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News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
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Pro-Life Anderson with League National Director Joe Scheidler in the 1980s
I knew Charles F. Anderson even before he had his first name officially changed to “Pro-Life.”
Pro-Life Andy was so tired of never seeing the word “pro-life” used in news stories — but always the weasel-word, “anti-choice”—that he went to court and had his name changed so the press would have to use “pro-life” whenever he did something newsworthy—which was often.
In fact, when Collins Publishers sent out 200 photographers to capture “A Day in the Life of America,” the day being May 2, 1986, they did a two page spread on Andy praying in his front yard. He was surrounded by six large pro-life signs leaning against his house and car, as he held a crucified doll in one hand and his rosary in the other.
In the photograph he is wearing his trademark white cowboy hat with the red badge on the front reading, “Protect Life.” The caption explains that Andy goes to church every morning at 7:30 and then hits the streets of Reno to campaign against abortion. [Continue reading ...]
This past Sunday I stumbled upon a speech by a fellow named Phil Plait from a 2010 conference called “The Amaz!ng Meeting 8″ (that’s not a typo, by the way—that’s how they write it). I had never heard of Plait or TAM before, but I found a lot of value in what he had to say.
Turns out Plait is a noted skeptic and atheist. An astronomer by training (he worked on the Hubble Space Telescope), he writes the popular science blog, Bad Astronomy (I don’t know where he stands on abortion, but I’m willing to bet he’s pro-choice). TAM is an annual meeting that focuses on science, skepticism and atheism.
It may seem strange for a devout Catholic pro-life activist like me to be taking advice from a world-famous atheist, but Plait offers some keen insight on how people think and how we can reach them.
Plait admits that the human brain is “wired for faith” and that therefore skepticism is a “hard sell”—and that’s where what he has to say becomes so relevant for us pro-lifers. [Continue reading ...]
Atlantic editor Megan McArdle
I ran across a very interesting article today by Megan McArdle, senior editor for the Atlantic. The thrust of the piece concerned why the “millennial” generation is growing in support for gay “marriage,” but waning in their support for abortion.
While the article gives some interesting reasons for that discrepancy and is well worth a read, one section really jumped out at me. McArdle was taking another article on the millennial question to task for implying that pro-lifers don’t really understand how many women, and which women, are having abortions and that if we only understood how widespread it was, we would just accept it. McArdle doesn’t think so:
Do you know who has the most accurate grasp of the number of abortions performed annually in this country? My pro-life friends. My pro-choice friends, in my limited experience, usually cannot come within half a million of the actual number. Now, you can argue that my pro-life friends are unusually well informed, and that’s true—I’m sure that there are loads of pro-lifers who believe wildly inflated statistics. But they’re about as well informed as my liberal friends, who generally dramatically underestimate the number of abortions obtained in America.
Last week I was out at the Planned Parenthood center in Aurora when a car pulled up to the side of the vacant lot across from the building, where the pro-life outreach there is usually based.
The driver rolled down his window and said, “Let me ask you a question: Why are you out here harassing these young women?”
That’s not an especially uncommon remark, but he went on: “Why don’t you go to the hospital and explain to the parents of a three-year-old dying of cancer why your God lets a child suffer.”
Standing beside me was Marie, a sidewalk counselor, who recognized the man from a previous encounter. Apparently this wasn’t the first time he’d stop to hassle the pro-lifers out at Planned Parenthood.
The man continued to harangue us about how the young women going into Planned Parenthood have made up their minds and probably even talked to their pastors, as Marie tried to explain that the girls going into Planned Parenthood are often scared and feeling pressured to get an abortion they don’t want. But he wasn’t listening.
Then I tried to respond to his original remark, though he kept interrupting me, too: [Continue reading ...]
Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration issued a mandate requiring so-called “comprehensive” sex education for all middle and high school students in NYC public schools.
In response, Dr. Anne Nolte, a family practice physician in Manhattan, wrote in a Fox News column last week that the city’s new mandate reminded her of the saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
She then goes on to make some incisive observations:
In medicine, sometimes what is needed is a paradigm shift — not just small changes but a radical re-evaluation of the problem and the assumptions and presuppositions relating to it.
If we had the courage to look honestly at teen pregnancy, we wouldn’t be satisfied with a mandate that does the equivalent of placing a tiny band-aid on a gushing artery. If we had the courage to admit that we don’t have a solution, we’d be unwilling to spend more money on an old model that has pretty much failed. [Continue reading ...]
Christopher Haley over at On the Square, the First Things blog, published an excellent analysis this morning on how the Department of Health and Human Services’ new rules, mandating that insurers cover contraceptives without co-pays, violates Catholics’ free exercise of religion.
After criticizes the contraceptive mandate in general, along the same lines as my own response when the changes were first announced, Haley focuses on how the mandate’s carefully worded, extremely restrictive exemption for religious institutions is bogus:
We do not serve people because they are Catholic; we serve people because we are Catholic. And the same goes for members of other religious groups ….
[A]t its core, this mandate is an assault on the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause. Catholic employers would no longer be free to serve or employ non-Catholics, except at the cost of violating deeply held and reasoned moral and religious convictions about human life and dignity. But then, not serving our neighbors also violates deeply held and reasoned moral and religious convictions about our mission to serve others. Thus, by providing only two equally unacceptable and offensive options to Catholic teaching, the mandate de facto prohibits the free exercise of the Catholic religion.
The whole piece deserves a reading.
There’s been a lot of attention recently on a ridiculous new social media campaign by Kenneth Cole titled, “What You Stand For” that, among other things, compares abortion to shopping.
On the “What You Stand For” site, clicking a button that says “Pro-Choice” brings up a a video in which a woman is shown agonizing over a decision — presumably, whether or not to have an abortion.
But then she is shown picking up a handbag, and then walks off.
The League’s Eric Scheidler was interviewed this week for a Fox News story about the new Kenneth Cole campaign:
“It so trivializes the issue. I think it would be offensive to anyone on either side of the abortion issue,” Eric Scheidler, the executive director of the Pro Life Action League, told FoxNews.com. “Even staunch supporters of abortion will admit an abortion is an anguishing decision and to compare it with buying a handbag is really offensive to women. Of course I also find it deeply offensive to the sanctity of the life that hangs in the balance.”
Indeed, many staunch “pro-choice” advocates do admit that having an abortion is an anguishing decision for a woman. This, of course, raises the question: Why is having an abortion such an anguishing decision? [Continue reading ...]
Slate writer William Saletan is committedly “pro-choice”, but because he has often publicly questioned the tenets that his movement holds to be sacrosanct, not everyone on his side of the abortion debate is a fan of his.
In his latest column, posted today, he tackles “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” article in the recent New York Times Magazine (which I wrote about here), asking straightforwardly in the subtitle: “Why do ‘reductions’ of twin pregnancies trouble pro-choicers?”
Saletan writes:
Look up any abortion-related item in [the pro-choice site] Jezebel, and you’ll see the developing human referred to as a fetus or pregnancy. But when the same entity appears in a non-abortion item, it gets an upgrade. A blood test could help “women who are concerned that they may be carrying a child with Down’s Syndrome.” A TV character wonders whether she’s “capable of carrying a child to term.” Nuclear radiation in Japan “may put unborn children at risk.”
Kameron and Kaydon Manns
On March 31, 2010, Kameron and Kaydon Hayes were born to Brianna Manns at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago.
They were identical twins—closer than most. Kameron and Kaydon were conjoined twins, joined at the thorax and sharing a heart and liver. From the beginning their mother and medical professionals knew that their lives would be short and fraught with difficulties.
But Kameron and Kaydon defied odds. Everyone was surprised that they survived to celebrate their first birthday. But on Friday, August 13, they finally lost the battle they had fiercely fought. Their heart was beating erratically, and there was nothing more that the medical team could do.
When doctors discovered the complication during Brianna Manns’ pregnancy they talked to her about aborting them. But their mother said abortion was never an option. “I am a strong believer in not having abortions — very, very strong,” said Manns. “They are my babies. I had the feelings that any mother would have,” I wanted my children to experience life to the fullest, to whatever extent that it might be.” [Continue reading ...]
If any topic has rivaled the debt ceiling negotiations lately in the news, it’s been the controversial move to force insurance companies to cover birth control without co-pays under President Obama’s health care law. Check out the video below from Fox Chicago’s newscast last night to get League Executive Director Eric Scheidler’s take on the issue: