PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tag abortion

A federal judge turned back pro-abortion objections against the Choose Life license plates in Illinois saying motorists have the free speech rights to purchase them and place them on their automobiles. U.S. District Judge David Coar said protests from abortion advocates don't trump the First Amendment. Coar also said the state must issue the specialty license plates as long as the sponsors of it meet normal requirements on the design and number of motorists wanting one. Tom Brejcha, an attorney with the pro-life Thomas More Society law firm that represented the sponsor, hailed the ruling.

The debut of a video on the Internet this week is causing more headaches for potential Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor and recent pro-life convert was forced to defend his newfound beliefs after a 1994 video surfaced showing him defending legalized abortion. Responding to the video, Romney appeared on a radio talk show and said, "I was wrong on some issues back then." "If you want to know where I stand by the way, you don't just have to listen to my words, you can go to look at my record as governor," Romney said during an appearance on the "Glenn and Helen Show," a radio program.

A New York mother has written to national advice columnist Harriette Cole saying she wants her pregnant 14 year-old daughter to have an abortion. The letter points to the alarming trend of parents forcing their children to have abortions when they discover their teenage daughters are pregnant.

An autopsy on the body of a baby girl found at a Hialeah, Fla., abortion business shows her arrival is being considered a birth, but it also notes that her cause of death was "extreme prematurity." The autopsy was obtained by the front-line pro-life organization Operation Rescue, and posted online.

An abortion business in Huntsville, Ala., should be closed down after the state Health Department cited the location for violating 10 state laws, according to the front-line pro-life Operation Rescue. According to officials, the Alabama Women's Center for Reproductive Alternatives was found to have been forwarding after-hours medical emergencies to non-medical personnel, routinely failing to document the gestational age of the unborn baby, and releasing abortion patients without following the mandatory 20-minute recovery period, according to a statement from Operation Rescue.

Democrats can't not be crazy. They will instantly set to work enacting a national gay-marriage law, impeachment hearings, slavery reparations and a series of new federal felonies for abortion clinic protesters. The only way to get Democrats to focus on terrorists would be to convince them that the terrorists are interfering with a woman's right to choose or that commercial jetliners exploding in midair are a threat to America's wetlands.

As public relations campaigns go, proudly proclaiming "We Had Abortions'" probably isn't going to win any Addy awards. Such is the gist of Ms. Magazine's current campaign to thwart trends toward curtailment of abortion. The Oct. 10 issue of the feminist magazine features a cover story titled "We Had Abortions," as well as a petition signed by thousands of women who, well, have had abortions. And who are not one bit sorry. ()() Bragging about having an abortion is just sick. Women used to be ashamed when they were forced to wear a scarlet letter on their chest.

More than 1,100 people participated in the 16th Life Chain in Wilmington and they lined the streets with non-graphic pro-life signs saying women who have abortions can be healed and that they are praying for abortion to stop in the United States. However, some abortion advocates pelted participants with eggs and some activists took the signs away from the people holding them.

Recent investigations at abortion clinics in several states have shown that such businesses are not just a danger to unborn children, but also to the immediate health and welfare of the mothers that enter their doors. In the past two months, Alabama's health department has shut down two of the state's 10 abortion clinics for health code violations and Florida's health department has shut down five.

Half a dozen abortion clinics in Florida and Alabama have had their doors locked after state health boards became concerned by alleged rule and drug violations, including claims of an illegal late-term procedure in Florida.

A Wichita, Kan., building that formerly was used as the headquarters for an abortion business had blood covering its walls "from floor to ceiling," according to a witness.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, admits his group lied about the number of women who died from legal abortions when testifying before the Supreme Court in 1972. "We spoke of 5,000 - 10,000 deaths a year ... I confess that I knew the figures were totally false ... it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

The Church and the Culture Wars There they go again. The liberal media, it seems, likes nothing better than to play up what they see (or create) as divisions in the evangelical ranks. This Sunday’s New York Times featured a front-page story about Gregory Boyd, an evangelical pastor in Minnesota who is highly critical of the religious right and refuses to talk about abortion or other cultural war issues from his pulpit.

In an age when we continue to debate "a woman's right to choose" when it comes to a girl aborting her baby and we are told that it is the girl's body and no one else should make decisions affecting it, a boy has no such rights. A girl can be given birth control by the school nurse and even abortion information without her parents knowledge or consent, but a boy can be prohibited from making decisions that affect his life and body. At least the courts are consistent. They forbid parental involvement in either case. In some states, though, parents are held responsible for their kids' illegal and anti-social behavior. Why is it that parents supposedly have power to keep their kids from committing crimes, but can be denied power when it comes to their child's health and welfare?

If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em. That's the tactic that an anti-abortion group in Wichita, Kan., took when it boasted about its purchase of a former abortion facility building and subsequent plans to convert it into a memorial for aborted fetuses. Operation Rescue bought the former site of Central Women's Services weeks after the abortion clinic sold its equipment and closed the doors -- a tactic used before by similar groups that may increase. ()() Isn't this the same tactic used by environmental wackos? If you can't beat 'em, evict 'em. Why is it OK for liberal groups to use this tactic, but not conservative groups?

In Chicago, an ambulance driver refused to transport a patient for an abortion. In California, fertility specialists rebuffed a gay woman seeking artificial insemination. In Texas, a pharmacist turned away a rape victim seeking the morning-after pill.

What's worse than legalized abortions? How about legalized abortions performed by a dangerously - and maybe criminally - inept staff that violates state rules, leading to the death of an almost full-term baby? What follows, with information provided by a State Board of Health suspension order, is a scene as gruesome as a slasher film - except it's real life. Or, more accurately, death.

Any doctor who thinks nothing of dispensing a pill that can kill has no place in the healing arts. Whether an abortion is surgical or chemical, it is still a tragedy for both mother and child.

A letter to Bill Clinton written by the co-counsel who successfully argued the Roe v. Wade decision urged the then-president-elect to "eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country" by liberalizing abortion laws. Ron Weddington, who with his wife Sarah Weddington represented "Jane Roe," sent the four-page letter to President Clinton's transition team before Clinton took office in January 1993.

A university professor who was forced to resign after leading a group of pro-abortion students in vandalizing a pro-life display has attacked pro-life advocates in a private email to the students involved. The email also encourages the students to "make it hard" for police investigating the vandalism to find them

Officials at Northern Kentucky University are preparing an official statement to faculty and students at the college in response to a professor and her students vandalizing a pro-life display meant to oppose abortion. Meanwhile the professor involved is slated to retire in a few weeks.

A professor at Northern Kentucky University said she invited students in one of her classes to destroy an anti-abortion display on campus Wednesday evening. NKU police are investigating the incident, in which 400 crosses were removed from the ground near University Center and thrown in trash cans. The crosses, meant to represent a cemetery for aborted fetuses, had been temporarily erected last weekend by a student Right to Life group with permission from NKU officials.

Abortion rights advocates once hoped that RU-486 would prove at least as safe as surgical abortions and largely end the abortion wars by making access widely available and very private. But in the wake of reports in March that two more women had died after taking abortion pills, some doctors say they are increasingly uneasy about prescribing them.

Heidi found herself pregnant, scared and alone. An abortion seemed the only way out. Then she found the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.optionline.org/">Option line website</a>. Heidi realized she wasn't alone, that she had life-saving options and there was someone out there who cared. Heidi made an appointment and chose life for her baby!

A new congressional effort to police advertising by crisis pregnancy centers is unnecessary, pro-life advocates said, and unconstitutional, free-speech defenders charged. The American Civil Liberties Union, which has long promoted itself as the leading defender of freedom of speech and civil rights, is right in the middle of the controversy, promoting the new legislation to the surprise of some.