Tag Archives: Pro-Choice

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North Carolina Republicans get pro-life bill signed into law

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Republican governor Pat McCrory signed a pro-life bill into law in North Carolina. ABC local news reports.

Excerpt:

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory on Monday signed into law a measure directing state officials to regulate abortion clinics based on the same standards as those for outpatient surgical centers, a change that critics say will force most to close.

[…]The law, pushed through by the Republican-majority legislature in the session’s waning days, directs the Department of Health and Human Services to revise the rules for abortion clinics. It follows similar actions by Republican-controlled legislatures in other states.

Critics say the move will effectively close most of North Carolina’s 16 abortion clinics because only one now meets the standards of an outpatient surgical center. An ambulatory surgical center costs about $1 million more to build than an abortion clinic, state Division of Health Service Regulation (DHHS) director Drexdal Pratt told lawmakers earlier this month. It’s unclear how much it would cost existing clinics to convert to higher standards once they are set by DHHS.

[…]The law also prohibits abortions for gender selection and allows any health care provider to opt out of participating in abortions, extending that option beyond doctors and nurses. The measure also prohibits abortion coverage in insurance plans offered by cities, counties or the online marketplace for private policies being established under the federal health overhaul law.

Life News reported on the reaction from North Carolina pro-lifers.

Excerpt:

The law addresses concerns about the administration of abortion inducing drugs and rules for abortion facilities, North Carolina Right to Life informs LifeNews. The pro-life provisions that were left intact after the compromise are: the opt out for abortion in the federal exchange and the city and county employee health plans, as well as the sex selection and web cam abortion bans.

“Thousands of unborn children’s lives will be protected from abortion,” stated Barbara Holt, President of North Carolina Right to Life, “by preventing the expansion of tax payer funded abortion through the federal exchange. By passing this legislation, our state has also demonstrated that it will not tolerate unborn babies being aborted just because they are the wrong sex or doctors being miles away from the patient when they administer drugs that kill the unborn baby and can harm the child’s mother.”

[…]North Carolina joins Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, as well as 19 other states, by opting out of abortion in the federal exchange; 14 states , by banning “web cam” abortions; and 6 states, by prohibiting sex selection abortions.

How’s that for some Tuesday morning good news?

News

Hobby Lobby granted temporary injunction from Obamacare abortion mandate

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The Daily Caller reports.

Excerpt:

A federal appeals court granted The Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. a preliminary injunction against the Obamacare contraception mandate, Friday.

The ruling prevents the government from enforcing the mandate against the Christian craft company, which has resisted the healthcare law’s requirement that companies provide employees health care plans that cover contraception on religious grounds.

In a decision read from the bench the court ruled, “There is a substantial public interest in ensuring that no individual or corporation has their legs cut out from under them while these difficult issues are resolved.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing Hobby Lobby, considers the ruling to be a major victory.

“We were extremely pleased that the court granted [the preliminary injunction],” Adele Keim, a an attorney with the Becket Fund on the Hobby Lobby’s case said in an interview with TheDC. She explained that the Justice Department has until September 25 to decide whether to appeal the ruling.

“The tide has turned against the HHS mandate,” Kyle Duncan, general counsel with the Becket Fund and lead attorney for Hobby Lobby, said in a statement.

If the government were to enforce the mandate against the Hobby Lobby, failure to provide contraception in their plans would cost the company $1.3 million a day in fines, according to the Becket Fund.

There are currently 63 lawsuits challenging the contraception mandate, according to the Becket Fund.

The Weekly Standard had an article about the Obamacare abortion mandate a while back.

Excerpt:

As of August 1st of next year, the morning-after pills that must be provided free of charge, from coast to coast, will include Plan B and ella. Both drugs arguably act, in part, as abortifacients — by keeping a fertilized egg (or a newly conceived being) from implanting in the uterine wall. (“Pregnancy” is no longer medically defined as commencing with conception, but days later, at implantation.) None other than Planned Parenthood — a favorite of President Obama — admits that taking a morning-after pill not only helps prevent ovulation but also “thins the lining of the uterus,” adding, “In theory, this could prevent pregnancy by keeping a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.”

[…]CBS News notes ella’s “chemical similarity” to RU-486 (which will not be “free” under Obamacare). The New York Times describes it as being RU-486’s “chemical relative.” The Washington Post describes it as being RU-486’s “close chemical relative.” WebMD says that it works to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg — in other words, as an abortifacient.  Dr. Justo Aznar writes that between 50 percent and 70 percent of the time, ella “will act by an abortive mechanism.” The European Medicine Agency acknowledges that the drug has the “ability to delay maturation of the endometrium likely resulting in prevention of implantation.”

Far from denying that ella can prevent implantation of the fertilized egg in the womb, the FDA observes that it could potentially cause an abortion even later.  It notes that there “are no adequate and well controlled studies in pregnant women” pertaining to ella, while the drug has been found to cause abortions in pregnant rats and rabbits:  “Embryofetal loss was noted in all pregnant rats and in half of the pregnant rabbits,” the FDA declared.

Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council writes that, like RU-486, ella not only works to prevent implantation but also causes embryos to be aborted post-implantation. She writes, “Plan B can prevent an embryo from implanting in the uterus, thereby causing its demise.  However, Plan B cannot terminate an already implanted embryo…. Ella can cause the demise of an embryo that is already implanted in its mother’s womb, in addition to preventing implantation after fertilization.”  Dr. Rich Poupard of the Life Training Institute (who doesn’t think that Plan B likely acts as an abortifacient) says that “ella is basically RU-486.” He explains that both drugs act to block implantation, and, if implantation does occur, they act to prevent progesterone from adhering to the uterine lining, thereby denying the embryo the nutrients it needs to survive.

Obamacare forces pro-life individuals and businesses to subsidize abortions.

News

A response to Judith Jarvis Thompson’s violinist argument for abortion rights

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Amy posted this on the Stand to Reason blog, and it got a ton of comments.

Excerpt:

The “Violinist” argument for keeping abortion legal is an illustration created by Judith Jarvis Thompson for the purpose of clarifying our moral intuitions about abortion by considering a parallel situation. The Violinist story goes like this (see the full, original story here): A woman wakes up to find she’s been attached without her consent to a famous violinist who needs the help of her kidneys for the next nine months in order to live. If the woman detaches herself from him, he will die.

According to Thompson, since it’s clear that the woman ought not be forced by law to remain attached to this man (though he is a person with rights), in the same way, the law ought not force a woman to remain attached to an unborn child who is similarly using her body to live (though he is a person with rights).

In response to this bodily rights argument, Stephen Wagner, Josh Brahm, and Timothy Brahm (along with others—see acknowledgments) have developed a new illustration that more closely parallels the situation of a pregnant woman (including those who are pregnant by rape), which they call “The Cabin in the Blizzard.” From Stephen Wagner’s paper, “De Facto Guardian and Abortion”:

Imagine that a woman named Mary wakes up in a strange cabin. Having gone to sleep in her suburban home the night before, she starts to scream frantically. She goes to the window and sees snow piled high. It appears she is snowed in. On the desk by the window, she finds a note that says,

“You will be here for six weeks.
You are safe, and your child is, too.
There is plenty of food and water.”

Since she just gave birth a week ago, she instinctively begins tearing through each room of the cabin looking for her infant son. She finds an infant in a second room, but it is not her infant. It is a girl who appears to be about one week old, just like her son. Mary begins to scream.

Pulling herself together, she goes to the kitchen area of the cabin and finds a huge store of food and a ready source of water. The baby begins to cry, and she rightly assesses that the baby is hungry. Mary sees a three-month supply of formula on the counter in the kitchen area.

Now imagine that the police show up at the cabin six weeks later, and Mary emerges from the cabin. After determining she is in good health, albeit a good bit frazzled, one policeman says, “We’ve been investigating this situation for some time. The Behavioral Psychologists from the nearby University of Lake Wobegon are responsible. We’ll bring them to justice. We’re so glad you’re okay. Is there anyone else in the cabin?”

Mary said quietly, “There was.”

“There was?” The police hurry past her to the cabin. They search the cabin and find the infant formula unopened on the counter. They find the infant dead on a bed. The coroner confirms that the infant died from starvation.

We can see that Mary was wrong for not feeding the baby in this situation, regardless of the fact that she did not consent to these demands being placed on her. As Wagner points out, our moral intuition tells us her obligation to feed the child exists even if her only option is to use her own body to breastfeed that child, causing her great discomfort.

Another problem with the violinist argument is that it neglects the fact that the baby is there as a result of the woman’s own decision to have sex without being ready for a baby. In the violinist example, the woman is a helpless victim of some group of music lovers. But in a real pregnancy, the woman had to have made a decision that resulted in the baby being born, (except in the case of rape).

Triablogue explains it thus:

Thompson seems to make a distinction between consent to pregnancy and consent to sex (as Beckwith and others point out). But it seems that pregnancy is the designed result of sex, even though it may not be the desired result. It would seem that our sex organs have the purpose of being ordered towards procreation. Applying this to the violinist then: What if I engaged in an activity, say, spelunking, that regularly created rare kidney diseases in violinists? Say that every time I dropped 50 ft into the cave, a violinist was almost sure to develop the disease that only I had the blood type to correct or fix. If I did so, should I not be hooked up to him, voluntarily or not? Say that there was protection, some kind of spelunking helmet. Say that it was not 100% effective. If my helmet ripped, should I be attached to the violinist? Or say I tried to “pull up” before I hit 50 ft. Unfortunately, it felt so good to decend that I pulled up a little too late and my right foot passed the 50 ft mark. Should I be attached to the violinist? I don’t see why not. Indeed, say that the statistical evidence was that the first two people that ever spelunked together would eventually cause 6 billion violinists to come down with rare kidney diseases, I dare say the Society of Music Lovers, and almost everyone else for that matter, would call for abstaining from spelunking unless you agreed to take care of the violinists until they got better. This seems fatal to Thompson’s argument.

It’s very helpful illustration for dealing with pro-abortion people who admit that unborn children are human persons, but who still think that women should have a right to terminate their pregnancy.