way. I have a 10 year old daughter who has a severe seizure disorder that causes her to have between 8-10 terrible seizures every month. She also has gross and fine motor delays, mild mental retardation, speech delays and low muscle tone throughout her body.

I admit it is a lot of work to take care of and raise my daughter, but when I look at her do I see a sad, depressed child who wished she were never born? No way! I see a beautiful, brave, happy, strong, wonderful child who brings happiness to every life she touches. I see a courageous child who wants to learn as much as she can and sees the world in such a wonderful and peaceful light. She is not concerned with the problems of the world, the worries of the day, the way her hair looks or the way she’s dressed. She isn’t counting her friends or what she has or doesn’t have. She is busy making the people around her laugh. Looking forward to seeing her grandpa and spending their special time together on Friday. Feeling proud that she is learning to stand on 1 foot and the progress she is making! So much innocence in the way she sees the world. I wish I could be more like her.

CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!

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I gave her the right to life, but she has given so much more to me! She has taught me how to be strong, how to laugh, how to stand up for her rights! How to teach other children acceptance! How to celebrate the smallest of successes! How to reach out to others who learn and grow differently than myself. She has given me more than I can write in just one letter.

How sad for that lady that she will never have what I have. The chance to hug and love one of God’s most precious children! The chance to mold and guide one of God’s special angels. I am fortunate to have ALL my children in my life. But I feel especially blessed and honored that God entrusted ME with one of his most delicate and precious creations! In return, I promise to do my best to give her the best and happiest life that I possibly can, as long as I am lucky to have her in my life! Keep up the great work!

Susan C.
California

Every life has value. Every child can be a blessing despite his or her handicap. Parents who have handicapped children seldom wish that they aborted. The late C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General, was a leading pediatric surgeon specializing in correcting birth defects. He opposed abortion for handicapped children and was quoted saying:

Yet, I have a sense of satisfaction in my career, best indicated perhaps by the fact that no family has ever come to me and said: “Why did you work so hard to save the life of my child?” And no grown child has ever come back ask me why, either. (1)

According to pro-life activist John Wilke, there has never been an organization for the parents of handicapped children that endorsed abortion. (2)

No one will ever argue that life with a handicapped child is easy. But parents who give in to the pressure to abort miss out on the joy of seeing their children live and grow. The baby is robbed of her chance at life, and the parents are robbed of the gift of knowing and loving their child.

1. Ronald Reagan “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation” (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1984) P. 55 Quoted in John Ankerberg and John Weldon “When Does Life Begin? And 39 Other Tough Questions About Abortion” (Brentwood TN: Wolgemuth and Hyatt Publishers, 1989)
2. John Wilke, Abortion Questions and Answers (Cincinnati, Ohio: Hayes publishing Company, 1988) 211

LifeNews.com Note: Sarah Terzo is a pro-life liberal who runs ClinicQuotes.com, a web site devoted to exposing the abortion industry. She is a member of the pro-life groups PLAGAL and Secular Pro-Life. This originally appeared at Live Action News.

In recent weeks, Senator Ted Cruz has been under attack for comments that he made at the Conservative Political Action Conference in support of religious liberty.

Senator Cruz explained how powerful elements within the Democratic Party, including the Obama Administration, are “fighting a war on religious liberty.”[i] He highlighted some of the hardships that Catholic and other religious charities and business owners may face in light of the Obama Administration’s “HHS mandate.”

Though some dismiss Cruz’s concerns as alarmist or extreme, they entirely miss the point. While it is true that no one is talking of repealing the First Amendment, the deeper truth is that a hollowed-out First Amendment will eventually collapse, no longer an effective shield against state power. The HHS mandate is part of that hollowing-out.

Earlier this year, on Religious Freedom Day, President Obama said, “Americans hold sacred…the freedom to worship as we choose.”[ii] Likewise, the former Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, emphasized “freedom of worship.”[iii]

While that way of putting it may, at first glance, seem unexceptional, a closer look reveals that it actually points to the very problem Senator Cruz was addressing. Is “the freedom to worship” the same as “freedom of religion”? No it isn’t. The freedom of religion entails much more than being able to “worship;” it includes being able to live out your faith. And that means to conduct your affairs – for-profit or nonprofit –so as to honor your deepest beliefs. If freedom of religion is reduced to “freedom of worship,” does your right to religion stop when you walk out the front door of your church, temple, or mosque?

That is what some judges in HHS mandate cases apparently believe. For example in Frank R. O’Brien v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Judge Jackson opined, “Frank O’Brien [the owner of the business] is not prevented from keeping the Sabbath, from providing a religious upbringing for his children, or from participating in a religious ritual such as communion.” Apparently, the judge believes that it is irrelevant if Mr. O’Brien is coerced into violating his conscience every day of the week so long as he is able to worship on Sunday morning.

The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Until recently – until the Obama administration began asserting to the contrary- it was clear that the Constitution protects the freedom to live one’s faith, not just the right to show up at a church, temple, or mosque.

The critics of Senator Cruz are buying into a quite truncated notion of what religious freedom is. Americans need to support brave souls like Senator Cruz who insist on a more robust understanding of our “first freedom.”

CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!

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[i] CSPAN, “Senator Ted Cruz Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference,” March 16, 2013, available at, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/311531-20 (starting at minute 17:30).

[ii] The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Presidential Proclamation — Religious Freedom Day,” January 16, 2013, available at, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/16/presidential-proclamation-religious-freedom-day

[iii] Hillary Rodham Clinton, U.S. Department of State, “Remarks on the Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century,” December 14, 2009, available at, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/12/133544.htm.