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...

Alongside today’s respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet. Since the beginning of time, one of the clearest markers of an enlightened society has been the moral status it attaches to human life. And outwardly, at least, twenty-first-century Western societies express an unprecedented degree of respect for human life. For example, cultural and political institutions continually talk about the need to uphold human rights. The human rights narrative now shapes policymaking, both domestically and internationally. Many even argue that protecting human rights...

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...

“There is only one country in the world for which we project the median fertility to not fall below 2.1 children in the projection period between 2010 and 2100,” said the UN Population Division in the 2010 Population Estimates and Projections Revision. In their informative video series, Overpopulation Is a Myth, The Population Research Institute explains, ”by the end of this century, we’ll be losing 1 billion people every twenty years.”

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...

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...

An artist's rendering of the unborn child at 32-weeks gestation. MELBOURNE, Australia, November 23, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A 32-week set of twins were both aborted after staff at an Australian hospital initially killed the healthy twin by accident, and then also aborted the sick sibling after realizing their mistake, reports the Herald Sun. The paper reports that the mother of the children was told that one of her twin children had a congenital heart defect that would require years of surgery, and that the child may not survive. After she decided to have the child aborted, doctors then gave...

The Obama administration Friday revoked the approval of the best-selling drug Avastin for treating advanced breast cancer in the United States, despite appeals from distraught women, some patients advocates and the company that makes the drug. FDA Administrator Margaret Hamburg issued a 69-page decision outlining her decision, which was based on the recommendation of a six-member FDA advisory committee that unanimously concluded in June that the drug was harming women more than it was helping them. [Snip] ... Genentech spokesman Charlotte Arnold. “We are disappointed with this outcome. We remain committed to the many women with this incurable disease and...

I think my Ukrainian heritage fuels my twin obsessions with Soviet history and economics. Sadly, this often puts me on opposing ideological ground from my good friends and fellow alumni of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which recently helped bring Utopia in Four Movements to Iowa City's local tax-supported theater. Sam Green, the filmmaker who narrated the exploration of "the battered state of the utopian impulse," on one hand described socialism has having gone "monstrously wrong" and on the other expressed open sentimentality for the Russian and Maoist revolutions. He showed pictures of executed Cambodians and also said a copy of...

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.> In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes. Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates. > Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue. If he...

As global population reaches 7 billion, Jeffrey Sachs says we must adopt sustainable technologies, achieve stable population. Just 12 years after the arrival of the 6 billionth individual on the planet in 1999, humanity will greet the 7 billionth arrival this month. The world population continues its rapid ascent, with roughly 75 million more births than deaths each year. The consequences of a world crowded with 7 billion people are enormous. And unless the world population stabilizes during the 21st century, the consequences for humanity could be grim. A rising population puts enormous pressures on a planet already plunging into...

A speech by Don Feder at Ave Maria University, September 20, 2011 Hollywood has a penchant for blowing things up – especially the world. Since the 1950s, apocalyptic movies (which come with a variety of special effects) have been all the rage. We’ve met our doom through nuclear war (“On The Beach,” “The Day After”), a worldwide super-plague (“Twelve Monkeys” “The Stand”), global warming (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Waterworld,”), the earth’s core over-heating (“2012,” “The Core”), overpopulation (“Soylent Green”), a comet striking the earth (“Deep Impact,” “Armageddon”), sentient machines taking over (the “Terminator” and “Matrix” series), rampaging simians (the “Planet...

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...

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, August 22, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A recently retired New York Times reporter has penned a book in which she details how she followed through on a shocking pact to help her 88-year-old mother, Estelle, starve to death. Julia Gross with her mother Estelle. In an excerpt from the book, “A Bittersweet Season,” published recently in the Daily Mail, Jane Gross describes her mother’s increasing dissatisfaction with life as her health deteriorated, and her mounting desire to die, despite the fact that she was not terminally ill. “So here we were, my mother and I, wishing that she...

Population: The vice president gives a thumbs up to Beijing's policy of sustainable growth through forced population control. This is no gaffe. The White House endorses this policy. Just ask the president's science adviser. We are used to the "mouth that roared" putting his foot in it. But Vice President Joe Biden's remarks at Sichuan University in China clearly embrace the progressive belief that people are a plague on the Earth — not its greatest resource. "Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I'm not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you're...

In the wake of an onslaught of criticism for Vice President Joe Biden’s comments in China about “not second guessing” the country’s one-child policy, the Obama administration has issued a statement of clarification. “The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization,” Biden’s spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff told The Daily Caller in an email. “The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant.” Barkoff explained that Biden was attempting to critique the restrictive system with his comments.

I'm penning this column from Australia where I was privileged to speak a few days ago at an event at Parliament House celebrating Australia's National Marriage Day. As in America, marriage in Australia is under attack by homosexual activists who seek to shoehorn their lifestyle choices into a shoe that will never fit: marriage. They want the law-and public opinion--to redefine marriage to include homosexual sex as something good, the moral equivalent of marital sexuality expressed by a husband and a wife. Pro-family Australians are blessed with charismatic leaders like MP's Bob Katter and Kevin Andrews, and pro-family advocate Babette...

Comedian and actor David Cross appeared on Current TV's "Countdown" program Monday evening to promote his upcoming movie and other gigs when the conversation turned to a recent study that watching one hour of television shortens your life by 22 minutes. Cross was being very serious on how this would benefit his pocket because that would mean he would not have to pay for medical care of the elderly who are "not contributing anything." Keith Olbermann, the host of "Countdown," believes this is a Darwinian idea. Transcript below: David Cross: "I don't mind, I like the idea -- or I'm...

I am sure this will be happening in Madrid as it did in London. Richard Dawkins brought at least one laspsed Catholic back to the Church during the Papal visit to the UK. She saw the the anti-Pope snarling mob led by Dawkins and Tatchel, with their plastic devil horns and inflated condoms, sex "toys" and angry faces and she saw the sheer joy of those cheering the Pope and the banners carried by the enthusiastic youth. She said it wasn't about arguments, it was about faces. Dawkins & co. glaring and hopeless, those who were there cheering the Pope...

President Obama is on the verge of achieving his liberal revolution. His goal is to destroy our Judeo-Christian culture and replace it with European-style radical secularism. The administration is now contemplating forcing health insurance companies to provide free birth control - including the "morning-after" pill - as part of Obamacare. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seriously considering adding contraception to the list of services that must be fully covered by insurers without charging co-payments. HHS is expected to make its final decision before Aug. 1.

Our unsustainable population levels are depleting resources and denying a decent future to our descendants. We must stop the denial. A 2009 NPR story on U.S. pregnancies reported that half — yes, half — of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended. That's a lot of unintended consumers adding to our future climate change. And that's what the right calls the "liberal" side of the mass media. The politically conservative U.S. mass media cover unsustainable population levels even less. That pretty much reflects the appalling state of U.S. public education today on population. The U.S. approach to population issues across all levels...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday that it plans to ban the sale of “the most toxic rat and mouse poisons, as well as most loose bait and pellet products” to residential customers. The goal is to better protect children, pets and wildlife. “These changes are essential to reduce the thousands of accidental exposures of children that occur every year from rat and mouse control products and also to protect household pets,” said Steve Owens, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. The EPA also will require that all rat and mouse poisons

(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,”...

Dr. Jack Kevorkian passed away early Friday morning at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. Kevorkian died of pulmonary thrombosis around 2:30 a.m. He was 84-years-old.

WASHINGTON -- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that hospitals and healthcare providers will no longer be reimbursed for treating their Medicaid patients for illnesses, injuries, or readmissions that should have been prevented. A final rule announced Wednesday enacts a portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that prohibits states from making Medicaid payments to providers for conditions that are deemed "reasonably preventable." In 2008, Medicare stopped reimbursing hospitals for treating conditions, infections, or illnesses that were acquired in the hospital, and for any readmissions associated with treating those hospital-acquired conditions. The Medicaid list of what...

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...

May 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Warren Buffett apparently thinks you can have too many customers. Several years ago, I went toe-to-toe with Buffett — and won. The occasion was the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. I had introduced a resolution designed to stop company funds from being spent on population control and abortion campaigns. Buffett, you see, was convinced that there were too many people on the planet and, as the company’s majority shareholder, he was using company money to try and reduce their number. Buffett is not a religious man, so I made the argument in economic terms that any...

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...

Know what doesn't go over well with advertisers? Making fun of disabled children. On April 18, political blog Wonkette published a post titled "Greatest Living American: A Children's Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday" (none of which we will quote here). Trig, for those who don't remember, is Sarah Palin's youngest son, who has Down Syndrome. The initial response to this "celebration" of Trig's birthday was limited to comments getting in on the action, contributing the sort of jokes that would make Gilbert Gottfried proud. But then, according to Slate's David Weigel, conservative bloggers stumbled across it and the...

So this is the new leftist humor? Wonkette attacked Sarah Palin’s baby Trig on his birthday. Via Free Republic:This is disgusting- even for Wonkette. That strange man yelling unintelligibly at Sarah Palin? He’s merely a lowly shepherd proclaiming the birth of our savior. Today is the day we come together to celebrate the snowbilly grifter’s magical journey from Texas to Alaska to deliver to the America the great gentleman scholar Trig Palin. Is Palin his true mother? Or was Bristol? (And why is it that nobody questions who the father is? Because, either way, Todd definitely did it.) It doesn’t...

Where have all the children gone? It's a problem that Mark Steyn first addressed in his book America Alone. Other than a piece Jonathan Last recently wrote for Weekly Standard, few if any reporters, pundits, politicians, or scholars seemed to take any interest. This is rather astonishing in so far as everything from our national security, economy, and future well-being depends on our ability to procreate. As Mark Steyn quipped, "...a people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in." If one is to glimpse at the TFR (Total...

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

A number of years ago, I was the victim of a brutal street crime. Although I was left with a broken nose and two black eyes, I learned soon thereafter that I wasn't a "good victim." A progressive friend, Fran, clued me in. When I told her what happened, she said, "What you went through wasn't half as bad as what he has suffered." Fran was referring to the fact that I am white and the assailant was black. In other words, my suffering didn't matter. Fran's reaction is not at all unique in these parts; here, there are good...

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...

The UN’s IPCC Assessor David Shearman wants you to pay an eco tax of $18,000 for every child you have. This is to compensate the planet for you being a human. Don’t forget the eco elitists in power think you are a disease, a scourge on the planet, a virus that needs to be eliminated so the logical consequence is they want you to pay even more for being a human - that is to them of course. They have taken it upon themselves to represent the earth - no one voted them there - they elevated themselves to that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four previously abundant species of bumblebee are close to disappearing in the United States, researchers reported Monday in a study confirming that the agriculturally important bees are being affected worldwide. They documented a 96 percent decline in the numbers of the four species, and said their range had shrunk by as much as 87 percent. As with honeybees, a pathogen is partly involved, but the researchers also found evidence of inbreeding caused by habitat loss. We provide incontrovertible evidence that multiple Bombus species have experienced sharp population declines at the national level," the researchers reported in the...

Like so many other couples these days, the Toronto-area business executive and her husband put off having children for years as they built successful careers. Both parents were in their 40s — and their first son just over a year old — when this spring the woman became pregnant a second time. Seven weeks in, an ultrasound revealed the Burlington, Ont., resident was carrying twins. “It came as a complete shock,” said the mother, who asked not to be named. “We’re both career people. If we were going to have three children two years apart, someone else was going to...

A new campaign seeks to eliminate disclosure laws which require HIV positive individuals to inform their sex partners of their potentially deadly infection. The campaign is led by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and UNAIDS, an umbrella group of UN agencies. Notably absent from this campaign is any recognition of the danger posed for the possible victims of a willful refusal to disclose HIV status. As part of the campaign, IPPF released a collection of interviews entitled “Behind Bars”, which implies that such criminal laws fuel stigma against HIV persons. Proponents of criminal laws assert, however, they are designed...

Seeing as I just discussed murder, it seems fitting to next discuss abortion, as abortion is murder. When you get an abortion, you are killing a living organism, something that had the potential to become a fully-developed human being. I understand the perspective of the pro-life movement. However, we kill living things all the time. We chop down trees to build our homes, we kill rodents and insects when they intrude said homes, we kill fish and other animals for sport and for nutrition purposes, and neither microorganism nor mouse is safe in Smith Hall; they are constantly killed for...

During remarks that she made for the 15th Anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the launch of a new program that according to Clinton will now become the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.

November 24, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - When I read the words of pro-abortion leaders like Colombian psychologist Florence Thomas, who calls unborn babies “tumors” and says that they are only human if their mother wants them, a disturbing question comes to mind: what is, fundamentally, the difference between this type of perspective, so often expressed by abortionists, and the clinical definition of a “psychopath”?Although the stereotypical image of a psychopath is that of a serial killer, or a dangerous madman locked in an asylum, psychologists tell us that such people only represent a small minority of those who fall under...

Overpopulation panic is back. Concerns about a world too full of “filthy human children” motivated eco-terrorist James Lee when he held employees of the Discovery Channel hostage at gunpoint in September. But the deranged Lee is far from alone when it comes to worrying about overpopulation. The May-June cover of the progressive magazine Mother Jones asked, “Who’s to Blame for the Population Crisis?” British journalist Matthew Parris wrote an op-ed in September in the London Times asserting, “If you want to save the planet, stop breeding.” Parris further coyly suggested that we study “China’s example, for lessons good and bad.”...

Many years ago we learned that Princeton’s own Professor Peter Singer had devised a method by which to excuse some human persons from the human race and welcome into it other entities which were in fact animals, not humans. As Professor Dianne Irving pointed out in a speech on the topic,  “Princeton’s Peter Singer—a ‘preference’ utilitarian…argues that some animals have more moral value than young human children or ill, disabled human adults.” Of course Singer is not alone. Most recently he has been joined by a cadre of animal rights activists who have brought their own spin to the question...

AN aborted baby declared dead by doctors in south China's Guangdong Province cried before he was due to be cremated, but died hours later as doctors refused to treat him. A mortuary worker at Nanhai Funeral Home in Foshan City said the baby cried and scared him as he was about to throw the coffin into a furnace, Information Times reported today. He opened the box and found the seven-month fetus moving, but apparently choking on some cotton wool in his mouth, the report said. After the worker cleared his mouth, the baby yawned and breathed peacefully. Workers rushed him...

NIJ BEETS, Netherlands, August 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A woman has been arrested for killing her four newborn children and packing their remains away in suitcases in the Netherlands - a country where infanticide is legal as long a doctor administers the dose. According to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the unnamed 25-year-old woman was a well-known and liked dentist’s assistant in the rural town of Nij Beets, in the Dutch province of Friesland. She managed to keep the infanticides secret for years until her Wednesday arrest, and remains now in police custody. Police were tipped off by a suspicious neighbor who...

... Joseph Holland, a 25-year-old graduate student at Northwestern University, says he was standing still praying the rosary outside a Planned Parenthood facility in downtown Chicago July 3 when police arrested him for violating the city's new "Bubble Zone" ordinance. The law, passed in October, states that a person cannot approach within 8 feet of another person without consent "for the purpose of passing a leaflet or handbill to, displaying a sign to, or engaging in oral protest, education or counseling" within 50 feet from any health care facility. It also says a person cannot "by force or threat of...

Racist eugenicist and Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger would be so proud: "According to the city Health Department, 2008 saw 89,469 abortions performed in New York City — seven for every 10 live births. Among black women, abortions out number live births by three to two." These statistics from New York City more closely resemble the abortion mill culture of post-communist countries like China and Russia (who have historically devalued the worth of individual human life in favor of the collective good), than the old Clintonian mantra, “safe, legal and rare.” I realize that many people, liberal and otherwise, are...