The professional fate of Phill Kline, Kansas's former attorney general, is now in the hands of the Kansas Supreme Court. A complaint was filed against him for trying to prosecute abortion providers.
A hearing was held yesterday before the state Supreme Court in the continuing effort to disbar Kline for alleged ethics violations. Dana Cody of the Life Legal Defense Foundation (LLDF) tells OneNewsNow Disciplinary Administrator Stanton Haslett has recommended that Kline's license be revoked.
"The disciplinary administrator and his deputy took things out of context, made conclusions inferring things like … they could get inside Phil Kline's head," Cody details. "There was really no evidence that he violated any ethical directive in his role as the state attorney general, or later on as the Johnson County district attorney."
In fact, the LLDF spokesperson tells OneNewsNow Kline did an excellent job as a prosecutor.
"He went after Planned Parenthood and George Tiller's clinic for not reporting statutory rape, for not protecting young girls who were victims," she reports. "It just appears to be a totally politically-motivated prosecution" that came about because the state was under the control of then-Governor Kathleeen Sebelius (D), a strong supporter of abortion and Planned Parenthood.
Sebelius is now U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, and her appointees dominate the disciplinary administrators and the Kansas Supreme Court.
Contact: Charlie Butts
Source: OneNewsNow.com
Scientists continue to communicate with people thought to be oblivious and without awareness. From the BBC story:
A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain. It's the first time an uncommunicative, severely brain-injured patient has been able to give answers clinically relevant to their care. Scott Routley, 39, was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine. His doctor says the discovery means medical textbooks will need rewriting…
And here's something that is fairly typical:
Scott Routley's parents say they always thought he was conscious and could communicate by lifting a thumb or moving his eyes. But this has never been accepted by medical staff.
Time to start listening more to families!
People such as Routley are dehydrated to death every day in all fifty states and in many countries around the world by having their tube-supplied sustenance withdrawn–supposedly based on their lack of personhood. But don't expect this to stop the dehydration imperative. Bioethicists will merely say this is even more reason to kill them since they are aware of their profound disabilities and suffering. Indeed, that argument has already started.
And of course, the media will insist–as they do nearly every time such stories hit the news–that it has nothing to do with Terri Schiavo. No, I will never let it go!
Contact: Wesley J. Smith
Source: National Review
People with pro-abortion and pro-life views aren't necessarily rigid or consistent in their views.
In direct contrast to common assumptions, not all evangelicals and conservatives believe abortion should be outlawed in every situation, and many liberals do not want abortion available in all circumstances. Ron Sellers of Grey Matter Research conducted a survey that found evidence of this.
"Only 28 percent of all Americans believe that abortion should be legal in every situation," he indicates. "Only 18 percent believe abortion should be illegal in every situation. Thirty-eight percent said there are some cases where it should be legal; others said it should not. And then 16 percent frankly said, I honestly haven't decided how I feel on this issue. I just don't know."
So Sellers says the survey stresses that people may lean in a particular direction but are not totally one-sided. Sellers is not surprised that 30 percent of those surveyed support sex-selective abortions.
"The attitude among some of the folks who believe that abortion should be legal is that it is not a life, it is not a baby -- it is simply a mass of cells," he explains. "I mean, from a moral standpoint, [they believe] it's really no different than the mother having a growth or a tumor removed from her body."
What did surprise Sellers, "in a sense, is the lack of constancy from those on both sides of the debate."
Contact: Charlie Butts
Source: OneNewsNow.com
A new report from the United Nations Population Fund declares that family planning is a global "right" for women, and calls for the removal of any social and financial obstacles to it.
"Every adult, adolescent and young person everywhere, regardless of sex, social status, income, ethnicity, religion or place of residence must be empowered to decide freely and responsibly how many children to have and when to have them," the document said.
On Nov. 14, the United Nations Population Fund released the report, titled "The State of World Population 2012." It is subtitled "By Choice, Not By Chance" and links family planning to international development.
In its analysis, the UNFPA called the July 2012 London Summit on Family Planning a "sign of progress."
The event, which the population fund hosted with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, secured $2.6 billion in pledges from countries and foundations to provide family planning to 120 million women. It said $4.1 billion is needed to provide family planning to 222 million women who reportedly would use it but lack access to it.
The summit drew intense backlash, however, from critics ranging from the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano to global pro-life advocates.
Meghan Grizzle, research and policy specialist at the World Youth Alliance, and Greg Pfundstein – executive director of the Chiaroscuro Foundation – said the figure of 222 million women in need of family planning is "misleading" and likely overstated.
"Many women have access to contraception and choose not to use it. Social scientists and public policy experts identify women as having an unmet need for contraception even when those women have not expressed a desire to use contraception," Pfundstein and Grizzle said in a July essay published in Public Discourse.
Wendy Wright, interim executive director of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, in July charged that the summit marks "a new chapter in the population control movement." She said the summit would use the goal of helping poor women to secure permanent funding for abortion-promoting and population control groups.
Wright said that resources used for family planning could be better directed to providing access to basic health care and maternal health care.
In its new report, UNFPA included some population control advocacy and depicted access to family planning as a "sound economic investment."
It attributed the growth of some Asian economies to a family planning-driven demographic shift which caused the numbers of income-generating adults to be higher than those dependent upon them for support. The report predicted a $30 billion growth in the Nigerian economy if its fertility rate falls by one child per woman in the next 20 years.
The UNFPA report summary said family planning is "almost universally recognized as an intrinsic right" that should be "available to all." It said family planning should be promoted as "a right" which enables "a whole range of other rights."
The report does, however, include a favorable mention of family planning methods the Catholic Church does not recognize as sinful.
"Fertility awareness-related methods are also quite effective if used correctly," it said, citing Guttmacher Institute statistics indicating that these methods are only slightly more likely to result in pregnancy in the first year of use than condoms and are much less likely to result in pregnancy than no family planning method.
Source: CNA/EWTN News
Apparently, Planned Parenthood is no longer content exploiting just women and children–so they've moved on to the federal government. Over the past several years, it seems the country's biggest abortion provider has also been running one of the country's biggest scams: a Medicaid racket that's ripped off millions of taxpayer dollars.
Today, it appears that at least six states have been targeted by Cecile Richards's scheme, which reportedly conned the government with hundreds of thousands of bogus reimbursement claims.
One of those states–Texas–will be hearing its first arguments on the issue this week in U.S. District Court, thanks to former Planned Parenthood director-turned-whistleblower Abby Johnson. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), she plans to expose at least 87,000 instances of fraud during her time as a clinic manager in Southeast Texas.
Based on her testimony and supporting documents, Planned Parenthood routinely submitted ineligible claims on everything from pap smears to STD and pregnancy tests. In fact, Johnson says her bosses at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast were under so much financial pressure that they would repeatedly tell staff, "We must turn every call and visit into a revenue-generating client."
A ring of at least 10 clinics were falsifying patient charts, which they would "fix" and "cover up" before the auditors and inspectors came.
"People may hold different views about abortion," Johnson says, "but everyone can agree that Planned Parenthood should play by the same rules as everyone else. It certainly isn't entitled to any public funds, especially if it is defrauding Medicaid and the American taxpayer."
In states like Iowa, the plot was so sophisticated that clinics were getting $26.32 reimbursement checks for a $2.98 package of birth control. State and local governments have poured more than a billion dollars into Richards's group–and this is how she repays them? Twenty-eight million in stolen funds in Iowa, $6 million in Texas, $180 million in California, and similar allegations in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
And while we can't say exactly where the dollars went, evidence suggests President Obama's campaign was one of the biggest beneficiaries of Planned Parenthood's largesse. Thanks to this extra revenue from overbilling, Richards's group had the flexibility to spend a whopping $15 million to put Barack Obama back in the White House, where he can keep the money flowing to his favorite chain
Contact: Tony Perkins
Source: Ililnois Review
Martin Cullen, an intensive care physician in Sydney, writes that the increasing acceptance of euthanasia has helped increase patients' distrust of doctors.
"I never cease to marvel how deeply some families of my patients distrust the medical profession," says Martin Cullen. "Between me and them is a wall of suspicion. I know how used car salesmen must feel."
"No longer do families assume that their loved one will be cared for," he continued. "Families feel they need to be advocates for their sick relative. They aggressively question all of my suggestions for care. I really can't blame them. In the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legalized, non-voluntary euthanasia, aka murder, is no longer unknown."
"Nowadays when I bring bad news to families and tell them that death is imminent and that we can do no more, I expect resistance and hostility," he added. "Just a few weeks ago I was treating an elderly woman who was very sick. Her family told me that they believed that their father had been euthanased years before. They weren't going to let us doctors take their mother, too. They looked at me as if I were a murderer. It was very unsettling for me."
Source: CWN
In June of this past year, photos of a Chinese woman and her dead child flooded the Internet, accompanied by the account of how Feng Jianmei was abducted from her home and forced to undergo a late-term abortion by local family-planning officials. Mrs. Feng's story spread across international news headlines and provoked outrage by national governments. The European Parliament issued a terse statement calling the incident "unacceptable."
A recent article makes the case that any law which restricts abortion--such as waiting periods or parental consent--is the equivalent of China's brutal forced abortion policy that victimized Mrs. Feng. The article from the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the abortion group Planned Parenthood, says this because both represent "coercion in reproductive decision making." According to their analysis, "forcing a woman to terminate a pregnancy she wants or to continue a pregnancy that she does not want both violate the same human rights."
The article equates legal restrictions on abortion to enforced abortion by drawing false parallels with regard to both the nature and intent of the laws being compared. The article's author notably contrasts the continuation of a pregnancy, rather than conception, with its termination. No mention is made of any government policy which provides for the forced impregnation of women, only those which protect a pregnancy which has already been established. While this may be in part due to the fact that no country has a policy which allows for government-sanctioned rape, it also attempts to change the context of the debate.
A large portion of the article focuses on United States laws such as those requiring counseling prior to abortion and blocking taxpayer funds from subsidizing abortions. According to the author's thesis, these policies, like the Chinese family-planning regulations, force women "either to have or to not have children for the greater good of those other than themselves." While the article provides examples of national policies providing incentives or deterrents to childbearing enacted in response to fears of population explosion or implosion, no mention is made of the good of the child itself. The Guttmacher article fails to acknowledge any possible motivations for restricting abortion outside of "pronatalist" efforts by leaders to increase national birth rates.
However, government policies intended to increase childbearing typically focus on factors existing prior to the conception of a child, such as increased maternity leave, tax incentives, and housing benefits, such as those introduced in Russia in the 1980s. While abortion rates in Russia have been declining since the 1970s, the pronatalist policies instituted by the government have been incentives to childbearing, not restrictions on abortion. However, while the Guttmacher article fails to explicitly define which policies encouraging larger families it deems coercive, it provides only the most extreme instances of forced abortion and sterilization as counter-examples.
In their attempt to characterize restrictions on abortion in the United States as human rights violations comparable to forced abortion in China, the author completely ignores the argument that abortion itself is a violation of the human rights of the child, despite the fact that many Americans believe that life begins at conception.
Contact: Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.
Source: C-FAM
Many pro-life groups have issued statements regarding the election
results. So perhaps it is time for the Illinois Federation for Right to
Life to issue a post-election statement to our membership, affiliates
and pro-life activists. Perhaps even past time. I have been thinking
about what to say to you. I will not insult or offend you by even
suggesting that giving up or giving in is something that you have
seriously considered. I know you. That is not the spirit that governs
your life. Your heart drives you to do what is right in the face of
great adversity. You simply cannot turn away from confronting evil with
good. So I know you will be on the front line defending innocent life
at all costs no matter how dark the days may appear. You are the light,
you must show up.
The Federation is and will always be a grassroots organization. The
strength of this organization is our foundation. You are our strength.
So I have concluded that it is not time for me to issue a statement to
you but a time for me to seek wisdom from you. It is a time for
questions.
The IFRL Board of Directors will meet soon. And we will begin a process
of evaluation. It is time to think about new ideas, new methods and
new strategies. We intend to do so. We want to hear from you. You are
the past, the present and the future of the pro-life movement in
Illinois. What do you think we need to do to change the direction of
this state? What are your ideas? What has your experience taught you?
Please write us. I am certain that together we will discover the
answers.
We all worked hard. We gave our all. I am aware that it is tough to
face the results. But we are tough. We live in a state that has turned
its back on innocent life but we will not let that stand-ever. So we
get up, brush ourselves off and march on proclaiming the eternal truth
that life is sacred.
Give up? Not a chance.
Contact: Dawn Behnke
Source: Illinois Federation for Right to Life
The people of the United States ensured an Obamacare future by
apparently reelecting President Obama and maintaining a Democratic
Senate. Here are the immediate consequences:
1. The IPAB will go into effect: As I have written, IPAB is the
cornerstone of a planned bureaucratic state. The only way now to thwart
that is pure obstructionism. First, by filibustering the nominations
that President Obama will make to the Board. Not going to happen.
Second, by defunding. Even though the House will stay Republican, I
don’t see them taking that route on what, to most people, is an abstract
issue.
2. The attack on religious freedom will continue: The Obama
Administration is an implacable foe of faith operating outside the four
walls of church or cloister. Don’t look for the president to offer
religious institutions who oppose the free birth control rule anything
other than lip service to accommodation of religious institutions.
Businesses will be forced to take their cause to the Supreme Court.
Don’t count on help there, as the technocratic statists control the
court 5-4, perhaps 6-3. Eventually, we will see a free abortion rule.
3. The Mandate will now be carried out: States that have been resisting
will now begin to cooperate with the Feds by establishing exchanges.
4. There will be death panels: In a centralized system, rationing is the
cost containment method of choice. The UK shows us the future of the
USA. Already, powerful liberal voices on health care such as the New
York Times and New England Journal of Medicine, have called for it. It
is going to become very scary to be considered unproductive.
5. Single Payer, here we come: Obamacare is going to eventually implode.
That will also take down the private insurance market. The result, in
about 10 years, will be single payer. And that is by design. Oh, and
single payer’s inevitable outcome is health care rationing.
Obamacare isn’t just about health care. It is–as designed–a cultural
bulldozer, forcing the left’s liberal social views on all of society.
And at this point, I am not sure what can be done about it.
Contact: Wesley J. Smith
Source: National Review
