Gosnell Found Guilty

May 13, 2013 By 8 Comments

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Dr Kermit Gosnell, screen shot

Dr Kermit Gosnell stands convicted of 3 counts of first degree murder.

The charges stem from the deaths of babies that were born alive at Gosnell’s late-term abortion clinic and then subsequently killed by Dr Gosnell and members of his staff. According to testimony in his trial, Dr Gosnell most often murdered these babies by cutting their spinal cords through an incision in the backs of their necks. 

The sentencing phase of the trial is still ahead. Prosecutors have said that they will seek the death penalty. 

I’ve held off about making direct comments about Dr Gosnell because of the on-going trial. I’m going to continue that policy until after he is sentenced. However, I will make one small exception:

This verdict acknowledges something very important. By convicting Dr Gosnell of first degree murder, the jury has said that these babies were human beings. The misapprehension that any child before birth or even shortly after birth is not, in fact, a human, is what led to the things Dr Gosnell did. 

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Dr Gosnell’s Clinic, screen shot

This lie is what allowed Dr Gosnell to walk the gray area in the law for so long. I know from personal experience the lengths “pro choice” people will go to stop any regulation or limitation on the “right” to abortion. They are perfectly willing to endanger women’s lives with substandard and dangerous medical practices to protect abortionists. 

In the case of Dr Gosnell, the militant opposition to anything that limits the rights of abortionists to kill at will has finally crossed a bridge too far. The simple acknowledgement that a baby that survives an abortion is a human being has entered a courtroom and a jury has agreed that the baby is a human being who may not be killed with impunity.

You cannot have a verdict of murder in the first degree unless 12 people agree that a human being has been deliberately killed with premeditation. “Things that will one day become human beings” do not have the dignity of having their deaths called murder. 

I am going to save the rest of my thinking about Dr Gosnell and what he did for another time. I do not want to contribute in any way to an atmosphere that might be called prejudicial. 

Let the system work. 

Then, we’ll talk about it in detail. 

From the New York Times:

PHILADELPHIA — Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a West Philadelphia doctor known for performing late-term abortions, was found guilty on Monday on three of four counts of first-degree murder. 

The verdict came after a five-week trial in which the prosecution and the defense battled over whether the fetuses Dr. Gosnell was charged with killing were alive when they were removed from their mothers.

Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty when the trial moves into the sentencing phase on May 21.Dr. Gosnell, 72, wearing a dark suit, showed no emotion as the jury foreman read the verdicts on the 10th day of deliberations.

Before the foreman spoke, Dr. Gosnell smiled at his lawyer, Jack J. McMahon, and shook his hand. Read the rest here.)

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, child abuse, Culture, Health Care, Misogyny, Pro Life, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Do God and His Church Hate Women?

May 6, 2013 By 12 Comments

“The reason why any free, independent woman would call herself a Christian is beyond me.”

This thought came from a blog that I read yesterday. It’s a small personal blog, but the sentiment it expresses is passed around among unbelievers like a toke at an dorm party from the 1960s. That makes it worth talking about.

Does God tell Christian women, as this author proclaims, to “shut the h— up?”

Are Christian women downtrodden, silenced people who are not allowed to speak up about the things that matter to us?

While I can’t speak for every Christian woman in every denomination in all the world, I am a rather public member of the largest Christian denomination on this Earth. You may have noticed that nobody’s silenced me. 

In fact, I can honestly say that nobody wearing a collar has ever tried to silence me. That is not to say that the collar-wearers in my life don’t get perturbed by me and disagree with me from time to time. But silence me? Nope. Nobody has tried. Not once. Never.

If they did, it wouldn’t do them a lot of good. You can convince me that I’m wrong. It’s not easy, but it has been done. But you can’t just yell at me and tell me to shut up and get me to change my opinion. It won’t/doesn’t/hasn’t ever worked.

I would like to remind the readers of this last paragraph that I have been a woman for decades now. Before that, I was a little girl, and before that, I was a baby girl. My female credentials are undisputed. 

I have definitely had people try to silence me in the course of all these years of living, but not once has anyone wearing a collar been the attempted silencer. In fact, a good number of the people trying to get me to shut up have been other women who were mad as a nest of proverbial hornets at me for defending the unborn.

From what I’ve read, sexism in atheist circles is rife. It is also of a particularly vicious type.

Those who try to attack Christianity for its supposed mistreatment of women always trot out a series of Bible verses written by St Paul that truly are used against women in some churches. Unbelievers attempt to use this as “proof” that God wants women to be silenced. They ignore Deborah, who judged the tribes of Israel and was basically their commander in chief during a successful military engagement. They don’t mention Our Lady who asked the Lord Himself to help out at the wedding at Cana and then ignored Him when he demurred and … He obeyed her.

I assume that those who bandy Scripture about to “prove” that God “hates women” are operating more from ignorance than anything else. They are unaware of Church teaching on the full dignity of women, unlearned about the many women saints, some of whom, such as St Catharine of Siena, were downright salty in their criticisms of the male hierarchy.

St Catharine was exercising the great moral courage of women when she did this, and by doing it, she was following the Lord. It’s no accident that the Church regards this outspoken woman as a Doctor of the Church. It’s a direct function of her refusal to be silent when speaking out was the moral and Christian thing to do.

Catholic women are not battered, silenced and ignored. We may not be priests, but we are movers and shakers in the world at large, as well as our homes, and yes, in the Church as well. I have never encountered resistance from any of the bishops I’ve dealt with when I asked them for support in the fight to end violence against and degradation of women. In fact, the strongest supporters of legislation to provide protections for women have been officials in the Catholic Church.

I am not claiming that everything is golden for women throughout all the Christian world. Sin is everywhere in this fallen world, including, sadly, the church. I have personally witnessed a congregation that allowed itself to be drug into a vote on whether or not a rape victim should be allowed to remain part of that congregation. This was not a Catholic parish. It was an independent and quite small Protestant congregation.

Sin against women does exist in churches and among Christians. But it is not of God, and it is not the policy or the universal practice of Christians. Sins against women are condemned, and rightfully so, by the Catholic Church. The teachings of Blessed John Paul II are a case in point.

No woman has to be afraid that converting to the Catholic Church will deprive her of the freedom to exercise her individual voice on behalf of women’s rights. I have found that rather than silencing me, the Church has supported me in my feminist work. I do not feel diminished as a human being because I am both a woman and a Christian. I feel empowered by it. 

I have prayed, studied and thought about this a lot. I believe with my whole heart that when I stand up to fight against the degradation or limitation of women, I am speaking from the heart of the Gospels and with the full support of Catholic teaching. I do not doubt that my angels stand beside me and the Holy Spirit is working through me when I do these things.

Far from coercing me to sit down and shut up, the Church has taught me the meaning of fearless advocacy for justice of all people, including and most especially women. 

Filed Under: calling good evil, Catholic, Christianity, clergy, Faith, Following Christ, Freedom of Conscience, Misogyny, Our Lady, Scripture, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

Amazing Grace: A Former Prostitute Tells Her Story

April 29, 2013 By 34 Comments

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, Linda Cavanah is the founder and Director of All Things New, a ministry for women coming out of prostitution and trafficking. In what I regard as a singular act of courage, she volunteered to write a guest post for Public Catholic telling the truth of what “sex-work” really is. The result is a first-hand, no-holds-barred witness to the reality of prostitution. Here, in her own words, is her story

.… anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone, and a new life has begun.

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My name is Linda Cavanah, and I am the founder of All Things New Inc., a faith-based organization providing residential services for victims of sex trafficking.

All Things New exists because of the healing power of Jesus Christ in my own life many years ago when I was one of the women we are now serving.

My cycle of sexual abuse began at the age of 14 when an uncle raped me in my parent’s home.  I was too frightened to tell my parents what had happened and held everything inside for many years.  At that time, I did not realize how devastating that event was to become in my life, leading to a succession of problems emotionally and spiritually. Eventually, the things that were hidden deep within me escalated into a dual addiction of alcohol and cocaine.

My first marriage lasted two years and ended in divorce. I then promptly entered into a common law marriage, and it was during this union that my ex-husband and I began dealing drugs. The drug addiction increased over the next couple of years until I was drinking approximately 13 alcoholic beverages and snorting several lines of cocaine on a daily basis. This marriage also ended in divorce.

I do need to say that both of these unions were not true marriages because we were all addicts and they were not ordained of God.

I moved to New Orleans in 1980 and lived there for several years.  I managed a restaurant and hotel on the outskirts of the French Quarter, and continued the downward spiral in my life.  it was during this time that I became involved with the owners of the hotel, and my addictions had increased to the point of having delirium tremors if I did not get up and have a drink at 2am every morning.

One night we had a party at the hotel, and I went and had sex with one of the owners.  The next morning I woke up and there was a pile of money beside my bed. In the prostitution world, this is similar to being “jumped” into a gang.

There were six men involved in the operation. They each had their own business and then had one together. All of the men each had a woman, and one had control over me.  I was sold to cops in New Orleans (used as hush money) to keep them quiet.  I had to watch pornographic films and then perform those same acts, all the while enduring painful sexual acts behind closed doors.

I wanted to run but there was no way to escape. We were not allowed to use a phone and I was trapped, both physically and emotionally. I was being “groomed” to be a madame for them, and I wanted out so badly. They told me they would kill me if I ever said anything, and they meant it.

 Even though I did not know Jesus at the time, I know He had his hand on me. I was able to leave the situation through the help of another person, and I am still here to tell this story today! I was a single mother to two children, and decided to go to nursing school.  I had a Christian nursing instructor and within a few months I came to know Jesus.

I was immediately delivered from alcohol and drugs, and have had a continual healing from the emotional wounds of my past. Last Easter I was confirmed in the Catholic Church.

God has changed my life and I am eternally grateful. However, there are hundreds of thousands of young women and girls who are trapped in the horrible world of sex trafficking/prostitution.  Anyone who is forced to have sex with other people, is severely beaten and/or has to turn the money over to someone who has control of them is a victim of sex trafficking. Prostitution and sex trafficking are the same thing.

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Sex trafficking is slavery. Young women and girls are made to stand on street corners, or in a room in front of a potential john, and they feel like they are on an auction block, sold to the highest bidder. They endure eyes full of lust staring at their bodies, up and down, up and down, men sizing them up like a horse, not caring anything about them, just looking for their next sexual fix. Inside, the girl is slowly dying emotionally, and probably physically.

I want you to understand that prostitution/sex trafficking is the rape of the body and the soul. Pimps, traffickers and johns are rapists.  Some of them are also murderers.

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Ninety percent of the prostituted women we have helped have had a forced abortion. They are physically held down in the place they are trapped in, and an abortion is performed on them. Included in this statistic are those women who are beaten until their babies die.  These monsters are murderers!  The traffickers starve the women, tell them when they can eat, what they can eat and if they don’t bring in a certain quota, they don’t eat at all.

About a year ago I was called to talk to a young woman who had been severely beaten by a john.  She was black and blue from the top of her head to her feet, and was eating bowl after bowl of food. She said the john had thrown her against a wall and her pimp got mad at HER, so he had not let her eat for several days. Her pimp found out through one of his other girls where she was at, and I found out later that day he drug her by the hair down a street. The next day she was unrecognizable and the pimp had her out on  the street.  Men were still buying her.

Another girl was trapped in a house.  Her trafficker put her in a bathtub of cold water, poured several pitchers of ice on her, held her down until she started bleeding, then threw her against a wall and beat her until she passed out.

We have women who were forced underground and sold twenty to twenty five times a day.  One woman had been trapped for 16 days in an apartment with her tormentors and they had sold her 400 times.  Four hundred times she had been raped!

Women who are victims of sex trafficking feel like a piece of meat.  They are so degraded and traumatized that they sometimes never recover. Their souls and their lives have been stolen. They are dead inside. Multiple personalities abound.  How else can they survive? Despair runs deep and hopelessness abounds.  These victims have a tendency to blame everything on themselves and they don’t realize it is not their fault.  They feel they are falling into a dark, deep bottomless pit.

At the bottom of it all is the pornography that fuels the fire for the demand side of sex trafficking and prostitution.

     Can you hear the cries of the human beings who are being sold?

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All Things New is a 501c3 non profit corporation.

Donations are tax-deductible.

Send donations to:

All Things New, Inc.

PO Box 513

San Antonio, TX 78292

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Catholic, Christianity, Conversion, Faith, Following Christ, Misogyny, Pro Life, Slavery, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Violence in America, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 34 Comments

Catholic Church Against Human Trafficking

April 28, 2013 By 10 Comments

Human trafficking is like sex-selected abortion in that it gets caught up in the culture wars. This video shows the Catholic Church’s clear stand against human trafficking.

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Filed Under: Catholic, Culture, Following Christ, Misogyny, Politics, Slavery, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , 10 Comments

Gay Marriage: French Opposition Continues

April 25, 2013 By 17 Comments

 

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Opponents to France’s new law legalizing gay marriage say they will continue the fight. 

This unwise action by the French government in forcing the vote to legalize gay marriage on an unwilling population appears to have the potential to push France into a protracted struggle. Roe v Wade certainly did that here in America. This kind of government-created civil disturbance is almost always a bad idea.

I haven’t read the new law, but news reports about it say that it specifically allows medical technological interventions to create children for gay couples. Aside from the obvious commodification for children, this process also requires farming women’s bodies for eggs and then  using them for surrogates. The obvious misogyny in that is mind boggling.

This practice is widespread here in America. We have celebrities parading around with their manufactured children that were created by this use of women bodies. We also have a television show that “normalizes” the egregious practice. The violation of the basic human rights of both women and children to be treated as people and not commodities are entirely ignored in our public discussion of this issue. 

According to Vatican Radio, there are reports of “English-speaking companies offering to provide same sex couples in France with children at a cost of $100,000.” I would not be at all surprised if these companies were the same American companies that run baby-manufacturing mills here in America. 

From Vatican Radio:

(Vatican Radio) Opponents of a new French law legalizing marriage for same sex couples are vowing to continue their campaign, one day after France became the 14th country to pass the controversial legislation.
A bill, which also allows for adoption by same-sex couples, passed by 321 votes to 225 in the French parliament yesterday, amid heated debate and protests both in and outside the National Assembly building.
French President François Hollande is expected to sign the bill once it has cleared any constitutional challenges. But a broad coalition of opponents, including the Catholic Church, says it will continue contesting the legislation and is planning further demonstrations.
Tugdual Derville is a spokesman for the opposition movement and a leader of the Alliance Vita, pro-life organization. 
Listen: RealAudioMP3 
He says this movement marks the birth of a real reawakening in France of those who are concerned that the most vulnerable people, children, the aged, the handicapped, remain a priority for economic and social policies….today, he says, we see English speaking companies offering to provide same sex couples in France with children at a cost of $100.000 – this is deeply shocking to us.
It is time, Derville says, to open a serious discussion about what we call human ecology, aimed at recognizing, protecting and transmitting to future generations the truth about our human procreation, our birth from a man and a woman. Beyond the public protests, the movement will continue to promote serious reflection and the development of a culture at the service of all human beings.

Text from page http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/04/24/french_opposition_continues_to_same-sex_marriage/en1-686133 
of the Vatican Radio website

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, calling good evil, Catholic, Christian Persecution, Culture, Faith, Family, Marriage, Misogyny, Politics, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , 17 Comments

My Husband and I Sleep in a “Master Bedroom.” Does that Make Us Sexists or Racists or Some Kind of ist?

April 24, 2013 By 12 Comments

Realtor

This falls into what my grandmother would call the if-that-don’t-beat-hens-apeckin’-on-a-hot-griddle column. 

Evidently, homebuilders are moving away from labeling the main bedroom in a house the “master” bedroom.

Why?

They think it’s sexist. Or maybe it’s heterocentric. Or … maybe they’re nuts.

Personally, I’m leaning toward nuts.

If you want to see some sexism, take a gander at a post I put up this morning called Where are all the good people dead: In the Heart or in the Head? Now that’s sexism. Also misogyny, and hatred of women, and deadly deep sinful hatred of humanity, all rolled into one.

But … “master bedroom??????” I don’t think so.

However, after all that grimness in the earlier post, it is kind of fun to talk about, isn’t it?

From Yahoo Homes:

Has the “master bedroom” ruled the roost for long enough?

Evidently so, according to Washington Business Journal writer Michael Neibauer. His informal survey of 10 major D.C.-area home builders found that six of them are instead using phrases like “owner’s suite” or — and this one just slays me — “mastre bedroom” in their floor plans.

“Why? In large part for exactly the reason you would think: ‘Master’ has connotation problems, in gender (it skews toward male) and race (the slave master),” Neibauer writes.

He found evidence of a trend among listing agents too. The vice president and managing broker of Long & Foster Real Estate Inc., Lorraine Arora, told him that her office is split on the issue. Younger agents “want to be more politically correct,” she said, whereas older agents generally stick with “master.”

I asked the National Association of Realtors about this apparent shift. Spokesperson Sara Wiskerchen told me: “While this hasn’t become a widespread trend, we have heard that some real estate brokerages have shied away from using certain phrases that may carry negative connotations. Realtors are strong advocates for homeowners and strive to be respectful of and sensitive to the needs and concerns of their clients.” (Read more here.)

Filed Under: America, Culture, Humor, Misogyny, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , 12 Comments

Where are all the good people dead: In the Heart, or In the Head?

April 24, 2013 By 31 Comments

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Sheila Pott, mother of Audrie Pott, with photo of Audrie 

Here are the facts.

  • Fifteen year old girl attends a party in one of the elite zip codes in this country.
  • She drinks. Maybe she drinks too much. Maybe her drink was doctored.
  • What is certain is that she was raped by boys she thought were her friends.
  • The boys put graphic photos of the rape on the internet.
  • The girl hanged herself.

I have had to deal twice with situations like this in my job as a representative. One was a girl who killed herself after a gang rape by five men who took photos and showed them around, including to the police. When the police told the girl there were photos, she went home, got in the bathtub and killed herself with a shotgun blast to the face.

The other girl tried to kill herself. After four days in critical care, she survived. 

I’m going to post an excerpt of an article about the little girl who hung herself. I want to talk about the attitudes that show through this article. I have no grievance with the person who wrote it. They’ve just fallen into our societal trap of cleaning up what should be faced and excusing that for which there is no excuse.

The article begins by saying that 15-year-old Audrie got drunk at a party and when she woke up, concluded that she had been “sexually abused.” Let’s get our terminology straight. She concluded, probably due to some grisly physical evidence, that she’d been raped. 

Remember that word: Rape. It’s ugly and people don’t like it. But the word isn’t the real ugliness. The ugliness is living in a society where 15-year-old girls can be treated like this and then suffer the further indignity of having reporters try to clean the horror up for the perps with the use of “soft” expressions like “sexual abuse” to describe what happened. 

These upstanding young men posted “graphic” photos of their rape of their friend on Facebook. After Audrie saw the photos on the internet, and endured the mockery of emails and texts circulating about what had been done to her, eight days after she was raped, she hung herself.

According to our reporter, “the case underscored the seeming callousness with which some young people use technology.”

Is that what’s this “case” is about? “Sexual abuse” and “callous” use of technology? 

If we accept this kind of bland obfuscation of the brutal rape and murder by suicide of this young girl as a problem with technology and “cyber-bullying,” we need to burn our Member of the Human Race Card and go sit in the corner with the trolls and monsters of our deepest darkness.

To paraphrase a line from the movie Grosse Point Blank, where are all the good people dead:  In the heart, or in the head? 

Let’s get one thing clear: I don’t talk about misunderstood mass murderers and rapists who are otherwise such good people on this blog. You won’t see sweet-face lists of these young men’s accomplishments and wonderment about “how could such fine boys do this?” You’ll not read a word of sympathy and grief if they get sent to the prison where they belong, no matter how much they cry for themselves when they are sentenced. 

They were without pity for Audrie. I don’t care if they bawl their eyes out for themselves. I hope they spend the rest of their lives in jail. I don’t think they should ever breathe another free breath again. 

If you do something like this, then I put you in the monster column. The only way to get off that column is to manifest extreme remorse and humble grief for what you have done, coupled with a willingness to admit that you have in fact done it and that you are willing to do anything it takes to make up for it and to change. Even then, I want the proof of a changed life, and I mean a really changed life. 

Nice people do not rape their friends. They do not — ever — treat other people like things. They do not take photos of their raping and then post them on the internet, along with sending emails and texts to taunt, degrade and destroy their “friend” socially. What these men did to this girl, the rape, was physical torture. What they did later was emotional torture. What this young girl faced was social death.

People who treat other people like this are monsters. They will remain monsters so long as they continue to excuse, defend and deny the utter depravity and sub-human cruelty of what they have allowed themselves to become.  

From The Washington Post: 

SARATOGA, Calif. — Fifteen-year-old Audrie Pott passed out drunk at a friend’s house, woke up and concluded she had been sexually abused.

In the days that followed, she was shocked to see an explicit photo of herself circulating among her classmates along with emails and text messages about the episode. And she was horrified to discover that her attackers were three of her friends, her family’s lawyer says.

Eight days after the party, she hanged herself.

“She pieced together with emails and texts who had done this to her. They were her friends. Her friends!” said family attorney Robert Allard. “That was the worst”

On Thursday, sheriff’s officials arrested three 16-year-old boys on suspicion of sexual battery against Audrie, who committed suicide in September.

The arrests and the details that came spilling out shocked many in this prosperous Silicon Valley suburb of 30,000. And together with two other episodes recently in the news — a suicide in Canada and a rape in Steubenville, Ohio — the case underscored the seeming callousness with which some young people use technology.

“The problem with digital technologies is they can expand the harm that people suffer greatly,” said Nancy Willard, an Oregon-based cyberbullying expert and creator of a prevention program for schools.

Santa Clara County sheriff’s officials would not give any details on the circumstances around Audrie’s suicide. But Allard said Audrie had been drinking at a sleepover at a friend’s house, passed out and “woke up to the worst nightmare imaginable.” She knew she had been assaulted, he said.

She soon found an abundance of material online about that night, including a picture. (Read the rest here.) 

 

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Misogyny, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Violence in America, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 31 Comments

There is No Reason for Late-Term Abortion

April 15, 2013 By 38 Comments

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Late-term abortionist, Dr Kermit Gosnell

There is no reason for late-term abortions.

Abortion supporters are fond of saying that people like Dr Kermit Gosnell, the late Dr George Tiller and Dr LeRoy Carhart perform a “necessary service” for “desperate women” when they “provide” late term abortions.

Not true.

Not even close to being true.

There is no reason for a late-term abortion. None. Zip. Zilch. 

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 The legislators I work with, and (I would guess) much of the general public, lives in a fantasy land about abortion. They seem to think that an elective abortion involves a preternatural procedure where the doctor waves a medical magic wand over the pregnant woman and — poof! — she is no longer pregnant.

In their self-consoling dream world, abortion is just a re-wind that doesn’t put women through a surgery or, in the case of late-term abortions, a labor and delivery. All they will allow themselves to think that happens with “safe, legal abortion” is that the woman pays her money and is, through a miraculous medical intervention, made unpregnant.

In this fantasy world, there are no dismembered little baby bodies and their scrambled parts to reassemble and check to make sure the abortion is complete. In fantasy abortions, women do not experience pain during the fantasy procedure and danger is non-existent. 

This “thing” that will one day “become a baby” is not a human being. In the cowardly imaginations of those who won’t face facts, no one suffers, no one dies, and in fact, nothing much happens in an abortion. It’s all painless, deathless problem solving for problems they don’t want to actually solve.

That’s where most of the resistance to pro life legislation lives. It is a product of convenient lies that allow people to do monstrous things and keep their own mental skirts clean, at least so long as they box themselves off from reality and never know the truth. 

This nonsense about “necessary services” for “desperate women” concerning the work of Gosnell/Tiller/Carhart is  fantasy carried to the point of deliberate delusion. 

Let’s stop for a moment and try thinking about the reality rather than the fantasy.

Pregnant

Late-term abortion refers to the deliberate killing of babies whose mothers are far along in their pregnancies. That’s where the phrase “late-term” comes from. What does that mean? It means that the baby looks like a baby, acts like a baby, sounds like a baby and, if it’s born at this point, would have a fighting chance of living like a baby. 

Late-term abortions are performed on women who advanced months into their pregnancies before their “desperation” set in. This “service” requires that the women be put through horrific medical procedures that involve giving them large doses of contraction-stimulating hormones to induce unusually violent and painful labor and delivery. A nurse who assisted in these things told me that the doctors they worked for deliberately stimulated contractions so violent that the contractions would usually kill the baby while it was being born.

Aside from what this does to the baby, what do you think it does to the woman? The grisly and illegal procedure we call “partial birth abortion” requires that the baby be delivered feet first, then the delivery stopped so that the doctor can suction out the baby’s brain before it is legally born. Proponents of this procedure talked about how it was necessary for “women’s health.” But I ask you, aside from what it does to the baby, what do you think that does to the woman? How is that consistent with “women’s health?”

I’m not talking about her emotions here. I am talking about labor and delivery practices that are painful, dangerous and quite horrible for the woman. How is this something that protects “women’s health?”

The answer is, it doesn’t.

In addition to what this does to the woman, consider for a moment that many of these babies must be deliberately killed before the procedure takes place to keep them from being born alive. The way I’ve heard that this is usually done is to give the baby a shot of poison directly into its heart. This means jabbing a needle through the mother’s abdomen and into the baby. It means the mother has to feel her baby thrash around the avoid the needle, then feel it die. All this is done to keep the legal fiction that this late-term abortion is not, in fact, a cold-blooded murder.

In spite of this, many of these babies are born alive. The doctor might miss the mark and not shoot the poison into the baby’s heart. Or, the dose might be too small. Or, the doctor doesn’t administer the death-dealing drug and the baby is strong enough to survive the excessively violent contractions the doctor puts the mother through.

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Gianna Jessen, survived late-term abortion as a baby.

 However it happens, babies do manage to survive these deliberate attempts to medically murder them and are born alive. When that happens, what does a doctor do? For decades, they killed these babies. Changes in the law now require them to administer medical care to the babies, but as we’ve learned, that doesn’t always happen.

How does all this support my contention that late-term abortion is never necessary? What about abortion to save the mother’s life?

The answer is so obvious it’s hard to believe people don’t see it. 

Premature baby

If the woman is going to have to go through a labor and delivery anyway, there is no reason whatsoever to kill the baby. If the mother’s life is at stake, all that needs to be done is deliver the baby. Then, do your medical best to save both the child and its mother. 

There is no reason to kill these babies. There is no medical reason. No moral reason. No situation that requires it.

In some instances, late-term abortions are performed on very young girls. Proponents don’t argue their case, because they don’t have one. They simply point to the young girl and yammer about how can anyone “force” her to have a child. Their whole argument is based on the magic rewind fantasy abortion.

It ignores the fact that a late-term abortion will put the young girl through a much harsher labor and delivery than she would experience if she received life-saving medical care designed to save both her and her baby. It ignores the reality that the baby is already here. There is a child.

All late-term abortion does is kill the child. It does not save the mother anything. It is not “necessary” and it is not done to “save” “desperate” women. 

There is no reason for late-term abortion. 

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, calling good evil, Culture, Health Care, Misogyny, Politics, Pro Life, The War on Girls, Uncategorized, Violence Against Women, Violence in America, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 38 Comments

Five Abortion Workers Quit on First “Leave the Abortion Industry Day”

April 15, 2013 By 3 Comments

No Abortion Workers = No Abortions

It’s a simple equation. One that Abby Johnson seeks to employ with her ministry Then There Were None. The ministry held its first Leave the Abortion Industry Day on Monday, April 8. Five abortion workers have contacted her ministry for help in quitting the industry so far.

In addition to the babies this ministry will save, these five people have been saved as well.

Thank you Abby, for what you are doing.

From LifeSiteNews:

April 11, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Abby Johnson, the organizer behind the first-ever “Leave the Abortion Industry Day,” also known as Exodus 2013, says she is thrilled with the outcome of Monday’s event.

So far, she says, five abortion industry workers have contacted her ministry for help to leave their jobs. In addition, numerous media outlets, including the Mike Huckabee show and America’s News HQ show, and 30 radio stations, publicized the event.

“On Monday, we were able to talk to 5 employees who were looking to quit their jobs!!” she wrote in an e-mail to supporters today. “Five more people OUT OF THE ABORTION INDUSTRY!!  Five more people on the road to healing!” (Emphasis in original.)

Former Planned Parenthood clinic manager Abby Johnson.

Johnson, who is a former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic, started her ministry to abortion workers, And Then There Were None (ATTWN), in June of last year. Even before Monday’s event, the ministry had already helped 47 abortion workers leave the industry.

ATTWN provides emotional, financial, and spiritual support for workers who have left their jobs and are looking for a new line of work.

ATTWN’s motto is: “No more abortion clinic workers, no more abortion clinics, no more abortions. It starts with the workers.” (Read more here.)

Filed Under: America, Calling Evil Good, Catholic, Christianity, Culture, Following Christ, Misogyny, Politics, Pro Life, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , 3 Comments

Dame Margaret Thatcher: Women, Power and Politics

April 13, 2013 By 10 Comments

Thatcher zpsa7255709

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has been excoriated this week in a way that makes no sense.

After all, she was a duly elected official who served her term in office in a way that received approval from a good number of the people she governed. Nothing in her governance that I know of lends itself to the unseemly, downright crude behavior that has followed her death.

Jessica Hof, who blogs at All Around the Watchtower, wrote an interesting post, Women, Power and Politics, which was published on nebraskenergyobservor, taking the Iron Lady’s attackers to task.

I’ve been disturbed by the viciousness of the post-mortem attacks on Dame Thatcher myself. I saw a photo of one sign (which was held by a woman) proclaiming “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.” If anyone dared to use language that caricatured African Americans in this way when speaking of President Obama, they would be rightly criticized and shamed for it. However, as usual, when the object of this sort of thing is a woman, no one remarks on it.

Here is Jessica’s fine post in its entirely. Published with permission.

Women and power

by JessicaHof

womenandpowerWe live in a society in which men still dominate the political scene. Relax, this isn’t the prelude to a rant about how unfair that is – quite the opposite. Politics takes the sort of dedication which the gender which does obsession with stuff well has in spades. From my limited experience, men quite like power and they don’t, on the whole, regret (much) the loss of family time which it necessitates. Men seem happy to put the time and the effort in, so I see no reason why they shouldn’t reap the rewards.

When Mr Blair became Prime Minister he came to office with a lot of new female MPs, and we were told that a new era had opened. Well, nearly twenty years on, little has changed. Few of those women have got on in politics, and they have not inspired a new generation of women to try their hand.  It does not seem how hard feminists try, women don’t want to play that game. Sure, you’ll get some women who want to do it, but the idea that most women want to do it seems, by the evidence, to be wrong.

Maybe that’s why there is an unpleasant tine of misogyny in some of the leftist criticisms of Mrs Thatcher. Would anyone be calling a dead Tony Blair a ‘warlock’, and what, pray, is the male equivalent of ‘the bitch’. It is hard not to see in some of this a sense by men (and some women) that there was something fundamentally wrong in Mrs T even being in power.

A difficult one for the Left of course. They are supposed to be in favour of equal opportunity and female empowerment – and there was Mrs Thatcher, who was very powerful and owed nothing to equal opps.  She took on the men at their own game and she was better at it. That may lead a woman like Glenda Jackson (whose idea of empowerment was to run round in the nude in a Ken Russell film) to say she wasn’t her idea of what a woman should be, but that is more evidence, were any more needed, of the inability of leftist women to actually understand the majority of their own sex. Most of us don’t want to be men. We like men, we think they are wonderful, and we know that properly handled, they are God’s greatest gift. But there’s a whole art in that :)

Mrs Thatcher never pretended to be like men. She used her femininity as a powerful weapon. She knew that most men like a good-looking woman, and that being strong, efficient and capable are no bars to being attractive. By all accounts, she was perfectly capable of flirting with Mr Reagan, and even the socialist Mitterrand was struck by her combination of the mouth of Marilyn Monroe with the eyes of Caligula. She made her husband a cooked breakfast every morning, and she fussed over her staff like a mother hen.

The plain fact is that in our society there is no template for what being a woman in power is supposed to be like. No one makes anyone go into politics, and if you don’t want people to comment on your looks, don’t go into politics. If you do, don’t complain that you don’t get treated like a man – do what Mrs T did and take advantage of that.

Filed Under: Misogyny, Politics, Uncategorized, Women's Rights Tagged With: , , , , , , , 10 Comments