Denise Burke – Washington Times, June 25, 2012
The deadline for the Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare has nearly arrived. As the nation contemplates the impact of this historic case, the court’s ruling upholding Pennsylvania’s informed-consent and parental-consent requirements in the abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaches its 20th anniversary.
The rhetoric swirling around Planned Parenthood v. Casey would sound very familiar to those following the debates over Obamacare. Abortion advocates have not ceased inventing rights for women, such as access to federally funded contraception and unrestricted, unregulated and taxpayer-funded abortion. They allege that those who do not support their radical agenda are guilty of waging a “war on women.”
In June 1992, abortion advocates argued that the decision itself was anti-woman. They claimed it would encourage unnecessary and mean-spirited legislation designed to denigrate women, insult their intelligence and endanger their health. This has not been the case.
Despite the disappointment of many pro-life Americans with the court’s failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a pro-woman “silver lining” has emerged from this controversial decision: Women considering abortion are better protected and more informed than they were before Casey.
Pro-life legislators have continually demonstrated deep respect for American women and genuine concern for their health and safety. Informed-consent and parental-consent requirements have helped women in a vulnerable situation protect themselves by providing the facts about abortion and access to parental protection. Young girls with older boyfriends now have better legislative safeguards from potential exploitation, and women have greater opportunities to learn about every resource at their disposal.
State legislators have passed measures ensuring that women are fully informed about abortion, its ever-growing list of physical and psychological complications, and positive alternatives to abortion. They also have enacted laws protecting minors by requiring parental involvement in their abortion decisions, mandating that abortion clinics meet medically appropriate health and safety standards and, more recently, providing women opportunities to view ultrasounds before abortions.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmatively recognized that states have “legitimate interests from the outset of pregnancy in protecting the health of women.” The Casey decision helped spark the ongoing national debate taking place in legislative chambers, the media and the public square about the proper role and scope of abortion law and policy. Better educated about abortion and its consequences, more Americans – especially younger generations – are increasingly skeptical about abortion and, as a result, are widely supportive of laws designed to ameliorate abortion’s well-documented negative impact on women and society.
Since Casey was decided, 29 states have enacted or updated their informed-consent statutes, 18 states have enacted parental involvement laws, 23 states have enacted or enhanced abortion clinic regulations, and 23 states have enacted ultrasound requirements. These are just a few examples of the protective laws embraced at the state and federal levels over the past two decades.
Recognizing that the abortion industry is more concerned with maintaining its profits than protecting the lives and health of women and girls, pro-life legislators have repeatedly acted on their behalf, relying on the principles enunciated in Casey to ensure that the resulting laws are more likely to survive abortion advocates’ inevitable court challenges.
The Casey decision has given legislators the necessary tools to respond to outrages such as Kermit Gosnell’s West Philadelphia “house of horrors” abortion clinic.
Last year, after investigators found “deplorable and unsanitary” conditions in Gosnell’s clinic, including parts of aborted children stored in jars, padlocked emergency exits, and broken and inoperable emergency equipment, Pennsylvania legislators acted swiftly, passing a new law mandating that abortion clinics in the state meet the same exacting standards as other same-day surgical centers.
This new law is likely to survive any legal challenge because federal courts repeatedly have found, based in large part on the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Casey, that such regulation and oversight is protective of women, medically appropriate and thus legally permissible.
It also has allowed legislators to ensure that women considering abortion learn that there are many risks inherent in both surgical and chemical abortions, including death, life-threatening hemorrhage, psychological problems such as suicidal ideation, and an increased risk of complications in future pregnancies.
Meanwhile, abortion advocates, contrary to their self-promoted label as “defenders of women’s health,” have placed their radical abortion-on-demand ideology and financial bottom lines above the needs of American women.
For example, in recent years, the abortion industry has fought to maintain and increase taxpayer funding of abortion, worked to block the growing influence of life-affirming pregnancy care centers – which offer women support and abortion alternatives – championed legislation allowing non-physicians to perform surgical abortions, and developed less expensive methods of dispensing dangerous abortion-inducing drugs that directly contravene FDA-approved guidelines and have resulted in the preventable deaths of several women.
Well, I do know people who would say that if you use birth croontl you have just committed murder. Because God might have wanted you to get pregnant that month, and your preventing a person from BECOMING is the same as murder. And what’s the difference between preventing someone from becoming and murdering them at a preborn stage?I’m not that far on the spectrum. I feel God could (and sometimes does!) thwart people’s ideas about when they’re going to conceive. Sometimes God does not bless when we think He should, and other times isn’t it sad that the scared 14-year-old is pregnant when there are so many married moms who are really aching for a child? I don’t have answers to these things except that I think “just relax,” or do this procedure and have sex sideways, etc. to infertile couples or judgmentalism against the 14-y-o is going to help.I could certainly see times where a married couple because of sickness or something like that would feel it needs to not try to conceive for a while. And that might mean a form of birth croontl.And you know…It’s really none of my business, on the one hand, what someone does in that regard in their marriage privately so long as I’m not paying their medical bill. On the other hand I am concerned that it seems the NORMATIVE experience that one would be expected to use birth croontl. I find it disturbing. Sick, actually. It fosters the idea that we can have children when and if they are convenient. Children (usually!) should be an expected part of a marriage. It was the first command that God gave to Adam to “be fruitful and multiply.” I don’t see a “hey, quit all that babymaking!” verse in scripture, however, so I would have to assume that the NORMATIVE experience would be for a wife and husband to have several children. Some would have 14 and some only one or even none. But the usual should (ideally) be several and we see this borne out in scripture in several passages.So…No. I don’t think that birth croontl should be taught about at all. I don’t (I HOPE!!!) get all high n mighty against people who for whatever reason feel they need birth croontl. Or people who don’t have the same religious views I do. I know what it feels like to be looked down upon for thinking a certain way and would never want to do that to someone else. :]But I have to say I find the idea that this is the *usual experience* offensive… I should NOT have to be asked about birth croontl at my physician’s appointments. It shouldn’t be something pushed as some sort of medical accessory package at every doctor’s appointment. It makes me feel harassed, that the people who deliver babies would be the same ones pushing to croontl how many of them you have or what is best for your family. I think that in balance, doctors should be able to ask you ONCE. Once. Every stupid appointment, including when you’re in for tonsilitis is no stinkin’ fair LOL!My children should not be taught this in school. At all.I’m ok with other people teaching this to their kids. Other people might even buy birth croontl for their children and I would have no way of knowing this. It really isn’t my bz unless I’m paying for it.Then again…Ok, this isn’t really a birth croontl issue, though…Those poor children and young women forced into prostitution. What can be done for them? I would hate to just enable their rapists/ Johns by giving them condoms. Is there no rescue for these people? I think about it a lot. I would hate for the only “help” they receive to be a stupid condom… but I would hate even more for them to get AIDS because my stuffy morality prevented the condom distribution. :]Really… I wish there were some way to rescue these people!!! Sometimes, I can see some shades of gray at the edges there on these issues, you know? But I’ve sort of outlined my *ideal*. Those women and KIDS in slavery, though. I hardly even know how to pray for them. How to give folks like that hope… yeah, I guess that’s off topic a bit. But I wonder.
Bill: “It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘is’ is.”
Mitt: It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘employed’ is.
The Blue Dress is Mitt’s Tax Returns
No stain, no pain
Can a person be impeached before he is elected
This question is Mitt’s Bain in the A$$.
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
We must all remember a major contributing cause of the Financial Crisis of 2008 was the filing of false or misleading documents with the SEC. This is no small matter, since 2009 the SEC has collected fines of over 3 Billion dollars for this; from financial institutions such as, among others: Countrywide Financial, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, Credit Suisse Group, J.P. Morgan, Wachovia Bank, and UBS Financial Services. Even if Mitt Romney actually left all operational control of Bain Capital 1999, he sanctioned and acquiesced to the filing of false and misleading documents with the SEC until 2002. While this violation may not rise to the level of these other institutions, it does indicate a certain attitude towards these filings. The complete and truthful disclosure of all facts is unimportant. This was an attitude all too prevalent in the financial community prior to 2009, and all of us paid the cost.
Is full disclosure to the SEC one of the regulations Mitt would do away with? What about the other regulations regarding the financial community; Wall Street and the banks too big to fail? If you put a fox in charge of the chicken coop, you have a problem for the chickens. Will Mitt’s election be the equivalent of that for the small investor? As a life-long Republican, small investor, and small businessman, I can not take that chance; I have been burnt once by a government that did not believe in regulation, and was asleep at the wheel. The sad thing is that Bain was first brought up by a candidate who wanted to colonize the moon, and the false filing was never mentioned. If this was discovered earlier, I would not have supported Mitt in the primaries and we would have a different candidate. Perjury is perjury. It was ethically and morally equal to saying “I never had sex with that woman” only worse since it was related to a public institution, not sex; and there could be no equivocation since the two official documents Mitt signed exactly contradict each other 100%. He can not flip-flop between these two documents. The only way he can extract himself from this hole is release the 12 years of tax returns, as his father did, and thereby prove he received no direct benefit from Bain after 2000.
While your comment is off point to the article you make very salient points regarding Romney’s refusal to tender his tax returns….WM
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 established a nationwide right to abortion. In 1992, the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey upheld the Roe decision and allowed states to regulate abortions before fetuses are viable. The 1992 decision also said states may not place undue burdens or substantial obstacles to women seeking abortion, said George Cochran , a constitutional law professor at the University of Mississippi .
Recognizing that the abortion industry is more concerned with maintaining its profits than protecting the lives and health of women and girls, pro-life legislators have repeatedly acted on their behalf, relying on the principles enunciated in Casey to ensure that the resulting laws are more likely to survive abortion advocates’ inevitable court challenges.
When I see things like this I aalwys say a quick prayer of gratitude that my children were born into a family that loves children. I’m not saying that in a conceited way, and we are not perfect by any means, but the thought has occurred to me before that my children could have been born (or not born) into a family that would have ended their precious lives.I have a friend who recently had a baby who, when she was pregnant, her boyfriend put extreme pressure on her to have an abortion. His sister who is an OB even said, It’s really no big deal. Through lots of encouragement she stood her ground. When she heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, she texted him to let him know (he wasn’t speaking to her at that point). To make a long story short, the baby is a few months old now and her boyfriend (soon to be husband) is a PROUD father. He asked her to stay home with their new baby and is paying all her bills (they don’t live together so it’s double everything) and he even wants her to look into homeschooling! After the baby was born, he cried for weeks and begged her forgiveness and she says he is probably the most pro-life person ever! Pray for them, though, as they are still not Christians and please pray for me that I would not allow this opportunity to slip through. I’ve tried to share, and I see improvement, but I admit I am not really gifted in that area.The thing to remember is that while not every story ends this way, God has a story that is unique to every person and he uses it to glorify His name through it. I love Psalm 23 also and God spoke to me through it recently when I read, he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. I realized through that verse that many times God allows us to go through different situations, not just to refine us, but so that His name will be known (to those who don’t know Him) and glorified among us. So sorry to hear about your home, Kelly, but God will be gloried through this!