Not Murder if Committed by a Doctor

Here we have an interesting ruling by a Texas Appeals Court that allows the killing of a fetus to be prosecuted as murder, regardless of the fetus’ stage of development, so long as the killing isn’t the result of an abortion:

Wednesday’s ruling by the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected an appeal by Terence Lawrence, who said his right to due process was violated because he was prosecuted for two murders for killing a woman and her 4- to 6-week-old fetus.

The court ruled unanimously that state laws declaring a fetus an individual with protections do not conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling that protects a woman’s right to an abortion.

Lawrence was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life for the 2004 shooting death of his girlfriend, Antwonyia Smith, and the couple’s unborn child. Lawrence shot Smith after learning she was pregnant with his child, according to court documents.

Surely there is no one out there to sympathize with Terence Lawrence for slaying his girlfriend because she was pregnant with his child. But did he murder his unborn child?

Murder is defined as the premeditated, deliberate killing of another human being. By definition the Texas court applies the human being label to unborn fetuses if it can be considered murder to kill one.

Is abortion not the premeditated, deliberate killing of another human being (as unborn children are human beings according to Texas)? Abortion is premeditated, deliberate, and results in a death; therefore we must conclude for the first time that in some instances murder is permissible.

Senator Craig’s Non-Conservative Bathroom Adventures

He says he’s not gay. I couldn’t care less. The police report is highly uneventful and hardly worth the media fanfare covering the minor charges of “interference with privacy” and “disorderly conduct,” but he pleaded guilty anyway, and now regrets admitting guilt. With good reason too, as the available evidence would probably not have held up in court had Craig fought the charges.

But is he a hypocrite, as many have suggested, for being a conservative Republican while living a liberal social life? Hardly. Gays don’t have to support the legislation pushed by the homosexual lobby. You can be gay and oppose same-sex marriage at the same time. Blacks don’t have to support affirmative action. Women don’t have to support abortion. Christians don’t have to support prayer in schools.

Let’s not be so quick to accuse everyone of being a self-hater because they live a life that supposedly doesn’t fit their voting record. Let’s especially not use this incident to encourage Senator Craig to shed his conservative ideology and come out as the next gay-rights crusader.

No Tears for Tammy

Sharon Lerner’s dreary story at Salon.com doesn’t invoke much sympathy from me for a woman who found a three-month window to get an abortion too burdensome.

It’s a struggle for many women, especially the poor ones, to get an abortion in the state of Mississippi where clinics aren’t exactly within a Starbucks reach. But low-income earners can get one for about $300, a modest price tag I believe for women who don’t want their child. The sacrifices some have to make to scrounge up the dough to sacrifice their baby is apparently too great, and often takes longer than the 12-week limit set by Mississippi. As a result some women end up seeing their pregnancy through:

So young women like Angie continue to risk jobs and borrow money in order to make it out of state to get abortions. Others, like a young Mississippi woman named Tammy, forgo the procedure entirely. Tammy first came into the clinic last October, when she was in her 14th week of pregnancy. She hadn’t known the law had changed and had assumed she would be able to get an abortion. Instead she was told she’d have to make a trip to Alabama. A single mother, she would have had to arrange for childcare to go out of state, and she was struggling to raise the money for travel, according to Cheryl McGee, a staff member at Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “She had just started her job and she couldn’t get no time off and she couldn’t get nobody to take her,” explains McGee. “She doesn’t have a car to get there and she didn’t have the money to get a bus.”

Is the Mississippi law cruel for forcing some women to jump over a few hurdles to end their pregnancy? I say no. The deadline to get an abortion is a little different than the deadline to file your taxes. Paperwork is paperwork, but a fetus is a human being (or close to becoming a human being depending on your view) that will soon be viable.

The author admits that it is an accepted fact that fetuses can often live outside the womb at the 26th week (start of the third trimester) of pregnancy and sometimes even earlier. Abortion supporters are vocal about opposing such restrictive deadlines to get one but they don’t want to talk about the grisly reality that abortion is generally acceptable only 14 or so weeks before the baby can survive on its own. For that I applaud Mississippi’s 12-week limit and the positive results:

No one knows for sure what now happens to the women with unwanted pregnancies in Mississippi who have progressed beyond 12 weeks. In the year since the law went into effect, the clinic has performed 458 fewer abortions than the previous year. Many would-have-been patients, like Angie, were referred to a Montgomery clinic, New Woman All Women Health Care, which allows women who have attended informational sessions in Jackson to get abortions without having to repeat the session in Alabama.

The abortion rate here is low, despite the fact that the state has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. The state’s many restrictions clearly help depress the numbers. There were only six abortions for every thousand women of reproductive age in 2000 in Mississippi, compared to 21.3 in the U.S. In the six years following the enactment of the law requiring a 24-hour waiting period after counseling in 1992, the rate dropped from 11.3 per thousand to 9.9, according to a study published in Family Planning Perspectives in 2000.

I hope Tammy buckles down and does what she needs to do to provide for the new life in her life. I have no doubt in my mind that it will be difficult, but she won’t be the first mother to go through hardships of raising a kid. The author describes the birth of Tammy’s child as a “defeat,” but I can’t see it that way. And while I may not know what it’s like to be stuck with a child I never wanted, I certainly know the value of life and the potential greatness that can come from every almost-aborted survivor.

George Tiller ‘The Baby Killer’ Charged

Very good news coming from the office of the Kansas Attorney General, Democrat Paul Morrison, as reported in the Kansas City Star:

TOPEKA | Wichita abortion provider George Tiller broke the law when he performed late-term abortions, Attorney General Paul Morrison said today.

Morrison said he is rejecting all charges filed against Tiller by his predecessor, Phill Kline, but the attorney general today filed 19 misdemeanor charges of his own.

Kansas law forbids abortions after the 22nd week unless the procedure will save a woman’s life or prevent significant injury to a major bodily function. That exception has been read to apply to mental health.

The law also requires that two doctors agree the late-term abortion is medically necessary before the procedure is done, and the state forbids those doctors to have financial or legal ties. However, Morrison alleged today Tiller and the other physician had a financial relationship.

Morrison’s decision to charge Tiller is likely to come as a shock to anti-abortion groups who expected Tiller to be cleared. They predicted that Morrison would decline to charge Tiller, saying the attorney general would shield the abortion provider. A political action committee controlled by Tiller spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the recent election attacking Kline.

Michelle Malkin was quick to jump on the story. Bill O’Reilly has also been following the abortion provider who may have broken the law by not reporting the rapes of underaged girls.

The reluctance of abortion providers to follow the law and report underaged girls who come for abortions with their adult boyfriends is troubling. When this whole thing is through we can only hope -at the very least – that Tiller will have lost his license to practice.

The Right Has Hijacked Religion

Said Barack Obama in a speech this weekend:

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) – Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right- wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in remarks prepared for delivery before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.

“Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Illinois senator said.

“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,” according to an advance copy of his speech.

I agree with Obama that religious Americans care about issues other than abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design, but they certainly care about abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.

Like it or not a great percentage of Democrats unfortunately “disrespect” religious values. To them if you oppose abortion you hate women, if you oppose same-sex marriage you hate gays, if you support school prayer you want to alienate and indoctrinate the godless children, and if you believe in a God you’re a science hater who believes the Earth is flat.

We‘re certainly divided all right, but the vitriol is coming from the radical Atheists who want to quarantine every last show of religious expression to the home like some contagious disease. And these people are largely Independents and Democrats. That’s the undeniable truth.

I do believe there is room for religion in the Democratic party. They need it if they want to survive, as most Americans identify themselves as religious people and vote with religious issues in mind. But if Democrats want to debate and liberalize attitudes toward conventional religious topics they’re going to have to drop that whole condescending superior-elitist act.

Sad Conclusion in Double Murder Story

And to be sure it was a double murder headlining the news this week:

The boyfriend of Jessie Marie Davis has been arrested and will be formally charged Monday with her murder and that of her unborn child.

Bobby L. Cutts Jr. is in custody, and his arrest was just announced by the Stark County sheriff’s department.

Cutts, 30, a Canton police officer since 2001, was the father of Davis’ 2-year-old child and believed to be the father of the baby girl she was to deliver on July 3.

Fortunately there will be justice for the unborn daughter being that she was killed by someone other than her mother’s doctor. Shame on me for going down this unnecessary road, but I it was a point nevertheless I desired to make.

How to Manipulate Abortion Survey Results

The liberal-leaning online magazine Slate ran a story last Friday on the surprise controversy of the movie “Knocked Up,” a film about a girl who unintentionally gets pregnant but keeps the child because there isn’t another option in Hollywood – whereas in the real world she almost certainly would have opted for an abortion.

The author mentions (without citation) that a whopping 77% of Americans favor abortion and suggests the heroine of the film wouldn’t be such a bad guy if she went through the procedure, especially with that 77% behind her.

Then the New York Times ran a similar piece today citing a NYT/CBS News Poll saying “three-fourths of Americans favor access to abortion, though about half of those would like to see more restrictions than now.”

And there’s the rub. Assuming Slate used the same poll, it’s evident that abortion supporters ignore the part about the majority of Americans favoring restrictions.

The poll asked the question this way:

“Which of these comes closest to your view? Abortion should be generally available to those who want it. OR, Abortion should be available, but under stricter limits than it is now. OR, Abortion should not be permitted.”

The results tell a different story than what pro-choicers tells us. According to the survey, 39% of Americans believe abortion should be “generally available.” Yet almost as many, 37%, believe the limits we have now on abortion should be stricter. Finally, 21% are firmly against the procedure.

From those figures, a majority of Americans (58%) believe that either abortion should be outright illegal or at the very least harder to access. The survey doesn’t ask what restrictions the majority of Americans favor, but one that’s quite popular is restricting abortion unless needed to save the life of the woman.

Sorry Slate, but even if the restrictions didn’t go that far, I don’t think the majority of Americans would be happy with the film’s protagonist getting an abortion simply because she got “knocked up.”

Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Statistics

Planned Parenthood recently posted its annual report with statistics of the services they provided in 2005. According to the literature there was no planned parenting for the 264,943 abortions they performed in 2005; an increase of 9,928 abortions done in 2004. No statistics are provided on the number of underage girls who were illegally provided abortions at the request of their adult rapist boyfriends.

Pro-Life Blogs reminds us that the annual report was posted on the same day as the anniversary of D-Day. I’ll let you determine the significance.

One thing’s certain, a climb of nearly 10,000 additional abortions from the previous year is hardly anything to celebrate.

Any Partisans Like ‘Knocked Up’?

I’ve yet to see the film but I’m meaning to. I used to review them on my Aggressive-Voice site but careers and things that made me money got in the way. As I expected by the title alone, a bunch of righteous conservatives who haven’t even seen the film will dismiss it as Gina Dalfonzo has despite her readers pleading for her to see it for the subtle pro-life message.

Crazy psycho-feminist reviewer MaryAnn Johanson at Flickfilosopher who hates any movie that suggests God may exist didn’t like the film because the protagonist decides not to get an abortion (emphasis by the author):

Look: Alison doesn’t even want to touch Ben when she finds him in her bed the morning after their alcohol-fueled romp. If he’s really that disgusting, that much of a loser — and I’m not saying he is, except that the film casts him that way — why would she even consider having his child? A smart gal calls the clinic, gets an abortion, feels bad about it or doesn’t, and learns a lesson about not taking drunken losers home, or not having sex with anyone two hours after you meet him without a condom, a diaphragm, and the pill.

Pretty sick how some people regard fetuses as mere inconveniences and abortion always as the “smart” choice. Anyway, “Knocked Up” has gotten mostly positive reviews from the real critics and I’m looking for some free time to see it.

Abortion Clinic Silence

LifeNews has this story on a Connecticut abortion facility employee who sexually abused three teenage girls. What’s notable about the story isn’t the part about an adult molesting underage girls, but the disturbing trend of abortion clinics keeping quiet about girls who come for abortions accompanied by their rapists.

Michael Britt, a former model agency owner who worked as a janitor at the abortion center, allegedly abused girls aged 18, 17 and 14 in March and April 2005 after they signed up to become models thinking they had to have intercourse with him to find work. Some of the girls were taken to the abortion facility after being knocked up.

But here’s the gem (bold emphasis added):

The Britt case follows just weeks after another abortion-sexual abuse case prompted observers to wonder why abortion facilities are not contacting authorities about the actions.

Kevon Walker, 22, was charged earlier this month with getting his then 14 year-old girlfriend pregnant. He got the unnamed girl pregnant three times in six months and the girl wound up having three abortions as a result.

It’s obvious by now we can’t depend on abortion facilities to report statutory rape cases as required by law, especially after the undercover video investigation by a UCLA college student that showed how willing Planned Parenthood was to violate the law so a 15-year-old girl could get rid of the evidence seeded in her by a 23-year-old man.

But seriously, three abortions in one year? So much for the “rare” part in Bill Clinton’s message of “safe, legal and rare.”

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.