• • Actress Patricia Heaton Will Headline Pro-Life Rally: "We Must Offer Women Hope" Not Abortion
• • Abortions Hit Record Low, Abortion Activists Admit Pro-Life Laws Saving More Babies
• • Shawn Carney of 40 Days for Life: Abortion is the "Defining Moral Issue of Our Time"
• • Possible Trump Supreme Court Nominee William Pryor: Roe is the "Worst Abomination in the History of Law"

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For the first time in more than four decades, abortions dropped below 1 million in the United States, according to a new report from the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

The pro-abortion research group, considered to have the most comprehensive abortion numbers for the U.S., reported an estimated 926,200 abortions in 2014 and 958,700 in 2013. The abortion rate (the number of abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age) also dropped to 14.6 per 1,000 in 2014, down 14 percent from 2011, according to the report.

The numbers are the lowest since 1975, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade and opened the doors to abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy.

Notably, the pro-abortion researchers partially attributed the decline to pro-life efforts. In the past, Guttmacher and other abortion advocacy groups have avoided giving pro-lifers credit for the declines.

As is typical, Guttmacher researchers argued that one cause for the decline is improved access to birth control, which they said decreases the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions. However, they also admitted in less than flattering terms that pro-lifers are succeeding in their efforts to save unborn babies and moms from abortion.

"... the wave of abortion restrictions passed at the state level over the last five years could also have contributed to the decline by making it more difficult for women to access needed services in highly restrictive states," the report states.

In a statement reflecting the research group's abortion agenda, Megan Donovan, Guttmacher senior policy manager, added: "Restricting access to abortion may force women to delay the procedure or carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Instead, we should focus on increasing access to the full range of contraceptive methods, as well as to abortion services."

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40 Days for Life, the inspirational brainchild co-founded by Shawn Carney, now president of the organization, commenced as a small peaceful prayer vigil outside an abortion facility in his college town of Bryan/College Station, Texas.

Originally it was supposed to be a one-time event. Carney did not envision that media coverage would morph the small local prayer vigil into a national and later international campaign to preserve the sanctity of life and family values in all 50 states and 40 countries.

Carney has been previously featured on The O'Reilly Factor, USA Today, Drudge Report, The Guardian, The Laura Ingraham Show, Sirius XM Catholic Radio, Focus on the Family, The Christian Post, EWTN Radio and The National Catholic Register.

This week, LifeNews had the opportunity to speak with Carney, who shared about the birth of his sixth child last fall during a 40 Days for Life campaign and celebrated that his child is now finally sleeping through the night.

LN: Please tell us a bit about yourself, your childhood memories, where you grew up.

SC: I am from a small town in Texas and was raised Catholic. I was raised in the Bible belt and went to Catholic school all the way through. Being such a small diocese, we had missionary priest from Ireland who was courageous in his pursuit of the saving the unborn. This inspired me in middle school and high school.

Though I have always been involved in the pro-life movement, I was never involved outside abortion facilities until my freshman year at Texas A&M. I had never seen an abortion facility before in my life, and had never met a woman to my knowledge who had had an abortion. At the time, I was dating the woman I am now married to, and she peacefully prayed at the Planned Parenthood location in our town, College Station. She invited me to go and I went, convicted by the notion of going out and praying where abortions actually happen.

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President-elect Donald Trump has said that, just two weeks after his inauguration, he will nominate somebody to replace pro-life Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. One of his leading candidates has taken a strong pro-life position and condemned Roe vs Wade, the Supreme Court decision that allowed virtually unlimited abortions.

Judge William Pryor, a member of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, is widely considered to be one of the leading potential nominees for the Supreme Court. In a previous statement, Pryor did not mince words when it comes to his feeling about how wrong and far-reaching the Roe case was decided.

He once called the high court's decision in the controversial abortion case of Roe v. Wade the "worst abomination in the history of constitutional law," according to the court-watching website Above the Law.

Meanwhile, Pryor told a Senate panel, "I believe that not only is [Roe] unsupported by the text and structure of the Constitution, but it has led to a morally wrong result. It has led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children."

At the time of his nomination to the appeals court, abortion activists strongly opposed him.

Former NARAL president Nancy Keenan said Pryor was "outside the mainstream" and then Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt claimed "President Bush has decided to re-nominate judges who do not uphold our fundamental human and civil right to make our own childbearing choices."

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Last night, in an interview on CNN, pro-life Speaker Paul Ryan explained why the Republican Congress will defund the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

Ryan said Congress has a long-standing pro-life principle that it will not force taxpayers to be involved in the abortion industry. He also said that defunding Planned Parenthood will have absolutely no negative effect on women's health because the funding will be rerouted to legitimate Health Care Centers that actually provide healthcare for women as opposed to abortions.

Ryan said federal community health centers are "all throughout Wisconsin, they're in virtually every community," adding:

"By putting these dollars in the federal community health centers, which provide the same kinds of services. For every Planned Parenthood, there are federal community health centers. They are vastly bigger in network, there are so many more of them, and they provide these kinds of services without all the controversies surrounding this issue."

"Well there's a longstanding principle that we've all believed in - and by the way, this is for pro-choice/pro-life people - that we don't wanna commit taxpayer funding for abortion and Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider," Ryan said. "So we don't want to effectively commit taxpayer money to an organization providing abortions but we wanna make sure that people get their coverage."

On Friday afternoon, the House of Representatives approved a Senate-passed budget resolution that is the first step in defunding the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

This repeal resolution is the first step in the process to re-direct Planned Parenthood's taxpayer funding to legitimate health care entities and repeal Obamacare using the budget reconciliation procedure. President-Elect Donald Trump has promised to sign the bill into law.

Not surprisingly, the bill was approved on a party-line vote with almost every Republican supporting the measure and not one single Democrat approving of the resolution that would allow repealing Obamacare and defunding Planned Parenthood. Republicans voted 227-9 for the bill while Democrats voted 189-0 against it.

Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a pro-life Republican from Louisiana, talked about the Obamacare repeal provisions.

"Obamacare has failed the American people. If you go back to the beginning, it was created with a series of lies to the American people. We all remember, 'If you like what you have, you can keep it.' How's that worked out for millions of Americans who lost the plans that they liked and now cannot keep? What about the promise that premiums would go down by $2,500? President Obama made that claim," he said.

"Today in states all across the nation you're seeing premiums go up an average of 25%. That's on top of double-digit increases every single year Obamacare has been in effect. This law is not working. It's failing families, it's costing jobs across our economy. It's time to repeal this law and actually replace it with reforms that put patients back in charge of their medical decisions with their doctors. What a great concept that would be. It's about time we focus on lowering the cost of healthcare and giving people real choices," he said.