Abortion Kills 47% of Black Babies

by Joy Pullmann

Appropriate for a week that holds both Martin Luther King day and the anniversary of Roe v. Wade is a statistic I heard Saturday at our town's March for Life: thanks to abortion, 47% of African-American babies never take a breath.

The main speaker of our local event (which drew easily 500 people), Angela Minter, told her dramatic life story: Her mother had tried to have Angela aborted in the 1960s and failed. Later, Angela and her then-boyfriend chose two abortions and were about to commission a third, when Angela's father called.

"Don't kill that baby," he told her. She didn't. Later, the son that lived came to her. He and his girlfriend were pregnant, and planned to have an abortion. Eventually, his girlfriend refused the abortion, and now Angela has a beautiful two-year-old grandson.

Angela doesn't mince words when she talks.

A Reflection on "My Abortion"

By Erin Karlovich
Guest Contributor

Image by Katie Tegtmeyer

In a recent issue of New York Magazine, the cover story is "My Abortion," and in it 26 women share their experiences. It's incredible that a mainstream news source like this would address the issue so openly. Although it begins with commentary from the author, Meaghan Winter, the majority of this article is dedicated to the words of the women themselves, each of whom wrote a short paragraph describing her abortion.

Their stories are raw, expressing every emotion from regret to relief. Sometimes the voice is impersonal, as if the woman is trying to remove herself from her own memory. Some of the stories are graphic, discussing the reasoning, procedure, and reactions in detail. All of them share the same pain and underlying plea for acceptance.

I'm certain that this piece is sparking many reactions and conversations, but I want to focus on one small detail: the women's reactions to the pro-lifers they saw or spoke to outside of the facility or in their communities. As pro-lifers, our goal is to protect the lives of unborn children, yes, but we must never forget the mother in the process. These women are vulnerable, frightened, and seeking help. Their babies will die gruesome, painful deaths, but these mothers will live the rest of their lives with the memories of their abortions.

While most of the women don't mention encounters with other people, the little said is striking. I have taken excerpts from some of their stories so you may read for yourself (all emphasis is mine):

Although I always thought it was a woman’s right to choose, I honestly thought if I got pregnant I’d find a way to make it work. All that changed. My boyfriend terrorized me.... When I went to the clinic, there were protesters with awful, very graphic signs. I felt their judgment....With the slew of shitty things that have happened to me, I wonder, am I paying the price for what I did? I believe in a God who wouldn’t punish that way. But when you don’t want the gift you’re given, will the universe offer up that gift again? -Lauren, 34, Colorado

Obamacare attacks religion, but hurts women

By Helen Alvare
Women Speak for Themselves

The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear two important cases about whether women and men who own businesses are protected by civil rights laws against religious discrimination. The Obama Administration says it can ignore religious freedom laws when regulating businesses and their owners because it believes earning money is inconsistent with exercising religion.

Reacting to the news that the Supreme Court will consider this important issue, the White House struck its typical pose as the one and only protector of, and voice for, "women and families." The president assures us that he is pressing these cases so that "women and families -- not their bosses or corporate CEOs" make decisions about whether to use abortion-inducing drugs and devices.

The White House stance assumes that women care far more about free access to contraceptives, or their sex lives, than about religious freedom, or allowing businesses to have a conscience. This view of women is degrading. It treats women as one-dimensional victims needing the protection of government-as-big-brother.

Moreover, the government misjudges women at every turn. First, the idea that service to "women and families" requires crushing these businesses with fines is absurd because the businesses at issue are actually owned by . . . women and families. While it may have escaped White House notice, the plaintiffs in the two cases include women owners and operators of the relevant businesses. This should not be so surprising: there are more than ten million women-owned businesses in this country. And here in the 21st century, many women are the "bosses and corporate CEOs" the White House criticizes. Crushing businesses with fines-particularly businesses with women owners-hurts women, rather than helping them.

Second, the White House view ignores the fact that women benefit -- indeed, everyone benefits -- from having a job market in which people of all different faiths are able to create jobs. Hobby Lobby, for example, employs more than 13,000 people, and actually provides free contraceptives to its employees-- just not the small handful that can cause abortions. There are thousands of women whose lives are better and whose families are stronger and more secure because of those jobs. Crushing Hobby Lobby just because of its owners religious beliefs would hurt these women, not help them. The last thing our economy needs, and the last thing American families need, is the government shrinking the already too-small pool of available jobs.

Third, women actually tend to practice religion more than men. For this reason too, the government's attack on religious freedom rights hurts women more than men.

The White House insists that its heavy-handed approach is needed to protect women because it thinks contraceptives are "essential to women's health." That is, to say the least, a highly dubious claim. Women get sick and die, for the most part, of things like heart attacks, strokes and cancer. Their long list of ailments rarely calls for free contraceptives to solve a health problem. In fact, as Judge Janice Rogers Brown recently noted, there are credible medical sources (like the World Health Organization) who now classify some hormonal contraceptives as carcinogens. Americans spend millions of dollars a year to buy chicken and meat that have not been pumped full of synthetic hormones-precisely because they fear the associated medical risks.

But even if the government is right about how we all need easy access to contraceptives all the time, there can be no serious argument that the only way to provide us with our pills is to force unwilling employers to pay for them. Contraceptives are widely available and cheap. And for those who cannot afford them, the government already spends millions of dollars per year providing them for free. With the Obamacare exchanges now open, if the federal government thinks more women need or want this insurance coverage, it now runs a marketplace in which they can get it.

Women do not need big brother steamrolling religious liberty to make their lives better. They would prefer to hold onto religious liberty itself.


Helen Alvare is a law professor at George Mason University and the founder of Women Speak for Themselves. This article was originally published at USA Today and is used with permission.

Combating forced abortion and gendercide in China

By Mary C. Tillotson

Reggie Littlejohn, Women's Rights Without Frontiers

Today is the 33rd anniversary of China's one-child policy, which has been devastating for Chinese women and girls. I just got off the phone with Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, an organization dedicated to stopping forced abortions and gendercide in China. Reggie has testified with governments around the world, and her organization is running the Save a Girl Campaign, helping families on the grassroots level.

I'm going to let Reggie take it from here.

Tell me about the one-child policy in China.

Reggie: Some in the Chinese Communist Party want you to believe it's entirely voluntary. That is not true. Women are forcibly aborted up to the ninth month of pregnancy, and also forcibly sterilized. Some of these forced abortions are so violent that the women themselves die with their full-term babies.

The coercion gives rise to gendercide. Because of the coercive low birth limit, most families want to make sure they have a boy. Sex selective abortion is practiced, and up to 200 million women are missing in the world today due to sex-selective abortion. There are 37 million more men than women living in China.

What that gender imbalance is doing is it's driving human trafficking and sexual slavery, not only in China but in the surrounding countries as well.

Why do they have a preference for boys?

Reggie: Preference for boys is something that's centuries or possibly millennia old. It's prominent in Asia, but especially in China and India.

In both Indian culture and Chinese culture, when a couple gets married, the girl goes over to the boy's family, and the young woman and young man together support the young man's parents in their old age. If you give birth to a son, you know that when he marries, you will be gaining a daughter-in-law, so you're getting an addition to your family, whereas if you give birth to a daughter, you're not getting a son-in-law, you're losing your daughter also.

If you can only have one kid and it's a girl, you don't have anybody to support you in your old age. [Parents often have to choose between] sex-selective abortion or facing poverty in old age.

What is Women's Rights Without Frontiers doing about it?

Reggie met Pope Francis last week.

Reggie: We are doing two things. Number one, we've been called the leading voice in the world to expose and oppose forced abortions in China - forced abortion, gendercide, and sexual slavery in China. We gather documentation and go around and sound the alarm all over the world about what's going on in China.

Most people understand China has a one-child policy. They don't understand the brutality of the way it's enforced.

We gather documentation from China about forced abortion, forced sterilization, human trafficking, murder, all these things that are committed in connection with the one-child policy, and we testify.

We have credibility and a voice in informing government bodies about the truth about what's going on in China, concerning the one-child policy.

Reggie has testified six times at the United States Congress and three times at the European Parliament; she's also testified to the British, Irish, and Canadian Parliaments. She's briefed White House officials, the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, and the Vatican. She's also spoken multiple times at the United Nations Commission on the Status of women, an annual convention in New York; the commission made a statement condemning forced abortion, forced sterilization, and forced contraception.

The other thing we do, we have a Save a Girl campaign.

Tell me about the Save a Girl Campaign.

Reggie: We've got workers on the ground in China who identify women who are pregnant with girls who are planning to have an abortion, or who have just given birth to a girl and are planning to abandon her. They say, 'Please don't abort or abandon your baby because she's a girl. We'll give you a monthly stipend for a year to help support this girl.'

I understand, from my network, we have a 95 percent success rate. We're saving lives in China.

We also help women who are fleeing forced abortion. We are stopping gendercide in China one baby girl at a time.

The Save a Girl Campaign was launched last year on October 11, the International Day of the Girl Child.

What can regular people do to help?

Reggie: If people want to do something to help these girls, we have petitions to stop forced abortion, and they can also donate toward the Save a Girl Campaign. It's amazing how little it takes to save a life in China.

So much of our effort has to do with getting the word out, and people help get the word out by liking the article you write, posting it on Facebook, tweeting it - that's huge for us. It's the only way we can turn political opinion to understand what's going on and oppose the violence against women.

People are listening to us, listening to our message.

I Like Babies, But Not Pregnancy

When I was pregnant with my first child, I felt horrifically guilty for being so upset I was pregnant. And there was room for repentance there, as Christians believe children are a great blessing, and that God has the right to give you one when He wants (since he's the only one who can put a soul in a being anyway). I did not want a child then, and I really wished I could end his life. That was wrong, and evil.

But there's another aspect to not liking pregnancy that I think is not so much evil as human. Pregnancy is difficult, and annoying. It just is. And no one gains by lying about that. Right now I'm near month seven for baby three, and I do not look attractive in just about anything I wear. I look rotund because I am rotund. It's frustrating to be a 26-year-old young woman who is used to being skinny but really can't possibly look decent no matter how much makeup I apply, especially when my job involves lots of public presentations and interviews in which it is quite helpful to look at least not-hideous. As I have grown older and shared pregnancies with friends and been able to talk to more women about it, I have learned something that has made me feel a lot better: Lots of women don't like being pregnant, and lots of women are annoyed when we get pregnant, and we typically just get over it (right about when the baby stops being a bloodsucker and becomes a milksucker, and you can kiss his squashy little face and ditch the fat pants).

Women Speak (Calmly!) For Themselves

By Emma Smith
PaxEtLumen

Standing in the East Falls Church metro station waiting for our a couple of weeks ago, a woman approached us and asked “are you going to the Women Speak for Themselves rally?” We affirmed that we were, and she replied “I thought so, when I saw your Pro-Life signs!” and gestured at our “Mothers should be respected and babies protected!!!” sign. Turns out, she and 4 of her friends were also going to the rally, so when the train arrived we climbed aboard with our 5 new friends and headed off to DC.

Holding Pro-Life signs on a DC metro is an interesting experience. We got a lot of looks, though no one engaged with us and, despite some of the glares, a surprising amount of support came from those around us. We got surreptitious thumbs up, smiles, winks, or the occasional nod. The city was alive with Pro-Lifers, going about their daily business, supportive of our work, anxious for justice, just as we are.

This energy came into the open in Lafayette Park. About 100 – 150 people – students, professors, nurses, mothers, children, corporate assistants, lawyers, and lobbyists – gathered under the trees to witness to life and freedom. The thing about this rally was that it was no different than any other Pro-Life rally. I mean that in a good way. The people there merely gathered to affirm their beliefs, to love those around them, and to peacefully petition that their rights be respected. The people there gathered to witness to the beauty of life, and in that sense, it was like any other Pro-Life rally. It affirmed life by respecting life – all of it. Even those who disagree with what Pro-Lifers believe in. While Pro-Lifers made strong arguments concerning the evil of ObamaCare and the HHS Mandate, while they cheered at sayings they liked, and applauded passionate speakers, the entire rally was part of a greater movement – a movement of love and respect.

Pizza, abortion, slavery, and lessons learned: Seven quick takes for, well, Wednesday

By Mary C. Tillotson

I've seen the "7QT Friday" on blogs here and there. These aren’t as quick as I was hoping, but here are seven quick takes for – Wednesday!

#1

A couple weeks ago, on a Thursday, I took our car into the shop because it was squealing, clunking, and shining a light on the dashboard. Our mechanic (who I’d highly recommend to anyone in the area) gave me three or four diagnoses, so I planned to drop off the car Monday for a marathon of fixing and replacing.

On Friday at about 4:45 p.m., I got stranded in the Staples parking lot because – what do you know? – the car didn’t start. I did not want to call my husband – it was the second day in a row he’d stayed home sick and he was gearing up for a Sunday flight to Vermont for a five-day conference, so he didn’t need one more thing on his plate. But what else was I going to do?

A couple friends picked him up, and they met us at Staples. Fortunately, our car is a stick-shift (I never thought I would say that) so we were able to bump-start it, which involves pushing it till it’s rolling at a walking speed and letting the clutch out quickly.

We thanked our friends, drove home, and parked on a hill so we could bump-start it ourselves and drop it off the mechanic on Saturday, adding “replace starter” to our already expensive litany. We walked from the mechanic to our church for Saturday evening Mass, bummed a ride home from some neighbors, and found a friend to drive my husband to the airport at about 7:30 Sunday morning.

It was stressful and frustrating, but nothing extraordinary. This sort of thing happens to everyone. As I started catching my breath after it all, I wondered: what if I had been sick, too? What if we’d had two kids under the age of three? What if we were new to the area and didn’t have local friends we were comfortable asking for help? None of that would be out of the ordinary, either. Then I thought: How on earth do other adults handle situations like this?!?

Then I found my answer: imperfectly. That’s how other adults handle situations like this. That’s how we handled ours, and how we’re likely to handle similar situations in the future.

It was an oddly freeing discovery.

Talking to Women... Without Chocolate

By Christine Nussio
Guest Contributor

It seems like the conservative political establishment has a “women problem” and this is not related to the now-infamous “binders of women” gaff courtesy of Governor Mitt Romney from last year’s presidential race.  Joy Pullmann’s recent article, “Should People Talk to Women Differently?”, suggested that the problem is conservatives do not know how to engage women, and need to learn to talk to them differently than they do men. Joy asked astutely (and humorously), “Differently HOW? Like mention chocolate and pink?” Now there is a chance that you are reading this article because “chocolate” was in the title, and that itself might answer Joy’s question. But, setting that aside, I would argue that the issue is not that what the conservative politicians talk about, but how they talk about it.

"Women's Issues" and the Conservative "Woman Problem"

By Mary C. Tillotson

Can we do it all?

Joy opened a really interesting conversation last week about whether women and men should be addressed differently. She linked to a Forbes article by Sabrina Schaeffer noting “the odd contradiction that liberals proclaim men and women are essentially the same but target women as women aggressively … and conservatives typically will say men and women are different, but are reluctant to target women as a special interest group.” (Joy’s words.) I want to talk more specifically about the conservative “woman problem.”

“Women’s issues,” it seems, revolve around our childbearing capacity: abortion, contraception, flexible work hours. The so-called “war on women” initially rose over contraception (or, more specifically, the government requiring people to provide contraception free and ignoring their constitutionally-guaranteed religious freedom). It was further fueled by some stupid comments (“legitimate rape,” anyone?) that got more attention than they were worth. When it comes down to it, if we didn’t have wombs, there would be no such thing as “women’s issues.”

Disabled babies, moms, and men: can we please love them all?

By Mary C. Tillotson

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the baby with Down Syndrome who, it looks like, will not be aborted after all because some 900 families offered to adopt, thanks to Facebook and Fr. Vander Woude. If you haven’t heard, I think the Arlington Catholic Herald, my diocese’s paper, had one of the better stories.

I feel a particular connection to this story because my husband and I got one of the original emails; we’ve met Fr. Vander Woude and a friend of ours knows him well. I sent Father an email saying we might be interested but hadn’t had time to talk yet; by the time we were able to talk, we already heard about the enormously huge response and we weren’t needed. So it was exciting to watch the story go viral.

Regret-less Sex

By Julie Baldwin

Life isn't always what you expect, and this post I'm writing was not my initially chosen topic. Instead, I'm writing in response to a few articles I read today, and a conversation I had with one of my husband's classmates.

Today is Will's first day of school for his Master's program, and there was an open reception which I invited myself to as his special guest. Nothing fancy: his classmates, the program directors and corresponding staff, and me, the pregnant lady in the striped dress. The girl next to me and I struck up a conversation, gaining speed as we realized she grew up about 45 minutes from where my husband went to college. We talked about our shared faith, her boyfriend, my pregnancy, where we came from and why we moved to New Orleans.

"Sorry if this is too forward," she said suddenly, "But do you use Natural Family Planning?"

"We do," I said.

"Was the pregnancy planned?" she asked.

"Yes," I said as my husband said "No."

I smiled, and explained that we conceived on my P3 day, which is the third day past my Peak Day and the last day of my fertile time. We knew we could get pregnant if we had sex, and rolled the dice. We got pregnant. Will says "no" because we had originally planned on waiting to try for a mini-us till the fall, but we also had sex knowing we could become pregnant.

Talking Down to Women, Wendy Davis Edition

By Joy Pullmann

Lots of things infuriate me about this Texas abortion spectacle, but one has to be the patronizing way the media has treated Wendy Davis, the state senator who blocked a bill that would require abortion centers to meet safety standards and restrict abortions after a baby can survive outside the womb. Anti-life protesters rallied around Davis and stormed the Texas capitol with such force that police were overwhelmed periodically and senators could not discuss or vote on the bill.

John McCormack listed 20 questions major TV anchors asked Davis. They include serious questions like "It was a remarkable scene. Did you have any idea that it would grow like this?" from CNN's Anderson Cooper, "Why did you decide to wear your [pink] running shoes? Let’s take a look at those … they’ve kind of been rocketing around the Internet" from ABC's Jeff Zeleny, and "Well, after coming under these attacks, do you regret taking the front row that you did on this and leading this charge?" from CBS's Bob Schieffer.

Let me get this straight. A politician blocks a policy that vast majorities of Americans support (some 80 percent or more) because it would prevent mothers from ending the lives of children who could otherwise survive outside the womb in preemie wards, and she gets asked about her pink running shoes?! How much more patronizing can these male TV anchors get?