After Republicans in the Colorado state Senate approved an unborn victims bill to hold criminals accountable when they kill or injure unborn children in violent crimes against them and their mothers, Democrats in the state House killed the bill.
That means victims like Baby Aurora, who was cut out of her mother Michelle Wilkins’ (pictured above) womb in a horrific assault that claimed her life earlier this year, will not receive any justice. Criminals in Colorado, unlike most other states, can’t be charged with a second crime for killing or injuring unborn babies.
Today the Offenses Against Unborn Children Act, (SB 268) was defeated in the House State Veterans and Military Affairs Committee in a party-line vote of 6-5 with Democrats opposing the bill and Republicans supporting it.
Colorado Citizens for Life, the statewide pro-life group, is very disappointed by the vote.
“In March, a woman in Longmont was arrested after she attacked Michelle Wilkins and cut her 7-month-old unborn baby from her womb. Michelle’s daughter Aurora died, but she survived. Unbelievably, after the grisly incident, prosecutors in Boulder County announced that the woman responsible for baby Aurora’s death would not face murder charges because Colorado law refuses to provide justice for unborn babies,” said Colorado Citizens for Life director Sarah Zagorski.
[…]The bill creates a number of crimes against unborn children who are killed or injured in the process of an assault or homicide against the baby’s mother. The measure is similar to bills that have been used in the past to prosecute criminals for two crimes against both mother and child. Unborn victims laws have repeatedly been upheld as constitutional in court.
[…]Colorado state law does not regard unborn children as human beings who deserve justice when they are killed. In 2013, Colorado Democrats killed a bill that would add the state to the list of more than 25 states that provide justice and protection for pregnant women and unborn children.
These laws are important because it is an incremental step to getting the courts to recognize the value of unborn children. I think that the Democrat lawmakers are unwilling to protect unborn victims of violence for that reason. But what a position to take. Who is going to give the pregnant woman her baby back? And the child’s entire future was snuffed out in an instant, and Democrats just don’t care.
The comment has Hillary Clinton essentially saying that Christians must be forced to change their religious views to accommodate abortions.
“Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced,” Clinton said, using the euphemism for abortion.
“Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper,” Clinton argued. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed,:
That is not going over well with pro-life advocates.
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League let Hillary have it in his remarks to LifeNews.
“It was not surprising that Hillary Clinton, who strongly opposes a ban on partial-birth abortion, would tell her feminist audience that she supports Planned Parenthood. What was surprising was her comment on the need to change religious beliefs on abortion,” he said. “In others words, Hillary has a problem with the Catholic Church’s teachings on abortionthey must be changed.”
“Never before have we seen a presidential candidate be this bold about directly confronting the Catholic Church’s teachings on abortion. It’s time for Hillary to take the next step and tell us exactly what she plans to do about delivering on her pledge. Not only would practicing Catholics like to know, so would Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and all those who value life from conception to natural death,” Donohue added.
David Ripley of Idaho Chooses Life also condemned her remarks.
“We have known for some time that abortion would be Hillary’s primary campaign message,” he said. “What made this particular speech unique was Hillary’s bold declaration that God needed to get His act together on this whole abortion thing. It was past time to update the Ten Commandments.”
“Now, of course, most of those “religious beliefs” are based upon clear teachings within Scripture that teach us to hold children precious, to sacrifice ourselves for others – and, above all, not to kill the innocent. What Clinton and her comrades on the Left do not seem to understand is that our religious beliefs are not a matter of personal opinion, but, rather, one of submission to our Creator,” Ripley continued. “Clinton is not the first self-proclaimed leader to shake a fist at the Almighty. One can presume that He is not particularly impressed; though His heart is undoubtedly grieved.”
“And we can all be grieved that a person of such arrogance stands a chance of becoming president over this great nation,” he concluded.
Here she is speaking to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider:
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
And Planned Parenthood gets taxpayer funding.
A lot of evangelical Christian women will be voting for Hillary just because she is a woman. Do you know any? Why don’t you ask them?
Dr. Braun’s group found that at 21 days, the fatherless animals had less dense dendritic spines compared to animals raised by both parents, though they “caught up” by day 90. However, the length of some types of dendrites was significantly shorter in some parts of the brain, even in adulthood, in fatherless animals.
“It just shows that parents are leaving footprints on the brain of their kids,” says Dr. Braun, 54 years old.
The neuronal differences were observed in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is related to emotional responses and fear, and the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC, the brain’s decision-making center.
[…]The balance between these two brain parts is critical to normal emotional and cognitive functioning, according to Dr. Braun. If the OFC isn’t active, the amygdala “goes crazy, like a horse without a rider,” she says. In the case of the fatherless pups, there were fewer dendritic spines in the OFC, while the dendrite trees in the amygdala grew more and longer branches.
A preliminary analysis of the degus’ behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control, Dr. Braun says. And, when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior.
In a separate study in Dr. Braun’s lab conducted by post-doctoral researcher Joerg Bock, degu pups were removed from their caregivers for one hour a day. Just this small amount of stress leads the pups to exhibit more hyperactive behaviors and less focused attention, compared to those who aren’t separated, Dr. Braun says. They also exhibit changes in their brain.
The basic wiring between the brain regions in the degus is the same as in humans, and the nerve cells are identical in their function. “So on that level we can assume that what happens in the animal’s brain when it’s raised in an impoverished environment … should be very similar to what happens in our children’s brain,” Dr. Braun says.
I think this is important because we hear so much today that marriage can be redefined, that having one of each parent doesn’t matter, that live-in boyfriends and stepfathers have the same motivation to care for a woman’s children as the biological father does. We don’t want to make judgments, even if setting boundaries is better for children. A child’s well-being is enormously affected by the woman’s choice of biological father. You can’t have it both ways – either we are going to judge women who choose men who don’t have the desire to commit to marriage, and do the father role, OR we are going to take things away from children by encouraging women to choose men based on “feelings” instead of abilities. Lowering moral standards and removing moral obligations hurts children. It sounds so nice when we tell women, “you can do whatever you feel like, and just forget about responsibilities, expectations and obligations”, but letting women be guided by their feelings harms children. My stock broker makes me feel uncomfortable because he knows more than I do, and does not respect my opinion. But I pay him to make investment decisions for me. I mustn’t let my pride get in the way of letting him do his job – a job he is more qualified than I am to do. Let him do his job.
Here’s a related question: Are biological fathers or unrelated men more dangerous for children?
A March 1996 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics contains some interesting findings that indicate just how widespread the problem may be. In a nationally representative survey of state prisoners jailed for assaults against or murders of children, fully one-half of respondents reported the victim was a friend, acquaintance, or relative other than offspring. (All but 3 percent of those who committed violent crimes against children were men.) A close relationship between victim and victimizer is also suggested by the fact that three-quarters of all the crimes occurred in either the perpetrator’s home or the victim’s.
A 1994 paper published in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies looked at 32,000 documented cases of child abuse. Of the victims, only 28 percent lived with both biological parents (far fewer than the 68 percent of all children who live with both parents); 44 percent lived with their mother only (as do 25 percent of all children); and 18 percent lived with their mother and an unrelated adult (double the 9 percent of all children who live with their mother and an unrelated adult).
These findings mirror a 1993 British study by the Family Education Trust, which meticulously explored the relationship between family structure and child abuse. Using data on documented cases of abuse in Britain between 1982 and 1988, the report found a high correlation between child abuse and the marital status of the parents.
Specifically, the British study found that the incidence of abuse was an astounding 33 times higher in homes where the mother was cohabiting with an unrelated boyfriend than in stable nuclear families. Even when the boyfriend was the children’s biological father, the chances of abuse were twice as high.
These findings are consonant with those published a year earlier by Leslie Margolin of the University of Iowa in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect. Prof. Margolin found that boyfriends were 27 times more likely than natural parents to abuse a child. The next-riskiest group, siblings, were only twice as likely as parents to abuse a child.
More recently, a report by Dr. Michael Stiffman presented at the latest meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in October, studied the 175 Missouri children under the age of 5 who were murdered between 1992 and 1994. It found that the risk of a child’s dying at the hands of an adult living in the child’s own household was eight times higher if the adult was biologically unrelated.
The Heritage Foundation’s Patrick Fagan discovered that the number of child-abuse cases appeared to rise in the 1980s along with the general societal acceptance of cohabitation before, or instead of, marriage. That runs counter to the radical-feminist view, which holds that marriage is an oppressive male institution of which violence is an integral feature. If that were true, then child abuse and domestic violence should have decreased along with the rise in cohabitation.
Heritage also found that in the case of very poor children (those in households earning less than $ 15,000 per year), 75 percent lived in a household where the biological father was absent. And 50 percent of adults with less than a high-school education lived in cohabitation arrangements. “This mix — poverty, lack of education, children, and cohabitation — is an incubator for violence,” Fagan says.
Why, then, do we ignore the problem? Fagan has a theory: “It is extremely politically incorrect to suggest that living together might not be the best living arrangement.”
The moral of the story is that it is a lot safer for children if we promote marriage as a way of attaching mothers and fathers to their children. Fathers who have a biological connection to children are a lot less likely to harm them. We should probably be teaching women to choose men who have a certain tenderness towards people they mentor or nurture, as well. These things are not free, you have to persuade women to value the male tendency to want to lead / guide / mentor. A lot of social problems like child poverty, promiscuity and violence cannot be solved by replacing a father with a check from the government. We need to support fathers by empowering them in their traditional roles. Let the men lead. Swallow your feminist instincts, and prefer men who take seriously their role of leading others upward.
WINTERY KNIGHT 