Free Republic

I turned on my television Thursday morning and heard a beating heart. It was the beautiful, vulnerable sound of an unborn baby's still-developing heart, from an ultrasound. "We don't know her eye color," the voiceover said. "Whether she'll be a redhead or brunette. We haven't seen her toes, fingers or nose. But through the science of genomics we can look forward and begin to care for her future." The ad was for a medical group in northern Virginia. "Join the future of health," the commercial urged. It was quite the paradox that later that same day, the House of...

Everyone knows that ObamaCare will discourage employment. Everyone who stops and thinks that is. Yesterday's job report was genuinely awful. Here is a congressional hearing on why ObamaCare is making things worse. By mandating that employers buy expensive health insurance for their employees, the new health reform law will raise the cost of labor and make it more expensive than otherwise to hire new workers. Plus, the law forces employees to have this expensive fringe benefit, even if they would prefer a less costly health plan in exchange for higher wages. To make matters worse, the health plan that employers...

Last week, two prominent Catholic women -- Kathleen Sebelius in an address to the graduates of Georgetown University's public policy school, and Maureen Dowd in a column published in the New York Times -- delivered strong statements about the Church's role in civil society. Dowd's column was more or less a screed, while Sebelius's address was relatively measured in tone. Yet both were marked by some pretty fundamental misunderstandings, which have, sadly, become widespread. Echoing an army of commentators from the last fifty years, Dowd exults in James Joyce's characterization of the Catholic Church (drawn, it appears, from the pages...

House Democrats voted overwhelmingly against the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (H.R. 3541), killing this legislation's chances for passing in the current session of Congress. The bill would've barred doctors from performing abortions for the sole purpose of preventing the birth of a child of an unwanted gender. Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) characterized the bill as “yet another attempt to impose the shackles of the anti-choice lobby on the personal liberties of women. The Court gave women the right to terminate pregnancies in 1973. The Court didn't say women could only do it for good reasons. They don't have to give any...

Two headlines really struck me as sick and sad. They speak to a fascination with death and power and narcissism. They speak to the demise of the weak at the hand of the strong. They reflect a justification for self-preservation over and above things more transcendent. Even though the two headlines address two completely different geopolitical regimes—one being Syria and the other being the United States—they affirm one thing: it must be okay to kill off the defenseless and weak.

BEED, MAHARASHTRA, INDIA, June 1, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) - Officials in the Indian state with the most “missing” girls compared to boys, have arrested an abortionist who dodged restrictions on sex-selection abortions by feeding the evidence - aborted baby girls - to dogs. \ Abortionist Sudam Munde and his wife were arrested last Friday for the abortion-related death of a woman who was six months pregnant with an unwanted daughter, according to India Today. Reports this week indicated that officials were in the process of revoking the medical licenses of both Munde and his wife in connection with the abortion death....

We are winning; defeating the evil that is liberalism in large and small battles ways every day. What is happening to the Susan B. Komen for the Cure Foundation governing board is a good example of our victories. Last January when the Komen board was confronted with the fact that secretly produced videos proved Planned Parenthood would knowingly arrange an abortion for a supposed under aged prostitute, it did the right thing and stopped funding the death mills. They listened to their donors who demanded they stop giving their money to a group devoted to killing babies. Nevertheless, within days...

ACN Staff) The House of Representatives failed to pass a bill that would ban sex selective abortions on Thursday. Although a majority voted in favor of the bill (246-168), the measure reqired a two-thirds majority vote to pass. Many may be under the impression that the final vote tally was along party lines; however 20 Democrats actually voted in favor of the ban and shockingly, seven Republicans votes against banning sex selective abortions. Those Republicans were...

The House on Thursday rejected a Republican bill that would impose fines and prison terms on doctors who perform abortions for the sole purpose of controlling the gender of the child, a practice known as sex-selective abortion. The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), H.R. 3541, was defeated in a 246-168 vote. While that's a clear majority of the House, Republicans called up the bill under a suspension of House rules, which limits debate and requires a two-thirds majority vote to pass. In this case, it would have required more support from Democrats. Twenty Democrats voted for the bill, while seven Republicans...

So we can ban super-sized drinks, but not this barbaric procedure? A handful of GOPers voted against this commonsense bill that would have protected vulnerable women from the hideous coercion of their husbands or partners who want offspring of one gender over another (usually boys over girls). China's vicious campaign against girls has arrived on American shores. Rep. Ron Paul an OB/GYN, voted with the Democrats, perhaps out of a federalism concern. The argument by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee and other left-wing abortion fanatics is that this law would have led to women being "dragged out of doctor's offices" in an...

Legislation to ban sex-selective abortions failed to pass today despite it being supported by the majority of the House. The final vote was 246-168. The reason it failed was that this particular proposal required a two-thirds majority to pass; therefore the bill fell 30 votes short. This is just one more sign of how morally bankrupt some in this nation have become. There are many of us out here who are as disgusted by the wickedness that permeates every fiber of the Democrat Party. However, just like in Nazi Germany and other moments of darkness in world history - enough...

Note: The following comments were adapted from a speech given on May 12, 2012 as part of Italy’s March for Life weekend celebration. In the defense of life, it is absolutely essential that we are committed to the abolition of all laws and judicial decisions that would permit even a single abortion. But we have to look further ahead to protect in an integral way the whole of human life from its biological beginnings until natural death. The same logic of dominion over life that leads to abortion serves as justification for euthanasia, assisted suicide, as well as contraception and...

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, May 31, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) –  Five months ahead of the presidential election, the Democratic Party is already losing seats to Republicans, as a growing number of elected officials are changing parties over issues like the right to life, the definition of marriage, and the Obama administration’s mandate that religious institutions cover abortion-inducing drugs in their health care plans. Wednesday afternoon, seven local office-holders from three Mississippi counties announced they had voted with their feet. Each official had different reasons, but Leake County Sheriff Greg Waggoner “specifically said when [Obama] came out in favor of gay ‘marriage,’ that was...

WASHINGTON, May 31, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A bill to outlaw abortions based on a child’s gender received a strong majority of votes in the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday but failed to gain the two-thirds margin of support needed for passage. The House voted 246-168 in favor of H.R. 3541, known as the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA). 226 Republicans and 20 Democrats (Altmire, Barrow, Boren, Cooper, Costello, Critz, Cuellar, Donnelly, Garamendi, Holden, Kissell, Lipinksi, Lynch, Matheson, McIntyre, Peterson, Rahall, Reyes, Ross of AR, and Shuler) voted yea; while 161 Democrats and seven Republicans (Amash, Bass of NH, Bono Mack, Dold,...

NEW YORK, May 31, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An employee at the flagship abortion clinic of Planned Parenthood in New York has been caught on tape telling a woman how to be sure of her unborn baby’s female sex in order to abort her in a second undercover video released Thursday morning. The footage shows the undercover investigator, walking past a sign on the wall that reads “WOMEN COUNT,” meeting Planned Parenthood social worker Randi Coun at the Margaret Sanger Center International on Bleecker St. Coun walks the investigator through obtaining a CVS test to determine gender as early as the...

William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist—which went on to become an Oscar-winning movie—depicts an epic battle of good versus evil waged under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Reportedly based on a real exorcism Blatty heard about as an undergraduate on a scholarship at Georgetown University, the novel is steeped in Catholicism. Indeed, the “hero” of The Exorcist is the fictional Father Damien Karras, a Georgetown Jesuit, who, at great personal cost, drives out the demon. Now Blatty, a longtime financial contributor to his alma mater, says that Georgetown is no longer true to the Catholic identity he knew...

COLUMBUS, OHIO, May 31, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Medical transcripts leaked to Operation Rescue by a confidential informant through a third party reveal a pattern of botched abortions and other violations at Complete Health Care for Women (CHCW) in Columbus, Ohio, that paint a grisly portrait of an unsafe abortion business that routinely injures women and violates the law. CHCW is operated by abortionist Mervyn J. Samuel. The medical transcripts were smuggled out of a Columbus hospital and redacted by the informant before they were given to Operation Rescue. Records show that on March 16, 2012, a 23-year old woman reported...

President Barack Obama appears to oppose the ban on sex-selection abortions that the House of Representatives debated yesterday and will be voting on today. ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper posted a new report indicating President Obama opposes the bill to prohibit performing or coercing abortions to eliminate unborn babies of an undesired sex. Tapper raised the question at Wednesday’s White House press briefing, but did not receive a respond to his question about Obama’s position. “I will have to take that as well. Been focused on other things, but I will get back to you,” Jay Carney said...

As I type, the House of Representatives is debating the future of civil rights: a girl's right to life itself. Is it OK to choose to destroy a healthy unborn child simply because you or your husband prefer a boy? Should it be legal in this country? The Constitution gives to Congress the power to enforce the 14th Amendment's guarantees of equal protection by appropriate legislation. And this week, in a historic vote, the House is going to consider using that power to ban abortions based on gender. The bill is called the "Prenatal Anti-Discrimination Act," or PRENDA, because it...