LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report
Saturday, April 17, 2010
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Current Headlines
• Obama Pro-Abortion Appeals Court Nominee, Goodwin Liu, Gets Senate Hearing
• Dustup Over Elena Kagan Could Reveal Obama's Intention for Supreme Court Nominee
• What Women Want in a Supreme Court Nominee: A Pro-Life Position on Abortion
• President George W. Bush Shares Pro-Life Talk at Indiana Pregnancy Center Event
• Romney and Huckabee Now Lead Obama in Potential 2012 Presidential Race
• Canada Parliament to Vote on MP's Bill Legalizing Assisted Suicide Next Week
• Cloning Process Creating Human Embryo With Three Parents Unethical, Cures Nobody
• Georgia Bill to Stop Forced Abortions Gets Support From Governor Mike Huckabee
• HLI Calls for Clarification From Brazilian Archbishop on Abortions on Teenage Girls
• Pro-Life News: Florida, Abortion, England, SPUC, Arizona, Whittier, California
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Obama Pro-Abortion Appeals Court Nominee, Goodwin Liu, Gets Senate Hearing
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Despite protests from Republicans, a pro-abortion nominee President Barack Obama put forward for a federal appeals court position is receiving a hearing today in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Obama nominated pro-abortion professor Goodwin Liu for a spot on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
Liu is a professor at the liberal University of California, Berkeley and he came under fire earlier this month when officials discovered he left 117 questions blank on the official Senate judicial questionnaire.
The hearing is going forward today notwithstanding Republican objections to the short period of time they've had to review Liu s recent submission of papers correcting those problems.
Liu's nomination is seen as a test case in the ability of Obama and Senate Democrats to get a liberal,pro-abortion judge approved in the Senate in advance of a Supreme Court nomination.
The process is infuriating Republicans, who have stopped short of threatening a filibuster.
The concern here is whether this reflects President Obama s view of what a good judge is, said Sen. Jeff Sessions, a pro-life Alabama lawmaker who is the top Republican on the judicial panel, according to Politico.
There is now a serious question as to whether Professor Liu has approached this process with the degree of candor and respect required of nominees who come before the committee, Sessions told pro-abortion Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Pat Leahy on Thursday. We can no longer extend him the benefit of the doubt that these substantial omissions in which several of his more extreme statements appear were a mere oversight. Full story at LifeNews.com
Dustup Over Elena Kagan Could Reveal Obama's Intention for Supreme Court Nominee
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A dustup over one of the names on President Barack Obama's short list for president has one political observer thinking Elena Kagan may become Obama's pick to replace retiring pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. The aggressive posture of the White House in defending Kagan may reveal Obama's intention.
The dustup began when CBS News posted a story on its web site containing allegations that Kagan is a lesbian. Kagan's sexual orientation has been the subject of a whisper campaign since her name made the short list of potential nominees. CBS News initially refused to pull the story from its web site, prompting a fierce White House reaction.
Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director who is working with the administration on the high court vacancy, told Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz The fact that they ve chosen to become enablers of people posting lies on their site tells us where the journalistic standards of CBS are in 2010.
And White House spokesman Ben LaBolt complained to CBS that the column made false charges.
Looking at the bigger picture, Greg Sargent of the Plum Line Blog says the posture of the Obama administration makes it appear to him that Kagan is either the likely nominee or definitely on the list of two or three people most likely to receive the Supreme Court nomination.
"CBS unquestionably deserved to take a hit for this. But what s more interesting than CBS s role is the White House s aggressive response," he noted. Full story at LifeNews.com
What Women Want in a Supreme Court Nominee: A Pro-Life Position on Abortion
by Penny Nance 
Women want a Justice who will uphold the Constitution, the right to life, and will preserve the family as a foundational cornerstone of our society. They don t want someone who will legislate from the bench and uphold abhorrent legislation like the health care bill.
In the Mel Gibson-Helen Hunt movie, "What Women Want," Gibson s character is struck by lightning and can suddenly read women s minds, a gift that he comes to enjoy and uses to learn what women want and provide it for them. Of course, he uses the power to his advantage as well but manages to do some good in the meantime.
The elusive desires of women are becoming clearer as we learn that the majority of Tea Partiers are actually women. And what do they want? A sound economic policy for our country, less government intrusion in our everyday lives, and a society that values life in all stages.
Women have made it easy for the Obama administration to read their minds, yet the policies put forth, or rather rammed through Congress, are anything but what women, and the majority of Americans for that matter, want.
Coming off of a year-long health care battle, President Obama now faces the extraordinary task of nominating a lifelong Supreme Court justice, one that will most likely have a final say on whether or not Obama s unpopular healthcare reform legislation is constitutional. Full story at LifeNews.com
President George W. Bush Shares Pro-Life Talk at Indiana Pregnancy Center Event
Indianapolis, IN (LifeNews.com) -- Former President George W. Bush was the highlight of the evening for more than 4,000 people in Indianapolis last night as he shared a pro-life talk with people supporting the Life Centers, a network of pregnancy centers in the Indianapolis area. Bush was hailed by the Christian group for his lengthy pro-life record during his 8 years in office.
Bush spoke about his Christian faith and his passion for protecting unborn children from abortion.
He spoke for 30 minutes and answered questions for another 30 minutes.
While cameras were not allowed in the Conseco Fieldhouse, the large event center housing his speech, thousands of pro-life advocates filed inside while just a dozen pro-abortion protestors appeared outside the event center to oppose his appearance.
Julie Rupprecht of Life Centers told WTHR that Bush has a compassionate view of the abortion issue, by wanting to help women who need support and may feel abortion is their only option.
"He wants to encourage us to continue doing what we're doing and helping those girls in our city who really need to seek our services and don't have places to go," she said. Full story at LifeNews.com
Romney and Huckabee Now Lead Obama in Potential 2012 Presidential Race
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- New polling data from the Public Policy Polling national survey finds four of the potential Republican candidates are now tied with pro-abortion President Barack Obama in preview of the 2012 election. The pro-life movement will be working overtime to support one of the pro-life candidates against Obama due to his extensive pro-abortion record.
Obama trails Mike Huckabee 47% to 45% and Mitt Romney 45% to 44%, the new poling data shows.
The abortion advocate is tied with Newt Gingrich 45% to 45%, and leads Sarah Palin 47% to 45%.
"This is the weakest performance Obama's posted in these 13 monthly surveys and a pretty clear indication that passing health care has not done anything to enhance his political standing, at least in the short term," the polling firm says in a statement. "Whereas in previous months a good number of the voters disapproving of his job performance weren't ready to commit to voting Republican in 2012 yet, now 85-89% of them do in each of these hypothetical contests."
"That suggests that even if Obama's overall unpopularity has not increased, the intensity of it has," PPP noted. Full story at LifeNews.com
Canada Parliament to Vote on MP's Bill Legalizing Assisted Suicide Next Week
Ottawa, Canada (LifeNews.com) -- The Canadian Parliament is expected to vote on a bill next week that would legalize assisted suicide. Yesterday, Francine Lalonde, the MP sponsoring Bill C-384 to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada, had an article that was published in Le Devoir, a french language newspaper.
There, she explains that Bill C-384 will have its second-hour of debate on Tuesday and head to a second reading vote on Wednesday.
"We expected Lalonde to trade with another MP and delay the vote, but this confirms that the vote is coming now," Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition told LifeNews.com.
Schadenberg urges pro-life advocates to contact their members of parliament immediately to urge them to oppose the bill.
"Remember: C-384 gives medical practitioners the right to directly and intentionally cause the death of their patients, if the patient 'appears to be lucid,' and is suffering chronic physical or mental pain or is terminally ill," he explained. "That means that a person who is not terminally ill but 'appears to be lucid' and is living with chronic depression can be directly and intentionally killed by a medical practitioner."
"We need to maintain the political pressure on every MP in Canada. We need you to send hand-written letters to your MP or to every MP," he has urged. Full story at LifeNews.com
Cloning Process Creating Human Embryo With Three Parents Unethical, Cures Nobody
by David Prentice
UK scientists have used nuclear transfer (cloning) technology to create 3-parent human embryos one father and two mothers.
Despite the standard hype about curing disease using these cloning techniques, significant ethical concerns exist. First, the technique sacrifices two embryos the smallest, most vulnerable humans to create a third, recombined embryo, with two mothers and one father. It is not a possible cure, but germline genetic engineering and even eugenics, in that embryo manipulation moves us further down the slope not just of selecting children, but manufacturing them.
This technology, described below, is a further step toward tampering with the very essence of humanity, and demonstrates not just a contempt for life itself all the embryos in this experiment were destroyed for science but a profoundly dangerous and arrogant belief that we can tamper with the genetic makeup of our fellow human beings.
The rationale for the experiment was that some people have diseases caused by their mitochondria, little energy-generating factories in every cell. Mitochondria have DNA of their own coding for a handful of genes, separate from the nuclear DNA of the cell, and mutations in the mitochondrial DNA can lead to some diseases.
Every cell has mitochondria to generate energy, including the egg cell. When a sperm fertilizes an egg, the mitochondria from the egg cell that contributed to the new embryo are passed to every cell of the person, and if those mitochondria have a mutation, the mutations are passed on as well. The cloning technique used in this experiment was designed to try to get rid of problem mitochondria. Full story at LifeNews.com
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Georgia Bill to Stop Forced Abortions Gets Support From Governor Mike Huckabee
Atlanta, GA (LifeNews.com) -- Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is urging Georgia residents to support a bill that would help women who are pressured to get abortions. Huckabee announced his support for SB 529 in a message that is going out across the state.
The legislation also would make it illegal to do an abortion when it is done because a baby is a certain race, gender, or because the mother was coerced into having one.
Huckabee noted the importance of this bill, saying, "SB 529 is a simple bill that prevents a woman from being forced to have an abortion against her will and prohibits the use of abortion as a means of race or gender discrimination. I'm asking you to support SB 529 and to ask your representative to support SB 529."
Two weeks ago the Georgia Senate passed SB 529 with overwhelming support. On Tuesday, April 13, 2010, SB 529 had a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, but no vote was taken. Full story at LifeNews.com
HLI Calls for Clarification From Brazilian Archbishop on Abortions on Teenage Girls
Brasillia, Brzil (LifeNews.com) -- A pro-life group is calling on Archbishop Dom Fernando Saburido of Olinda and Recife to clarify his earlier comments concerning abortions on teenagers. Archbishop Saburido made it appear an abortion done on a minor child who is a victim of rape or incest may be morally permissible saying it is a decision "for the parents."
Saburido replaced pro-life Jose Cardoso Sobrinho last year reportedly told the Bem Paraná newspaper over the weekend that such a situation is "sad" but "the decision is for the parents, who have all of the freedom to act in the way that they believe to be most convenient."
"If there is a medical consensus that the life of the mother is at risk, abortion is something to be considered," he said. "However, the Church is against the procedure. We defend the preservation of life, of all lives."
Now, Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International told LifeNews.com today he has sent a letter to the Brazilian Catholic Church leader asking him to clarify his comments.
"Archbishop Saburido, please issue an immediate clarification of your recent comments on abortion, ensuring that no one may interpret from them that abortion is ever permissible," the HLI leader says in the letter. "Pro-abortion activists are ready to exploit any lack of clarity in the Church's position as an endorsement of abortion. This must not happen."
HLI said Saburido reiterated Church teaching that life must be defended at all points, but under further questioning seemed to imply that abortion was permitted if deemed necessary by a physician. Full story at LifeNews.com
Pro-Life News: Canada, Abortion, California, North Dakota, England, Abortion Drug
• Florida Bill Provides Better Enforcement of Parental Notification Abortion Law
• Arizona Right to Life PAC Backs Andrew Thomas for Attorney General
• British Pro-Life Group to Leaflet GOP Surgeries That Give Women Abortion Drug
• Arizona Legislature OKs Bill to Increase Reporting Requirements on Abortions
Full story at LifeNews.com
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