Archive for the 'Abortion' Category

Dr. George Tiller

Yesterday, Dr. George Tiller was murdered in the lobby of his church in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Tiller was targeted for assassination because he was one of the few doctors who would perform a late-term abortion. Tiller would provide an abortion at any time before fetal viability, which is generally thought of as coming 28-32 weeks into a pregnancy.

When you think about it, late-term abortions should be no worse in the eyes of anti-abortion fanatics than first-term abortions. If anything, late-term abortions should be less offensive, since they’re so often performed in order to save a woman from having to carry a fetus to term who has one of the following horrific conditions (look them up if you’re not the squeamish type):

Anencephaly
Trisomy 13
Trisomy 18
Trisomy 21
Polycystic kidney disease
Spina bifida
Hydrocephalus
Potter’s syndrome
Lethal dwarfism
Holoprosencephaly
Anterior and posterior encephalocele
Non-immune hydrops

Tiller’s killer was Scott Roeder, who was exactly the sort of right-wing fanatic described in a recent Homeland Security report, the one that the wingnut whiners said was “an exercise in political profiling.”

Predictably, some conservatives couldn’t conceal their glee at the news of this latest act of domestic terrorism:

UPDATE… Doctor George Tiller was aborted today in his 204th trimester - aren’t paybacks a bitch

George Tiller the baby killer was shot dead this morning. God bless the gunmen who hopefully won’t be caught.

Infamous baby killer George Tiller gunned down at (irony) church. Why do I not feel sorry for him? Have fun at Judgment Day.

May Tiller rot in Hell , infanticide is the murder of babies, he WAS a provider of death like Hitler, Bundy the list goes on….

Guy shoots a Dr. to death in Church. Me I’m willing to bet that Jesus was his co-pilot.

The person who shot Tiller the baby killer simply excercised a man’s right to choose.

Randall Terry, the patron saint of the anti-abortion movement, gave one of his typical “this murder was wrong, but it was the right thing to do” speeches:

Read the rest of this entry »

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee, the former preacher who came in second in the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, doesn’t seem to think much before he begins speaking. At a recent Missouri fundraiser, the former Arkansas governor compared abortion to slavery:

“What are we saying to the generation coming after us when we tell them that it is perfectly OK for one person to own another human being?” Huckabee said. “I thought we dealt with that 150 years ago when the issue of slavery was finally settled in this country, and we decided that it no longer was a political issue, it wasn’t an issue of geography, it was an issue of morality. That it was either right or it was immoral that one person could own another human being and have full control even to the point of life and death over that other human being.”

That’s a standard, if inappropriate, talking point of the antiabortion movement. And in mouthing that point, Huckabee is assuming, without putting forth any argument or evidence, that a human infant is no more human and has no more rights than these embryos:

Read the rest of this entry »

I think part of the problem is that Bush doesn’t understand what women’s health care is all about

From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration today issued a sweeping new regulation that protects a broad range of health-care workers — from doctors to janitors — who refuse to participate in providing services that they believe violate their personal, moral or religious beliefs.

The controversial rule empowers federal health officials to cut off federal funding for any state or local government, hospital, clinic, health plan, doctor’s office or other entity if it does not accommodate employees who exercise their “right of conscience.” It would apply to more than 584,000 health-care facilities.

Women’s health advocates, family planning proponents, abortion rights activists, members of Congress and others condemned the regulation, saying it would create major obstacles to a variety of health services, including abortion, family planning, end-of-life care and possibly a wide range of scientific research.

It’s not hard to see who this regulation is aimed at. There are a couple of dozen terminally ill patients in Oregon who are prescribed lethal doses of medication every year under the state’s Death With Dignity Act, and this regulation might make it slightly harder for these patients to undergo assisted suicide. But the real targets are the millions of women who will be denied abortions and birth control.

Already, women find it very difficult to obtain abortions and birth control, especially the “morning after pill”, in many areas of the US. In South Dakota, for example, there are only two doctors who perform abortions, and there are no providers in Rapid City (metro population 250,000, 350 miles from Sioux Falls). This regulation will make it impossible for many women to get an abortion, or to get the morning after pill in a timely fashion. The effect will be most acute in rural areas, where women may also find it difficult to get birth control pills.

Technically, the Bush administration’s new regulation doesn’t discriminate against women by denying them access to health care, because there might be some doctor out there who decides that it’s wrong to treat colon cancer because he objects to eating red meat on moral grounds, but in the real world virtually everyone denied care because of this regulation will be a woman.

Note that the “right of conscience” will only be available to workers in the field of health care. The Bush administration continues to pursue charges against Ehren Watada, who objected on moral grounds to participate in Bush’s war of aggression in Iraq. And for the past three years, the administration has hounded Thomas Tamm, who told the American people that their government was illegally spying on them.

Watada and Tamm are not given the “right of conscience”, probably because they aren’t trying to deny reproductive rights to women.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

From the Washington Post:

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops vowed Tuesday to forcefully confront the Obama administration over its support for abortion rights, saying the church and religious freedom could be under attack in the new presidential administration. In an impassioned discussion on Catholics in public life, several bishops said they would accept no compromise on abortion policy. Many condemned Catholics who had argued it was morally acceptable to back President-elect Obama because he pledged to reduce abortion rates.

Several prelates promised to call out Catholic policy makers on their failures to follow church teaching. Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pa., singled out Vice President-elect Biden, a Catholic, Scranton native who supports abortion rights.

“I cannot have a vice president-elect coming to Scranton to say he’s learned his values there when those values are utterly against the teachings of the Catholic Church,” Martino said. The Obama-Biden press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Diocese of Kansas City in Kansas said politicians “can’t check your principles at the door of the legislature.” Naumann has said repeatedly that Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic Democrat who supports abortion rights, should stop taking Holy Communion until she changes her stance. “They cannot call themselves Catholic when they violate such a core belief as the dignity of the unborn,” Naumann said Tuesday.

According to exit polls, 54 percent of Catholics chose Obama, who is Protestant. The new bishops’ statement is meant to drive home the point in a way that cannot be misconstrued.

“We have a very important thing to say. I think we should say it clearly and with a punch,” said New York Cardinal Edward Egan.

These would be the same bishops who thought it was perfectly OK to vote for George W. Bush, despite the fact that Bush launched an aggressive war that has killed hundreds of thousands, withdrew money from AIDS prevention programs, and ordered the torture of prisoners. And I don’t remember any of these guys running to the press to warn Catholics that some of their priests were child molesters, and that their fellow bishops were protecting the pedophiles by moving them from parish to parish.

Apparently, the only time these guys find their voices is when they’re trying to tell women what to do with their bodies. No wonder most American Catholics ignore them.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

The anti-choice crowd is really good at gnashing their teeth and playing the victim

The folks at Life News have their panties in a twist over the decision to bar 230 extremists from visiting the United Kingdom:

British government officials are lumping in pro-life advocates with terrorists in a new ban preventing more than 250 people from entering the European nation. The list, which has not been made public yet but eventually will be, includes people with so-called extremist views.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith crafted the list which features Muslim extremists, neo-Nazis and others who “encourage or spread extremism and hatred through preaching violent messages.”

Also included? People who are pro-life.

Smith says that 230 people have their names on the list and it will be published in the coming months on the web site of the Home Office, the British equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security. That includes 79 so-called “hate preachers.”

So it’s OK to ban Muslim extremists, but not the preachers who have been encouraging people to bomb clinics and assassinate doctors. The fact is, there are literally thousands of anti-abortion extremists in the United States alone. If only 79 are banned from travel to the UK, I have to think that they are the worst offenders.

The article goes on to complain about various individuals and organizations who have compared the bombers and assassins to terrorists, but it’s hard to see why that’s not a legitimate position. Life News often tries to distance the anti-abortion movement from the violent extremists at the movement’s fringes, so it’s hard to see why this publication would object to a travel ban for advocates of violence. It looks like the folks at Life News are not as anti-violent as they pretend to be.

From the Huffington Post:

Sarah Palin opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. As she said in a gubernatorial debate nearly two years ago, even if her own daughter were a rape victim, she - not the daughter, interestingly, but she - would ”choose life.”

Now there’s an e-mail making the rounds that urges people to make a gift donation to Planned Parenthood in Palin’s name.

What makes it even better, the e-mail says, is that for every donation made in her name, Planned Parenthood sends Palin a card thanking her.

You can send your donation in Sarah Palin’s name right here.

But today’s best headline wasn’t “Palin raises money for Planned Parenthood.” The best headline was “Woman wakes up, should have smelled the coffee.”

Silly. The fact that Gianna Jessen is alive and well and doing commercials for anti-choicers today disproves the whole point of the ad. If it were true that doctors could just leave viable babies to die, Gianna Jessen wouldn’t be here to call the only candidate with a plan to dramatically reduce infant mortality a baby killer.

(Cross-posted at my blog)

It doesn’t matter how young a girl is, or how she got pregnant. It doesn’t even matter if bearing a child would endanger her health. The anti-abortion zealots want her to have that baby.

From the BBC:

An 11-year-old Romanian girl who is 21 weeks pregnant after being raped by an uncle will be able to have an abortion, even though it is forbidden by law.

A government committee said the procedure should go ahead due to the exceptional circumstances of her case.

Romania’s abortion limit is 14 weeks. It had been suggested the girl might travel to the UK for the abortion.

Some 20 Christian Orthodox groups had threatened to press charges if the girl was allowed to abort the foetus.

(emphasis added)

Read the rest of this entry »

Some time ago, an extremely powerful world leader learned the hard way, just how costly it is to ignore one’s own military generals.

Yet even now, there are still some world leaders who can’t/won’t either face facts nor learn from others’ catastrophically, costly cock-ups.

White House denies Army’s pitch for more brass

By Richard Lardner, Associated Press Writer, Mon Jun 23 2008

WASHINGTON - The Army’s march to overhaul its tarnished contracting system has been slowed by an unlikely foe: the White House.

The Office of Management and Budget, President Bush’s administrative arm, has shot down a service plan to add five active-duty generals who would oversee purchasing and monitor contractor performance.

The boost in brass was a key recommendation from a blue-ribbon panel that last fall criticized the Army for contracting failures that undermined the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, wasted U.S. tax dollars, and sparked dozens of procurement fraud investigations.

So, is THIS sheer stupidity or is this sheer stupidity?

Well, they got THAT right. Ike WAS right.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Do you still think that the the anti-choice crowd is less concerned about preventing sex than they are about preventing abortion?

The American Life League is now holding protests against birth control pills all across the nation. Yes, those are the same birth control pills that prevent unwanted pregnancies, thus preventing abortions.