Free Republic

With all that's going on with the Catholic Church and the President right now, this has become a huge hot button topic. But why is this so important to progressives? Rush keeps saying that "abortion is the sacrament of liberalism." What makes this so? Let's ask Margaret Sanger. In her book "Woman and the new race", Sanger explains the purpose of birth control:(Page 229) Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those...

If you aren't creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren't listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up. When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of "increased access" to "reproductive services" for "poor" women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling. As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 "to stop the multiplication of the unfit." This, she boasted, would be "the most important and...

UPDATE, 12:14p: More evidence the “compromise” stinks: Planned Parenthood likes it. UPDATE, 12:02p: From a House source: This “new policy” is a distinction without a difference.  The services the religious organization opposes won’t be listed in the contract, but the insurance companies will give it the employees anyway.  Insurance companies will justify providing the coverage that the religious charity opposes by swearing that birth control coverage doesn’t actually cost anything because it’s cheaper than pregnancy services, so it’s just a free perk. The administration will argue that people of faith should be fine with this arrangement, because they can tell...

February 8, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The conundrum faced by the organ transplant industry, that the removal of vital organs kills the “donor,” can be “easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing,” two leading U.S. bioethicists have said. In an article titled, “What Makes Killing Wrong?” appearing in last month’s Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors have moved the argument forward by admitting that the practice of vital organ donation ignores “traditional” medical ethics. “Traditional medical ethics embraces the norm that doctors … must not kill their patients. This norm is often seen as absolute and universal. In contrast, we...

The drama continues to deepen.When the board of directors of the Susan G. Komen Foundation decided to halt funding to notorious abortion provider Planned Parenthood, abortion activists launched an informal investigation. Something sinister was happening here; some pro-life plague had to have infiltrated Komen. They pinned their attention on Komen’s relatively new VP, Karen Handel, an admittedly pro-life former Republican candidate for the governor of Georgia. They pointed out that the announcement of Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns’ investigation into Planned Parenthood preceded Komen’s revision of its grant eligibility criteria, which now excludes any organization under investigation by local, state or...

Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee has opened a new satellite health center in Johnson City. Located at 409 E. Unaka Ave., the Planned Parenthood office is open to patients... ...That's all you need to know. Go straight to the first comment!

“Planned Parenthood’s mission is to pressure as many women into having an abortion as it can,” a former abortion facility worker has revealed. From Catherine Anthony Adair’s op-ed piece in The Washington Examiner: In 1997, I began working at a Boston Planned Parenthood clinic as a young, idealistic college student who strongly believed in what I had been told about the organization, that I would be helping other young women access safe and affordable health care. My time there was not spent providing prenatal care to pregnant women, providing counseling or basic health care services or educating women about reproductive...

In a recent article that has to be read to be believed, Shannon Dea, co-president of Planned Parenthood Waterloo Region, responds to a call by a Canadian member of parliament to have a debate on the humanity of the unborn child, saying: “Medical science is irrelevant to the question of when a fetus becomes a human being — that matter is a legal and philosophical one, not a medical one.” Dea might as well have said that medical science is irrelevant to the question of whether or not a pig is a pig, or an elephant is an elephant, or...

January 9, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a recently released report, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) claimed credit for helping to “shape” the Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama this past March. “In the latter half of 2009 – in what will surely be remembered as a pivotal achievement – Planned Parenthood worked with its supporters across the nation to help shape and pass the Affordable Care Act,” wrote PPFA President Cecile Richards and PPFA Chair Valerie McCarthy, in a letter published as part of the organization’s 2009-2010 annual report. The women credit their organization’s “tireless efforts” with...

The “slippery slope” is often derided as a logical fallacy. But when one of the leading advocacy groups for euthanasia in Belgium posts an article entitled “Euthanasie: tijd voor de volgende stap, Euthanasia, time for the next step”, it’s hard not to think that it may not be so illogical after all. The Humanistisch-Vrijzinnige Vereniging (Humanist-Liberal Association) complains that eligibility for euthanasia is far too restrictive. At the moment, only people with unbearable suffering can be euthanased. This leaves out people in irreversible comas, people with dementia, people with irreversible brain diseases and people who are under 18. This is...

A woman in Australia who was pregnant with twins decided to have one of her babies aborted after doctors discovered that he had a life-threatening congenital heart defect. The seriously disturbing part? The doctors aborted the wrong fetus, terminating a perfectly healthy child. After doctors realized the "blunder," the woman, who was 32 weeks pregnant, had to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the sick fetus, where it was later terminated. The Royal Women's Hospital confirmed the incident and referred to it as a "terrible tragedy." Um, yeah ... one could say that. I honestly really don't even know what...

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as...

No amount of reassuring chat can disguise his advice that we should keep deadly drugs in our sock drawerDr Philip Nitschke, aka “Dr Death”, has been in town. According to a report in the Independent on Tuesday the Australian euthanasia campaigner has been telling audiences in London, York and Scotland that “his aim [is] to save lives”. His argument runs that “once people have a means of killing themselves, many who might attempt a botched suicide would instead prolong their lives, knowing they had a way out without having to call on a loved one to help, exposing them to...

August 21, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A prominent left-wing American political blog has come under fire after publishing one writer’s quip that the world needs “a global superplague” because “there are too many goddam people already.” Daily Kos contributor Jon Stafford’s August 10 post, in which Stafford described himself as “Not Pro-Choice, Pro-Abortion,” drew immediate attention in the blogosphere. While Stafford said that his remarks are partly “facetious,” he went on to say, “nevertheless there is a seed of truth in it, because I believe that the world is wildly overpopulated and that we must take steps as a society to...

In 1992, my friend Frances committed suicide on her 76th birthday. Frances was not terminally ill. She had been diagnosed with treatable leukemia and needed a hip replacement. Mostly, though, she was depressed by family issues and profoundly disappointed at where her life had taken her.Something seemed very off to me about Frances’s suicide. So I asked the executor of her estate to send me the “suicide file” kept by the quintessentially organized Frances and was horrified to learn from it that she had been an avid reader of the (now defunct) Hemlock Quarterly, published by the aptly named Hemlock...

When Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a leading proponent of right-to-die legislation, died June 3, he may have achieved something he was unable to accomplish in his last years: perhaps return the issue of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) to a serious level of legitimate public discourse. Public opinion polls conducted during the middle of the last decade by CBS/New York Times and the Pew Research Foundation show that Americans are pretty much split down the middle on whether PAS should be an option for dying patients and their families. Yet in more recent years, the debate, while unsettled, seems to have subsided even...

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama’s regulatory czar retreated from a 2003 academic report he wrote advocating that government assign a higher monetary value to the lives of young people than to senior citizens during testimony to Congress on Friday. Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein testified in front of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations about the Obama administration’s plans for reviewing and reducing federal regulations. “I’m a lot older now than the author with my name was, and I’m not sure what I think about what that young man wrote,”...

major segment of ObamaCare will force cuts in drug and medical device research that “will kill more people than it will help,” according to an astonishing study quoted in Reason Magazine May 24. The government medical program was sold as better health at lower cost. But estimated economic cost will total $1.7 trillion, resulting in 32 million lost years of life. The administration’s program is called federal Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 provided $1.1 billion for research and development in CER. This was to create an inventory of CER therapies to give...

Washington D.C., May 10, 2011 / 01:36 pm (CNA).- A United States attorney has indicted a man who described himself as a “pro-choice terrorist” with six counts of making interstate threats against pro-life advocates such as Priests for Life director Father Frank Pavone and Princeton University law professor Robert P. George. New York resident Theodore Shulman, 49, has plead not guilty to six counts of communicating interstate threats. The charges each carry a maximum five-year sentence and were filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York. Shulman allegedly left a threatening voice mail message with the Calif.-based...

The Cemetery of the Innocents at Clarion University in Clarion, PA is supposed to commemorate the millions of babies lost to abortion. But last week, the quaint memorial with 350 wooden crosses resembled a satanic ritual scene after it was vandalized during the campus’s Life Week, which also happened to be Holy Week. Students for Life of America (SLA) explains the vandalism: In a breathtaking public display of anti-Christian and anti-Life motivations, 350 crosses were pulled up and re-inserted in inverted fashion, a well-known anti-Christian symbol. Additionally, red paint was splattered on crosses and signs. Even eerier was the mock...

Former green jobs czar Van Jones spoke to the attendees of the global warming conference Power Shift 2011 this weekend. During his remarks, which can be viewed in full here, he went off on an odd diatribe about how our society is powered by death. He says that because fossil fuels are made of dead things that we shouldn’t be surprised burning them brings death in the form of global warming, oil spills, asthma, and cancer. Yea. He says that we need to replace these dead forms of energy with the “living sun” and wind power. Because, somehow, we are...

The number of euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands rose significantly in 2009 compared with 2008. There were reportedly 200 more deaths under the law, but pro-life advocates say those numbers are likely lowball estimates given the underreporting in the Dutch system. The Dutch News indicates approximately 2,500 people died via euthanasia in 2009, but the actual number is unknown because the government estimates about 20 percent of cases are not reported. The new government figures also include six registered cases of euthanasia on elderly patients with senile dementia, all of whom were supposedly in the early stages and able to...

HOW MANY severed baby spines does it take to pay for a $984,000 shore house? How many severed infant feet is a boat worth? And what part of Kermit Gosnell's clinic paid to keep his mistress, 41 years younger, on the payroll

TORONTO, ON (The Interim) - There is nothing right or left-wing about pro-life, but pro-lifers are repeatedly and ridiculously condemned and dismissed as being on the right. Life, however, is more important than political labels.

John B. Miller, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, doing research for NOAA, has been filmed at a “350″ climate change rally at the Denver statehouse calling for control of population and an end to the “madness” of economic growth.In what was clearly a passionate and deeply heartfelt speech, Miller told the audience, to cheers and applause: I would be remiss, as a scientist who studied this, if I didn’t mention the following two things:The first is that, most importantly, we need to do, as a society, in this country and globally, whatever we can to reduce...

(CBS) This story was originally published on Nov. 22, 2009. It was updated on Aug. 6, 2010. Every medical study ever conducted has concluded that 100 percent of all Americans will eventually die. This comes as no great surprise, but the amount of money being spent at the very end of people's lives probably will. Last year, Medicare paid $55 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients' lives. That's more than the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of Education. And it has been estimated that 20 to 30...

The House health-care reform bill proposes to decrease hospital visits by establishing a “medical home pilot program” for elderly and disabled Americans. Such a medical home would not require a physician to be on the staff, and therefore could be run solely by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Medical homes also would practice “evidence-based” medicine, which advocates only the use of medical treatments that are supported by effectiveness research. But physicians’ groups say the legislation could lead to restrictions on which treatments may be used for certain conditions, despite the fact that some patients might require a unique or unconventional...

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone...

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone...

Tuesday June 23, 2009 Obama Abruptly Sacks Bio-ethics Panel Critical of Embryonic Stem-Cell Research By Peter J. SmithWASHINGTON, D.C., June 23, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The White House has dismissed the members of the President’s US Council on Bioethics just a few months before their mandate expires, indicating their services are no longer required by the President and that he is looking for a more “practical� advisory board. The New York Times reported that Reid Cherlin, a White House press officer, told the paper that President Barack Obama saw them as "a philosophically leaning advisory group" designed by the previous...

The 65-31 vote came after Democrats urged quick action so that Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius could get to work leading the federal response to the flu outbreak.

Appearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was confronted in a way she probably wasn't expecting. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., asked the secretary to account for her comments the previous month, when she accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "I admire Margaret Sanger enormously," Clinton had said in March, "her courage, her tenacity, her vision ... And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of...

When someone with a terminal illness decides to end their life by overdosing on barbiturates, they hope the drugs will lull them into a peaceful and permanent sleep. But if the drugs have passed their expiration date or lack a sufficiently lethal concentration, the would-be suicide victim may actually survive - risking an array of complications including coma, reduced physical functioning and the opprobrium of disapproving friends and family. Now, in an effort to provide certainty to those contemplating suicide, one of the world's leading euthanasia advocates plans to sell barbiturate testing kits to confirm that deadly drug cocktails are,...

Health Service paramedics have been told not to resuscitate terminally-ill patients who register on a controversial new database to say they want to die. It has been set up by the ambulance service in London for hundreds of people who have only a few months to live so that they may register their 'death wishes' in advance. It is believed to be the first in the country, but other trusts around the country are expected to follow suit to comply with Government guidelines which state that patients' wishes should be taken into account, even at the point of death. Patients'...

WASHINGTON, April 3, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a speech to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Awards Gala, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she admires "Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision." Secretary Clinton said she is "really in awe of" Sanger for Sanger's early work in Brooklyn, New York, "taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions." Immediately following a trip to Mexico's Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the pro-life movement, Mrs. Clinton travelled to Texas on March 28, where she was awarded the Margaret...

Salem, OR (LifeNews.com) -- The number of assisted suicides in Oregon has increased 30 percent in the last two years and euthanasia activists themselves may have provided the reasons why. It appears members of Compassion & Choices have infiltrated the hospice system and are urging patients to kill themselves.LifeNews.com reported on the increase earlier this month, but a Compassion & Choice press release last week provided an interesting take on the report.The group said that "nearly 100% of terminally ill individuals using the law in 2008 were enrolled in hospice.""Hospice enrollment among those using the Act increased to 98%,...

AMA Supports President's Decision to Fund Stem Cell Research For immediate release March 9, 2009 Statement attributable to: Joseph Heyman, MD Board Chair, American Medical Association "The American Medical Association supports President Obama's decision to lift the ban on federal funding of stem cell research. Stem cell research holds great promise to treat diseases that science has so far been unable to cure, and this change in policy will allow researchers to accelerate their efforts by applying for federal research funds. "The AMA supports biomedical research on stem cells and has encouraged strong public support of federal funding for this...

LONDON, March 12, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An Oxford University stem cell expert has urged the use of aborted children in organ transplants as a solution to the shortage of available organs. Sir Richard Gardner has called for a feasibility study on the possibility of obtaining organs from the bodies of aborted babies.He said, "It is probably a more realistic technique in dealing with the shortage of kidney donors than others."The Daily Mail reports that pro-life and Christian groups have called the proposal "morally abhorrent," and said it will result in abortions being timed to suit transplant patients. Dr Peter...