Scriptures teach consistently that faith comes through the proclamation of the gospel, not through good works. Christ himself was not arrested and arraigned because he was trying to restore family values or feed the poor...The mounting ire of the religious leaders toward Jesus coalesced around him making himself equal with God and forgiving sins in his own person, directly, over against the temple and its sacrificial system. Michael Horton
If Wendy Davis and Planned Parenthood are the face of the
pro-abortion movement, then there may yet be hope that this is the last
generation for legal abortion in the United States.
First some background: Yesterday the 5th-Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling
and allowed Texas’ new restrictions on abortions to remain in effect.
This case will certainly be heard by the US Supreme Court, and is
probably the most significant case in the struggle to end legal
abortion.
The case started last year when abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of eight counts of murder
for botched abortions. Essentially, Gosnell ran what was described by a
grand jury as a “house of horrors” where young women were drugged,
labor was induced, and if any babies were old enough to survive
delivery, they had their spines cut with scissors. He continuously
infected patients with STD’s, reused dirty instruments, and misused
drugs. Cats roamed the halls, and the place was a urine and blood-soaked
mess. Continue at Jesse Johnson
Cecile Richards is no stranger to controversy. As the president of
Planned Parenthood she leads one of the central institutions of the
Culture of Death — an organization that was born in the dark vision of
Margaret Sanger and now exists as the nation’s most visible promoter and
provider of abortion. Cecile Richards has been an ardent defender of a
woman’s “right” to abort her baby at any time for any reason. She also
believes that women should be able to abort their babies for free, with
taxpayers footing the bill.
Her support of abortion for any reason and for any stage of fetal
development — including the most barbarous partial-birth abortions — was
explained, perhaps accidentally, in an interview she recently gave to
Jorge Ramos of Fusion TV. Continue at Al Mohler
Today, President Obama will give a speech at Planned Parenthood Federation of America's 75th anniversary gala, making him the first sitting president to address the group. Here are nine things you should know about the nation's largest abortion provider.
1. Planned Parenthood Federation of America has 95 affiliates and 865
health centers, according to its latest annual report, which covers the
2008-09 fiscal year. They require that at least one clinic per affiliate must perform abortions. PP performs over 320,000 abortions a year.
2. The motto for this year's gala is "Our past is our prologue." Part
of the past the organization will be celebrating includes its founding
by the notorious racist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger.
Sanger wanted to control the reproduction of immigrants, the poor,
certain religious groups, and anyone else she thought was from an
"unacceptable" heritage. Sanger referred to such people as reckless
breeders who were "unceasingly spawning a class of human beings who
never should have been born at all . . ." In 1939 Sanger started the "Negro Project"
and attempted to get Christian ministers to aid her effort. As she
wrote in a letter to a fellow eugenicist, "we do not want word to go out
that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is
the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of
their more rebellious members." Continue at Joe Carter
Facts help us grasp abortion in our communities. With the internet no
one is innocently ignorant. Here are some facts from the Twin Cities to
San Antonio. There are no grizzly pictures here. But there are some
miracles. I won't show you what the babies look like after they are
killed, but before.
Start with the on-the-ground facts. There are five places to get
elective abortions in the Twin Cities, Planned Parenthood (671 Vandalia
St., St. Paul), Robbinsdale Clinic (3819 West Broadway, Minneapolis),
Mildred Hanson (710 East 24th St., Minneapolis) and two locations of the
Whole Woman's Health (33 South 5th St, Minneapolis, and 825 S. 8th St.
#1018 Minneapolis). I encourage you to visit them and pray, or perhaps
see if any of the workers will talk with you.
All of them do abortions up to 13 weeks gestation. Here is what the baby looks like at 13 weeks.
Mildred Hanson advertises that she does abortions to twenty weeks. Two pictures show the babies she is willing to dismember. Continue at John Piper
A
few years ago the Planned Parenthood Federation of America got my
attention by pioneering a Christmas card. The group sent a holiday
greeting — complete with sentimental snowflakes and stars — with the
caption “Choice on Earth.”
Evangelicals and Roman Catholics rightly noted the incongruity of the
nation’s largest abortion provider using an ancient Christian holiday
to promote abortion rights. The give-and-take over this card was a quick
controversy, forgotten once all the wrapping paper and tinsel were put
away for the season.
But the card made me think of Joseph, and how this obscure Middle
Eastern laborer could show 21st-century Christians how to celebrate
Christmas in a culture of death?
For too long, Christians have concentrated almost exclusively on what we do not believe about Joseph.
We rightly insist that he was not the birth-father of Jesus. Mary, a
virgin, conceived the Messiah through the power of the Holy Spirit, with
no biological contribution from a man (Luke 1:34-35). And yet, there is
so much more that Scripture has to say about Joseph. Continue at Russell D. Moore
When Abby Johnson quit her job in 2009, it became national news.
Johnson was director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas and did not
merely quit her job, but also changed sides in the abortion battle.
Formerly an employee of the organization that performs more abortions
than any other, she had come to believe that abortion was morally
offensive. What was it that caused her to change sides? She witnessed an
abortion. On the screen of an ultrasound machine, she witnessed human
life being dismembered and destroyed, and in an instant she saw what she
had denied for so long—what was being aborted was a baby, not just a
potential baby or a blob of tissue. She had been an eyewitness to murder
and not only that, but she had been complicit in countless
other murders.
Unplanned tells Johnson’s story, from
being recruited by Planned Parenthood while she was a college student,
to rising through the ranks and eventually becoming the director of a
clinic. She also tells of her own history of abortion and how she found
forgiveness for the sins of her youth.
This book has several strengths to commend it—several reasons you may want to read it.
First,
it comes from an insider’s perspective, clearly describing the
arguments, verbiage and subtleties used by Planned Parenthood and
similiar organizations as they promote their pro-choice agenda. They
weigh every word and their every action represents a careful strategy.
Johnson proves what pro-life advocates have been saying all along, that
although Planned Parenthood does provide some valid and valuable
services for women, it is at heart an abortion provider. Continue at Tim Challies
The Pink Ribbon, for now anyway, is an emblem of the culture wars.
Today the Susan Komen Foundation for the Cure announced that it was caving to pressure from the Planned Parenthood Federation, reversing its decision not to fund Planned Parenthood in the screening of women for breast cancer.
This is an important victory for Planned Parenthood and
the abortion rights lobby. First of all, the association with Komen is a
key piece in Planned Parenthood's effort to present itself as a
"women's health provider" rather than simply as an abortion provider.
Beyond that, the surrender of the nation's leading breast cancer
awareness group to this kind of political pressure proves the clout of
Planned Parenthood and their allies.
Evangelical and Catholic Christians, and our pro-life
allies of all faiths, might be tempted to draw some wrong conclusions
from this tragic affair. After all our years of trumpeting opinion polls
showing a "pro-life majority" in the United States, this demonstrates
that, when it comes to money and power, the pro-choice forces aren't
sustained simply by the penumbra and emanations of an old Supreme Court
decision. Continue at Christianity Today
Earlier this week a new study was released on abortion safety. The Reuters Health headline reads: "Abortion safer than giving birth."
According to the study, one woman dies in childbirth for every 11,000
births in the United States, while one woman dies from abortion for
every 167,000 abortions. These numbers led the researchers to declare
that a woman is 14 times more likely to die giving birth than she is to
die during an abortion.
There are a number of ways to respond to a story like this. The first is
to remind people that even if abortion is safer for the mother, it is
certainly not safer for the child. Maternal, abortion-related deaths may
be a rarity, but fetal, abortion-related deaths are not. We could just
as easily say that for every 167,000 abortions in the United States,
there are 167,001 abortion-related deaths. The headline of the
MedicineNet article was a much more honest one: "Abortion Safer for Women Than Childbirth, Study Claims."
The second thing to note is the sources of the datasets used in this
study. While accurate birth data is available from the federal
government, accurate abortion data is not.
As such, abortion data must be obtained from the Guttmacher Institute, a
research group founded by Planned Parenthood and named after their
former president, Alan Guttmacher. The Guttmacher Institute openly
advocates abortion and seeks to normalize its use around the world.
Speaking to this issue,
Dr. Donna Harrison, director of research and public policy at the
American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says,
"Abortion mortality is not systematically collected. What Dr. Grimes'
paper most clearly illustrates is the immediate need for reporting
requirements for abortion deaths in all 50 states." Continue at Abort73
MILWAUKEE, April 12th--A new undercover video reveals medically inaccurate abortion counseling at a tax-funded Milwaukee Planned Parenthood clinic. The video, released by youth-led pro-life group Live Action, records Planned Parenthood staff distorting basic facts of fetal development and pressuring a woman to have an abortion.
In the video, a staffer tells a woman who is reportedly 6 to 8 weeks pregnant that at this stage her baby has "no arms, no legs, no heart no head, no brain." The staffer emphasizes the difficulties of adoption, urges the woman to obtain an abortion as soon as possible, says that images of abortion are fabricated, and states that the unborn child at 6 to 8 weeks has no "identifiable parts" and is just "fetal matter."
A similar video released in December from an Appleton, WI abortion clinic prompted state senator Glenn Grothman to call for an investigation of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Two leading embryologists also denounced Planned Parenthood's counseling, calling it "absurd and scientifically erroneous." Live Action also released a video last February catching Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin failing to comply with mandatory reporting laws for the sexual abuse of a 14 year old girl.
Wisconsin law requires women to receive medically accurate information before obtaining an abortion. The America Medical Association indicates in its Code of Ethics that "the physicians obligation is to present the medical facts accurately to the patient."
Lila Rose, UCLA student and president of Live Action, says the new footage further confirms the deceptive and manipulative practices of Planned Parenthood: "Planned Parenthood has an abortion-first mentality that is drive n both by ideology and the desire for money," says Rose. "Since women will often choose against abortion if they learn the scientific facts about the unborn child inside the womb, Planned Parenthood distorts basic facts in an attempt to perform more abortions."
The video is the second in Live Action's "Rosa Acuna Project," a multi-state undercover investigation documenting Planned Parenthood's deceptive abortion counseling. Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion chain in the U.S., has come under fire recently after Live Action's previous investigations found the abortion giant willing to conceal sexual abuse of young girls and accept racist donations earmarked to abort African-American babies.
...one of the dirty secrets of the abortion rights movement is that its earliest momentum was driven by a concern that was deeply racial. Leaders such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued quite openly that abortion and other means of birth control were necessary in order to limit the number of undesirable children. As she made clear, the least desirable children were those born to certain ethnically and racially defined families. Sanger, along with so many other "progressive" figures of the day, promoted the agenda of the eugenics movement --- more children from the "fit" and less from the "unfit."
President Nixon, speaking off-the-cuff about the Roe v. Wade decision handed down just the day before, did register his concern that the open availability of abortion would lead to sexual permissiveness and a further breakdown of the family. Nevertheless, he carefully carved out an exception for interracial pregnancies. Read the rest HERE
