Monthly Archives: March 2014

Unmasking the push to terminate children with Down syndrome

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By Nancy Flanders

In Australia, much like the United States, only 5.3% of people diagnosed in the womb with Down syndrome are actually born. About 95% of people with Down syndrome are never given the chance to live their lives. That means 95% of parents who receive such a diagnosis for their child have given in to their fears and now live everyday with the pain of having ended their child’s life.

News.com.au asks, “Is this the beginning of the end for Down syndrome?”  And it very well could be.

In the article, which first appeared in QWeekend Magazine, the author visits with families of children and adults with Down syndrome. Each admitted to having initially struggled with the diagnosis, whether it came during the pregnancy or at birth. But none regretted their child, each boasting about their child’s accomplishments – from the five-year-old little girl learning to write to the adult who participates in international competitive swimming. Each of their stories leaves you wondering, what’s the big societal problem with people with Down syndrome?

There isn’t one.

Our society is overall supportive of everyone with any type of disability or health condition. From inclusive education to Special Olympics, the majority of us now treat people with different abilities with respect and kindness. Unless of course, those people are still in their mother’s womb.

It’s the common “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. If I can’t see it, it isn’t really happening.

But these are real people we’re talking about. Actual lives that are being ended because they have Down syndrome. There is no other reason. And just as society discriminated against people with Down syndrome in the past by labeling them “idiots” and placing them in institutions, society today discriminates against them by telling their parents to kill them. Despite the fact that there are new medical technologies to help them live healthier and longer lives. Despite the fact that there are numerous programs to help them lead more fulfilling lives. And despite the fact that families of people with Down syndrome and people with Down syndrome themselves report being happy with their lives.

Despite all of these advances and improved life outcomes, we no longer institutionalize people with Down syndrome, we actually kill them.

And it’s all thanks to pre-natal testing. And the less invasive and expensive it gets, the more people will die. Isn’t that the opposite of what medical advances are meant to do?

Instead of doctors informing parents of all the resources available to them and their child, they tell them only of the stereotypical negatives that are often associated with the condition. And they advise the parents to abort. One mother, Angela, says that her doctors were brilliant, however there was “overwhelmingly negative” advice being thrown at her and her husband. She was even told to leave her daughter behind and just walk away.

Parents, lost momentarily in their fears and mourning for the child they had planned on, can be too emotionally distraught to make a clear decision about their child’s life, and most end up aborting. Many will carry that pain with them through the rest of their lives.

We have to ask ourselves, are the medical field and society doing parents a disservice when we talk about abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities? Are we denying parents and entire families the joys that come with parenting, the triumphs that come with struggles, and the pride that comes with watching your child succeed when no one thought they would? By denying people with Down syndrome their very lives, are we denying ourselves happiness? Are we denying the evolution of a compassionate society? Are we headed backwards in our quest for diversity, inclusion and acceptance?

If the only words a doctor can offer her patients who receive the news of a pre-natal Down syndrome diagnosis are, “I’m sorry” and “You can terminate,” than yes, the medical community is causing emotional and mental harm to parents. And society is backing it up by repeatedly arguing for the right to allow abortion especially in the cases of humans with disabilities.

Call it bullying. Call it misguided intentions. But in the end, there’s a human being who has been denied his or her life and two parents who are suffering with the guilt. And this is only on track to continue until there is no longer a single person with Down syndrome on the planet. So much for inclusion and acceptance.

Editor’s note. Nancy is a work at home mom who writes about parenting, special needs children, and the right to life. She is the lucky mother of three spirited little girls, one who has cystic fibrosis, and she spends any free moment she can find fundraising for a cure for CF. This appeared at liveactionnews.org.

 Down Syndrome

SOURCE:

http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2014/03/unmasking-the-push-to-terminate-children-with-down-syndrome/

NAACP and Hollywood Celebs Receive Big Abortion’s Highest Honor

by Ryan Bomberger | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 3/28/14 11:26 AM

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Someone just received a nice shiny award from the nation’s largest abortion chain. It’s not every day that one can simultaneously celebrate racism and heap accolades on an organization (the NAACP) founded to eradicate it.

Planned Parenthood commemorates never severing from its racist and elitist past by centering a gala on the eugenist founder of the billion-dollar abortion empire—Margaret Sanger. And lest anyone think her original 1939 Negro Project slipped into oblivion, Planned Parenthood reminds us they’ve never stopped using prominent black figures to push their agenda of population control. Last night, Big Abortion had a big night honoring the NAACP, Nancy Pelosi, BET’s “Being Mary Jane”, and ABC Family’s “The Fosters”.

While the NAACP is currently enmeshed in a lawsuit with The Radiance Foundation (and organization that my wife and I founded) flat-out denying that they’ve taken a position on abortion, their organization’s actions prove how adamantly pro-abortion they are. NAACP chapter presidents are merely following the former NAACP president Benjamin Jealous’ lead.

Just months before our federal court case with the NAACP in December 2013, Jealous was the keynote speaker at a $1000-a-Margaret-Sanger-Circle-Ticket political rally hosted by Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates in Atlanta, Georgia. So, it’s no surprise that the Reverend Doctor William Barber II, NAACP North Carolina President and National NAACP Board member, engaged in the same direct partnership with an organization birthed in eugenic racism.

Never mind more black babies are aborted in the city where Planned Parenthood is headquartered; these so-called “civil rights” leaders show nothing but love for the baby-killing machine.

Reverend Barber, responsible for launching the radically liberal “Moral Monday” protests at the NC state capital, hosted and featured their partner Planned Parenthood of Central NC and Planned Parenthood Action Fund of NC (as if they need a “political arm”) at rallies demanding no restrictions on abortion. So last night, Barber received the “Care. No Matter What.” Award from Planned Parenthood. Scare, no matter what. That’s Barber’s tactic.

Bizarrely, in one public speech (start at 3:25) he details a strange historical timeline of egregious civil rights violations suggesting that the oppressors were Republicans, never once mentioning the known source of the violence, lynching and dehumanization—the Democrat Party.

The Negro Project 2.0 is in full effect today. Barber is one of many prominent black public figures Planned Parenthood relies on for double-speak, empty religiosity, and celebrity. Gabrielle Union, star of BET’s “Being Mary Jane” has been a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood for years.

Like most Hollywood liberals, she reads straight from the script provided, which might explain why she made the absurd claim that Planned Parenthood performed 830,000 mammograms. They would actually need a mammogram machine to do that. They don’t. Which is why PPFA hasn’t done a single one, yet they won’t stop their public spokespeople from making Mammosham (h/t LiveAction) claims.

Nevertheless, “Being Mary Jane” is getting a Maggie! How exciting! Union’s character, yet another leading black actress playing a character that has an adulterous affair with a married man (Planned Parenthood black celebrity spokeswoman Kerry Washington plays same adultery game in Scandal). But marriage fidelity isn’t of any interest to the nation’s largest supporter of birth control over self-control.

Margaret Sanger wanted nothing to do with marriage except the financial boondoggle that it provided her (her last husband, Noah Slee, was an oil tycoon whose money enabled her eugenic Birth Control crusade). In fact Sanger called “the marriage bed the most degenerative influence in the social order” (see Sanger’s 1922 book Women And The New Race).

Have you ever noticed that Planned Parenthood never promotes marriage or adoption? Well, that’s not entirely accurate any more. They do promote one form of marriage—gay marriage. Never before has the abortion giant given a Maggie Award to a show about adoption…ever. But you throw a lesbian couple that has foster and adopted children (it’s a scripted drama, not a reality show) on a network that’s a “Different Kind of Family” (ABC Family) and there you have the first Maggie Award pretending to care about foster care and adoption.

Pretending is what Planned Parenthood does best. They have powerful allies in the civil rights movement, in public education, in mainstream media and in Hollywood–the land of make-believe. However the reality is that the Maggie Awards remind us how little we learn from human history. When people accept being showered with praise by an organization that kills for a living, they lose a little bit of their own humanity, one mutilated child at a time.

SOURCE:

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/03/28/naacp-and-hollywood-celebs-receive-big-abortions-highest-honor/

12-Year-Old Girl’s Speech on Abortion Leaves Her “Pro-Choice” Teacher Speechless

by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 3/28/14 9:44 AM

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Lia Mills is a student pro-life activist who surprised her class with a moving speech on abortion that is so good it’s gone viral on the Internet.

“My daughter prepared and delivered this speech for her grade 7 class. Even those who didn’t agree with her loved it,” her mother says in a note accompanying the video on YouTube.

Lia, who is now 17, has since blossomed into an articulate pro-life advocate, penning an article taking on euthanasia that ran at LifeNews last year and was very well-received.

Here is how she describes herself on her Twitter account: “Lover of Jesus. Daughter of the Most High. Human Rights Activist. Public Speaker. Pro-life. Survivor. Revivalist. Nation shaker. World changer.”

Judge for yourself here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wOR1wUqvJS4

Source:

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/03/28/12-year-old-girls-speech-on-abortion-leaves-her-pro-choice-teacher-speechless/

Letter Pope Francis Gave Obama to Read Says Defending Life Central to Human Rights

by Dave Andrusko | The Vatican | LifeNews.com | 3/28/14 9:21 AM

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Not to be overly cynical, but if I was President Obama (with every kind of approval index mired in the high 30s and low 40s), I know I would like to bask in the reflected glow of Pope Francis, whose popularity is double that of the beleaguered President.

So far not a lot has come out about the 52-minute meeting Thursday between Pope Francis and President Obama. Mr. Obama expressed his appreciation for the meeting, the first with Pope Francis and the second the President has had with a Pope. (The first was with Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, “a cordial meeting that nevertheless drew attention to the differences between the church and Obama on abortion,” as Fox News noted.)

“I was grateful to have the opportunity to speak with him about the responsibilities that we all share to care for the least of these, the poor, the excluded,” Obama said today. “And I was extremely moved by his insights about the importance of us all having a moral perspective on world problems and not simply thinking in terms of our own narrow self-interests.”

The Vatican put out a brief statement. “Views were exchanged on some current international themes,” the statement read. “[T]here was a discussion on questions of particular relevance for the Church in that country, such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection, as well as the issue of immigration reform.”

Other accounts, such as Doyle McManus for the Los Angeles Times and John Allen for the Boston Globe, both read between the lines and reminded readers that there are serious differences between this Administration and Rome.

Allen, for example reminded us that “Aside from the broad clash between Obama’s support for abortion rights and the Catholic church’s opposition,” the meeting at the Vatican comes two days after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two lawsuits challenging the Obama mandate that compels employers to provide health coverage for drugs and procedures , including contraceptives, to which they have moral or religious objections.

“Sharp differences on that score still loom over the administration’s relationship with the church,” Allen reported.

McManus noted that just as Obama gave an interview with a newspaper in Rome prior to the meeting, so, too, did the Vatican media office issue a statement before the Pope and the President met. It noted that the two men were meeting during “a complex phase of the administration’s relations with the Church of the United States, marked, in particular, by controversy on the implementation of health care reform (the ‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,’ commonly known as ‘Obamacare’)…”

Of the stories I read, only McManus noted the significance of Pope’s parting gift to the President: “a bound copy of his 2013 letter to the faithful, ‘The Joy of the Gospel’ — the one that became famous for its critique of trickle-down economics.”

McManus wrote that Obama said, “I actually will probably read this in the Oval Office when I’m deeply frustrated,” and added, “I’m sure it will give me strength and calm me down.”

But “If the president actually does read the pontiff’s letter, he’ll find that though it’s joyful, it isn’t always comforting,” McManus observed. “[T]here’s also a strong reminder that the church still believes that there are ‘objective moral norms which are valid for everyone.’ And there’s a full-throated defense of traditional Catholic teaching on abortion, which Francis complains is too often criticized as ‘ideological, obscurantist and conservative.’”

He then quotes from what Pope Francis wrote in “The Joy of the Gospel”:

“This defense of unborn life is closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right,” the pope argues. “Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defense of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be.”

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared at National Right to Life News Today.

SOURCE:

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/03/28/letter-pope-francis-gave-obama-to-read-says-defending-life-central-to-human-rights/

 Pelosi says you are dumb

Pro-life Friend —

Brace yourself for what I’m about to tell you.

Last night, Nancy Pelosi accepted Planned Parenthood’s highest honor – the Margaret Sanger Award – at their annual gala.

Now, that’s enough to make most people’s blood boil.

Sanger – the founder of Planned Parenthood – was a racist eugenicist who called African Americans, immigrants and the poor “human weeds,” “reckless breeders,” “spawning… human beings who never should have been born.”

But wait until you read this – Politico is reporting that, in accepting the award, Pelosi called pro-lifers “dumb,” “closed-minded,” and “oblivious.”

Pro-life Friend, I don’t know how you feel right now after reading this, but frankly, I think pro-lifers should take these insults as a badge of honor.

Pelosi knows that abortion on-demand is absolutely indefensible, so she’s resorted to elementary school name-calling.

So here’s how I’m asking you to respond:

Fight back by making an immediate donation of $25, $50, or even $75 or more right now to the SBA List, knowing that your donation will be instantly DOUBLED.

Thanks to a generous contributor, every donation received by March 31st at midnight will be doubled up to $50,000 in support of our efforts to enact pain-capable protection laws across the country.

…After all, how are we “oblivious” when we’re presented with compelling evidence that unborn children can feel pain at 20 weeks?

…How is it “dumb” that we accept the scientific fact that life begins at conception?

…And how is it “close-minded” that we want to protect women when study after study shows just how much abortion hurts women?

The truth is, I think we got under Nancy Pelosi’s skin yesterday.

You see, pro-lifers across the country participated in a TweetFest social media campaign to educate Nancy Pelosi about Margaret Sanger’s hateful legacy.

She was a well known eugenicist who thought birth control and abortion were the best way to “create a race of thoroughbreds.” Sanger believed in forced sterilization of “the feeble minded,” and said that “the most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

We presented Nancy Pelosi with facts about Margaret Sanger, and instead of attempting to defend the indefensible, she resorted to name calling instead.

That’s a win in my book!

Pro-life Friend, we are under Pelosi’s skin and we cannot let up now: Make the most generous donation you can today knowing that it will be instantly doubled up to $50,000.

One of our donors is so committed to helping us advance our top legislative priority and beating legislators like Nancy Pelosi that they have offered to match all donations from now until Monday, March 31st at midnight. We need to raise $15,000 between now and then.

Pro-life Friend, our opponents know that faith AND reason are on our side. Name-calling is what the other side does as a last resort when they’ve run out of arguments.

Science and medical technology have only further confirmed the truth about the unborn child in the womb and the threat abortion poses to women. We also have God on our side.

The bottom line is this, and Nancy Pelosi knows it: Life is winning!

God bless you.

Marjorie Dannenfelser
President, Susan B. Anthony List

Donations:

http://www.sba-list.org/

Donations can also be mailed to SBA List, Suite 550, 1707 L St., NW, Washington, DC 20036
Contributions or gifts to Susan B. Anthony List, Inc., a 501(c)(4) organization, are not tax-deductible for Federal income tax purposes. Donations may be used for political purposes such as supporting or opposing candidates. All donations are made to the general treasury of the Susan B. Anthony List, Inc., and are not designated for any particular purpose. Donation will be used in the sole discretion of the Officers and/or Board of Directors in accordance with the mission and purposes of the SBA List.

Priests for Life Lawsuit Against the Unjust HHS Abortion Mandate of ObamaCare

March 27, 2014

As you continue your Lenten journey, I know that one of your resolutions is to deepen your prayer life.

It is for that reason I decided to send you an email Robert Muise just sent me.

As you’ll recall, Rob is the Co-Founder and Senior Counsel of the American Freedom Law Center and the lead attorney in our Priests for Life lawsuit against the unjust HHS abortion mandate of ObamaCare. Here’s the email he sent me:

Fr Pavone: Reminder: our petition for review with the Supreme Court is scheduled to go to conference on Friday, March 28th. Pray that the Court accepts it. We will likely know the outcome within a couple of days. Remember, if the Supreme Court denies the petition, it will have no effect on our appeal in the D.C. Circuit, and we can still seek review in the Supreme Court after the circuit court rules (assuming we don’t prevail—if we do prevail, it is likely that the Solicitor General will seek review, in which case, it is highly likely the Supreme Court will grant review). Much to pray for during this Lenten season!

March 28 is tomorrow.

So, I’ve sent you this email to ask you to do exactly as Rob asks:
PRAY THAT THE SUPREME COURT ACCEPTS OUR PETITION FOR REVIEW.

Please pray RIGHT NOW and continue to pray until you receive an email from me informing you of the Court’s decision.

This past Tuesday – the Feast of the Annunciation and the International Day of the Unborn – I was at the Supreme Court, speaking at a rally for religious freedom. The Court was hearing arguments regarding how the HHS Mandate applies to for-profit businesses.

Our case, on the other hand, would bring the Court to decide how it applies to not-for-profit religious entities, like Priests for Life.

So much is at stake in our nation right now that it is vital all of us PRAY, and that we do so without ceasing.

That being the case, in addition to praying for the Justices on the Supreme Court, PRAY ALSO for the three judges who will decide our appeal to the D.C. Circuit that Rob mentions. This is our appeal of the terrible and unjust ruling Judge Sullivan handed down last December against Priests for Life.

Your prayers are especially needed because the Court unexpectedly changed the makeup of the 3-judge panel that will hear our case.

As Rob put it so well:

MUCH TO PRAY FOR DURING THIS LENTEN SEASON.

Finally, as long as I have your attention, if at all possible …

… please make a contribution Priests for Life can use for our Legal Fund.

Your dollars will be used to advance both the cause of life in America, and especially our legal fight to protect your right to speak out against the injustice of abortion without fear of government coercion!

Please do whatever you can to help. The severe winter weather has wreaked enormous damage on donations. Contributions are well behind where they normally are at this time of year.

So I beg you to be as generous as you possibly can.

Both with your PRAYERS and with your FINANCIAL SUPORT. Priests for Life desperately needs them.

Thank you. May God bless you. And know that in heartfelt appreciation for your support, I remember you at every Mass I offer; as do all the priests of Priests for Life.

Sincerely,

Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director
Priests for Life and Gospel of Life Ministries

P.S. If you wish to make a contribution to the Priests for Life Legal Fund or in support of all our life-saving work. Thank you again and God bless.

NOTE: If you prefer to send a check, please make it out to Priests for Life and send it to us at PO Box 141172, Staten Island, NY 10314. If you have any questions, call us toll-free at 888-735-3448.

We offer various options for you to receive different emails from the different branches of our ministry. See how you can vary your preferences or unsubscribe. Remember, we want to keep you in the loop!

Make a contribution:

https://www.priestsforlife.org/