Tag Archives: Unborn Child

Court of Appeals upholds Texas sonogram law

From Life News.

Excerpt:

A federal appeals court has upheld a pro-life law in Texas allowing women a chance to see an ultrasound of their unborn child prior to an abortion.

During the recent 82nd Texas Legislative Session, the Sonogram Bill (House Bill 15) was passed and signed into law by Governor Rick Perry.  This historic law protects a pregnant woman’s right to view her unborn child and hear the heartbeat of that child before making a decision about an abortion. On August 30, federal district court Judge Sam Sparks enjoined crucial parts of this law – further jeopardizing the health of women undergoing abortions—just two days before the law was to go into effect.

The injunction was sought by the New York based Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion advocacy group that files lawsuit against pro-life legislation.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is pro-life, quickly filed an appeal on the same day that the lower court released the injunction with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Last Tuesday, a federal three-judge panel heard arguments to determine whether to lift the injunction. The panel was critical of the grounds for the injunction and Jonathan Mitchell, Solicitor General, argued for the law before the panel.  Mitchell explained that the level of scrutiny and the arguments used to rule the law as unconstitutional — and thus block the law from going into effect — were misapplied and needed to be overturned.

Chief Judge Edith Jones, of the three-judge panel, asked pro-abortion attorneys how medical sonogram imaging, and a factual description of that image could be viewed as radical or against the health of women.

Today, the court ruled the state can enforce the law and said Judge Sparks was wrong to rule that abortion practitioners would likely win their case in court.

[…]The legislation allows women to see the ultrasound 24 hours before the abortion and abortion centers typically do ultrasounds to estimate the age of the baby before the abortion but they don’t normally allow women a chance to see or explain to them in detail the development of their unborn child. When used in pregnancy centers offering abortion alternatives, approximately 80 percent of women change their mind about having an abortion.

There are so many incremental laws and initiatives that a pro-lifer like Rick Perry can implement. What I find disturbing is when people accept a candidate like Mitt Romney, who has a pro-abortion record, as being equal to candidates who have a pro-life record.

Gendercide: Planned Parenthood and NARAL oppose ban on sex-selection abortions

Letitia, who blogs at Talitha, Koum, notified me about this article in Life News.

Excerpt:

As members of Congress hold a hearing today on legislation that would ban sex-selection abortions and abortions done if the unborn child is of a specific race, leading pro-abortion advocacy groups are strongly opposed to it.

Their opposition could explain why organizations like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the ACLU almost never speak out against the horrible human rights abuses associated with the one-child policy in China – ranging from sex-selection abortions, to forced abortions, to coercive sterilizations and infanticides.

[…]Planned Parenthood, NARAL, ACLU and a total of 30 pro-abortion groups banded together for a letter opposing the legislation, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.

The claim the bill, sponsored by pro-life Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, is “simply more of the same from the anti-choice extremists choice extremists in the House” and they urged a no vote on it.

“[T]he bill will effectively exacerbate already existing disparities by limiting some women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care and penalizing health care providers,” they allege.

They claim:  “Instead of addressing health disparities and ensuring accessible and culturally competent medical care for all women, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act will further isolate and stigmatize some women — particularly those in the Asian American and Pacific Islander and African American communities — from exercising their fundamental human right to make and implement decisions about their reproductive lives.”

Nancy Northup, President of Center for Reproductive Rights talked about her group’s opposition to the bill with Fox News and said it is an “anti-choice” measure that she claims is a “trumped up bill for a trumped up problem,” and a “ridiculous waste of congressional resources at a time when the U.S. economy is faltering.”

“This bill is a cynical and offensive attempt to evoke race and sex discrimination when actually it’s about taking women’s rights away,” she said.

Got that? If you want to kill a baby simply because it’s a girl, and you wanted a boy, then Planned Parenthood and NARAL are all in favor of that. They support sex-selection abortions. They don’t just permit it, they lobby in favor of it. That’s how “pro-woman” they are.

Here’s an article from the Economist that explains how gendercide is happening in India and China.

Excerpt:

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

Letitia has written a post about the prevalence of sex-selection abortions in the Asian community. Go here to read that. And Letitia also writes about the legalization of sex-selection abortions in Sweden here.

You can learn more about the Republican bill to end sex-selection and race-selection abortions.

New Zealand researchers link abortion to higher rates of mental illness

Story from Fairfax Media. (H/T Beretta Blog)

Excerpt:

New Zealand researchers who examined the medical history of more than 500 women have concluded abortion “leads to significant distress in some”.

Women reporting adverse reactions were up to 80 percent more likely than women not exposed to abortion to have mental health problems, the Otago University study found.

That finding has raised questions about justifying abortions on the basis of mental health.

The study, reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found the risk of mental illness was “proportional to the degree of distress” associated with the abortion.

[…]More than 85 percent of women reported a least one negative emotional reaction, including sorrow, sadness, guilt, regret, grief and disappointment.

[…]The study found that women who reported at least one negative reaction had rates of mental health problems “approximately 1.4 to 1.8 times higher than women not exposed to abortion”.

The report concluded: “This evidence raises important questions about the practice of justifying termination of pregnancy on the grounds that this procedure will reduce risks of mental health problems in women having unwanted pregnancy.

Read the rest here.