Free Republic

Planned Parenthood took a big hit on Tuesday after the District Court for Polk County, Iowa upheld a ban on “webcam” abortions. Judge Jeffrey Farrell’s ruling concluded that abortions – if done at all – really should be done after a complete medical exam. Better yet, Judge Ferrell ruled that the medical exam should actually be done by a physician – in person – and not via video feed. Well slap my head, imagine that. In an effort to increase profit margins, Planned Parenthood’s management decided that their rural clinics could save money if they did abortions without having a...

The Taco or Beer Challenge couldn’t be simpler: You eat a taco and/or drink a beer, and you donate to an abortion fund. The only ice you’ll need for this challenge is the ice in your cooler, or maybe the ice in your water if you get a particularly spicy taco. (Snip) I started the Taco or Beer Challenge on Monday as something of a Twitter joke, after hearing about the “ice bucket challenge” that’s been growing in popularity as celebrities and plebes alike film themselves dumping buckets of ice-cold water on themselves, sometimes to hilarious effect, in support of...

The abortion backer who attacked a pro-life man in a profane rant captured on video last month has been ordered to pay restitution and the case has been closed. Mark Harrington, founder of Created Equal, whose group held abortion victim signs which enraged the abortion activist, provided the update on the case. Previously, Harrinton and Seth Drayer, who was physically attacked (video below) while leading a group of pro-life students in sharing the pro-life message in downtown Columbus, Ohio, said they would drop the charges if Victoria Duran would meet with them. createdequal“We’re willing to drop the charges,” Harrington told...

I told you this was coming. Now, Jerry Brown has decided to force two Catholic universities to cover abortion in their health insurance.From the San Francisco Chronicle story: Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration has reversed an earlier decision to allow two Catholic universities to eliminate coverage of most abortions for employees, saying state law requires health insurance plans to cover all abortions…Urged by abortion-rights groups and university employees to reconsider the issue, Brown’s Department of Managed Health Care, in letters to be sent Friday to insurers for both universities, said the exclusions violate a 1975 state law that requires group health...

One of the great quotations of our time is from James Burnham, a former Trotskyite Communist-turned-conservative who became an editor at National Review. Fifty years ago, he wrote in his book Suicide of the West that “Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.” To compensate for five decades of public education...

Mr. Dawkins, I'd let you meet my son if you promised to open your mind, your eyes, and your heart to a unique kind of absolute beauty. But, in my request for you to be tolerant, I’d have to warn Trig he must be tolerant, too, because he may superficially look at you as kind of awkward. I'll make sure he's polite, though! Love, Sarah Palin & family

Why do I think Democrat pro-abortion congressional candidate James Woods is slimy? Aside from the fact Woods retaliated against a pro-life letter writing campaign by mailing condoms back to pro-lifers, he introduced his condom strategy on Facebook with “Got Wood(s)?” What person running for U.S. Congress goes gutter like that? Woods is also a card-carrying atheist, which may help explain his lack of decorum. Here’s the letter he sent with his condoms: Actually, condoms are not the route to go if one is trying to avoid pregnancy. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, condoms have an 18% failure rate, meaning...

The Medical Board of California filed a petition on August 12, 2014, to revoke the medical license of long-time abortionist Gary T. Prohaska, 78, based on his diagnosed mental impairment. prohaskaIt appears from the Board petition that someone noticed his unfit mental condition and reported to the Medical Board that Prohaska was suffering from symptoms consistent with early dementia. The petition states that Prohaska, who once worked at the Planned Parenthood abortion facility in San Diego, California, has suffered “moderate severity cognitive impairment” according to a psychiatrist who conducted a psychiatric examination of Prohaska at the California Medical Board’s request....

Richards Dawkins is doubling down on his controversial comments yesterday suggesting that parents of babies with Down Syndrome should “abort them and try again.” Today, Dawkins says aborting babies with Down syndrome is the “moral and sensible” choice. In a newly-released column responding to the firestorm of criticism Dawkins has faced, he doubles down on his claim that special needs babies should become victims of abortion. Description=Richard Dawkins Photograph: Jeremy Young 05-12-2006Dawkins starts his column complaining about how people on twitter discovered his tweets promoting abortion. Then, he launches into a new defense of his pro-abortion thesis. “For what it’s...

The city of Huntsville has ruled that an abortion facility will remain open and be able to relocate next door to a middle school, although the waiver it is using to get around city ordinances was granted to another owner for another kind of business 16 years ago. In a controversial 3-2 decision, the Huntsville Board of Zoning Adjustment on Tuesday night voted to uphold a city manager’s previous decision to issue a building permit to a local abortion clinic that wants to relocate to a larger facility across the street from a middle school. In response, local pro-life activists...

During the last week of May abortion proponent Dawn Porter and members of the National Network of Abortion Funds traversed southern Texas and upper Mexico to film footage for an upcoming documentary, Trapped. Trapped will “look at the impact of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws in the southern United States, and their disproportionate effect on women living in poverty.” There are currently no abortion clinics in the Rio Grande Valley, which borders Mexico. The nearest one in the U.S. is 230 miles north in San Antonio. The group filmed themselves crossing the border to buy Misoprostol, an ulcer...

In a piece for The Washington Post, blogger Carter Eskew recently argued, “It’s time for a new dialogue on abortion.”Eskew, director at The Glover Park Group (which lobbies for Planned Parenthood) and former strategist for Al Gore, wrote in response to his colleague Janet Harris, who insisted abortion is never immoral or “difficult.” “Control over one’s reproduction is a deeply affirmative value,” he approved, and “It’s time to assert it.” Citing Harris, Eskew affirmed, “She couldn’t be more right” and added, “the current political dialogue is even worse than she documents.” “The pro-choice movement,” he lamented, “has been on the...

n 2010, Marianne Anderson worked at a Planned Parenthood facility in Indianapolis, Indiana. She started working there because the job was very close to her house, and she was hired to start up their conscious sedation program, which allowed clients to purchase mild to moderate sedatives to be given intravenously before an abortion. Anderson, who is a mother of two and a grandmother of one, said when she started at the facility she was on the fence about abortion. This was because when she was on staff at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis she had seen girls that had attempted abortions...

FULL TITLE: Abortion clinic quits fight to keep doing procedures, says state is 'methodically' trying to close all providers COLUMBUS, Ohio -- An abortion clinic that was fighting the state of Ohio to remain open has decided it will stop performing surgical abortions. A spokeswoman for the Lebanon Road Surgery Center in Sharonville near Cincinnati said Wednesday that it will continue to provide the first step consultations in the two-day process for obtaining an abortion in Ohio.

In a bizarre rant on Twitter earlier today, atheist Richard Dawkins wrote that choosing not to abort a child with Down Syndrome would be "immoral." The conversation started when Dawkins tweeted that "Ireland is a civilised country except in this 1 area." The area was abortion, which until last year was illegal in all cases. A Twitter user then asked Dawkins if "994 human beings with Down's Syndrome [having been] deliberately killed before birth in England and Wales in 2012" was "civilised." Dawkins replied "yes, it is very civilised. These are fetuses, diagnosed before they have human feelings." Apparently I'm...

Following the death of a young elementary school teacher, Jennifer Morbelli, I had the sad duty of speaking at a press conference in Germantown, MD, in February 2013. Mrs. Morbelli died from complications from a late term (33 week) abortion performed by Dr. LeRoy Carhart. She experienced complications in between office visits, but neither her family nor the ER to which she was eventually admitted was able to locate Carhart. Her cause of death was determined to be an amniotic fluid embolism; the same condition that killed Christin Gilbert, another of Carhart’s patients in 2005. Maryland, does not have a...

A national civil rights and violence debate is brewing because of the tenuous situation in Ferguson, Missouri. But the president of the Planned Parenthood abortion business isn’t letting an opportunity to push her pro-abortion agenda go to waste. LifeNews blogger Ryan Bomberger has more on Cecile Richards’ latest antics: cecilerichards23And to add more craziness to chaos, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, injected herself into the Ferguson tragedy. Keep in mind, this is someone who derives her $583,000 annual salary from the nation’s largest abortion chain whose home city, NYC, aborts more black babies than are born alive. On Facebook she...

Edward Pohlman, in a pre-Roe study financed by Planned Parenthood, noted: “Induced abortion requires overt action and a decision that is somewhat daring. In cultures which provides sanctions against abortion, it is impossible to believe that all of the parents who want abortions have them. Others would seriously, consciously like to have them but do not, because of health, conscience, public opinion, and other barriers… there are psychological as well as legal and practical differences between… seriously considering abortion and actually going through with one, to be sure.” Edward Pohlman “The Psychology of Birth Planning” Shenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge Massachusetts,...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about one of the major problems I have with the bodily autonomy argument: that it’s totally at odds with people’s real-life experiences with abortion. In keeping with that theme, here’s another issue I have with the bodily autonomy argument. If the bodily autonomy argument were genuine, abortion supporters would have no discomfort whatsoever with Melissa Ohden.Who’s Melissa Ohden? I’m so glad you asked.Melissa (above) is a public speaker who lives in Missouri with her husband and two daughters. And when she was 31 weeks old, she was born prematurely after an abortionist injected...

Pro-choice author Anne Eggebroten, edited a book entitled Abortion: My Choice, God’s Grace which tells the stories of Christian women who had abortions. The book celebrates abortion as an acceptable choice and tries to justify it based on the Bible. There is one story in particular I want to comment on. It is a first-hand account of a pro-choice clinic escort who describes how she got involved in the pro-choice movement. I think what she said is worth considering: My participation in the pro-choice march was motivated by boredom and restlessness as much as by a desire to be of...