Obama’s New Budget Contains Massive Funding of Abortion, Planned Parenthood

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 2, 2010

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) – President Barack Obama released his FY 2011 budget on Monday and it contains provisions that will force Americans to pay for abortions in the United States and promoting abortion abroad. The budget takes advantage of Congress having overturned the ban on abortion funding in the nation’s capital.

Obama’s FY 2010 budget contained a new policy allowing public funding for abortion in the District of Columbia and Congress eventually approved overturning the Dornan amendment that had long banned funding.

Page 1248 of Obama’s proposed budget requests that public funding for abortion in the District of Columbia be continued.

As was the case last year, the Obama budget also proposes overturning another ban on abortion funding — concerning the Legal Services Corporation.

Congress has previously approved budgets that retain a long-standing prohibition on the Legal Services Corporation, which provides legal help to lower-income Americans, providing legal counseling to any person or entity “that participates in any litigation with respect to abortion.”

Page 1284 of the proposed budget Obama submitted to Congress includes a change to that law that would result in LSC funds going to people or groups that engage in abortion litigation provided that LSC funds are not used directly for the litigation.

Still, the concern for pro-life advocates is that the money is fungible and LSC is essentially reimbursed for providing legal advice and support for people or groups that are in lawsuits related to obtaining abortions.

Obama proposed this pro-abortion funding in his previous budget but members of Congress agreed on retaining the current abortion funding ban.

read the entire article at: http://www.lifenews.com/nat5952.html

NYTimes OKs Super Bowl ProLife Ad

New York Times Defends Pro-Life Ad Featuring Tim Tebow, Mom’s Non-Abortion

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
January 31, 2010
New York, NY (LifeNews.com) – The New York Times is no bastion of pro-life thought and has taken a consistently aggressive pro-abortion stance over the years. In what may come as a shock to pro-life advocates, the liberal newspaper issued an editorial today taking abortion advocates to task for blasting an ad featuring Tim Tebow.

As LifeNews.com has reported, the ad, sponsored by Focus on the Family, will reportedly focus on the story of Tebow’s birth.

Tebow’s mother, Pam Tebow, rejected a doctor’s suggestion to get an abortion when she became ill on a missions trip to the Philippines during her pregnancy with Tim. Tebow gave birth to Tim and he famously won the 2007 Heisman Trophy and led the Florida Gators to a college football championship.

The Focus on the Family ad has drawn attacks from abortion advocates, who have called on CBS to cancel its plans to allow the ad to air before and after the Super Bowl, and feminist attorney Gloria Allred has made the claim Pam Tebow made up her story about rejecting an abortion.

The New York Times weighed in on the debate in an official editorial titled “Super Bowl Censorship.”

“The National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America and other voices … have called on CBS to yank it,” the Times editorial board wrote. “Their protest is puzzling and dismaying.”

The Times noted how the Women’s Media Center (for a collection of pro-abortion groups) sent a letter to CBS calling for rejecting the ad, saying the commercial “uses one family’s story to dictate morality to the American public, and encourages young women to disregard medical advice, putting their lives at risk.”

Responding to the claim, the Times calls it “a lame attempt to portray the ad as life-threatening.”

read the entire article at: http://www.lifenews.com/state4775.html

In a related article Ken Shepherd at Newbusters.com (an anti-liberal political website) quotes a story by “liberal, pro-choice sports columnist Sally Jenkins” in the other national liberal newspaper The Washington Post:. She writes:

“Are you saving yourself for marriage?” Tebow was asked last summer during an SEC media day.

“Yes, I am,” he replied.

The room fell into a hush, followed by tittering: The best college football player in the country had just announced he was a virgin. As Tebow gauged the reaction from the reporters in the room, he burst out laughing. They were a lot more embarrassed than he was.

“I think y’all are stunned right now!” he said. “You can’t even ask a question!”

That’s how far we’ve come from any kind of sane viewpoint about star athletes and sex. Promiscuity is so the norm that if a stud isn’t shagging everything in sight, we feel faintly ashamed for him.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ken-shepherd/2010/02/02/pro-choice-sports-writer-jenkins-slams-now-trying-scuttle-pro-life-teb#ixzz0eRHzjDMu

Embryonic Stem Cells Don’t Cure

Stem Cells derived from Embryoes – that are killed in the process – don’t provide cures. See this editorial at the Investors Business Daily.

California’s Proposition 71 Failure

Posted 01/12/2010 06:36 PM ET

Bioethics: Five years after a budget-busting $3 billion was allocated to embryonic stem cell research, there have been no cures, no therapies and little progress. So supporters are embracing research they once opposed.

California’s Proposition 71 was intended to create a $3 billion West Coast counterpart to the National Institutes of Health, empowered to go where the NIH could not — either because of federal policy or funding restraints on biomedical research centered on human embryonic stem cells.

Supporters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, passed in 2004, held out hopes of imminent medical miracles that were being held up only by President Bush’s policy of not allowing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) beyond existing stem cell lines and which involved the destruction of embryos created for that purpose.

Five years later, ESCR has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state agency created to, as some have put it, restore science to its rightful place, is diverting funds from ESCR to research that has produced actual therapies and treatments: adult stem cell research. It not only has treated real people with real results; it also does not come with the moral baggage ESCR does.

see the entire article at: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=517870

Some fear Kan. ruling may spur abortion violence

Its possible that Mr. Roeder’s defense will be successful.  If anyone thinks this would be a Prolife victory they are doubly wrong.  First Roeder killed someone; you can’t get much less ProLife than that.  Second Roeder’s success at beating the system, though a pitiable limited success – he will likely spend the remainder of his life in jail – will prompt backlash of the worst kind against all true Prolife workers.  He has done no good thing here.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — On a balmy Sunday morning, Scott Roeder got up from a pew at Reformation Lutheran Church at the start of services and walked to the foyer, where two ushers were chatting around a table. Wordlessly, he pressed the barrel of a .22-caliber handgun to the forehead of Dr. George Tiller, one of the ushers, and pulled the trigger.

As his premeditated, first-degree murder trial begins Wednesday, no one – not even Roeder himself – disputes that he killed one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers.

But what had been expected to be an open-and-shut murder trial was upended Friday when a judge decided to let Roeder argue he should be convicted of voluntary manslaughter because he believed the May 31 slaying would save unborn children. Suddenly, the case has taken on a new significance that has galvanized both sides of the nation’s abortion debate.

Read the entire article.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ABORTION_SHOOTING

The Senate Postmortem

From the Wall Street Journal Reveiw & Outlook December 26, 2009.

Every Democrat cast the deciding health-care vote..

In the post-dawn hours on Thursday the Senate passed ObamaCare 60 to 39, in the first vote on Christmas Eve since 1895 and after the longest consecutive session in Congress since World War I. We are thus heading toward the first U.S. entitlement program dragged across the finish line on a straight partisan majority, a bill that even its most fervent supporters admit is “flawed” but better than nothing.

It is far worse than nothing. The bill itself is an unprecedented arrogation of federal power over one-seventh of the economy, and even its closest antecedents, Medicare and Medicaid, passed in 1965 with the support of both parties. Reflecting the political consensus that has always inspired durable social reform in America, those entitlements cleared the Senate with more than half of the GOP caucus voting in favor.

read the entire essay at:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704254604574614662877143186-lMyQjAxMDA5MDIwNzEyNDcyWj.html

Catholic Bishops oppose Senate bill

Catholic Bishops Oppose New Abortion Restrictions in Senate Health Bill

FOXNews.com

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, one of the most important anti-abortion voices in the country, continues to oppose the Senate health care bill despite additional restrictions included to segregate taxpayer money from abortion coverage.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, one of the most important anti-abortion voices in the country, announced its opposition to the Senate health care bill despite additional restrictions included to segregate taxpayer money from abortion services coverage.

read the entire article:  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/21/catholic-bishops-oppose-new-abortion-restrictions-senate-health/

The Hill on the Senate bill

Coburn: Nelson agreement with leaders ‘threw unborn babies under the bus’

By Kevin Bogardus
12/19/09 01:41 PM ET
A number of Republican senators attacked an agreement reached between Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Senate Democratic leaders Saturday, saying it would lead to the eventual reversal of more than 30 years of federal law banning abortion funding.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oka.) said it is “absolutely fictitious” that there is an anti-abortion provision in the Senate Democrats’ reworked healthcare reform bill.

“The negotiations, whoever did them, threw unborn babies under the bus,” Coburn said.

read the entire article:  http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/73081-coburn-nelson-agreement-with-leaders-threw-unborn-babies-under-the-bus

from FRC to US Senators

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 21, 2009

CONTACT: J.P. Duffy, (202) 679-6800

FRC Asks: ‘Is There No Democratic Senator Who Cares About Life?’

Washington, D.C. – Early this morning, the U.S. Senate voted for cloture on the manager’s amendment which includes abortion language that would force the federal government to pay premiums for private health plans that will cover any or all abortions while doing nothing to protect individual conscience rights. Beyond the issue of abortion, the legislation has a myriad of other problems including increasing taxes on families while singling out and penalizing married couples through an increase in the payroll tax. Cuts to Medicare and the expansion of the federal role in personal health care decisions will inevitably lead to rationing of care for patients.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins had this to say about the legislation:

“While true health care reform is needed, this legislation does nothing to alleviate the problems facing American families. Under this bill, families face an increasing tax burden that will be used to further devalue human life. A federal government run health care system will create a nationwide abortion network funded by government dollars resulting in the greatest abortion expansion since Roe v. Wade.

“The Senate’s cloture vote reflects the whole process leading up to it – ugly, partisan and dangerous. This legislation was drafted by a handful of people, supported by only one political party and will negatively affect every single American citizen.

“What is most disappointing is that while some Democrats in the House of Representatives put the sanctity of human life first and foremost, not one Senator from the Democratic Party could be bothered to stand up for mothers and their unborn children.

“Senators Ben Nelson (D-Nebr.) and Robert Casey (D-Penn.) gave mere lip service to protect the most innocent among us by placing their stamp of approval on government funding for abortion coverage in direct conflict with longstanding policy. I ask them to reverse course in any future votes to move this deadly bill forward.”

from the FRC website:  http://www.frc.org/pressrelease/frc-asks–is-there-no-democratic-senator-who-cares-about-life

A religious argument for action

This is interesting and well written.  From a Christian and Catholic perspective the purpose of social activism is to reform the society to better reflect the Truth of how God made us.  Even without accepting this premise the content of this essay is enlightening and wise.

All the problems that we see today in society and in our church can be traced to these three fundamental strategies. It is the basis of the politically correct movement and of the heresy of individualism. These strategies are the fuel that powers feminism, the engine that drives liberalism, and the vehicle of the post-modern worldview that dominates our world today and that contaminates the Church.

These three secret strategies are:

All opinions are equal

Never judge anyone

Never step on toes

 read the entire essay at:  http://www.saint-mike.org/warfare/library/wp-content/docs/secret.pdf

Stop the Abortion Mandate audiocast

Dear Friend,

We desperately need your help as the U.S. Senate moves on pro-abortion health care legislation, so please join us for a Stop the Abortion Mandate Coalition live audiocast roundtable – Tuesday, December 15^th at 9 p.m. ET – to find out what you can do to take action on this urgent issue.

LIVE AUDIOCAST DETAILS:

WHAT: Stop the Abortion Mandate Urgent Audiocast

DATE: Tuesday, December 15th

TIME: 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, 6 PM Pacific

Register now at: www.StopTheAbortionMandate.com/audiocast

Expert presenters include:

• CHARMAINE YOEST, Americans United for Life
• MARJORIE DANNENFELSER, Susan B. Anthony List
• TONY PERKINS, Family Research Council
• KRISTAN HAWKINS, Students for Life of America
• DOUGLAS JOHNSON, National Right to Life Committee
• KRISTEN DAY, Democrats for Life
• WENDY WRIGHT, Concerned Women for America
• DAVID BEREIT, 40 Days for Life

JOIN US TO HEAR…

• The LATEST UPDATES on abortion and its inclusion in the Senate health care legislation…
• What’s at stake if the abortion industry successfully pushes their agenda through passage of this pro-abortion bill…
• What you can do SPECIFICALLY to help us BLOCK this NOW.

We hope you can join us.  Thank you for helping defend life!

For Life,

Charmaine Yoest, Ph.D. President & CEO

P.S. Even if you can’t participate in this live audiocast, you can contact Congress today by clicking here and call your Senator at (202) 224-3121.

P.S.S. Please forward this email to at least one friend.