Free Republic

On March 30, 2005, Terri Schiavo had her last full day of life on this earth and both her family and Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life will never forget the last moments they shared with the woman whose former husband won a court order to take her life.Terri was killed on March 31, 2005 when her former husband won a protracted legal battle against the Schindler family for the right to disconnect her feeding tube. Doctors who examined Terri say she was not in a persistent vegetative state and that her condition could have been improved has she...

March 30, 2015 (BreakPoint.org) -- In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in Vacco v. Quill that there was no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. Those of us here at BreakPoint recall how Chuck Colson and others breathed a sigh of relief.But a lot has changed in 18 years. What was legally unthinkable then is oh so thinkable today. And even if the Court doesn’t reverse itself, at least eighteen states and the District of Columbia are contemplating following the lead of Oregon and several European countries, most notably the Netherlands and Belgium.That’s why a vitally important Heritage Foundation paper by Ryan T....

March 30, 2015 (NewsBusters.org) -- Media Research Center (MRC) and Family Research Council (FRC) are launching a joint national campaign to educate the public about a Disney ABC sitcom pilot based on the life of bigoted activist Dan Savage. MRC and FRC contacted Ben Sherwood, president of Disney/ABC Television Group, more than two weeks ago urging him to put a stop to this atrocity but received no response. [Read the full letter]A perusal of Dan Savage’s work reveals a career built on advocating violence — even murder — and spewing hatred against people of faith. Savage has spared no one with whom he disagrees from his vitriolic...

The Supreme Court today decided it will not hear a lawsuit challenging the death panels in Obamacare that pro-life groups strongly opposed because they involve rationing health care and potentially denying lifesaving medical treatment — putting patients’ right to life at risk.Previously, one of the leading national pro-life groups called for legislation to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board established by the controversial Obamacare legislation because of pro-life concerns about it.“Repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is critical to prevent the rationing of life-saving medical treatment,” said Burke Balch, J.D., director of National Right to Life’s Robert Powell...

As LifeNews has reported, the Colorado woman who cut out a 7-month-old unborn baby from a mother’s abdomen, resulting in the death of the infant, will not be charged with murder. That’s because the state lacks an unborn victims law to hold criminals accountable when they kill or injure unborn children in such criminal attacks.However, new information reveals the prosecutor in the case is an abortion advocate who has the endorsement of prominent pro-abortion groups in a previous campaign for state Attorney General and who endorsed legislation to not regard unborn children as victims of such crimes, which would allow...

CHINO, CA, March 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Southern California’s Chino High School is facing outrage from parents and students alike after school administrators decided to keep secret a teacher’s plan to undergo a sex change in the middle of the school year.The teacher in question, 32-year-old Michael Swager, showed up at work dressed and made up as a woman the morning of March 16, after eight years of teaching chemistry at the school as a man.  The teacher informed students that the 6’6”, 300 lb. man they once knew as “Michael” was now a woman, and told them they should...

Raissa Maritain, the philosopher and spiritual writer, died some months after suffering a stroke. During those months she lay in a hospital bed, unable to speak. After her death, her husband, the renowned philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in preparing her journals for publication, wrote these words: “At a moment when everything collapsed for both of us, and which as followed by four agonising months, Raissa was walled in herself by a sudden attack of aphasia. Whatever progress she made during several weeks by sheer force of intelligence and will, all deep communication remained cut off. And subsequently, after a relapse, she...

March 24, 2015 (NationalReview.com) -- I have repeatedly warned about articles published in medical and bioethics journals advocating killing the profoundly disabled or dying for their organs.The assault on the “dead donor rule” has now filtered down to the popular media. The Atlantic has an article advocating that dying patients be killed for their organs rather than having to actually, you know, die first. From, “As They Lay Dying:” A more useful ethical standard could involve the idea of “imminent death.” Once a person with a terminal disease reaches a point when only extraordinary measures will delay death; when use (or...

March 23, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The fight for life for the family of Lisa Avila, a mother of seven, continues.Avila, who has been in a coma for nearly six weeks, has been surrounded by family and friends who do not want Anaheim Regional Medical Center to remove the medical care that is keeping her alive.The hospital had planned to withdraw care on Friday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. local time, but chose to extend the deadline until Tuesday at noon.According to Avila's family, however, that's not enough time for their wife and mother to recover. They are insisting that she...

COPENHAGEN, March 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A professor of sexology at Aalborg University has suggested that showing children pornography in school would help children better understand sexuality.Christian Graugaard said he hopes by watching hardcore porn, children will realize that it differs from real-life sex.Graugaard told the Danish public broadcaster DR that if children try to act out what they see online, it could result in "broken necks and disappointment," so he thinks schools should help teenagers distinguish between porn and real life. That process, he said, would involve showing them more porn.“Instead of having sex education be boring and technical,...

In exposing the liberals war on women we must begin with their physical killing of females (and males). Abortion is a legal holocaust resulting in the murder of 3,500 babies daily (mostly girls) in the United States. These acts of violence bring terror to the most helpless and innocent of human beings who are pro-choice — they choose to live. There’s is a "silent scream" as the abortionist pulls the baby apart limb by limb, or injects into the womb a powerful solution that slowly burns and suffocates the infant. This is child abuse at its worst — the sentencing...

TORONTO, March 13, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- A homosexual activist has candidly admitted that gay-themed materials and policies pushed in grade schools across North America are for the sake of “indoctrinating” children into an unquestioning acceptance of homosexuality.“I am here to tell you: All that time I said I wasn't indoctrinating anyone with my beliefs about gay and lesbian and bi and trans and queer people? That was a lie,” writes long-time Canadian gay activist S. Bear Bergman in a piece appearing on Huffington Post a week ago tellingly titled ‘I Have Come to Indoctrinate Your Children Into My LGBTQ Agenda...

March 11, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A British woman has given birth to her own grandson, acting as a surrogate mother for her homosexual son.Kyle Casson's 46-year-old mother, Anne-Marie Casson, 46, of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, carried a donated egg fertilized with her son's sperm.The UK's 2008 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, which governs surrogacy arrangements, generally discourages surrogate mothers from acting on behalf of a single parent. Under the law it is illegal to hand over a child to only the biological father. Instead, the child must be given to a couple "in an enduring family relationship."However, in this case a...

March 11, 2015 (ALL.org) -- If you have ever heard the word “eugenics,” you probably know that it is a heinous act. And in the 21st century, we’re supposed to be more sophisticated and better behaved than the Nazis or the 18th and 19th century Americans who plotted massive exterminations of the “undesirable” population. In today’s world, where individuals have a host of legal “rights,” it might seem safe to revisit such goals as purifying the human race of genetic defects, preventing births in locations designated by scientists as overpopulated, and using abortion and contraception (often the same thing) to...

March 6, 2015 (ThePublicDiscourse.com) -- When running for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama misled the voters about his true position on the question of same-sex marriage. This is not an accusation made by one of the president’s political enemies, but an admission made by one of his closest political advisors: David Axelrod. According to Time magazine, Axelrod’s new book about his career in politics reveals that candidate Obama really believed in same-sex marriage, but he publicly said that he opposed it because he feared the electoral consequences of his real convictions.In response to the mini-burst of commentary and indignation that this...

When one considers the number of abortions in any given country, the tally of human life lost to abortion is staggering.In the United States alone, 57 million unborn children have died from abortions since Roe v. Wade ushered in an era of unlimited abortions in 1973. If you factor in the number of legal abortions in the several states that legalized abortion prior to the Supreme Court's infamous decision, that horrific total is even higher.But what of the number of babies who have lost their lives to abortion around the world int he decades abortion has been legal in countries...

At the end of this month, Terri Schiavo will be ten years dead. But she is far from forgotten. Everyone reading these words knows the story, and everyone has an opinion. What began in 1990 as a private tragedy—a vivacious young woman stricken in the prime of life with a severe cognitive disability—became a source of profound cultural division, as likely to spark debate today as when the case first broke into the public’s consciousness. Why has her story remained so potent? Part of it has to do with the high-profile and vituperative legal and public-relations battle between Terri’s...

DUBLIN, March 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The government needs to protect children from the religious views of their own parents, according to popular atheist writer Richard Dawkins.His speaking partner went further, comparing parents instilling their religious views in their children could be compared to denying them medical treatment.In an interview prior to a speech at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, last week, Dawkins told the media that parents have too much influence in their children's education, especially when it comes to religion.“There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children,...

Periodically I receive emails from good pro-lifers (and occasionally from pro-abortionists) politely suggesting that what I had written was hard to believe. None exactly accused me of making it up, but the gist was hard to miss: Nobody, but nobody would ever say, could ever say what I attributed to the author of a particular article.The beauty of the Internet is that you can easily direct good-faith skeptics to the source. So, in his instance, go to “I Love Abortion: Implying Otherwise Accomplishes Nothing for Women’s Rights,” by Jessica DelBalzo.The rhrealitycheck.org site is peopled by the kind of women who...

March 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Although there has always been contraception, its acceptance and practice by society as a whole is a relatively new phenomenon. In the first part of the 20th century barrier methods became through mass production increasingly used. However, with the advent of the hormonal contraceptive pill in the 1960s the contraceptive era, ushering in the sexual revolution, really took off.The term “revolution” is by no means exaggerated, for the result was a fundamental change in the understanding of human sexuality in society. With the pill, people thought, nothing can happen, i.e. no child could be conceived....