Free Republic

Planned Parenthood Doubles "Abortion Services" From 2007 to 2008 to Over 1 Million Expanding into "climate change” to increase support to fund abortion growth By Samantha Singson NEW YORK, January 2, 2010 (C-FAM.org) - International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) recently released its annual performance report for 2008-2009. Despite an economic downturn and a slight decrease in annual income, the abortion industry giant boasts of increased activity across all of its lines of work, including condom distribution, advocacy and abortion services. IPPF’s overall income for 2008 was US$119.7 million, down from over $120 million the previous year. While IPPF's total financial...

A pro-life organization is blasting a Switzerland-based cosmetics manufacturer whose website openly admits some of its products were developed from the tissues of an aborted baby. Children of God for Life is a non-profit organization focused on the bioethics of embryonic tissue use in medicine and manufacturing. One of its current campaigns includes petitioning pharmaceutical companies to produce safe, effective alternatives to vaccines derived or cultivated from aborted fetal tissue.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A coalition of mainline Protestant churches have authored a letter to members of Congress asking them to make certain the health care bills they are considering contain taxpayer funding for abortions. The letter comes from a group of churches that have long advocated the pro-abortion position. Under the umbrella of the Religious Institute, the church denominations and more than 1,100 pastors and church staff from the denominations endorsed the letter. The letter calls abortion a “morally justifiable decision” and opposed any amendments to the House and Senate bills, which current contain massive abortion funding, to strike...

Doctors said I'd had a miscarriage and did nothing as my premature baby fought for his life Like all mothers, Sarah Capewell will never forget the first minutes she spent with her newborn baby. She told her tiny son how much she loved him, gently kissed his face and took photos of him wrapped in the pretty blanket she'd bought for his birth. Then she held him tightly in her arms and watched helplessly as his body grew cold and he finally stopped breathing. Sarah pleaded for help from hospital staff from the moment he was born, but none came....

Bioethicist Jacob Appel can be relied on to promote the most radical bioethics agendas, assisted suicide for the mentally ill, fetal farming, you name it.  And now he has argued that if Montana affirms a constitutional right to assisted suicide in Montana, the state has a duty to make sure that doctors are willing to do the deed.  Why?  Doctors have a monopoly on a limited commodity–the practice of medicine–and hence they should be able to be forced to participate in the taking of patients’ lives in assisted suicide. From his column: However, it [medical license and professional autonomy]...

We gather today to mourn the loss of so many lives, and celebrate those who saved them; honor those who survived, and contemplate the obligations of the living. It is the grimmest of ironies that one of the most savage, barbaric acts of evil in history began in one of the most modernized societies of its time, where so many markers of human progress became tools of human depravity: science that can heal, used to kill; education that can enlighten, used to rationalize away basic moral impulses; the bureaucracy that sustains modern life, used as the machinery of mass death,...

We warned him, for his children's sake, to wash his hands of the innocent blood he assisted in spilling because, as Scripture warns, if "you did not hate bloodshed, bloodshed will pursue you". (Ezekiel 35:6) A news source states that Bud Feldkamp visited the site of the crash with his wife and their two surviving children on Monday. As they stood near the twisted and charred debris talking with investigators, light snow fell on the tarps that covered the remains of their children. I don't want to turn this tragic event into some creepy spiritual 'I told you so' moment,...

Terrorist strikes on four American cities. Russia rolling into Eastern Europe. Israel hit by a nuclear bomb. Gay marriage in every state. The end of the Boy Scouts. All are plausible scenarios if Democrat Barack Obama is elected president, according to a new addition to the campaign conversation called "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America," produced by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action. The imagined look into the future is part of an escalation in rhetoric from Christian right activists who are trying to paint Obama in the worst possible terms as the campaign heads into the...

Catholics for Obama has just launched a web site as the Nov. 4 White House race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain enters its final laps. Catholics, who account for close to a quarter of the U.S. adult population, comprise a key religious group that both sides have tried to woo. In closely contested swing states such as Ohio or Florida the Catholic vote could make a difference. The web site is sure to stoke controversy in Catholic circles with this statement: “Is Barack Obama really pro-life? The answer is ‘yes.’ Looking through the lens of Catholic Social...

Mary Anne Burke's voice was full of emotion as she left her 31st message of the night, this one for a parishioner of the Church of Immaculate Conception. "I'm a member of Our Lady Help of Christians in Abington," she said, "calling with a request that you support McCain-Palin on one nonnegotiable issue. The issue is life -- life from birth to death. Hopefully, prayerfully, you will consider it." Burke, 76, a volunteer for the Pro-Life Union of Southeastern Pennsylvania, has been an active opponent of abortion rights for three decades, but "it's never been this intense," she said, putting...

The news from Barbara Wagner's doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing. Barbara Wagner(Paul Carter/Register-Guard) The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay. What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50. "It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically...

St. Louis basketball coach Rick Majerus had no intention of creating such a firestorm when he made an appearance at a Hillary Clinton rally last Saturday night in St. Louis and answered questions regarding his pro-choice, pro-embryonic stem-cell research beliefs for a local TV affiliate. Three days later, Archbishop Raymond Burke of the St. Louis diocese, who is very active in the pro-life movement and recently attended the March for Life conference in Washington, D.C., drew a line in the sand in response. Burke said St. Louis University, which is a university operated by the Jesuit fathers, should discipline Majerus...

Legalizing doctor-assisted suicide does not lead to a "slippery slope" of excess deaths among the vulnerable poor, uninsured, elderly or other patients, according to a U.S. study in the October issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. "Fears about the impact on vulnerable people have dominated debate about physician-assisted suicide. We find no evidence to support those fears where this practice already is legal," study lead author and bioethicist Margaret Battin, a distinguished professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah, said in a prepared statement. She and her colleagues analyzed data from The...

Anita Hill said on Tuesday she testified truthfully in 1991 in accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment and responded to a new book by the U.S. Supreme Court justice by saying he had unfairly attacked her character. It was Hill's first response to the Thomas memoir that denounces his former aide and liberal interest groups who wanted to stop his nomination to the highest U.S. court. "I'm really concerned that the approach that Clarence Thomas is taking now is so typical of people accused of wrongdoing. They trash their accusers ... and I don't want this to become the model...

After 5 Years Without Inspection, Abortion Clinic Closed By Kevin Mooney CNSNews.com Staff Writer October 01, 2007 Part I. (CNSNews.com) - New Jersey health officials are not inspecting abortion clinics in that state regularly, apparently because they don't have the resources or the manpower. In one case, an abortion facility was not inspected for five years, and when inspectors finally visited, they found numerous, often morbid, violations, which led to the clinic losing its license and shutting down. "The lack of health inspections at these clinics speaks volumes about the sentiment to reduce abortion at all costs to the detriment...

What’s so bad about Planned Parenthood? It’s a question Americans must wonder about as they see pro-lifers protesting or praying outside clinics. And it deserves an answer because it gets to the heart of some key and contentious questions we face as a society, one that is ever creeping toward a brave new world (in many respects already living in it) as biotechnological choices propagate. Consider that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood in her Senate runs. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, has given money to them in the past....

Construction crews unearthed the burial chamber this spring near the town of Tula, the ancient Toltec capital, 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Mexico City (see Mexico map). The chamber contained 24 skeletons of children believed to have been sacrificed between A.D. 950 and 1150, according to Luis Gamboa, an archaeologist at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. All but one of the children were between 5 to 15 years of age, and they were likely killed as an offering to the Toltec rain god Tlaloc, Gamboa said. The Toltec, a pre-Aztec civilization that thrived from the 10th to...

More than two-thirds of Americans believe there are circumstances in which a patient should be allowed to die, but they are closely divided on whether it should be legal for a doctor to help terminally ill patients end their own lives by prescribing fatal drugs, a new AP-Ipsos poll finds. The results were released Tuesday, just days before Dr. Jack Kevorkian is freed from a Michigan prison after serving more than eight years for second-degree murder in the poisoning of a man with Lou Gehrig's disease. Kevorkian's defiant assisted suicide campaign, which he waged for years before his conviction, fueled...

In a case of "Whose life is it anyway?" a state appeals court ruled yesterday that a mentally handicapped woman has no say over whether she should be kept alive on life support. In the unanimous decision, a five-judge panel ruled that the 26-year-old - who says she wants to be kept on life support in the event she's felled by illness or an accident - isn't competent to make that decision. Instead, her mother, who is her legal guardian, gets to make the call - and she doesn't want her daughter on life support. A lawyer for the woman,...

"Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World." — Thomas Friedman, New York Times, August 9 The act of infanticide, the practice of intentionally causing the death of an infant, is rarely practiced today. Yet in the Middle East, it has taken on a new form. Under the direction of some leading Muslim religious figures, some parents in the region are encouraging their children to commit suicide as...