Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission

Contrary to the confident assurances of the Obama administration, opposition to its mandate requiring religiously-affiliated universities, hospitals, and charities to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization and contraception continues to mount. Here is just a short list:

On Monday the Family Research Council unveiled a letter, signed by more than 2,500 evangelical and ministry leaders from a range of denominations, expressing their opposition. Among many points made in the letter was the declaration that the issue was not contraception but religious freedom.

“This mandate was not necessary, nor warranted under the provision of ‘preventive care services for women’ contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [ObamaCare],” the religious leaders wrote. “Worse still is the fact that the mandate essentially ignores the conscience rights of many Catholic and Protestant Americans. Our country was founded on certain freedoms, the first of which is the freedom of religion.”

Today’s Washington Times reports that with the addition of new lawsuits yesterday and today, a growing number of organizations (mostly colleges) are suing the Obama administration over the mandate. Catholic or Catholic-affiliated organizations include Belmont Abbey College, Priests for Life, EWTN Global Catholic Television Network, and Ave Maria University. “But evangelicals have joined the fray as well,” the Times reports, including Geneva College and  Louisiana College.

“The state shouldn’t punish people of faith for making decisions in accordance with their faith,” said Gregory Baylor, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which filed the lawsuit. “Every American should know that a government with the power to do this to anyone can do this — and worse — to everyone.”

Geneva College President Ken Smith said in a statement, “At Geneva College, we only have one Lord, and he does not live in Washington, D.C.” Added Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, “We are not going to stand by and allow our God-given rights, protected by the Constitution, to be atrophied, neutered, confined and restricted.”

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Archbishop Charles Chaput

If you want an in-depth, thoughtful discussion about virtually any issue NRL News Today readers would be interested in, chances are you could not do better than Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia.

Last week I wrote about his tender, loving speech to students prior to the March for Life [“Children with disabilities: ‘A doorway to the real meaning of our humanity’”]. I also addressed an op-ed he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer in which the Archbishop confronted head-on the Health and Human Service mandate compelling Catholic universities, hospitals, and charities to paying for health insurance that covers sterilization and contraception [“The HHS mandate, including its latest variant, is belligerent, unnecessary, and deeply offensive to the content of Catholic belief”].

Archbishop Chaput revisited the mandate in his weekly column (http://catholicphilly.com/2012/02/archbishop-chaput/current-hhs-mandate-is-not-a-real-compromise). Many of his comments were specifically addressed to Catholics, but many were equally applicable to people of all faiths and to those who respect religious liberties as an intrinsically important part of the social fabric.

He begins with the importance of being polite and never degrading opponents. (Of course, that is a courtesy that pro-abortionists rarely, if ever, extend to pro-lifers, a point Archbishop Chaput deals with at length.) But that is not an excuse (my word) for standing idly by in the face of an HHS mandate that “is coercive and deeply troubling in its implications for the rights of conscience.”

Archbishop Chaput reminds his readers that this is not “accidental. The administration, despite the good will it has enjoyed from many Catholics, has taken a path that it knows to be unnecessary and knows to be hostile to Catholic belief.”

Archbishop Chaput directly confronts the demeaning, sneering assault on the Catholic Church for its resistance to the Obama/HHS mandate. “The contempt dumped on Catholic teaching in our mass media over the past few days of debate tells us quite a lot about our critics,” he writes. “It also underlines the need for fighting respectfully but vigorously for what we believe.”

He makes the critically important point that people are “free to criticize Catholic belief in any way they choose.’

“But they’re not free to force Catholic institutions, organizations and individual employers into violating their religious convictions. They’re not free to mislead the public about a flawed and dangerous HHS mandate. And they’re not free to ignore the concerns of Catholic citizens who are rightly angry about the current administration’s indifference to religious freedom and the rights of conscience.”

No matter how many times we read that the current HHS mandate is a “compromise,” it isn’t. “It’s bad law with very dangerous implications,” the Archbishop writes. “It needs to be rescinded, and it doesn’t matter how ugly or deceptive our critics choose to be.”

If you have a chance, read, “It’s not a ‘compromise,’ and it needs to be rescinded” at http://catholicphilly.com/2012/02/archbishop-chaput/current-hhs-mandate-is-not-a-real-compromise/

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Former PPFA President Faye Wattleton

Charlotte Hays is a terrific correspondent for the National Catholic Register, who wrote a piece that I just ran across. “Planned Parenthood and Komen: Future Funding Remains in Question: AT&T Situation Sheds Light on Defunding Issue” ran yesterday. While I will take a further look at her piece tomorrow, you can read it for yourself today at www.ncregister.com/site/article/planned-parenthood-and-komen-future-funding-remains-in-question.

As the title suggests, Hays is speculating (and that’s all it can be at this stage) about what the future relationship will be between Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood, which clobbered Komen unmercifully when it revisited its breast health grant strategy. For example, will it be similar to AT&T which (Hays writes) was also the object of an all-out barrage when it stopped donating to PPFA in 1990 but did not buckle under.

As I wrap up National Right to Life New Today for Tuesday, I leave you with this closing nugget. Hays writes.

“Faye Wattleton, who was president of Planned Parenthood at the time of the AT&T controversy, summed it up in her book Life on the Line. ‘Corporate support was only about 5% of our budget,’ Wattleton wrote, ‘but it meant a great deal to us. The credibility that such endorsements bestowed was at least as valuable as the actual dollars given.’”

Worth considering in light of the fact that to a $1 billion corporation, the amount of money coming to PPFA from Komen was peanuts.

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A sharp reader of National Right to Life News Today dropped me a line today to politely remind me I had inadvertently dropped the ball. I’d like to make clear today what I muddied, by accident, yesterday.

In “Virginia Ultrasounds and the Feverish Pro-Abortion Mind”  I wrote about the hysteria times ten reaction of the abortion lobby to a bill in Virginia that would require that an ultrasound be performed prior to the performance of an abortion.

The point of the story was that the object of this orchestrated hysteria was the use of a vaginal transducer. I wrote, “The vast majority of abortionists use a vaginal transducer because it dates the pregnancy more accurately! This could be crucial if they are contemplating a RU486 chemical abortion since age of the baby is a key point in chemical abortion.” (And, for that matter, its use is not required by the bill.)

What I should have written, but didn’t, is this. We know abortionists are giving RU486 to women who are 63 days (or more) past their last menstrual period (LMP), even though the FDA protocol that spells out what conditions the agency thought made use of the drugs “safe” and “effective” recommended limiting its use to women who were seven weeks (or 49 days) LMP.

It was my mistake. My apologies.

Already set to be the longest argument in the Supreme Court’s modern history, the justices today tacked on another 30 minutes for oral arguments over ObamaCare. The extra half-hour means the Court will listen a total of six hours of arguments in March.

In recent decades the Justices have typically allotted an hour per case on one day. That they would listen to four separate questions that arose from one suit over three days is universally understood to signal just how important a case the High Court believes this to be. That suit, begun in Florida, was brought by 26 state attorneys general and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).

On the first day (March 26), the court will now devote 90 minutes to the  threshold question of whether the High Court can rule until the mandate goes into effect in 2014 and someone refuses to pay a penalty because they have no health insurance. No one—neither the states, NFIB, nor the Obama administration—say the Anti-Injunction Act should stop the court from ruling on the healthcare mandate.

“But in part because a lower court cited the law, the justices have to consider it,” according to the Hill. And since neither the plaintiffs nor the Obama administration relied on this to delay a decision, an outside lawyers was appointed by the Court to argue the point.

The next day the core issue: two hours over whether the “individual mandate” that everyone have health insurance is (as the plaintiffs argue)  an unconstitutional burden on people who do not want to buy insurance. The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit held that it could when it struck down the provision.

On March 28, the court will devote an hour and a half to the “severability” issue. If the mandate is declared unconstitutional can this one provision be “severed”  so the rest of the law can stand? The same day the justices will consider ObamaCare’s expansion of the Medicaid program (which is jointly funded by the states and the federal government).

CNN’s Bill Mears has described the question this way: “Can states be forced by the federal government to expand their share of Medicaid costs and administration, with the risk of losing that funding if they refuse?”

Two circuit courts of appeals declared ObamaCare constitutional—the 6th and the District of Columbia. One deemed it unconstitutional—the 11th circuit–while one (the 4th circuit) said until someone was forced to pay the penalty for not purchasing insurance, a challenge could not be brought.

From a pro-life perspective, there are multiple abortion-expanding provisions of ObamaCare. (See in an October 6 letter to the House of Representatives and in testimony by Legislative Director Douglas Johnson at www.nrlc.org/AHC/ProtectLifeActDouglasJohnsonTestimony.pdf.) It is those abortion-expanding  provisions  that the Protect Life Act, passed by the House last October, are intended to remedy.

Specifically, ObamaCare includes provisions  that “provide authorizations for subsidies for abortion, both implicit and explicit, and also multiple provisions that opened doors to abortion-expanding administrative actions.”  The Protect Life Act would prohibit the use of any ObamaCare-authorized funds for abortions or to subsidize health plans that cover abortions, except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest.

There are also provisions in ObamaCare  that virtually guarantee rationing (See www.nrlc.org/HealthCareRationing/Index.html).

Your feedback is very important to improving National Right to Life News Today. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha

It’s no news to you, but once a ‘fact’ gets established in the abortion context (always to the advantage of the pro-abortion side), it is nearly impossible to root it out.

Not to pick on the Associated Press—they are hardly the only offender—but its unctuous coverage of a pro-abortion rally at the Virginia legislature included this: “Both chambers have passed legislation that requires women to have a transvaginal ultrasound before undergoing abortions.”

It is their alleged use which pro-abortionists have spun off into justification for signs that read, “Say No to State-Mandated Rape.”

As we’ve reported several times, (1) almost all abortion clinics already use transvaginal ultrasounds for a variety of reasons, including dating how old the baby is, and (2) there is nothing in the bill that mandates their use. Nothing. The bill has already passed both houses.

So, abortion clinics, by this definition, already are “raping” women.

That pro-abortionists treat the truth like funny putty is nothing new. We just need to correct the distortions—repetitively, patiently, persistently.

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Rick Santorum

Today’s wrap up of election news will be both brief and encouraging. Rasmussen Reports, which conducts telephone polling daily, reported, “In potential Election 2012 matchups, both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have pulled to within two points of the president. Obama leads Romney 45% to 43% and, if Santorum is the Republican nominee, the president leads 46% to 44%.”

Probably more important long-term  is what voters told Rasmussen about what Rasmussen calls the “Presidential Approval Index.” (This is the difference between those who strongly approve versus strongly disapprove.)

President Obama currently stands at a minus 15. That is, 40% strongly disapprove of the way Obama “is performing his role as President” to 25% who strongly approve.

Mitt Romney affirms his pro-life convictions

In the battle for ascendency in Michigan, Rick Santorum’s advantage over Mitt Romney has vanished. In four recent polls, Santorum’s average lead  is 1.5 points. Michigan holds its presidential primary February 28.

In Arizona, which holds its presidential primary the same day, Romney leads by 6.2 points (also reflecting an average of four polls). But “With a week to go, there is still time for the race to swing in either direction,” TIME magazine reported, referring to its own poll that had Romney up by 4 points. “Just 58% of respondents in the TIME/CNN/ORC poll said they would definitely support their preferred candidate, while 34% suggested they were open to changing their mind.”

Pro-abortion President Barack Obama

Gallup’s new national tracking poll of Republican registered voters found Santorum with a ten point lead over Romney, 36% to 26%. This represents a gain of 20 points for Santorum in the last two weeks, and a drop of 11 points for Romney.

But there was good news for Romney as well.

“In a separate USA Today/Gallup survey conducted Feb. 16-19, all Americans were asked which of the two candidates — Romney or Santorum — they believed would have the best chance of beating Barack Obama in November. Overall, 54% of Americans named Romney and 29% chose Santorum.”

Among Republicans 58% “say Romney has the best chance of beating Obama, while 32% choose Santorum.”

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Retired Judge Christina Harms

In a letter sent yesterday to other family court judges in Massachusetts, Christina Harms, the now-retired family court judge who ruled in January that a pregnant woman with schizophrenia should have an abortion and be sterilized strongly defended her decision. Her judgment was subsequently overturned by the Massachusetts Appeals Court.

On January 17, reporting on the Appeals Court’s reversal, the Boston Globe’s Peter Schworm wrote

“Earlier this month, a Norfolk probate judge declared a pregnant woman with schizophrenia incompetent and ordered her to undergo an abortion, stating she could be ‘coaxed, bribed, or even enticed’ into the hospital for the procedure.

“Unbidden, the judge further directed that the 32-year-old woman be sterilized ‘to avoid this painful situation from recurring in the future.’’’

However citing a 1982 ruling by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, the Appeals Court ruled on January 16 that “The personal decision whether to bear or beget a child is a right so fundamental that it must be extended to all persons, including those who are incompetent.”

Schworm wrote, “In sharp words, yesterday’s decision also denounced the sterilization order, a directive that several legal specialists said they had not heard of in recent memory.” He quoted Appeals Court Judge Andrew Grainger, who wrote, “No party requested this measure, none of the attendant procedural requirements has been met, and the judge appears to have simply produced the requirement out of thin air.” 

The woman’s mental health condition was never in question, according to Schworm’s accounts. “Mary Moe,” the woman’s pseudonym,  also has bipolar disorder and had been pregnant twice before.

At a hearing in December Harms ruled “the woman was not competent to make a decision about an abortion, citing ‘substantial delusional beliefs,’ and concluded she would choose to abort her pregnancy if she were competent,” Schworm wrote. “Mary Moe” identified herself to court officials as “very Catholic” and said “she would never have an abortion” according to Schworm. One of her two previous pregnancies had been aborted.

Judge Harms “ordered that the woman’s parents be appointed co-guardians to give their consent to the abortion and sterilization,” according to Schworm. “The parents, who have custody of the woman’s son, believe that terminating the pregnancy is in their daughter’s best interests, according to court records.”

But Harms improperly decided the matter of the woman’s competence, the Appeals Court concluded, noting “that a court-appointed specialist had determined that the woman would ‘decide against an abortion if she were competent,’” Schworm wrote. “Without conducting a hearing, Harms found the specialist’s report inconclusive.”

In her letter sent on Monday, Harms unstintingly defended her decision in “a tragic set of circumstances for which no outcome would have been easy or obviously correct.’’ She called the Appeals Court ruling ”simplistic and unfair.” In her letter Harms wrote that “the statements of a person suffering from schizophrenia surely cannot simply be taken at face value.’’

According to Schworm, “Harms said she has requested a meeting with the chief judge of the appeals court to register her objection to the ‘insulting tone’ of the decision.”

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Abortion supporters have grossly mischaracterized the provisions of the Pro-Life Protections Act–HB 2598–and, as expected, the Wichita Eagle blindly editorialized against it, characterizing the proposal as a measure that “defies mainstream science.”

One of the purposes of HB 2598 is to codify basic elements of the informed consent pamphlet, so it cannot become a political football as it had been in the administration of former Governor Kathleen Sebelius, currently President Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

HB 2598 says that the booklet “shall also contain objective information… including risk of premature birth in future pregnancies, [and] risk of breast cancer…” 

Anti-life opponents try to frighten legislators by saying that the national medical advocacy groups do not acknowledge the abortion-breast cancer link. But the Kansas Department of Health and Environment  (KDHE) has already recognized their duty to inform women about the link.

Two full paragraphs about abortion links to pre-term birth and breast cancer are ALREADY published here on page 24 of the online version of the Kansas Woman’s Right to Know pamphlet. The pre-term information is accurate but  the breast cancer section still needs tweaking to more clearly convey these relevant biological facts.

FACT: Most women who have abortions will not get breast cancer, and most women with breast cancer did not have abortions.

And most people who smoke won’t have lung cancer. The issue is unnecessarily increasing the risk and incidence of breast cancer. In the last 40 years, during which time there have been over 54 million abortions, the national figures show a 400% increase in breast cancer “in situ.” (This is breast cancer that is treated by radiation and removal of all, or part, of the breast). This means that the statistical risk of getting breast cancer in a woman’s lifetime has risen during that time from 1 in 12 to 1 in 7.

FACT: For over fifty years, it has been known that the first full-term birth affords a woman lifetime risk reduction for breast cancer.

What cannot be denied by mainstream medical groups (and usually isn’t) is that

·         The number of a woman’s breast cells increase dramatically with every pregnancy.

·         Breast cells that make milk (at full term birth)  become cancer-resistant.

·         However an induced abortion denies a woman the breast-cancer risk-reduction of having experienced a full-term birth.

·         Abortion is an immutable risk for future pre-term birth. *

What abortion supporters claim is in dispute is the independent effect of induced abortion itself on breast cancer. That is, that having an abortion increases the chances of a woman having breast cancer. But such a link has been consistently confirmed by world-wide studies, including those produced by National Cancer Institute researchers.

Contrary to what critics insist, HB 2598 is not pushing any medically-inaccurate facts, only undisputed facts not promoted by the federal health bureaucracy.

*A naturally-occurring miscarriage in the first trimester is mostly produced by a lack of estrogen, the hormone that makes cells increase, and thus does not increase breast cancer risk beyond that of a woman who has never become pregnant.)

Because I was unable to reach the author, I will not provide a link to a online post that is the kind of message everyone needs to hear…and often.

The author tells us she is very reluctant to “touch the topic of abortion” but feels she “must share my story. Perhaps there are other abortion-survivors who can relate.”

Her story is, in some sense, commonplace, in another sense more of an exception. Her mother became pregnant with her when she was only 17 and she heard all the usual advice (the same now as then): “Just ‘get rid of it’ and move on. Be happy,” was the consensus,” we read.

But her parents—her mom and dad—were made of sterner stuff. They married, which happens less frequently today, and rejected the “quick fix.” They “chose life. And I mean that literally.”

What lends even greater authenticity is that she confides times were often very rough for her family. (Nobody ever said doing the right thing is going to be easy.)

But if being an “abortion survivor” was not enough to make her acutely aware, the author lost a baby at nine weeks. “That experience solidified my perception of ‘life,’” she writes. “There was no turning back after that.” And understandably so.

“I saw that little baby on the ultrasound. Then I lost it. It tore me apart to think there are some people who CHOOSE to dispose of their nine-week-old babies. Did they see them, I wonder?”

Our Teens for Life often refer to themselves as “abortion survivors.” And that is, because they are. Roe v. Wade made every pregnancy problematic, at least in the law’s eyes.

Thank heaven for all those who chose life. Thank heaven for all of you dedicated to helping women and girls everywhere to do likewise. In every sense of the word, you are doing God’s work.

Your feedback is very important to improving National Right to Life News Today. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha