Free Republic

The crime was so horrific, so deranged, it was almost impossible to write about at the time. But yesterday 22-year-old Christian Ferdinand was sentenced to 29 years to life for murdering 14-year-old Shaniesha Forbes whom he was convinced was pregnant but who would not get an abortion. “After telling Ferdinand that she was pregnant and would not get an abortion, [Ferdinand] smothered the teen with a pillow, sprayed the corpse with Axe body spray and ignited it,” wrote John Marzulli for the New York Daily News. “Then he stuffed Shaniesha inside a suitcase and tossed it into Gerritsen Creek. Several...

Abortions reached a historic low in 2013 in Pennsylvania [32,108–a decline of 7%], as unsafe abortion centers shut down and women had better access to life-affirming pregnancy resources. A lot of the credit goes to the thousands of dedicated pro-life volunteers across the state who work to protect every child and mother from the devastation of abortion. Still, 32,108 abortions happened in 2013, and that means we have a lot of work to do. The report from the state Department of Health points to key areas where we can focus our efforts. Here are ten important facts from the report:...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A federal judge has entered a final ruling barring an Indiana law that changed the classification of abortion clinics in a way that opponents say targeted a Planned Parenthood center in Lafayette that provided only drug-induced abortions. U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson entered a permanent injunction and final judgment Wednesday siding with Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky and barring the 2013 law because it violated the constitutional Equal Protection Clause. She ruled preliminarily last month.

A youtube video has been uploaded which shows that a Nevada church is only steps away from an abortion clinic. According to the video, West End Medical Clinic abortion clinic in Reno Nevada is thirty-three steps away from The Potter´s House Christian Fellowship. The church’s website address is Reno for Jesus, where they state that they are a, “Bible based, Spirit Filled, Nondenominational Family of Believers.” Saynsumthn has no knowledge of the church’s position on abortion or whether they or their members protest this abortion clinic. The blog has sent an e-mail to the pastors to find out. As of...

The bottom has fallen out of the abortion-centered “war on women” strategy. Why is that? Women just don’t agree with the shrinking ranks of the feminist Left like EMILY’s List and NARAL that unlimited abortion is the great liberator for women. And they are tired of the politics of division and grievance. In fact, the next Congress will usher in a record-breaking number of pro-life women who share this belief. When I worked with other women to start the SBA List in 1992, the “Year of the Woman,” there were only two consistently pro-life women serving in Congress. The Congress...

That Bill Clinton is a serial adulterer is not news. That Clinton may have been involved with underage sex slaves is new. A new lawsuit has revealed the extent of former President Clinton's friendship with a fundraiser who was later jailed for having sex with an underage prostitute. Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who served time in 2008 for his illegal sexual partners, included up multiple trips to the onetime billionaire's private island in the Caribbean where underage girls were allegedly kept as sex slaves. The National Enquirer has released new details about the two men's friendship, which seems...

Moving to quash a conservative GOP insurrection, Assembly Speaker-designee John Hambrick on Saturday harshly rebuked Assemblywoman Michelle Fiore, telling her to stop playing “childish games” and undermining him by insisting she’s still Republican majority leader. Hambrick said in an email to Fiore that he had full authority as the elected leader of the Assembly Republican Caucus to remove her as majority leader and as chair of the Assembly Taxation Committee. He said he removed her last month for insubordination and for how she’s handling a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over unpaid payroll taxes for her home health care...

Clinic worker Jenny Higgins says that wealthy women get better abortion care than poor women do. She says: “… We almost never service wealthier women at the clinics where I worked. In the southeastern clinic, which was in an urban area, the majority of the clients were African-American….. [Wealthy women] are more likely to have access to higher quality, private abortion care, either due to their insurance plans or because they can afford to pay out-of-pocket for such services.” …. “Even though I prided myself on providing attentive and empathic care to the patients with whom I worked, the clinic...

When Planned Parenthood can’t bully its way to what it wants, it can still wish ill upon things that don’t go its way – like the Helms Amendment. In a tweet last week, the group used The Smiths and their song, “Unhappy Birthday,” as a mouthpiece to convey its sentiments toward the Helms Amendment: Since 1973, the Helms Amendment has ensured that abortion stays out of US foreign aid appropriations. The amendment was the first major pro-life victory after Roe v. Wade, setting the tone for pro-life legislative efforts going forward. It ensures that the hard-earned dollars of U.S. taxpayers...

Last month, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) released a Committee Opinion entitled “Increasing Access to Abortion.” In the opinion, ACOG unequivocally condemns pro-life legislation, contending that pro-life laws are bad for women (emphasis added): Legislative restrictions fundamentally interfere with the patient-provider relationship and decrease access to abortion for all women… The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists calls for advocacy to oppose and overturn restrictions, improve access, and mainstream abortion as an integral component of women’s health care. However, as an “integral component of women’s health care,” we have seen abortion do nothing to improve women’s health....

Planned Parenthood and the abortion lobby have long rallied for U.S. Peace Corps members to have abortion coverage footed by federal tax funding. According to The Hill, efforts by Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) have granted their wish through the Appropriations bill: Though it was best known for preventing a government shutdown, the Appropriations bill also contained provisions that will ensure for the first time that Peace Corps volunteers have access to abortion in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the woman. Planned Parenthood has also lavished Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) with kudos for his...

The risk of being raped in Sweden during one’s lifetime is one out of four (if every raped woman is only raped once), which is probably equal to the risk of being raped in countries in war, such as Iraq or Syria. When it comes to rapes, Islamized Sweden is already in a state of war. Sweden does not publish statistics on immigrant crime. If we want to have a hint about who is committing these tens of thousands of rapes and other types of sexual assaults yearly, we can turn to another Scandinavian country, Sweden’s neighbor Norway, the country...

Authorities on the alert to ensure only men attend much-anticipated football match in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian authorities have intensified security around a stadium in the Red Sea city of Jeddah to ensure no woman could sneak in to watch a football match. ... Saudi Arabia has a very strict policy regarding female attendance at sports matches. Permissions are needed to allow foreign women to watch the matches in which their home teams play.

Two Saudi women detained for nearly a month in defiance of a ban on females driving were referred on Thursday to a court established to try terrorism cases ... The Specialized Criminal Court, to which their cases were referred, was established in the capital Riyadh to try terrorism cases but has also tried and handed long prison sentences to a number of human rights workers, peaceful dissidents, activists and critics of the government. For example, this year it sentenced a revered Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a vocal critic of the government, to death for sedition and sentenced a prominent...

Feminists in France say they have secretly inserted tracts inside children's toys from Barbie dolls to plastic guns issuing a warning that "this toy is sexist". Hundreds of French girls and boys will open Christmas presents at the foot of the tree to find an unexpected accompanying note resembling those found in Chinese "fortune cookies". Except in this case, the message will neither provide instructions nor predict the future. It will read: "Warning, this toy is sexist:" The operation was launched by feminist group FièrEs, which said that it had inserted "around 500" such tracts into a range of toys...

Women and girls from Iraq's Yazidi religious minority forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State jihadist group have committed suicide or tried to, Amnesty International said on Tuesday. IS militants have overrun swathes of Iraq since June, declared a cross-border caliphate also encompassing parts of neighbouring Syria, and carried out a litany of abuses in both countries. The group has targeted Yazidis and other minorities in north Iraq in a campaign that rights group Amnesty said amounted to ethnic cleansing, murdering civilians and enslaving others for a fate that some captives consider even worse than death. "Many of those...

According to Islamic law, Muslim men can take “captives of the right hand” (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 33:50). ... The rape of captive women is also sanctioned in Islamic tradition: .. The Egyptian Sheikh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni declared in May 2011 that “we are in the era of jihad,” and that meant Muslims would take slaves ... on May 25, 2011, a female Kuwaiti politician, Salwa al-Mutairi, also spoke out in favor of the Islamic practice of sexual slavery of non-Muslim women, emphasizing that the practice accorded with Islamic law and the parameters of Islamic morality. ... Asian father-of-four raped pub worker...

A common narrative in our society is that, by opposing abortion and infanticide, Christians are conducting a “war on women.” However, in a fascinating study entitled “The Rise of Christianity,” published by Princeton University Press, sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the phenomenal growth of “the obscure, marginal Jesus movement” was due in large part to women. Stark argues that early Christianity was “especially attractive to women” because “within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.” Furthermore, Stark argues that the Christian opposition to abortion and infanticide was one of the...

CARSON CITY — Las Vegas Assemblywoman Michele Fiore’s tax liens and problems with the IRS were cited in her second removal from Assembly leadership positions Thursday. Fiore’s removal could clear the way for moderate Republicans to control the Assembly in the 2015 session and eliminate any talk of a GOP-Democratic partnership challenge to the leadership. It could also smooth the way for Gov. Brian Sandoval to win more funding for public education. Assembly Speaker designate John Hambrick reversed course on Fiore for a second time in recent weeks and removed the controversial lawmaker as majority leader. She has also been...

In the end, making a political issue personal might have done in Assemblywoman Michele Fiore. The Las Vegas Republican was coming off a tumultuous week — she’d been deposed and then quickly restored as majority leader-designate and chairwoman of the Assembly Taxation Committee by Speaker-designate John Hambrick, R-Las Vegas — when she doubled down on allegations that certain Republican forces were targeting her and other conservatives. Speaking on the Alan Stock radio show on KDWN-AM 720 on Tuesday, Fiore not only repeated her rhetoric about a “war on women,” but blamed some of the alleged infantrymen in that conflict: Republican...