As a 30-year veteran fighting in the trenches of the abortion war, I found Abby Johnson’s book unPlanned — a story published only 18 months after she quit her job as head of a Bryan, Texas, Planned Parenthood abortion clinic — remarkable. The book is commendable on a number of levels. First, Johnson’s conversion from … Read more
Over the past week, there has been a lot of disagreement in the Catholic blogosphere about the tactics pro-life group Live Action used to obtain sting videos of Planned Parenthood. The organization, run by student activist Lila Rose, released its first video showing a Planned Parenthood staffer who appears to give aide and advice to a sex … Read more
From the Boston Globe: A Massachusetts antiabortion group has unveiled a bill that would let individual taxpayers opt out of paying for publicly funded abortions. Under the measure, a taxpayer could choose to have whatever portion of their state taxes pays for abortion coverage directed instead to the Baby Safe Haven Law. That law allows … Read more
A reader recently sent me the following: Somebody I know wrote: This following is about abortion, but not “is it right or wrong” or “what does the Church teach,” but “How on earth would you deal with this pastorally?” A friend of mine has a married cousin. She and her husband had a healthy child … Read more
Great news for the city of Baltimore: A federal judge has struck down a law that would require crisis pregnancy centers to post signs saying that they don’t provide abortions, or pay a fine. Steven Ertelt reports: Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the former city council president who is now the mayor, sponsored the measure that the city council … Read more
Last week Creative Minority published a story about Ralph McCloud, the director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, revealing that he served as the treasurer of a political campaign during his first year on the job at the USCCB. The candidate, as it turns out, was an abortion supporter. McCloud has responded, and Creative … Read more
The story about President Obama’s support for infanticide as an Illinois state senator came immediately to mind last week when a Philadelphia abortionist was arrested on eight counts of murder. One of the counts faced by Dr. Kermit Gosnell includes the death of a woman following an abortion at his office. The other seven were … Read more
A new story from the Creative Minority Report says that CCHD director Ralph McCloud worked as treasurer for a pro-abortion politician during his first year at the USCCB. Ralph McCloud was named head of the CCHD in November 2007. In his first year as head of the CCHD, according to public records, McCloud also worked as … Read more
With the March for Life just around the corner, it’s hard not to be aware of the cultural contradictions inherent in our attitudes toward life, specifically unborn life. Ross Douthat calls it the Unborn Paradox, pointing to the high rate of abortion on one hand and the unprecedented number of couples coping with infertility on … Read more
Some discouraging news: After more than 20 years of a slow but steady decline in both the rate and number of abortions performed in the U.S., the Guttmacher Institute is reporting a slight increase in its latest survey. The increase was just 1%, to 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age in 2008, from … Read more
CBS reports that almost 40 percent of pregnancies in New York City ended in abortion in 2009, according to the city’s health department. Out of 225,667 recorded pregnancies there were 126,774 live births and 87,273 abortions. Archbishop Timothy Dolan joined with other religious leaders yesterday calling for efforts to make abortions “rare:” “I re-affirm Cardinal … Read more
I’m a lifelong Democrat who is now badly disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Why? Because the party has become America’s anti-Christian party, a party that is dominated not just by atheists and agnostics (the agnostics being of that species whose skepticism is the virtual equivalent of atheism), but by atheists and agnostics having an anti-religion … Read more
2010 was a horrible year for health care — that is, if you believe abortion is not “health care.” The ObamaCare health legislation, if not amended by the next Congress, will result in hundreds of thousands of federally funded abortions that would not happen without that funding. But Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, who is a … Read more
The Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues (PNCI), a pro-life outreach to members of democratically-elected legislatures, reports that Lord Nicholas Windsor has described abortion as “the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life.” The great-grandson of King George V penned the essay “Caesar’s Thumb: Europeans should not forget their most pressing moral issue: abortion” in … Read more
I was putting together my list of “ten most laughable public attacks of 2010″ when I received an e-mail newsletter from Chris Korzen and the team at Catholics United. Korzen’s letter — an attack on Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, and Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York — was packed with alternately risible … Read more
Sky News reports that the European Court of Human Rights has criticized the Dublin government for “leaving its courts with a lack of good information regarding lawful abortions in the country.” Three women known as A, B, and C have been fighting Ireland’s ban on abortion. In Ireland, abortion is only allowed if there is … Read more
The Minnesota couple asking people to vote about whether they should abort their child has said they never intended to have an abortion at all. Frankly, I was waiting for this. According to a CNN article, husband Peter Arnold said he wanted “to stimulate conversation about the politically charged subject”: Arnold told CNN he bought … Read more
Among its mournful fruits, Roe v. Wade has advanced the debasement of sex instruction in our schools. Over a quarter-century after the legalization of abortion, institutionalized “sex ed,” like a caustic agent, has eroded the innocence of our youth. Hence the dark coeval of our time: the murder of unborn children alongside the murder of … Read more
In the response the CCHD sent to me yesterday, there was no mention of the incontrovertible evidence that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers belongs to coalitions publicly supporting abortion. As I pointed out in my article, this is in direct violation of the new CCHD Ethical Guidelines. The CCHD instead focused on an issue about the participation of … Read more
Cybernetics — basically, the science of the brain qua computer — explains much more than we realized. They used to think schizophrenia was due to demons. Then it was bad parenting. Now some think it may be bad brain wiring. They used to think déjà vu (“Hey! I’ve been here before!”) was evidence of reincarnation. … Read more