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40 Days for Life consists of 40 days of prayer and fasting for an end to abortion, 40 days of constant, peaceful vigil outside abortion centers and Planned Parenthood offices and 40 days of active pro-life community outreach. Your community may be participating in this prayerful vigil. If so, please join others in your area or unite with thousands across America during these 40 days in Autumn as we pray for an end to abortion in this nation.

ROCKAWAY--The niece of the nation's most famous civil rights activist, who has taken up the pro-life cause as her own civil rights crusade, plans to champion the rights of the unborn when she speaks at a church in Rockaway Friday.

A Michigan police chief says a 63-year-old anti-abortion activist who was protesting outside a high school was shot and killed in front of horrified students and parents. Owosso police chief Michael Compeau said the activist, Jim Pouillon, was outside the school this morning with a sign when a man drove by and shot him. No one else was injured. Compeau says a 33-year-old Owosso man was later arrested in the school shooting and he then told police he was involved in the gravel-pit shooting.(continued)

We already knew this, thanks to Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Barack Obama himself, but it’s nice to get confirmation from those fine folks at Factcheck.org — an Annenberg project, no less. After Obama tried to paint it as a lie, the National Right to Life Committee insisted that ObamaCare would use taxpayer money to fund abortions. It turns out that they were right: The truth is that bills now before Congress don’t require federal money to be used for supporting abortion coverage. So the president is right to that limited extent. But it’s equally true that House and Senate legislation...

Roman Catholic leaders are stepping up their fight against the Obama administration’s healthcare plans, urging their faithful nationwide to contact legislators to protest abortion provisions in Democratic bills. Catholics who attended Mass Sunday in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, received weekly bulletins with a call to action from Cardinal Justin Rigali, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' pro-life committee. The archdiocese, one of the largest in the nation, serves 1.45 million Catholics. “While this legislation is still in draft form, the request for action at the local level is imperative,” the cardinal wrote. “[W]e must take...

President Obama’s top science adviser said in a book he co-authored in 1973 that a newborn child “will ultimately develop into a human being” if he or she is properly fed and socialized. “The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.” Holdren co-authored the book with Stanford professors Paul R. Ehrlich and...

Leadership: Our new science czar, John Holdren, once backed compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as part of a government population-control program. The only thing missing was a Soylent Green recipe.In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." In everything from stem cell research to climate change and energy policy, reason and science would triumph. The problem is that what the Obama administration considers science, as exemplified by the choice of Holdren, is troubling. In a recently rediscovered 1977 book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with doomsters Paul and Anne Ehrlich,...

Like many black women, I once believed the doctor who told me my babies were no more than "a blob of tissue." I wanted to believe it. Eventually, I realized I was wrong, that I was a secondary victim of abortion. I repented and found healing through God. Today, I work in the civil rights movement of the our century -- the right of every one of every race to live... Abortion has taken a gruesome toll on the black community, killing more than AIDS and crime combined. Some 14 million black babies have been aborted since the 1973 U.S....

In the late afternoon of July 1o, President Obama met privately with Pope Benedict XVI for just over 30 minutes. According to official Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi, S.J., "The president explicitly expressed his commitment to reducing the numbers of abortions and to listen to the church's concern on moral issues." On July 13 in a Senate committee hearing, Sen. Barbara Mikulski was forced to admit under persistent questioning by Sen. Orrin Hatch that the new health-care bill includes abortion coverage. Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute estimates government funding of abortion increases abortion by 20 to 35 percent. There were 1,206,200...

Bioethics: The former director of the National Institutes of Health, once an enthusiast for embryonic stem cells, now says their future has "dimmed." So why is the administration bailing out research into such therapies while troubled states like California have committed billions?Aside from creating or saving a few research jobs, the administration's decision to federally fund embryonic stem cell research is, as we've noted, a bailout of bad science. It throws money at an avenue of research that time and adult stem cell progress have passed by. Applauding the administration's move was Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who echoed the claims...

They weigh less than 3 pounds, usually, and are perhaps 15 inches long. But they can remember. The unborn have memories, according to medical researchers who used sound and vibration stimulation, combined with sonography, to reveal that the human fetus displays short-term memory from at least 30 weeks gestation - or about two months before they are born.

Fetuses found to have memories By Jennifer Harper July 16, 2009 They weigh less than 3 pounds, usually, and are perhaps 15 inches long. But they can remember. The unborn have memories, according to medical researchers who used sound and vibration stimulation, combined with sonography, to reveal that the human fetus displays short-term memory from at least 30 weeks gestation - or about two months before they are born. "In addition, results indicated that 34-week-old fetuses are able to store information and retrieve it four weeks later," said the research, which was released Wednesday. Scientists from the Department of Obstetrics...

A new study found that unborn babies may start to develop memories as early as thirty weeks into a pregnancy, but ABC’s “Good Morning America” ignored the study’s potential impact on the abortion debate, especially concerning late term abortion. Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi’s July 15 segment covered the pivotal study without even mentioning abortion. Anchor Chris Cuomo attempted to broach the issue during a follow-up interview but fell short. Alfonsi touted the study, “Day by day, a fetus goes through remarkable changes. By 30 weeks, opening and closing their eyes. Making facial expressions. And now, a new study reveals, forming memories....

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that she considered Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion, to be “settled law”...Dr. Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, said Roe is “anything but settled law.”“This question of Roe as settled law goes to a central point in the testimony we’ll be providing on Thursday morning: Roe is not settled law,” Yoest said in a statement

In 1984, a video called The Silent Scream helped change the way people think about the unborn child. The footage of an actual abortion and the fetus’s reaction reminded us that abortion involves the death of a real person. A recent bit of footage has similar potential, only it couldn’t be more different from The Silent Scream. The footage was part of a recent PBS special, The Music Instinct: Science & Song. The program was an exploration of, among other things, music’s “biological, emotional and psychological impact on humans.” Part of this “exploration” included how music affects babies. If we...

The most overturned appellate court has teed up another case for the Supreme Court to consider — and likely soon. The 9th Circuit overturned an injunction in a district court case, allowing the state of Washington to force a pharmacy to stock and dispense morning-after pills, which causes the abortion of an embryo in the early days of a pregnancy. The pharmacy owners had objected, claiming that the law violated their religious practice:

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI stressed the church's opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday, pressing the Vatican's case with the U.S. leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative Catholics and bishops back home...Afterward, the Vatican said the leaders discussed immigration, the Middle East peace process and aid to developing nations. But the Vatican's statement also underscored the pair's deep disagreement on abortion. "In the course of their cordial exchanges, the conversation turned first of all to questions which are in the interest of...

In his first week in office, President Obama issued an executive order overturning the Reagan-era Mexico City regulations, which had prohibited American foreign aid from going to organizations that finance overseas abortions. Just a few weeks later, the Gallup organization revealed that the executive order was the single most unpopular action taken by the president during his honeymoon period. At a time when American families had experienced an average 25 percent decline in their net worth, it would appear that increasing the net worth of foreign abortionists was not high on their to-do list.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) received $50 million from the United States government this year, despite its involvement in China, where the government's population program, according to the U.S. State Department, includes a "coercive birth limitation policy" that in some cases results "in forced abortion or forced sterilization."

At United Nations headquarters this week, the Obama administration continued its push for ever increasing access to legal abortion around the world. The Obama team has introduced language that has thrown a high level negotiation into a roil. The US proposal calls for “universal access” to “sexual and reproductive health services including universal access to family planning.” The document under consideration will culminate in the 2009 Annual Ministerial Review, which convenes next week in Geneva.