Obama on FOCA"The Bad Old Days of Abortion"

What did pre-legalization abortions look like in practice? There were physicians who ran abortion mills, physicians who did selected abortions on their own patients, physicians who worked patients in through loopholes in the law. In addition to physician abortionists, there were the professional non-physicians, often operating with training, equipment, medications, and back-up provided by physicians. Here are more representative stories of pre-legalization abortions:

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Who performed abortions before they were legal?

(hint:  doctors)

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The bombing of abortion clinics

The last murder of an abortion clinic worker was 10 years ago Thursday.

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What is FOCA?

A government may not

(1) deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose –

(A) to bear a child;
(B) to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability; or
(C) to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or

(2) discriminate against the exercise of the rights set forth in paragraph (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.

Section 6 adds:

This Act applies to every Federal, State, and local statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act.

The section highlighted above in bold italics means that FOCA, if passed, will accomplish two things:

1. it would invalidate all current and future statutes, ordinances, regulations, administrative orders, decisions, policies, or practices--at any level of government--that regulate or restrict abortion in any way;
2. it would mandate taxpayer funds to be used at the state and federal level for abortion services (not to do so would discriminate against the "rights" of abortion set forth in the bill).

The National Organization of Women says that FOCA "would sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws, policies." Planned Parenthood says FOCA "would invalidate existing and future laws that interfere with or discriminate against the exercise of the rights protected."

What are some of these state laws? The Family Research Council has complied the following list:

• All 50 states have abortion reporting requirements
• 46 states have conscience-protection laws for individual health-care providers
• 44 states have laws about parental notification
• 40 states have laws restricting late-term abortions
• 38 states have bans on partial-birth abortions
• 33 states have laws requiring counseling before an abortion
• 16 states have laws about having ultrasounds before an abortion

From Between Two Worlds

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Heart, Mind, Soul and Strength

Do you know what you get if you run a DNA test on an embryo, a fetus, and a baby? Human, I expect, and I would be very shocked to hear anyone even try to maintain otherwise. Too easy to take samples to labs and have the matter settled once and for all. I mean, you could hardly screen for Down Syndrome in utero if you didn't know where in the human DNA sequence to look for the genetic problem, could you? In the case of a human pregnancy, "embryo" is an early stage in human development. "Fetus" is a later stage in human development. "Baby" is, in Abortion Rights terms, a still later stage in human development. What cannot be so easily escaped at this point is that we are talking about an early stage in human development: the developing human being is not fully developed but is fully human. The Abortion Rights supporters have long confused the two issues, equating "human" with a certain developmental stage. This is the ground on which they are, factually, simply wrong. We have some options in bringing this to light. We could factually call that which is aborted:

• human life in the early stages of development
• the embryonic (or fetal) stage of human development
• developing humans at the embryonic (or fetal) stage.

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From Slice of Laodicia

Note: At 4:48pm central, a call was made to the Clarion Hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The clerk was asked to confirm whether a discount was offered to patients at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center (abortion clinic). The female clerk answered, “Yes. The rate would be $59 dollars a night instead of $109.” The caller than said: “Let me get this straight, if I KILL my baby, I get a discount from your hotel. If I KEEP my baby, I don’t.”

The clerk answered, “Yes.”

Wow. Just wow.

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On the "Born Alive" act

Obama's case against the bill did not revolve around existing state law, as he seemed to suggest last night. The law Obama referred to in the debate was the Illinois abortion statute enacted in 1975. But at the time of the debate about the Born Alive Act, the Illinois Attorney General had publicly stated that he could not prosecute incidents such as those reported by nurses at Christ Hospital in Chicago and elsewhere (including a baby left to die in a soiled linen closet) because the 1975 law was inadequate. It only protected ''viable'' infants-and left the determination of viability up to the ''medical judgment'' of the abortionist who had just failed to kill the baby in the womb. This provision of the law weakened the hand of prosecutors to the vanishing point. That is why the Born Alive Act was necessary-and everybody knew it. Moreover, the Born Alive Act would have had the effect of at least ensuring comfort care to babies whose prospects for long-term survival were dim and who might therefore have been regarded as ''nonviable.'' As Obama and the other legislators knew, without the Born Alive Act these babies could continue to be treated as hospital refuse. That's how the dying baby that Nurse Jill Stanek found in the soiled linen closet got there.

This is the bill that Obama voted against even allowing the bill to leave committee and be voted on by the full Senate and voted "present" when it was voted on.

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How many late term abortions are elective?

In the middle of 1998, the state of Kansas instituted a mandatory reporting policy that required Tiller to submit information about the abortions that he performs.  The Kansas Department of Health and Environmental Statistics has recently published this information: http://www.kdhe.state.ks.us/hci/absumm.html.

The information sends a clear message: the majority of late-term abortions are purely elective.  They typically involve healthy babies and healthy mothers.  If you are inclined to disagree, or if you have a hard time believing that mainstream abortion practitioners would be willing to kill babies that are months from being born, then I ask that you continue reading.  You will be amazed—and hopefully outraged—when you see the data for yourself.

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