Topping the news this week was the election of a pro-abortion candidate in Alabama to join the U.S. Senate. The new senator will take over the seat formerly held by pro-life senator Jeff Sessions. The balance of the Senate was always precarious and this election could mean that it will be nearly impossible to get any truly pro-life legislation through the Senate. Time will tell.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons just published a qualitative study of how women perceived the positive and negative effects their abortion has had on their lives. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they aborted to make others happy. Seventy-four percent felt some form of coercion to abort. The article claimed that commonly voiced positives included spiritual growth, involvement in pro-life efforts, and the ability to reach out to other women who were considering the procedure or who had obtained an abortion. Negatives included deep feelings of loss, existential concerns, and declines in quality of life. More specifically, common negatives included feelings about termination of a life, regret, shame, guilt, depression, anxiety, compromised self-appraisals, and self-destructive behaviors. Read the article at jpands.org/vol22no4/coleman.pdf.
Another study published in The New England Journal of Medicine confirmed that hormonal contraceptives, including birth control pills and IUDs containing hormones, increase women’s risk for breast cancer. The study found that the risk factor increased 9 percent during the first year of use, 20 percent after five years, and 38 percent after 10 years of use. These are the pills Planned Parenthood distributes to our teens. You can read the NEJM article abstract at nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1700732.
This week, American Life League’s STOPP program released our 2017 Planned Parenthood Facilities Report. This report shows that Planned Parenthood now operates less than 600 abortion clinics in the U.S. after 32 clinics closed and only five opened in 2017. Planned Parenthood operates 597 facilities now compared to 700 facilities in 1973. The organization ran 938 clinics in 1995 when Planned Parenthood was at its peak, but has closed 36 percent (341) of its clinics since 1995. Today, Planned Parenthood has 356 facilities that commit surgical or medical abortions. All 597 Planned Parenthood facilities, however, distribute abortion inducing drugs. The full report is available for free at stopp.org/2017-facilities-report/.
During a call-in news conference this week, David Daleiden, and the attorneys representing him and Sandra Merritt in a criminal trial in California, revealed the reasons they are asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to remove Judge William Orrick from their case. The reasons included Judge Orrick’s own biased statements as well as evidence connecting Orrick to Planned Parenthood. One of the damning pieces of evidence was that Judge Orrick and his wife were instrumental in getting a specific Planned Parenthood clinic into a San Francisco family resource center and then helping maintain it. That clinic is operated by Planned Parenthood Northern California, which is one of the plaintiffs against Daleiden and Merritt. Daleiden reportedly stated in the news conference: “Whenever you hear Planned Parenthood or their allies churning out the talking point that ‘these videos have been discredited because a federal judge has found that the videos are dishonest’ or ‘a federal judge has found that these videos don’t show any criminality,’ Judge Orrick is the judge they’re referring to.” Let’s pray that the 9th Circuit Court agrees to remove Orrick from the case.