Illinois Right to Life Committee
APRIL 2007
April, 2007 Pro-Life News (see articles below): 04/27/07 Defending life and parents’ rights 04/20/07 Incremental progress on defending human life 04/17/07 Distorted study claims abstinence education fails 04/10/07 Are images of aborted babies disgusting and embarrassing?
Illinois Right to Life News for Friday, April 27, 2007 Defending life and
parents’ rights On April 26th, 62 members of the Illinois House of Representatives voted in favor of real parental notice of abortion in Illinois. Since only 55 members voted for HB 317, the possibility of real parental notice finally taking effect in Illinois has been preserved. This critical vote protected the 1995 Parental Notice of Abortion law from amendments specified in HB 317 that would make it meaningless for Illinois parents. Congratulations to everyone who helped make it clear that Illinois citizens want parents to be involved in their daughters’ lives, especially for critical decisions such as abortion. More implications of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring the ban on partial birth abortion constitutional were revealed on April 24th when the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded two federal appeals courts’ rulings overturning partial-birth abortion laws in Virginia and Missouri. The Court returned Herring v. Richmond Medical Center (No. 05-730) to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Nixon v. Reproductive Health Services (No. 05-1124) to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking them to review their respective cases in the light of Gonzales v. Carhart. Previously the federal courts had overturned the Virginia and Missouri bans on partial-birth abortion, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 reasoning in Stenberg v. Carhart, which invalidated a similar Nebraska law for lacking an exception for the mother’s “health.” These recent very limited successes in expanding regulations of abortion have abortion advocates claiming that the sky is falling. A Chicago Tribune article by Judy Peres on April 27th dramatically lists recent actions to regulate abortion in North Dakota and Missouri along with “two federal appeals courts were asked to life injunctions blocking enforcement of state abortion bans” as signs of this impending doom. This sentence fails to reveal that these are state abortion bans on partial birth abortion directly related to the recent Supreme Court ruling. Beyond that, the legislative actions in both North Dakota and Missouri were already well in progress and would have occurred even without the Supreme Court ruling. While discussing a South Dakota regulation that just received a court hearing, the Peres article cites Planned Parenthood’s concern that requiring an abortion provider to inform his customer that the fetus is a living human being “is ideological, not factual.” Actually, stating that a fetus is a living human being is very factual, and Planned Parenthood’s opposition to this biological fact is ideological. Abortion advocates are pulling out the old Freedom of Choice Act that went down to defeat without even receiving a vote during President Clinton’s first term in office. This bill would enshrine the Roe v. Wade abortion decision into law, showing that abortion advocates really do understand that Roe v. Wade did not make abortion the law of the land like they claim. They will have serious difficulties getting such a bill passed. Even the April 26th protests of the Supreme Court decision on partial birth abortion organized by Planned Parenthood received very weak participation. A large majority is opposed to partial birth abortion so they will certainly not be found coming out to defend this outrageous procedure. However, defenders of life still have much work to do because the sky is not really falling on abortion advocates yet.
Illinois Right to Life News for Friday, April 20, 2007 Incremental progress
on defending human life By now you have most likely learned the positive news that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the 2003 Federal law banning partial birth abortion is constitutional. While this ruling is crafted on narrow grounds, contrary to the dire warnings generated by abortion advocates, it does present some potential implications on the legal landscape regarding abortion. The focus of the ruling was based on finding a lack of merit to any argument that the law is unconstitutional on its face, that is, in the general case. Earlier Supreme Court rulings were often willing to declare various state laws unconstitutional in the general case, rather than waiting for an “as applied” case to consider specific circumstances of the law’s application. This change in perspective may encourage state legislatures to consider bills placing more regulations on abortion than they felt able to achieve in that earlier legal climate. On the other hand, this ruling actually invites an "as applied" challenge so the court could see when the procedure was necessary to protect a woman's health and rule the law unconstitutional in those situations. Another angle that could be taken to challenge the law would be to raise the question of whether Congress actually can pass such a national ban on an abortion procedure, or whether that's a power reserved exclusively to the states under the Constitution. Both of these alternatives for further challenging the ban on partial birth abortion have drawbacks. In suggesting the "as applied" challenge, the court was also saying it might no longer accept the more general method of challenging abortion restrictions based on the argument that they are unconstitutional on their face, so such an effort would reinforce that approach for Court review of other abortion regulations. And if an argument succeeded that the ban on partial birth abortion violates the scope of Federal power under the commerce clause, the same argument might also spell the end to Federal laws like the one banning blocking entrances of abortion clinics. Switching to the state of Illinois we have learned that Attorney General Lisa Madigan returned to Federal court at the end of March to ask Judge Coar to lift the injunction of the 1995 Parental Notice of Abortion Act. Apparently, this more definite request for removing the injunction, compared to the conditional approach she took in January, occurred after she received a letter signed by the seven Illinois Supreme Court justices. That letter criticized Madigan’s January action as in error when it suggested that Illinois courts were not ready to apply the rules issued by the Illinois Supreme Court. Might it be possible that Judge Coar will actually lift the injunction so parental notice can go into effect in Illinois? We may know the answer before the end of May, after a waiting period for abortion advocates to present other arguments on why the injunction should remain in place. It would be ironic that after all these years of losing so many court battles on the abortion issue, that we would actually get positive results in court both nationally and in Illinois, at the same time when we are again stymied from getting any Pro-Life legislation passed either nationally or in Illinois. Pray for a correct decision from Judge Coar.
Illinois Right to Life News for Tuesday, April 17, 2007 Distorted study claims abstinence education fails
Has anyone conducted a study to see if Planned Parenthood’s approach of casual sex education with emphasis on birth control, including wide distribution of same without parental knowledge or consent, has achieved the claimed reduction in unintended pregnancies and abortions? I don’t think any formal study of this type has ever been performed. However, as I have explained before, even statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, demonstrate that casual sex education and wider access to birth control do not reduce unintended pregnancies or abortions. In fact, the opposite is true. That is one reason why abortion rates are highest in the states that offer the widest possible casual sex education and distribution of birth control, such as New York and California. Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., a Washington-based think tank, released a study last week that claims abstinence programs are ineffective. Of course, this report was immediate ammunition for proponents of casual sex education. If anyone is willing to ask the tough questions, they will find that the basic design of the Mathematica study was flawed from its conception. The study targeted children who were in abstinence programs from ages 9-11. There was no follow-up to this original abstinence message. After five years, those children were evaluated, and the conclusion was reached that abstinence does not work. So, what’s wrong with this picture? First, this study targeted children who were too young to absorb the abstinence message. Second, virtually all educators know that presenting a topic without any repetition or reinforcement will not be effective. These basic flaws in the study design should clearly invalidate the findings in the study report. Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, Director and Senior Fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, noted another major difference between abstinence and casual sex education when she stated, “Comprehensive sex education is not values based. Yet, sex involves values — especially the values of commitment, love and intimacy. If values are omitted, the teaching implies that casual teen sex has no lasting consequences as long as the teens use a condom.” Family Research Council’s Washington Update noted that the Mathematica study only tracked four elementary and middle school programs, representing less than one percent of the 700 abstinence programs that receive Federal funding. The Washington Update observed, “The four programs that Mathematica evaluated (beginning in 1999) have already been revised and improved, and they are by no means representative of abstinence education as a whole.” and concluded, “For every study that disparages the abstinence approach, there are many others that point to its success and suggest that effective, long-term programs should be given more funding--not less.”
Illinois Right to Life News for Tuesday, April 10, 2007 Are images of aborted babies disgusting and
embarrassing? I received an email expressing concern about the graphic images of
aborted babies that were displayed during the April 7th witness and prayer vigil at Orland
Park Planned Parenthood Express. I responded
as follows: Thank you for your
feedback. I appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns. I will address the last
concern first. We display pictures of the horrible results of abortion
to educate the public that Planned Parenthood is an abortion provider. Their
"express" location is simply the front office for that abortionist.
That office allows establishment of a customer relationship so when birth control fails
and abortion becomes the solution, Planned Parenthood is almost guaranteed to get the
abortion business. We are not "lowering
our marketing" based on any
assumption about the intelligence of our target audience. The only
assumption that we are making about our target audience is that they may have either
a neutral or even a positive impression about the work of Planned Parenthood. We
want to allow them to reconsider their impression of Planned Parenthood. We
want them to recognize that Planned Parenthood is a serious danger to young people in our
community. If some in our audience
decide they do not like the messenger, they may still have a worse opinion of Planned
Parenthood just because its presence brings out protesters that they do not like.
If that is what they conclude, so be it. Since you observed that when we stand next to
a picture on the side of the road, a person's opinion will automatically associate us
with the picture, maybe that is how you will ultimately see this situation, but I hope you
will consider looking beyond that first reaction based on the information I offer for your
consideration below. We would expect that you
would find the image of an aborted baby disgusting and embarrassing. We find these
images disgusting and embarrassing. Abortion is disgusting. The fact
that it remains legal in the USA where we proclaim our commitment to life, liberty and
pursuit of happiness is embarrassing. We believe that displaying
the truth about abortion has the potential to awaken the nation to the need to
end abortion. We did not arrive at that belief on our own. I have copied below information from the web site
of Priests for Life. Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests
for Life, explains why it is necessary to show the pictures of injustices to
move people to respond to those injustices. He cites the cases of using
graphic images to educate teens on the risks of drunk driving, how pictures of Emmett
Till (brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman) transformed many who would
fight in the civil rights movement, and how child labor laws were the result of pictures
of children working in intolerable conditions, etc. While we may not reach the
same conclusion, hopefully you will at least be aware that we are not using graphic images
without considerable thought on the merits of that choice. Should
We Use Graphic Images? (Fr. Frank Pavone)
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