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News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
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In response to President Obama’s HHS Mandate, the Pro-Life Action League is partnering with Citizens for a Pro-Life Society in calling for a national day of prayer and protest.
The Nationwide Rally for Religious Freedom will take place in cities and towns all across the country on March 23 at Noon.
Thousands of faithful, pro-life Americans will meet at U.S. government sites—Federal Buildings, Congressional offices and historic sites—to stand up for religious freedom and demand that Obama rescind the HHS Mandate.
Over 50 cities and towns have already signs on to be a part of the Nationwide Rally on March 23, with more locations being added to the map every day. Contact the League for information on leading a Rally in your town.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is now mandating [Continue reading ...]
Earlier this hour, President Obama announced in a White House Press Conference an “adjustment” to the HHS Mandate. The Mandate is set to go into effect in August, and will require all employer health plans to provide free contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients.
The HHS originally provided a “religious exemption” so narrow that it would exclude Catholic hospitals, universities and charities, forcing these institutions to act in direct opposition to Catholic teaching through the health care plans they provide. Institutions run by other religious organizations would be likewise affected.
In response to outcry from religious leaders—including 171 Catholic bishops—and Americans from across the political spectrum, Obama today outlined an “adjustment” to the HHS Mandate whereby the objectionable services will be paid for by insurers rather than directly by employers.
Setting aside the fact that contraceptives are not preventative health care—since pregnancy is not a disease—Obama’s adjustment is nothing but a shell game.
At the end of the day, religious employers are still required to provide health plans that offer free contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients. [Continue reading ...]
Note: This is Eric Scheidler’s fourth and final report on his pro-life mission to Germany and Austria. Previous reports covered his participation in the March for Life in Berlin, activities with German Youth for Life activities and meeting with Austrian Youth for Life.
Eric praying at Klinik Stapf abortuary in Munich, Sept. 21 [Photo by Bryan Kemper]
On the warm, sunny afternoon of September 21, I stood alone on the sidewalk outside Klinik Stapf, the oldest abortuary in Munich, Germany, praying a Rosary. But why alone? Where was Bryan Kemper, my partner in this pro-life mission to Germany and Austria?
Bryan was across the street—banished there by a law enacted in Munich earlier this year that allows only one person to stand outside an abortion facility at a time. But far worse, the law actually bans sidewalk counseling.
For those of who have been fighting unfair restrictions on sidewalk counseling like Chicago’s Bubble zone, the Munich law is incomprehensible. Indeed, it has been a terrible blow to pro-life activists in Munich, who estimate that 50-80 babies will be killed as a direct result of this law, babies whose mothers would have been reached by sidewalk counselors. [Continue reading ...]
Yesterday on Morning Edition, National Public Radio’s national morning news magazine, a story ran about the Justice Department taking a “tougher stance” on abortion protesters.
The story profiles the work of the Department of Justice’s National Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers. The task force, created to combat the supposed scourge of violence against abortion workers back in 1998, prosecutes violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, but was almost never utilized after President Bush was elected in 2000.
Since President Obama took office in 2008, it’s been a different story. The task force has been revitalized and has already filed eight cases of FACE violations. Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation representatives make clear in the story that they’re working with the task force to encourage further persecution of Americans who oppose abortion. [Continue reading ...]
Pro-life activist Peter D’Attilio [Photo via MassResistance.org]
As he was passing out pro-life bookmarks (see here) at the St. Rocco Family Festival on the grounds of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Franklin, Massachusetts on August 11, pro-life activist Peter D’Attilio was approached by two police officers.
After one of the officers, Patrolman Robert Burchill, asked him what he was doing, he asked to see D’Attilio’s identification. D’Attilio says he responded by asking why he wanted to see his ID, to which Burchill responded that he “needed to know who he was dealing with”.
D’Attilio claims that Officer Burchill then told him he was on private property owned by the church, at which point D’Attilio claims he offered to leave voluntarily, but then Burchill told him not to leave.
D’Attilio says he then told Burchill he was illegally detaining him, and that the officer tried to put his hand in D’Attilio’s back pocket to grab his wallet. At that point, D’Attilio was handcuffed, and shortly thereafter, he claims Burchill started choking him, and then punched him in the face, giving him a black eye. [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.
Walter Hoye (right) with the League’s Joe and Ann Scheidler at the Hilo, Hawaii Right to Life conference in 2009
Veteran sidewalk counselor Walter Hoye scored a major victory last week when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — widely regarded as the most liberal appeals court in the nation — sided with him in ruling that the City of Oakland’s “bubble zone” ordinance “unconstitutionally suppresses speech based on the content of its message.”
Pastor Hoye was the first person arrested and later convicted under the ordinance after it was adopted in May 2008, although those convictions were overturned last year.
While the Circuit Court ruled, unfortunately, that the Oakland ordinance was constitutional as it is written (pursuant to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hill v. Colorado decision), it also ruled that the ordinance is not valid as the city applies it, because police have only enforced it against Hoye, but not other speakers, including abortion clinic “escorts” who have made a habit of surrounding him, blocking his sign that says, “Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help,” and otherwise making it impossible for him to communicate with abortion-bound women. [Continue reading ...]
Attorney Lance Malina defends new ordinance to the Aurora, IL City Council [Photo by Matt Yonke]
When the City Council of Aurora, Illinois gathered at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, one of the items on the agenda was an amendment to the City’s peddling and soliciting ordinance that would muzzle free speech by requiring advance notice and a permit from the City in order to distribute any kind of written material. The Pro-Life Action League was there to protect free speech.
The proposed changes flagrantly violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, as was clearly shown in the 2002 case of Watchtower Society v. Stratton where Jehovah’s Witnesses objected to an ordinance in the upstate New York village of Stratton which would have required a permit for the canvassing activities for which Jehovah’s Witnesses are so well known.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority decision in that case, in which he said the following:
It is offensive, not only to the values protected by the First Amendment, but to the very notion of a free society, that in the context of everyday public discourse a citizen must first inform the government of her desire to speak to her neighbors and then obtain a permit to do so.
May 18, 1994—The National Organization for Women (NOW) issues a statement saying they have amended their complaint in the NOW v. Scheidler case, first filed in 1986, adding arson and bombing to the charges against League Director Joe Scheidler and the other defendants. League staffer Ann Scheidler remarks that this is just a media stunt. Meanwhile Joe, unfazed by the latest allegations, gives a talk in Boston to a standing-room-only crowd of over 300 pro-lifers.
The package insert from the emergency contraceptive Plan B. Read closely the bold section that explains "how this product works."
On April 24, Aurora Beacon columnist Jeff Ward wrote a column titled “Your beliefs have nothing to do with my Rx.”
In it Ward argues that pharmacists who don’t want to sell Plan B and other oral contraceptives should not have become pharmacists in the first place.
He also argues that “the not so funny inevitabilities” of a moral stance that prohibits a pharmacist from dispensing Plan B would similarly keep Muslims from selling Nyquil (which contains alcohol) or “Jewish pharmacists wouldn’t fill Heparin prescriptions because that blood thinner is derived from pig intestines.” [Continue reading ...]