Northern Alabama will be without any abortion clinics as of June 27th.
Alabama Women’s Center is voluntarily shutting its doors because they cannot meet the requirements of the state’s new abortion law which goes into effect on July 1.
The Alabama Women’s Health and Safety Act, which passed in April 2013, stipulates that doctors working at abortion clinics in the state have hospital admitting privileges in the same city where they perform abortions. Also, all abortion clinics must meet the same safety standards as ambulatory surgical centers.
The standards include making sure hallways are wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs and patient gurneys. Failure to meet the requirements would mean the state health department must revoke the clinic’s license.
The clinic’s owners say they hope to be able to reopen their clinic in the future at a different location that meets the state requirements for women’s health and safety.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Massachusetts law requiring a 35 foot zone around abortion clinics where pro-life protesters could not speak to women seeking an abortion is unconstitutional.
Court observers were surprised to see the law was struck down in a unanimous ruling.
Chief Justice John Roberts said that authorities have less intrusive ways to deal with problems outside abortion clinics without violating the free speech rights of pro-life activists.
The decision, while unanimous, was not without some dissent. The chief justice joined with the court’s four liberal justices on a narrow ruling that this particular law was unconstitutional. The court’s four conservative justices issued briefs expressing concerns.
Justice Antonin Scalia criticized the majority opinion for continuing “this court’s practice of giving abortion-rights advocates a pass when it comes to suppressing the free-speech rights of their opponents.”
The Massachusetts law replaced an earlier law that created a “six foot bubble” around unwilling listeners if they were within 18 feet of the clinic. The “floating zone” was modeled after a Colorado law that has been upheld in the past by the Court.
Planned Parenthood has been launching a social media campaign attacking NBC, claiming the network refused a commercial for a movie that contains the word “abortion”.
However, NBC says the representatives of the movie never contacted them regarding any interest in buying spots to promote their movie.
Planned Parenthood’s president released a statement slamming the network with the propaganda claim that the “vast majority” of Americans support abortion and that the network “belongs in another decade” for not running commercials for the movie Obvious Child. They ran a campaign on twitter telling NBC to “stop the stigma” of abortion.
NBC released a statement saying that the claims of the pro-abortion group are false.
“No final spots were submitted to NBC broadcast standards for on-air consideration and NBC broadcast advertising sales was never contacted about a media buy on NBC for spots related to this movie,” explained an NBC spokesperson. “Moreover, initial feedback from our broadcast standards group did not include any suggestion to remove a specific word.”
The movie, which Newsbusters’ Katie Yoder reviewed as “little more than slick pro-abortion” political propaganda, is being presented as a romantic comedy about a character who gets an abortion after becoming pregnant from a one night stand.
New Zealand pro-life groups are praising a new report that shows the country’s abortion rate has struck a 20-year low.
Right To Life New Zealand credits increase public awareness that abortion is really murder and also of issues connected to the process.
“There is also an increasing awareness that abortion damages women’s health with an increased risk of breast cancer, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, grief, anger, regret and increased depression,” the group wrote in a statement.
“Right to Life commends those brave and courageous women who when faced with an unplanned pregnancy chose life for their child,” the statement continues. “These are truly heroic women who deserve our admiration and support. Right to Life also commends the majority of the medical profession who faithful to the Declaration of Geneva have sworn to maintain the greatest respect for human life.”
The abortion rate of 15.4 per 1,000 in 2013 was barely above the 1994 level of 15.3. The abortion rate for women under 19 also fell significantly, from 27 per 1,000 in 2007 to 14 per 1,000 in 2013.
The pro-life group Voice for Life praised the news but also had a bit of a somber tone in their celebration.
“While Voice for Life is pleased at today’s news of yet another decline in the abortion rate, we also feel a sense of great sadness and loss for the more than 14,000 human beings who were denied social justice and their fundamental human right to life last year in NZ.”
The abortionist called the “Gosnell of Texas” in reference to convicted murder Kermit Gosnell who killed babies born alive has been shut out of performing abortions in Texas.
Douglas Karpen has been unable to obtain admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of his clinics, effectively banning him from performing the abortion procedures. However, the clinics have found other abortionists with privileges allowing the centers to continue to end the lives of babies via abortion.
Former employees of Karpen’s clinics have come forward to report multiple times that Karpen has killed babies born alive in his clinics. They report he has also violated the laws against late-term abortions.
Harris County District Attorney’s office officials said that they did not find enough evidence at the clinics to back the allegations. However, unlike Pennsylvania authorities that raided the clinics of Gosnell before announcing the investigation, Texas officials announced it first so Karpen knew the searches would be coming.
Karpen and his staff reportedly spent the time between the announcement and the raid cleaning up the facilities and disposing of evidence.
Karpen is currently defending against a lawsuit filed by a woman who claims that he ruptured her uterus during a late-term abortion in February 2013 and then did not tell her about the life-threatening mistake.
Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, wrote that the Gates Foundation had decided not to fund abortions anywhere in the world.
“I understand why there is so much emotion,” Gates wrote, “Conflating these issues will slow down progress for tens of millions of women. That is why I when I get asked [about] my views on abortion I say that like everyone, I struggle with the issue, but I’ve decided not to engage on it publicly and the Gates Foundation has decided not to fund abortion.”
Gates also reiterated her position during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper when journalists focused on the abortion issue. Canada’s wide-open abortion policy has virtually no limits on how a woman may end her child’s life via abortion.
Pro-abortion groups attacked Gates, saying that her actions were “stigmatizing abortion.” The groups also attacked Gates saying that because she and the Foundation do not support abortion, it causes women around the world to die when it wouldn’t happen if they funded abortion services.
The Gates Foundation includes a Global Health Initiative aimed at advancing health and sciences in developing nations.
A British woman whose daughter survived an attempted abortion says that she will “always regret” attempting to kill her daughter.
A doctor told Shannon Skinner to abort her child when she became pregnant with her second child because of complications with the first pregnancy. The 20-year-old went home and took a handful of abortion drugs and waited for the miscarriage to begin.
“I told myself it wasn’t a baby yet,” Skinner told the Christian Institute. “I was out of my mind with worry that the abortion pills had affected the baby, but it wasn’t until I saw the 3D scan of my daughter on Christmas Eve that I fell in love with her. Once I’d seen her face, everything was different.”
However, doctors weren’t done trying to get her to kill her baby. Doctors told her because she had taken abortion drugs that the baby would likely be deformed and that she should undergo the abortion process at 20 weeks.
“To see your daughter’s face and then be told you can still go through with an abortion…how can you?” Skinner told the London Daily Mail. “To survive the first abortion, my daughter obviously wanted to be here and I couldn’t go through with a surgical abortion. It didn’t matter to me if she was born healthy or not.”
Skinner says she will have to wait to see if the abortion drugs had any impact on the long term mental health of her daughter Amelia, but she doesn’t care either way.
“Every time I look at her I think: ‘She really shouldn’t be here.’ But now that she is, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Planned Parenthood’s latest attempts to undermine the truth of the Gospel and the sanctity of life come from a “pastoral letter” that tells patients the Bible doesn’t condemn abortion.
The letter from the group’s “Clergy Advocacy Board” says that they were there to support their decision and that neither Jewish nor Christian scriptures mention abortion. The letter goes on to say that no one should have “faith beliefs” forced upon anyone else.
The letter tells makes the blasphemous claim “no one knows the circumstances of your life as well as you know them” and that “no one knows what’s in your heart better than you.”
The letter says that God will be with them even if they choose to kill their baby through abortion. It also says the Planned Parenthood office will find them a clergy member that will support and endorse their decision to abort their child.
A woman who posted a video online that she said was aimed at “stopping the stigma” on abortion is now being questioned after the former actress’s video has been shown to have inconsistencies.
Emily Letts posted the video showing her smiling and praising her abortion procedure as part of a contest organized by pro-abortions groups, including one that advocates for underage girls to have abortions without parental consent.
Since the video was posted, it’s been released that the clinic where Letts works as a counselor paid to settle a malpractice lawsuit in 2003 after their abortionist performed on an underage girl without parental consent. The Cherry Hill Women’s Center also falsified the underage girls’ records.
The Christian Post tried to contact Letts about the situation but the Center would not return CP’s calls.
Pro-life organization Live Action took apart the video and noted what they called “many red flags.” Live Action said it was unlikely the baby was the age claimed based on the procedure and that one of the people shooting the video was behind the overall pro-abortion campaign.
But the possibility of the video being false is only part of the problem.
“Certainly it’s good to call into question the factors of the video and whether or not it was an actual video of her undergoing the procedure. But I think the most shocking aspect that makes it surreal and lacks reality is that women do not go into abortions with smiles on their faces,” Live Action head Lila Rose explained. “And when she’s having the abortion, we never actually get to see the victim of the abortion or the violent aspects of it, and how this is killing a person. The fact that she shielded that from view, whether it’s because it never actually happened and the whole thing is a hoax, or if it’s because it’s part of her propaganda, either way, the viewer doesn’t see the reality.”
A woman who brought the lives of thousands of babies to an end during her over ten years running a Florida abortion clinic has walked away and dedicated her life to Christ.
The woman, who has only been identified as Terri, accepted Christ after stopping and talking with the protesters that had been standing outside her clinic for years.
“I thought she was going to be angry or something,” John Barros told Christian News Network.
After speaking with the pro-life counselors that Barros’ ministry brought to speak to the women in an attempt to have them keep their babies, she began to see the great error of her beliefs in abortion and her decade of promoting it.
“She’s really showing repentance and she’s really broken up over what she’s done,” Barros explained. “At one point she said, ‘I can’t do enough to erase this. And I said, ‘None of us can. 1st John tells us that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin, and that includes what you’ve done.’”
Terri quit her job, severed all ties with the clinic and has told friends and family that she renounces all of her work in ending the lives of babies.
“I dedicate my life to Christ and I thank Him—believe it or not—every day that I am no longer affiliated with a clinic,” she stated. “It’s a wonderful thing that I got out of there. I thank God every day I’m gone.”