Free Republic

Challenged by a New Hampshire woman, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker held firm Saturday on his recent comments about ultrasounds and defended Wisconsin’s law that requires doctors to conduct them before performing abortions. “I’m pro-life, but if someone’s pro-choice, don’t you want an informed choice?” Walker said in response to a question from Mary Heslin of Concord. […] Walker reiterated those comments Saturday and charged the media with twisting the facts around Wisconsin’s law. …

The number of American babies who have been aborted in the years since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision has already exceeded the entire population of the United States as recorded in the 1880 Census. This is according to numbers published by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Guttmacher Institute. In 1880, according to the Census Bureau, there were 50,189,209 people in the United States. These included, the Census Bureau notes, Mark Twain, who had not yet written The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Thomas Edison, who would start his electrical company two years later; and Booker T. Washington,...

A federal appeals court struck down one of the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions on Wednesday, ruling that women would be unconstitutionally burdened by an Arkansas law that bans abortions after the 12th week of pregnancy if a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with doctors who challenged the law, ruling that abortion restrictions must be based on a fetus’ ability to live outside the womb, not the presence of a fetal heartbeat that can be detected weeks earlier. The court said that standard was established by previous U.S. Supreme Court rulings. The...

Vermont has a new Safe Haven law, which means that parents can hand over an infant to an employee at any fire station, health facility or hospital, with absolutely no questions asked. However, apparently Planned Parenthood is considered a safe place for infants in Vermont. In an advertisement from Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, the abortion business announced, “Vermont has a new safe haven law. This means that rather than abandoning your newborn, you can bring your baby to a safe place where he or she will be carried for. All Planned Parenthood health centers in Vermont are safe...

Broadcast networks have taken their cues from The New York Times, except when it publishes stories about babies that they don’t like. A study released Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine documented thousands of premature births to discover a small number of babies born at 22 weeks, with medical treatment available to them, survived with few health implications. The findings that could “affect the abortion debate” landed on the front page of the May 7 New York Times and garnered attention from NBC’s Today. Other media, like ABC and CBS, stayed silent during their morning and evening news...

We know satanists believe abortion is sacred as we have documented several times. Now, a St Louis, Missouri Satanic Temple is raising funds to get a woman an abortion. According to sources, the Satanic Temple has raised enough money via the GoFundMe crowdsourcing website to pay for a southwest Missouri woman to travel to St. Louis for an abortion. The GoFundMe site has since been removed. The elusive “Mary” for which the fund was created, has, with the help of the Satanists created a “Satanic Religious exemption form” which reads in part: My body is inviolable and subject to...

A Chinese attorney who escaped house arrest in his home country for his efforts to protect women from forced abortion for violating the government’s one-child policy said on Thursday that in the 35 years since the practice hundreds of millions of babies have been killed. “Over the past 35 years, China has killed a total of 360 to 400 million young lives as a result of its inhumane and violent birth control policies,” Chen Guangcheng, now senior fellow at Catholic University of America said at a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China. “During a six-month period of 2005,...

Michigan Republican Tim Walberg was a Christian minister before winning election to Congress in 2010 — and he hasn't entirely changed jobs. In a rare Tuesday night committee meeting at which House Republicans advanced a bill curtailing reproductive rights, Walberg took the even rarer step of lecturing his colleagues on Scripture. "It is clearly taught by Jesus the Christ himself," Walberg preached to members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, "for those of us who believe in him — and I understand and I accept the fact that there are those who don't — but he said render...

Spain’s Socialist leader, Pedro Sánchez, has apologized after he accidentally voted for a law requiring girls under 18 to obtain parental consent for abortions. The law, introduced by the governing People’s Party and long opposed by the Socialists, was promised by the conservative PP last autumn after it abandoned its controversial attempt to reverse the country’s abortion laws. The legislation being proposed then would have turned Spain into one of the toughest places in Europe to obtain an abortion. […] On Wednesday, as social media poked fun at the opposition leader’s blunder, likening him to Homer Simpson at the control...

House Republicans ran into divisions Wednesday over the new Congress’ first abortion bill, and leaders were trying for a way to advance the legislation without an embarrassing split over the issue. Legislation set for debate Thursday would ban virtually all abortions for pregnancies of 20 weeks or longer. It would offer some exceptions, including for victims of rapes that have already been reported to authorities. Some Republicans were upset about that requirement, saying that many women feel too distressed to report rapes and should not be penalized. …

The Congressional Budget Office says legislation the House will pass this week to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy would lead to an increase in the budget deficit of at least $235 million over the next decade, and perhaps as much as half a billion dollars. The CBO released a report Tuesday for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, H.R. 36, which the House will consider on Thursday. That bill aims to ban abortions after 20 weeks, and is based on evidence that a fetus can feel pain once it reaches that age. CBO’s report assumes that if the...

Planned Parenthood clinics did 327,653 abortions in its fiscal year 2014 (which ran from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014), according to Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s newly released annual report. That works out to an average of 37 abortions per hour or nearly 1 every 90 seconds. Planned Parenthood also received $528.4 million from government grants and reimbursements, which equaled 41 percent of its revenue. The federal government is prohibited from paying directly for abortions through Title X family planning grants and reimbursements; however, federal funds do pay for Planned Parenthood operations, including the clinics where abortions are...

Today, Planned Parenthood sent two Black women out front to push support for abortion in Ohio. They were opposing Ohio’s pro-life Heartbeat legislation due for a vote this week. HB248 would generally prohibit an abortion of an unborn human individual with a detectable heartbeat. The heartbeat is detected usually around six weeks gestation. Speaking for abortion giant Planned Parenthood which was founded in eugenic racism was an African American mother of six who said that her decision to have an abortion should not be judged. Samantha Williams began her speech on the south lawn of the Ohio Statehouse by saying,...

Northern Ireland’s most prominent anti-abortion activist was convicted Wednesday of harassing the director of Belfast’s only abortion clinic in the latest chapter of a bitter two-year confrontation. Bernadette Smyth, leader of the Precious Life group, was convicted on two counts of threatening Dawn Purvis, who runs British family planning service Marie Stopes’ Belfast branch. It is the only such clinic on the island of Ireland, where abortion is legal only in extreme cases where a woman’s life is deemed at risk from her pregnancy. …

In a report issued in September, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recommended that the United Nations provide women with “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services” in refugee camps in Syria, Iraq and Sudan, including abortion. “I call upon all actors to support improved access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services in conflict-affected settings,” Ban said. “This must include access to HIV counseling and testing, which remains limited in many settings, and the safe termination of pregnancies for survivors of conflict-related rape.” …

FULL TITLE: Girl Scout membership plummets for second straight year losing more than 100,000 members For the second straight year, youth and adult membership in the Girl Scouts has dropped sharply, intensifying pressure on the 102-year-old youth organization to find ways of reversing the trend. According to figures provided to The Associated Press, the total of youth members and adult volunteers dropped by 6 per cent over the past year — from 2,994,844 to 2,813,997. Over two years, total membership is down 11.6 per cent, and it has fallen 27 per cent from a peak of more than 3.8 million...

At an event on Thursday at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, used a Chinese Communist Party official’s statistic to point out how many babies have been aborted in the 34 years since the one-child per couple policy was put in place. “Forced abortion is not a choice,” Littlejohn said. “The Chinese Communist Party has become the enemy of the people, and has boasted that it has prevented 400 million lives through the one child policy.” “That is a greater number than the entire population of the United States and...

The Spanish government has scrapped plans to restrict the availability of abortion because there was no consensus for change, the prime minister said Tuesday, in a move that brought the resignation of the justice minister who was in charge of introducing a new law. Spain now allows abortion without restrictions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The government had promised to restrict abortion to only cases of rape or serious health risks. But the proposal triggered widespread denunciation, with critics saying it would put Spain back 40 years in terms of women’s rights. …

On Monday, PBS aired the controversial documentary “After Tiller,” a film that sympathizes with the four remaining late-term abortionists in the country. Pro-life groups immediately filed petitions urging the station to remove the film from its lineup, to no avail. Today, the documentary’s filmmakers and Dr. Susan Robinson, one of the abortionists featured in the film, participated in a Google Chat to field viewers’ questions. Their “answers” were misleading, accusatory, and, at times, outright lies.“What is the hardest part of your job?,” one Google participant asked Dr. Robinson: “Listening to the desperate, sad stories and not taking it on as...

Health insurance companies in California may not refuse to cover the cost of abortions, state insurance officials have ruled in a reversal of policy stemming from the decision by two Catholic universities to drop elective abortions from their employee health plans. Although the federal Affordable Care Act does not compel employers to provide workers with health insurance that includes abortion coverage, the director of California’s Department of Managed Health Care said in a letter to seven insurance companies on Friday that the state Constitution and a 1975 state law prohibits them from selling group plans that exclude the procedure. The...