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Your Invitation
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Next year you will vote on AMENDMENT 1 to our state Constitution. Amendment 1 may be known by you as Senate Joint Resolution 127 while it was going through the Tennessee General Assembly.
Literally, lives of unborn babies will be determined by your vote. Amendment 1, if adopted by the people, will once again allow the state legislature to pass common sense regulations regarding abortion that will save lives and ensure that women understand what they are doing and the consequences to them of abortion.
That is why The Tennessee Action Council (no affiliation with The Family Action Council of Tennessee) is sponsoring a rally and seminar in support of the Amendment on April 27th.
Location: New Hope Community Church, 605 Wilson Pike, Brentwood, TN
Time: 6:00 P.M. (central)
Special guest speakers, Dr. George Grant and Dr. Neil Anderson, both of whom are prolific authors and speak to audiences across the globe, will share their views and provide clear insight on this subject.
David Fowler will provide the facts about abortion in Tennessee that will shock you. You will need to know this information in order to speak to your friends about the Amendment.
Please put this important event on April 27th on your calendar.
At the conclusion of the event there will be an opportunity to support the media campaign being developed to support the Amendment.
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Parker: Kermit Gosnell is not an Exception
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Kirsten Powers has done a national service, by virtue of her now-famous USA Today column, of putting the news of the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell on the national radar screen.
This, of course, is the horror story of a cesspool in Philadelphia posturing as an abortion clinic, operating without inspection for 17 years. Gosnell, the doctor who ran the place, is formally charged with the murder of one woman and seven infants.
However, the grand jury report and testimony of family and staff at the trial indicate that if there were records in this dump, where life and death were meted out daily, Gosnell would be indicted for hundreds of murders of live children.
Most likely, and sadly, this horror story will have its 15 minutes of fame, and the nation will move on. The national press got dragged unwillingly to report it, finally, because of Powers' courageous column.
But there is no way to keep them on a story they don't want to cover. Maybe we can keep this story alive by keeping in mind a few things.
What was happening in Gosnell's Women's Medical Society clinic was not some bizarre exception to the rule.
You can ask Day Gardner, founder and president of the National Black Pro-life Union. Her life is dedicated to covering these realities. In her words, "This is not an exception. These realities are happening every day all over our country." Read more here. |
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From Roe to Gosnell
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NOTE 1: Sometimes it is helpful to read the writings of people who are not entirely pro-life, but are examining the issue and their own positions.
The case for regime change on abortion.
By JAMES TARANTO
Here is incontrovertible proof that Kirsten Powers and Conor Friedersdorf are correct in arguing that the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell has received insufficient media coverage: On Friday, Snopes.com was compelled to publish a page confirming that the story is real, not merely an urban legend.
Gosnell, as we noted in January 2011, is charged with eight counts of murder. One of his alleged victims, Karnamaya Mongar, was a 41-year-old woman. The other seven did not live long enough to acquire names. They were infants who were born when Gosnell induced labor in their mothers. According to the Philadelphia grand jury report, he or his employees then killed them by using scissors to sever the neck and spinal cord:
He called that "snipping."
Over the years, there were hundreds of "snippings." Sometimes, if Gosnell was unavailable, the "snipping" was done by one of his fake doctors, or even by one of the administrative staff. But all the employees of the Women's Medical Society knew. Everyone there acted as if it wasn't murder at all.
Most of these acts cannot be prosecuted, because Gosnell destroyed the files.
The trial opened March 18, as the New York Times reported on page A17 of the next day's paper--its last word to date on the topic.
What accounts for the media's lack of interest in a trial that not only is sensational but implicates the most divisive social and political issue in America? PJMedia.com's Roger L. Simon has the answer: "The trial of Dr. Gosnell is a potential time bomb exploding in the conventional liberal narrative on abortion itself." He demonstrates via self-reflection:
I can give you two guinea pigs to prove this point--my wife Sheryl and me. We were in the kitchen last night, preparing dinner, when we saw a short report of this story on the countertop TV.
Both lifelong "pro-choice" people, after watching only seconds, we embarked in an immediate discussion of whether it was time to reconsider that view. (Didn't human life really begin at the moment of conception? What other time?) Neither of us was comfortable as a "pro-choice" advocate in the face of these horrifying revelations. How could we be?
Yes, Dr. Gosnell was exceptional (thank God for that!), but a dead fetus was a dead fetus, even if incinerated in some supposedly humane fashion rather than left crying out in blind agony on the operating room floor, as was reportedly the case with one of Gosnell's victims. I say blind because this second-trimester fetus did not yet have fully formed eyes. (Think about that one.)
So I don't think I'm "pro-choice" anymore, but I'm not really "pro-life" either. I would feel like a hypocrite. I don't want to pretend to ideals I have serious doubts I would be able to uphold in a real-world situation. If a woman in my family, or a close friend, were (Heaven forbid) impregnated through rape, I would undoubtedly support her right to abortion. I might even advocate it. I also have no idea how I would react if confronted by having to make a choice between the life of a fetus and his/her mother. Just the thought makes my head spin.
Anyone who he thinks he knows how he would respond in these situations--and hasn't--is doing nothing but posturing.
Welcome to the mushy middle, Roger. This columnist has been here for quite some time, as you can see from this 1999 piece. But we too, when we were very young, were a "pro-choice" libertarian. We came to question, and ultimately rejected, that position, although fully accepting the "pro-life" side of the argument remains a bridge too far for us.
Our path was more cerebral and less visceral. It started with our education in constitutional law. Although we thought abortion on demand was a good policy, we knew how to read, and the Constitution had nothing to say about the matter. We came to view Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that declared otherwise, as a gross abuse of power by the Supreme Court, notwithstanding that it was in the service of a cause we agreed with.
Related Video
Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Photo: Getty Images
A funny thing happens when you dissent from Roe v. Wade: You come to see that there's not much else by way of intellectual content to the case for abortion on demand. Roe predates our own political consciousness, so we have to assume there were once stronger arguments. But these days the appeal to the authority of Roe is pretty much all there is apart from sloganeering, name-calling, appeals to self-interest and an emphasis on difficult and unusual cases such as pregnancy due to rape.
So totemic is Roe that on one recent day two top New York Times commentators, editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal and columnist Bill Keller, cited it as if it were still the law and ignored the 1992 case that supplanted it, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The latter was pretty much a complete do-over, although the "core holding" was the same.
When you dissent from Roe v. Wade, you notice that people committed to the pro-abortion side almost never acknowledge that the question of abortion poses a conflict of rights or of legitimate interests. Try to pin them down as to where they'd draw the line--at what point in fetal development does abortion become unacceptable? It's pretty much impossible. The court in Casey said abortion could be restricted after 23 to 24 weeks, earlier than Roe's 28 weeks, but groups like Planned Parenthood oppose restrictions on late-term abortion, too. All they care about is "a woman's right to choose."
The line-drawing exercise is indeed a vexing one. We aren't "pro-life"--which is to say that we do not favor the outlawing of all abortion--and not only because of the difficult cases Simon notes. Our own moral intuition is that an early-term abortion, or the use of an abortifacient to prevent implantation, is different in kind from a late-term abortion or infanticide.
But we concede that intuition is irreconcilable with the scientific fact that the difference between a zygote and an infant--or, for that matter, an adult--is one of degree: All are the same human being at different stages of development. (To be sure, the natural occurrence of apogamy, or monozygotic twinning, makes that last statement a bit of an oversimplification, as do recent and prospective technologies like in vitro fertilization and cloning. That doesn't make the puzzle any easier to solve.)
Any line one could draw between acceptable abortion and homicide would be an arbitrary one. Both extremes in the abortion debate are united in rejecting the line-drawing exercise in principle for that reason. But either "principled" position leads to monstrous results.
A law protecting every human life from the moment of fertilization would be draconian or unenforceable, and probably both. Would a free society really tolerate its government's forcing a rape victim to carry her attacker's child to term? Surely not--but an exception for rape would also create a loophole, an incentive for women seeking abortions to claim rape falsely. Norma McCorvey, the anonymous Roe v. Wade plaintiff, did just that, albeit unsuccessfully, before filing her lawsuit. Read more here.
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Leon Kass: The Meaning of the Gosnell Trial
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NOTE 2: This interview is a thought-provoking commentary on contemporary society.
Eminent bioethicist Leon Kass on the dangers of a world increasingly indifferent to matters of human dignity.
The trial of Kermit Gosnell—a Philadelphia doctor charged in January 2011 with, among other things, murdering seven infants who survived abortions he performed—has been under way for a month. But it was only last week that the case was thrust into the national spotlight. Thanks to intense pressure from conservative critics of the media's apparent lack of interest in the case, the rest of the country has now glimpsed some of what went on for years in Gosnell's benignly named Women's Medical Society.
Investigators who raided the clinic in 2010 saw "blood on the floor" and smelled "urine in the air," according to the grand jury that indicted Gosnell. They also found "fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic—in bags, milk jugs, orange-juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers." Members of Gosnell's staff testified that the abortionist would deliver babies who had been gestating for as long as 30 weeks, far longer than the 24-week limit imposed by Pennsylvania law. Gosnell or staff members would gouge the infant's neck with scissors to sever the spinal cord, according to the grand jury report. Gosnell referred to the method as "snipping."
These and other appalling details of the Gosnell trial elicit reactions that might be called revulsion or disgust or horror. The word that eminent bioethicist and physician Leon Kass prefers is "repugnance." This intense human reaction reflects a sort of deep moral intuition, he says, and it is one that deserves much more serious consideration than our too-sophisticated culture allows.
"As pain is to the body so repugnance is to the soul," Dr. Kass says as we sit down for an interview in his book-lined office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is the Madden-Jewett Scholar. "So too with anger and compassion. Repugnance is some kind of wake-up call that there is something untoward going on and attention must be paid. These passions are not simply irrational. They contain within them the germ of insight. You cannot give proper verbal account of the horror of evil, yet a culture that couldn't be absolutely horrified by such things is dead."
The observation may not sound controversial, yet Dr. Kass, who was the chairman of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, has often found himself in a minority among bioethicists when it comes to abortion, euthanasia, embryonic research, cloning and other right-to-life questions. Dr. Kass's emphasis on what he calls "the wisdom of repugnance," for example, has been assailed by liberal thinkers. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, for instance, said in a 2004 critique of Dr. Kass's work that repugnance has been used in the past "as a powerful weapon in social efforts to exclude certain groups and persons."
Dr. Kass says his critics misunderstand the role of repugnance in his thinking. "It's not that repugnance is always right," he says. "There was once repugnance at interracial marriage, and there have been other repugnancies that turned out to be mere prejudice. But you wouldn't want to live in a society where people feel no guilt or shame just because guilt and shame are sometimes disruptive—or in a society that doesn't feel righteous indignation at the sight of injustice."
Degradation and its opposite, human dignity, are central elements of Dr. Kass's philosophy, and he fears that American society risks becoming disrespectful of dignity and indifferent to degradation.
Consider abortion. After years of calling for abortions that are "safe, legal and rare," the Democratic Party in its 2012 platform dropped such language altogether in an attempt to appeal to its feminist base. But viewing childbearing solely as a matter of personal reproductive choice, Dr. Kass says, "means we no longer see a child as a gift but as a product of our will to be had by choice only. That makes human choice the basis of all value"—at the price of the child, for "he or she comes from the hands of nature." Read more here.
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Kermit Gosnell Judge Drops Three Abortion-Infanticide Charges
The judge in the trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell has acquitted him of three of the eight murder charges the abortion business owner faces in his murder trial.
Gosnell faces eight total murder counts — one for killing a woman in a botched abortion and seven for killing babies in abortion-infanticides that involved live-birth abortions and snipping their necks after birth.
Gosnell’s defense attorney asked the judge to drop three of the charges for killing the babies and the judge agreed with the contention there was not enough evidence to convict Gosnell on those charges. Another charge of infanticide was also dropped. He still faces the other charges the prosecution has brought and the murder trial will continue on them.
One of the dropped charges involves a 28-week-old baby Gosnell killed and whose remains were kept in an abortion clinic freezer.
Common pleas court Judge Jeffrey Minehart also dropped five counts of corpse abuse at the request of his defense attorney Jack McMahon and did not explain his ruling dropping any of the charges.
The defense has argued that there were no live births at Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Center abortion clinic and contends the babies died during abortions and their necks were snipped afterwards. But former Gosnell staffers testified they saw signs of life even after the abortion had been completed — saying the babies “jumped” and “screamed” and tried to escape.
But, according to AP, McMahon told the judge “there is not one piece …. of objective, scientific evidence that anyone was born alive”
“We still have a long to go,” McMahon told the press about the rest of his Gosnell defense.
One pro-life advocate who has been following the trial closely says the charge should not have been dismissed.
“I am shocked that these counts have been dismissed. I have heard testimony by very credible witnesses to the effect that these babies were murdered in cold blood by Gosnell as they cried and struggled for life. We pray that justice will be done in the remaining five victims of Gosnell’s horrific slayings,” said Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Policy Advisor for Operation Rescue, who has observed the trial and published first-hand accounts of the proceedings.
Sullenger said testimony from the medical examiner and toxicologist has indicated that there was no evidence the babies were injected with Digoxin to ensure the babies were dead prior to the abortion, as the defense has claimed.
The medical examiner testified that tests were inconclusive as proof that the babies were born alive. However, the tests also did not prove the babies were dead prior to birth. Those inconclusive test results were overshadowed by the weight of testimony from witness after witness, who detailed how the babies were in fact living prior to being murdered through what one witness described as a “virtual beheading.” Read more here.
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"Should the Baby Live?"
NOTE: This article by Randy Alcorn from 2010 demonstrates that the total disrespect of life over and above abortion is nothing new.
EXCERPT:
When Singer came to teach at Princeton, he was protested by Not Dead Yet, a disabilities rights group. They took offense at Singer’s books, which say it should be legal to kill disabled infants, as well as children and adults with severe cognitive disabilities.
Singer suggests that individual human worth is based on its usefulness to others:
“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.”
Peter Singer says, “There [is a] lack of any clear boundary between the newborn infant, who is clearly not a person in the ethically relevant sense, and the young child who is. In our book, Should the Baby Live?, my colleague Helga Kuhse and I suggested that a period of twenty-eight days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to life as others.”
Read entire article here.
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