Free Republic

The Justice Department will defend against any legal challenge to the new Obama administration mandate to force employers to provide abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception, even if it goes against their conscience, Attorney General Eric Holder told a House subcommittee Tuesday. The Department of Health and Human Services rule, part of Obamacare, violates the freedom of conscience for Catholics and other religious groups that expressed their objections to the mandate, opponents say. Already there is litigation asserting that the rule violates the First Amendment’s guarantee to free exercise of religion.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, January 18, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Appeals Court threw out a lower court’s ruling that would have forced a mentally ill woman to undergo an abortion and be forcibly sterilized against her will. Norfolk Family and Probate Court Judge Christina Harms had ruled on January 6 that the 32-year-old could be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed…by ruse” until she was sedated for the procedures. The woman, who is identified only by the pseudonym “Mary Moe,” is approximately five months pregnant. Moe, who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, had a previous abortion in her history....

A stunning Planned Parenthood document that includes radical ideas such as compulsory abortion and sterilization; special "permits" to have children; penalizing parents; and encouraging homosexuality dovetails with some Obamacare mandates, according to a former Planned Parenthood director. Abby Johnson, who left her position after helping with an abortion and writing about her experience in "unPLANNED," said the document has been around for 40 years but has been virtually ignored. "When I worked at Planned Parenthood, there was something that we were not allowed to talk about," Johnson said. "If we didn't talk about it, then maybe no one else would...

A few days ago in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune Fr. Peter Laird, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, had a good piece about the mandate from the Obama Administration (HHS) requiring that “contraception” and sterilizations be paid for by tax-payers. CounterpointThe Star Tribune’s editorial “Benefits outweigh birth control costs” (Aug. 1) drew attention to an Institute of Medicine recommendation adopted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.It requires health care plans to cover contraceptives and sterilizations [Remember: some "contraceptives" are abortifacients.] under regulations for preventive care created in response to the health care reform legislation...

Population: The vice president gives a thumbs up to Beijing's policy of sustainable growth through forced population control. This is no gaffe. The White House endorses this policy. Just ask the president's science adviser. We are used to the "mouth that roared" putting his foot in it. But Vice President Joe Biden's remarks at Sichuan University in China clearly embrace the progressive belief that people are a plague on the Earth — not its greatest resource. "Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I'm not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you're...

JODHPUR, India — A district in northern India is offering prizes including television sets, food processors and even a Tata Nano car for people who agree to undergo sterilisation, a doctor told AFP on Friday. "We want to promote sterilisation," Pratap Singh Dutter, the deputy chief medical officer of Jhunjhunu district in the north Indian state of Rajasthan, told AFP. "Everyone who gets sterilised between today and 30 September will be entered into a lottery to win prizes." The first prize is a Tata Nano, billed as the world's cheapest car at about $3,000, but other rewards up for grabs...

June 27, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Even when confronted with the deaths of 160 million children in the womb simply because they were girls, the father of the modern population control movement doesn’t bat an eyelash. The problem of sex-selective abortion has been receiving increased scrutiny in the media recently, following the release of Maria Hvistendahl’s book “Unnatural Selection,” which was reviewed last week in the Wall Street Journal. In that book the author documents the devastation wrought by widespread female gendercide in countries that favor sons over daughters.  She also records a discussion about prenatal gendercide with Paul Ehrlich, the...

METAIRIE, Louisiana, May 3, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Controversial Louisiana state Representative John LaBruzzo filed legislation recently that would ban all abortions in the state. House Bill 587 redefines feticide as the “killing of an unborn child by the act, procurement, or culpable omission of a person… including the mother of the unborn child.” Under the bill, doctors and even the mother of the child could face prison sentences for between 5 and 10 years for their involvement in an abortion procedure, although LaBruzzo has said the inclusion of the mother was an error that will be corrected. He maintains his...

Eight years ago, Nial Cox Ramirez stood up in a Raleigh conference room and bared her soul about the pain she endured after North Carolina forcibly sterilized her in 1965. "I tried so hard to bury this, but it just won't go away. It's like a cancer that eats you and eats you and eats you," she said on that March afternoon. On another afternoon 38 years before, in a building just a few miles away, five strangers had voted to have her sterilized. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina, a bureaucracy oblivious to the pain it caused its victims,...

Many of us know the warnings that have been put out regarding second hand smoke. We know that if you are in the same room with a smoker that youÂ’re being exposed to the risks of lung cancer just like the smoker.This is also true with the water supply. Water filtration systems are effective in many regards but they are not filtering all dangers from our water.An article in a last yearÂ’s National Catholic Register discussed what is happening to the fish in our waterways because of the birth controls being used are then seeping into our water.With all the...

On March 22 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) will hold a hearing to investigate the allegations of a Slovakian woman of Romani ethnic origin (also known as gypsy) who claims she was the victim of a forced sterilization during the delivery of her second child by caesarean section, in 2000 at the Prešov Public Hospital. The applicant, known only as Ms V.C., claims she was given the sterilization consent form to sign while in pain and neither understood what she was signing nor the consequences of the procedure. She further alleges that her Romani ethnicity was a deciding...

A British court still needs to decide whether to authorize the sterilization, at her mother’s own request, of a mentally disabled woman (see e.g. here and here). Reading only the headlines and initial paragraphs of the news entries devoted to the case, one might become worried that we are seeing here a resurgence of an abhorrent practice that gained much favour in the first half of the 20th-Century, in countries like Germany or the United States: i.e. the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded for eugenic purposes. However, it is important to look at the particulars of this case in...

The number of people on food stamps keeps hitting new all-time highs; as of September, nearly 43 million people were using the program, according to figures out this week. Of course, because of population growth, absolute numbers only tell part of the story. The best way to look at the numbers over a long period of time is as a percentage of the population. And when you do that, you see that we're also hitting new highs.

FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, September 2, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) -  Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro-Carambula, Interim President of Human Life International (HLI), yesterday denounced comments made recently by British Professor David Marsland in which Marsland called for certain "unfit" members of society to be forcibly sterilized. "Professor Marsland's comments only go to show that no evil is ever fully buried in the past," said Monsignor Barreiro. "Every time we think we've seen the last of the Sangerian calls to forcibly sterilize and otherwise do away with the disabled, we are aghast at their return." Monsignor Barreiro was referring to Margaret Sanger, founder of...

Thursday September 2, 2010 No Abortion Referrals at Newly Acquired Hospital Says Caritas after Meeting with Archdiocese By Kathleen GilbertBRAINTREE, Massachusetts, September 2, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Following a meeting with the local archdiocese, a Catholic hospital chain in Boston appears to have reversed its earlier position that a newly-acquired secular hospital would be allowed to continue its practice of providing contraception, sterilizations, and abortion referrals.Terry Donilon, spokesman for the Archdiocesan of Boston, referred LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) to an archdiocesan statement in which Cardinal Seán O'Malley said he was "concerned" about statements appearing in the Providence Journal from both the Catholic hospital...

... Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about. So why don’t we make ourselves the Last Generation on Earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction! Of course, it...

Gulbahor Zavidova’s story is a tragic one: brought in for a caesarian section, she was sterilized during the procedure—and never informed. Frustrated at her inability to conceive again, she visited a doctor, only to be informed that she had been sterilized. Upon learning this, her husband left her.Zavidova’s story has become unfortunately common in Uzbekistan. According to news sources in the area, Uzbekistan’s “president” (read: Soviet-era dictator) Islam Karimov has revisited an old mass sterilization campaign, bringing thousands of women in to be sterilized like farm animals. The Times Online reports:Activists say mass sterilisation began in 2003, but was eased...

The twenty-day campaign, launched April 7, is well along in achieving its goal of 9,559 sterilizations. “A doctor in Daba village said that his team was working flat out, beginning sterilizations every day at 8 am and working straight through until 4 am the following day.” What’s the hurry? Officials in Puning may fail in their bid for promotion to a second tier county “if they cannot meet all quotas,” according to The London Times. Unfortunately, the Puning sterilization campaign is not an isolated incident. According to the 2009 Report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, “Violators of the [one...

The Chinese Communist Party denies that it forces women to abort wanted pregnancies or to be sterilized. This is propaganda. The breaking story that Family Planning Authorities have detained 1300 people in a campaign to sterilize nearly 10,000 people in Puning City, Guandong Province, proves it.

Drug addicts in the US are being paid to get sterilised so that thousands of children are "saved from growing up within a damaged environment," a media report has said. American charity organisation, Project Prevention, in North Carolina state, has stopped more than 3,500 drink and drug addicts from having children by paying them up to £200 to seek permanent forms of contraception such as an IUD implant or full sterilisation, the Independent reported on Saturday. Encouraging drug addicts to seek sterilisation saves thousands of children from growing up within a damaged environment, Barbara Harris, founder of the organisation, was...