America’s abortion extremism

Hard to be the shining beacon of human rights and dignity with this record.

Sheila Liaugminas | Oct 12 2017 | comment

Somehow, Planned Parenthood has remained powerful, heavily funded and very influential among the power brokers of politics and culture: government, media, academia and Hollywood. Somehow, the abortion mentality has pervaded even believers in religion and absolute truth and moral order, convincing roughly half of them to accept the decades-long slick marketing slogans that it’s about empowering women and respecting women’s rights and protecting particularly their right to choose.

Choose what? Planned Parenthood gives women, particularly in minority neighborhoods, a lack of choice but easy access to abortion.

Having frequent conversations with expert guests on radio covering these issues – especially lately with congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, the abortion giant’s social media campaign in reaction and response to the possibility of losing federal funds, the recent vote in Congress to ban abortions of five month old babies in the womb, and the administration’s move last week to roll back the HHS mandate requiring birth control pill coverage in health insurance plans for Christian and particularly Catholic groups like Little Sisters of the Poor – the point has come up more than once that the US is amongst the seven countries in the world with lax and extreme abortion laws.

The Washington Post editors must have found that hard to believe, and so submitted it to their well known ‘fact checker‘. This is how it opened:

“Seven out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.”
— statement of Trump administration policy, Oct. 2, 2017
The House approved a ban on 20-week abortions this week, and this dramatic statistic caught our attention…

It’s about time. What brought it to WaPo’s attention now? That House of Representatives ban on the ‘Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act’, which prompted this response from the White House, which included the attention grabbing statistic contained in this fuller snip than WaPo led with.

The United States is currently out of the mainstream in the family of nations, in which only 7 out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Worse still, the United States is in the top (or worst) four:

Here’s a look at the seven countries. We sorted them from the most liberal on gestational limits to the least:
North Korea and Vietnam: No specified gestational limit, though regulatory mechanisms vary.
China: “Abortion is virtually freely available in China, and there are no defined time limits for access to the procedure,” according to Pew Research Center. China now has a “two-child” policy, and human-rights advocates have criticized China’s population and family planning laws.
United States: No federal ban on gestational limit, but 43 states have prohibitions on gestational limits, from 20 to 24 weeks, or the point of “viability,” according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group. There are some exceptions made, usually for the life or health of the mother.

Then come Canada, Netherlands and Singapore.

Only North Korea, Vietnam and China are ahead of the United States in abortion extremism.

“Our nation does not belong in that disgraceful club”, the Susan B. Anthony List declared in a statement after the House vote.

The 20 week abortion ban bill now goes to the Senate for a vote, and SBA List is running a grassroots campaign in states with vulnerable pro-abortion senators up for re-election in 2018 in states favorable to common sense restrictions to otherwise liberal abortion laws.

My home state of Illinois just got a major setback of unprecedented proportion when Governor Bruce Rauner broke his promise to pro-life leaders and voters, state clergy and even Chicago’s Cardinal Archbishop Blase Cupich and signed into law the first binding legislation passed by an elected state official, ensuring that abortion will remain legal in the state of Illinois even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, and that state taxpayers’ dollars will pay for abortion, violating consciences, and religious and other deeply held beliefs of citizens who have no say now.

At least, until the next election.

Sheila Liaugminas writes from Chicago. She is a journalist, author and host of A Closer Look on Relevant Radio.

October 12, 2017

All warfare is terrible, but the commemorations of the First World War bring sobering reminders of just how dreadful and futile some of it can be. For a small country like New Zealand, which sent 42 percent of men of military age to fight with Britain against the Kaiser, these occasions touch many families in a personal way.

One hundred years ago today (October 12) the New Zealand Division of the 2^nd Anzac Corps took its turn to attack the German line near the town of Ypres in Belgium. It was raining heavily, as it had been for most of the week, turning the battle front, Passchendaele, to a quagmire, and the artillery could not be properly positioned. But the high command believed the Kiwis, who had done well in previous battles, could achieve the breakthrough that would cut off Belgium’s channel ports, bases for U-boats that were taking a heavy toll of merchant ships supplying Britain.

The division’s commander urged a delay for a break in the weather, but the Corp commander and Field Marshall Douglas Haig were determined to attack that day. “At dawn the soldiers went forward as best they could, wading in the mud under machine gun fire. Any who made it as far as the barbed wire were doomed to die on it. Within hours, New Zealand had suffered its largest death toll in a single day. The division was virtually destroyed.”

There were 2,735 casualties, 845 of whom were dead or stranded in the mud that sucked them down so they could not be rescued. Another 120 men would die of their injuries. All for a miserable 500 yards of ground gained.

No doubt there are many battles in history that were as bad or worse in their own way, but the horrific images Passchendaele leaves in the mind serve to remind Kiwis that a great price has been paid at different times for our peace and security – and not to squander our moral capital on petty, self-serving ambitions.

* The above account draws heavily on an editorial in today’s New Zealand Herald print edition. A fuller account is here.

Carolyn Moynihan
Deputy Editor,
MERCATORNET