abortion

New at Live Action: Guttmacher’s Defense of Deleted Pregnancy Data Falls Short

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

Last week, we highlighted Willis Krumholz’s Federalist article detailing how the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute appears to have dropped a 1994 data point from its materials on unintended pregnancy rates to obscure Planned Parenthood’s role in driving them up in the mid-1990s and falsely suggest its promotion of intrauterine devices was key to driving them back down.

Guttmacher spokesman Joerg Dreweke replied, claiming the data point was flawed, and removed to more accurately reflect the true rates. Now, Krumholz has answered the charge, defending his work and maintaining that Guttmacher still has some explaining to do.

While conceding the explanation deserved a mention in his original piece, Krumholz first notes an obvious reason why Dreweke’s cries of victimization are overblown…

Read the rest at Live Action News.

Gee, Why Would Anyone Think John McCain Didn’t Support Reagan?

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John McCain is throwing a hissy fit because Ted Cruz had the temerity to suggest that McCain didn’t support Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign. “It’s an outright lie,” McCain fumed to CNN.

Cruz’s actual comments weren’t as inflammatory as —he simply said in a speech, “Do you know if you define as a Reaganite anyone who supported Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primary, do you know that the Republican Party has never once nominated a Reaganite to be president since 1984?”—but okay, McCain was (tragically) among those nominees. McCain says he “worshipped” the Gipper at the time, but was prohibited from public endorsements prior to his 1981 retirement from the Navy.

I’ll take the Arizona senator at his word, but to hyperventilate that this was an “outright lie” or willful dishonesty on Cruz’s part requires one to ignore, well, everything else about McCain’s political career. Continue reading →

New at Live Action: TX Abortion CEO Fear-Mongers at TIME

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

As pro-lifers mark the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade with mourning for its victims and resolve to set things right, abortion advocates are commemorating it with a mix of ghoulish celebration and fear-mongering over the possibility of Roe falling. In Time Magazine, Whole Women’s Health CEO Amy Hagstrom Miller and reproductive historian Rickie Solinger write a commemoration that leans heavily toward the latter, inadvertently demonstrating why overturning this monstrous ruling is so vital.

Today, where a woman lives determines her access to abortion services, and states mandate whether she is required to have (and look at) an ultrasound beforehand, whether she must obtain parental consent, whether has the right to have a medical abortion, among other conditions. Wherever she lives, she has to assess the political and economic environment into which her child would be born, as she decides whether to continue her pregnancy.

If the Roe court had addressed all the additional factors Miller and Solinger wish they had, their ruling would have even less to do with the Constitution’s actual meaning than the already-bankrupt decision they gave us.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Jezebel’s Self-Defeating Attack on Abortion-Slavery Comparison

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It’s been a while since we’ve given Jezebel, home of some of the internet’s most unhinged pro-abortion partisans, more than passing references, which is a shame considering that the site was once a near-constant font of unintentional humor and accidental self-discrediting.

But fear not, readers, for Jezebel’s Joanna Rothkopf brings us an attack on pro-life Virginia Delegate Rick Morris for making an impassioned case that abortion is today’s slavery, in which the only wounds that connect are self-inflicted.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Why Aren’t WI GOP Leaders Fighting for Fetal Tissue Bill?

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Disturbing news is coming out of Wisconsin, where Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is trying to lower pro-lifers’ expectations for a vote on AB 305, which would ban medical research from using fetal organs obtained from abortions:

Every time people say ‘I think that I have the votes,’ they don’t,” Vos said. “My job is to count votes for a living […] My job is to talk to lawmakers and to try to craft a compromise that can work in the long run that we can also make sure we explain to the public and do the right thing […]

There were many who said, look, let’s try to craft a bill that can address the issue but not go so much further. And some of those on the pro-life side have said they don’t want to compromise at all; they’d rather ban the research. I just fundamentally have an issue with that, which is why we’ve had that discussion in caucus and we haven’t found a consensus.

Vos has been dragging his feet on the legislation for months (GOP Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald says he has reservations, too, while Governor Scott Walker is largely keeping quiet on the issue). In September, Wisconsin Family Action President Julaine Appling said it was “very disturbing that the Speaker can’t find 50 votes out of 63 fellow Assembly Republicans all almost all of whom at least claim to be pro-life,” and the Milwaukee pro-life ads we reported on earlier this month were meant in part to pressure him to change his tune.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

Republicans Can’t Do Anything Right: Sean Duffy Edition

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Donald Trump’s authenticity on issues such as ending abortion may be highly questionable, but there’s still a stylistic lesson more conventional Republicans desperately need to learn from him: people are sick of timidity in response to outrageous policies and malicious smears.

Case in point: on Friday, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) said the following:

I hear a lot in this institution from minority leaders about how their communities are targeted, but what I don’t hear them talk about is how their communities are targeted in abortion […] My liberal friends, Congressional Black Caucus members, talk about fighting for the defenseless, the hopeless, and the downtrodden […] There is no one more hopeless and voiceless than an unborn baby, but their silence is deafening. I can’t hear them. Where are they standing up for their communities, advocating and fighting for their right to life?

So far, so good. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) reacted with the usual hysteria:

After nearly 30 years in public office, not much surprises me anymore. So you can imagine my lack of astonishment when my dear friend and colleague from Wisconsin, Sean Duffy, rolled out abortion statistics among African-American women to lecture black legislators like me about defending the welfare of our constituents […] I don’t expect Rep. Duffy to understand why his comments are offensive […] What he and so many of his Republican colleagues fail to acknowledge is the underlying context behind high abortion rates in African-American communities. High rates of abortion are related to poverty and lack of access to quality care […] Rep. Duffy’s hypocrisy on this issue is as predictable as it is offensive. If he truly, truly wants to fight for the hopeless and voiceless, he should join us.

At which point Duffy falls apart. Moore’s attack is equal parts dishonest and malicious, purely an attempt to distract from his critique by changing the subject. This should have been met with doubling down on the original charge against her and her colleagues, with a healthy dose of shame added in.

Instead, he felt the need to appease his attacker. Continue reading →

New at Live Action: Christie Lied About Backing Sotomayor at GOP Debate

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

There was no significant discussion of abortion at Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, except for a brief mention by Ted Cruz of New York being a relatively pro-abortion place (a crazy idea he must have gotten from Americans United for Life’s ranking of New York among the ten most pro-abortion states, or NY Governor Andrew Cuomo outright saying pro-lifers “have no place in the state of New York”), and Marco Rubio criticizing funding of Planned Parenthood.

In a brief segment, Rubio criticized Obama for making Planned Parenthood funding a priority instead of the military. In another, he accusing Chris Christie of having donated to Planned Parenthood and of having supported pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The ensuing argument between Cruz and Donald Trump on New York didn’t touch on abortion again, but sparks flew on the latter incident…

RUBIO: Unfortunately, Governor Christie has endorsed many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports, whether it is Common Core or gun control or the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor or the donation he made to Planned Parenthood. Our next president, and our Republican nominee can not be someone who supports those positions.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: The Petty Ridiculousness of NARAL’s Spat with Pelosi

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is the second major Democrat to upset her pro-abortion constituents with unexpected comments lately. In a new interview with Roll Call, she said this (emphasis added):

I don’t believe in abortion on demand, I don’t believe in abortion on demand. I’m talking about the health of the mother and the child and this is not a decision that a politician should be making. This is about a woman’s judgment. This is about respect — respect — for women. I sometimes wonder if the Republican men who are here even know what’s going on in their own families, because the fact is that contraception and birth control is something that is used — I don’t believe that abortion is a form of birth control or contraception — and if you want to diminish the number of abortions in our country, you should love contraception, but they don’t.

This from Nancy Pelosi, who has dutifully voted for everything the abortion lobby wants, who called late-term abortion “sacred ground,” who gladly accepts awards named after the founder of the abortion-as-birth-control industry, who bitterly snaps at anyone who tries getting her to discuss the science behind what she claims not to believe in?

This isn’t the first time the former Speaker’s tried this whopper—last fall, she claimed to “abhor” abortion. However, Pelosi’s actual record being everything the abortion lobby could want didn’t stop NARAL from criticizing her remarks.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Planned Parenthood Loses It, Calls SOTU Nun Invite “Disrespect”

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , ,

Pro-lifers should celebrate one of the latest public statements from Planned Parenthood. Not because it’s any good, mind you; it’s completely horrid. No, this is a positive development because it shows they have lost all semblance of self-restraint or awareness of how they sound to anyone not on their mailing list, which can only help quicken their descent to the fringes.

In response to House Speaker Paul Ryan inviting two of the Little Sisters of the Poor to attend the State of the Union Address, Planned Parenthood tweeted the following:

Folks, we are officially so far through the looking glass that it’s not in the rearview mirror anymore.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Media Matters’ Sham Briefs Don’t Disprove Abortion Regret

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“Never let facts get in the way of a good narrative” is the opposite of how things should work at a real media watchdog organization, but that’s exactly how they see it at Media Matters, where Sharon Kann declares the specter of abortion regret “debunked” by amicus briefs filed in the Supreme Court’s consideration of Texas’s abortion regulations:

In a January 5 article, MSNBC noted that the personal stories in many of the amicus briefs were meant to combat the generalization that women systemically regret their choice of abortion and suffer “severe depression.” Beyond influencing Kennedy, the article also said that the briefs challenged the stigma and backlash surrounding abortion that “persist in society and in state legislatures.

She goes on to quote MSNBC as reporting that “a task force by the American Psychological Association reviewing the actual research found that adult women who have abortions are at no greater risk of mental health problems than if they chose to give birth,” and argues that the “sheer volume of women” relaying positive abortion stories in the briefs proves that “post-abortion syndrome” is a sham.

Read the rest at Live Action News.