Category: Abortion

Accomplices of Evil

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Feminists support abortion, an inherent evil, and in doing so, permit rapists to destroy evidence of their crimes:

In defending himself and his clinics against state allegations, the Illinois physician [Ulrich Klopfer] recounted how he performed an abortion on a 10-year-old girl who was raped by her uncle, never reporting the crime to police and, as a result, helping her parents cover up the atrocity by a family member. State officials cited the sickening defense as part of their reason for stripping him of his medical license. He was previously charged with failing to report performing abortions on two 13-year-olds.
According to a complaint filed by the Indiana Medical Licensing Board, Klopfer worked in clinics in South Bend, Gary and Fort Wayne from 2012 to 2015.
With thousands of ghoulishly stored dead bodies straight out of a horror movie, medical malpractice and a multistate mystery, you’d think the news media would be all over this story. Not so much.

How do such people sleep at night? How do feminists justify their association with monsters like Klopfer? And why are journalists unwilling to tell the truth about what is done in the name of “choice”?

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)



 

Democrats 2020: ‘Ban All the Things!’

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No burgers. No plastic straws. No coal. No cars. No offshore drilling. Babies? No, you can’t have babies! Babies cause global warming!

Professor William Jacobson summarizes:

The presidential ambitions of the leading Democrat candidates may not survive CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Townhall.
It was a man-made disaster, created in the fevered swamps of CNN and fueled by pledges of allegiance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
The candidates came across as not-serious-people. Worse, they came across as nanny-state monsters who really do want to take away your plastic straws and cheeseburgers to save the planet. It was a self-parody of what woke totalitarianism sounds like, with an abnormal focus on meat.
Republican attack-ad makers have hours of footage that can be sliced and diced to make any of the candidates who appeared at the Townhall look insane.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

As for banning babies, it was a fanatical vegan who prompted Bernie Sanders to endorse global population control:

A member of the audience, Martha Readyoff of New Milford, Conn., said to Sanders, “Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth. I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it is crucial to face. Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?”
“Well, Martha, the answer is yes,” Sanders said. “And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions.”
The CNN town hall audience whooped and clapped at this line, having apparently missed all that Readyoff’s position entails.
“And the Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that are — that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd,” Sanders continued.
This is not true — Mexico City only excludes abortion advocacy groups from family-planning funding, in line with federal laws that ban the funding of abortion as a method of family planning. In plainer terms, the Mexico City policy does not prevent funds from going to birth control and other non-abortion means of family planning. So I am not sure what Sanders is on about, unless he is calling specifically for more terminated pregnancies as a means to regulate world populations.
The senator concluded: “So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, it’s something I very, very strongly support.”

Martha Readyoff, who apparently teaches young children at a charter school in Connecticut, is an animal-rights activist who promotes veganism as an “important social justice movement . . . for the planet.”

The Left has been promoting the “overpopulation” myth for decades. The belief that babies are the cause of a “climate catastrophe” is so easily disproven — it’s been debunked so often by so many qualified researchers — that it seems redundant to do so again, merely because a vegan idiot got hold of the microphone at a CNN town hall. And yet, as with the case of the Connecticut teacher, America’s children are being indoctrinated with this bogus mythology, as John Hayward remarks:

If you’re wondering why so many young people are mired in despair, futility, and occasionally violent nihilism, try listening to the Democrat presidential field babbling for 7 hours about how humanity is a virus that must be culled to save the Earth.
Remember, the Left controls education with an iron grip. Today’s young people are subjected to years of indoctrination in the insane anti-human ideology you heard the Democrats vomit at the CNN town hall. They are constantly told the Earth is suffering from human overpopulation.
It’s a perspective hammered into the heads of young people by the Left with many tools, from worshiping abortion as a pseudo-religious sacrament to radical environmentalism. Every aspect of the Left’s ideology views humans as a problem to be controlled and reduced.
The most baffling thing is that so many people are baffled that young people are depressed, fearful of the future, and reluctant to marry or have children. This garbage is pumped into their skulls as soon as Democrats get hold of them in schools.
Anti-humanism is deeply entwined with anti-capitalism. A core belief of the Left is that human freedom is dangerous and only the elites can be trusted to make important decisions. You can’t believe the junk pushed by a Warren or Sanders without a very dim view of the common man. . . .

You can read the rest of that on Twitter.



 

Sweet (Pro-Life) Home Alabama

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Professor Glenn Reynolds linked to my post examining the feminist rage over the Alabama law restricting abortion. In the comments, one reader drew attention to how few abortions are actually performed in Alabama — 6,063 in 2017, 6642 in 2016, 5899 in 2015. So, in a state with a population of 4.9 million, only about 6,000 abortions are performed annually. There are roughly 900,000 females of child-bearing age (15-44) in Alabama, so that each year, more than 99% of Alabama women don’t get abortions. Even if you think of the problem in terms of cumulative risk — i.e., the chance of any woman having an abortion at any time in her life — the abortion numbers are still very low in Alabama.

There are more than a million abortions a year in the United States, and the National Abortion Federation claims that about 35% of American women will have an abortion in their lifetime, but it seems obvious that Alabama’s women are not a significant contributor to that grisly statistic.

Numbers matter in politics. Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation indicate that the abortion rates are highest in New York (23 per 1,000 women ages 15-44 annually), and a few other liberal states (Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, etc.), while the abortion rate in Alabama (6 per 1,000) is some 70% lower than for women in New York. While it may be true that more than a third of U.S. women will have abortions in their lifetimes, that number is likely somewhere around 10% in Alabama.

In other words, about 90% of Alabama women have never had an abortion and never will. Actual difference between the behavior of women in different states — the more rural South versus the more urban North — reflect not only differences in socioeconomic conditions, but also differences in cultural attitudes. The South is more religious than the North, and this may explain a lot:

Alabama’s governor said Monday the new abortion ban she recently signed into law reflects the high value residents place on the “sanctity of life,” adding she doesn’t expect any fallout from the controversial measure on tourism or business recruitment.
Gov. Kay Ivey last week approved the most stringent abortion law in the nation— making performing an abortion a felony in nearly all cases unless necessary for the mother’s health. The law provides no exception for rape and incest. Asked about criticism the state has received— particularly over the lack of an exception for rape and incest— the Republican governor noted the bill was overwhelmingly approved by the Alabama Legislature without the exceptions.
“The Legislature has spoken,” she said. “It underscores the sanctity of life the people of Alabama value so highly.”

The governor of Alabama is a woman — a pro-life Republican woman. Liberal women elsewhere in the country, including journalists in New York and Washington, D.C., may find it mind-boggling that a woman would sign Alabama’s legislation and defend the law, but life in small-town Alabama isn’t life in Brooklyn or Dupont Circle. Numbers matter, culture matters, and the pro-abortion culture in liberal states has real consequences. Consider that the total fertility rate (TFR, average lifetime births per woman) in Alabama was 1.82 in 2017, whereas the TFR in New York was 1.65 and TFR in Massachusetts was 1.51. This means that Alabama women average about 10% more babies than New York women, and about 20% more babies than Massachusetts women.

Last week, it was reported that the U.S. birth rate is the lowest in more than 30 years, and the Associated Press quoted an expert:

If trends continue, experts said, the U.S. can expect labor shortages including in elder care when aging baby boomers need the most support.
“I keep expecting to see the birth rates go up and then they don’t,” said demographer Kenneth M. Johnson of University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.
He estimates 5.7 million babies would have been born in the past decade if fertility rates hadn’t fallen from pre-recession levels.
“That’s a lot of empty kindergarten rooms,” said Johnson . . .

If you are a young person planning a career as a teacher, chances are you’ll have trouble finding work in Massachusetts or New York, and the scarcity of children being born in these liberal states may explain why Democrats support illegal immigration. New York needs to import people to substitute for the children liberal women aren’t having, whereas people in conservative states like Alabama, with higher birth rates, perceive illegal immigration as a threat to their own offspring.



 

Ben Hill and the New South

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As a boy growing up in Douglas County, Georgia, I did not realize that Ben Hill Road, which ran by our family’s house, was named for a historic figure. Benjamin Harvey Hill was a brilliant statesman, hailed as a “peerless orator,” who was so widely admired in Georgia that, although he had eloquently spoken in opposition secession in the crisis of 1860-61, he was nevertheless elected to the Confederate Senate. After the war, he spoke out against radical Reconstruction, and was subsequently elected first to the U.S. House and then to the Senate.

Of all he accomplished in his long career, however, perhaps Ben Hill’s most lasting achievement was his role in inspiring the New South. In a commencement speech at the University of Georgia in 1871, Hill bemoaned the lack of industrial development in the state, and encouraged Georgians to embark on a program to educate their sons to undertake this work. The question, Hill said, was not whether the abundant resources of the South would be developed, but instead by whom these resources would be developed. Would this work be done (and the rewards be reaped) by Georgians, or would her native sons be replaced by others who were more willing and able to take up the mechanical and commercial trades necessary to industrial development?

We must establish schools of science and educate our children. Others will come in and supplant us, and we shall perish truly from slavery. Our own sons must be taught to build and operate all machinery. We must build up schools of science. Our duty towards the negro is plain — we must educate and elevate him.
We must have educated labor, acquire a knowledge of mining operations, and skill in the manipulation of all metals . . . and the prosecution of every craft that will tend to contribute to the material interests of the country, or to develop its wonderful resources. Our children must take the lead and point the way.

This speech proved a pivotal turn in Georgia’s history, because one of those who heard Ben Hill speak that day was a young alumnus of the university named Henry Grady, who as a journalist became the most famous proponent of the “New South.” Grady made his case to the North, urging Yankees to invest in Southern industries, and the result was that soon every good-sized town in the South had a textile mill, and a pro-business attitude came to define the region’s leading cities, most particularly my hometown of Atlanta. My father, who grew up on a farm in Alabama, left home at 16 to work in a textile mill in West Point, Georgia, then after the war attended the University of Alabama on the G.I. Bill. After graduation, he moved to Atlanta, where he first worked a year for the Southern Railroad before hiring on at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Marietta, where he worked the next 37 years. Growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, I witnessed the booming prosperity of “The City Too Busy to Hate,” and as a young journalist saw how communities competed to attract business and encourage economic growth. And what remarkable success! In 1970, when I was in fifth grade, the population of Georgia was 4.6 million; by 2010, the population was 9.7 million — more than doubled. By comparison, during the same 40-year span when Georgia’s population increased by more than 5 million (110% growth), the state of New York’s population increased by just 1.1. million (6%). The result has been that Georgia has increased its influence in national affairs, while New York has waned. Whereas in the 1940s, New York had 45 House seats and Georgia had 10, now New York’s representation has dwindled to 27 House seats, while Georgia has increased to 14.

This historical background is necessary to understanding my indignation at a Yankee journalist’s recent display of ignorance. Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times wrote an article with the headline “Abortion and the Future of the New South,” implying that the recent passage of legislation restricting abortion in Alabama, Georgia and other states was somehow a threat to the region’s progress. The problem, of course, is that Ms. Bellafante considers liberalism as a synonym for progress, and misinterprets contrary evidence:

At the end of last year, LinkedIn, which regularly mines its database of 150 million worker profiles to analyze patterns in American employment and migration, reported that Atlanta had received more workers from New York City than any other place in the country during the preceding 12 months. That development has continued for most of this year.

Ms. Bellafante cites this data after invoking “the system of afflictions that places like New York and San Francisco impose on their young” — i.e., the heavily regulated social-welfare nightmares that degrade the quality of life. It does not seem to occur to her that this “system of afflictions” is yoked to the pro-abortion politics of the Left, for in turning their cities into places where no sane person would want to raise a child, Democrats thereby incentivize abortion. Rod Dreher has taken Ms. Bellafante to the woodshed, but I thought it important to point out how her concept of the New South was at odds with its historic origins. Certainly, we cannot imagine Ben Hill advocating abortion, because his vision of the New South was rooted in a spirit of pragmatic optimism, a hopeful promise that Southerners could adapt to the challenges of an industrial future, so that their descendants might inherit a better life. The advocates of abortion, by contrast, are possessed by an evil spirit, telling young women that there is no such hope for the future, that children are a curse, and that the life of their offspring is without value.

Not only Southerners, but all Americans with a sense of pride in our nation’s history, must reject these wicked voices of the Culture of Death.

If the godless liberals of New York wish to abort themselves into oblivion, I am powerless to stop them, but I hope Southerners will not be persuaded to follow the foolish example of Yankees. The future belongs to those who show up for it, as Mark Stein has observed. Let us do all we can to make America great again for our descendants. Selah.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

Solipsism and Feminist Rage Syndrome

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In his third book, The Rational Male: Positive Masculinity, Rollo Tomassi observes that women are prone to solipsistic thinking, making their own feelings the measure of everything, a self-referential point of view that makes objectivity impossible. Of course, many men are also inclined toward solipsism, but in our feminine-primary social order (to employ Rollo’s phrase), only male behavior is considered a proper object of criticism, whereas we are generally forbidden to criticize women. Therefore, the selfish attitudes and emotionalism of women is never noted — at least not by academics or journalists in any “respectable” forum — and these tendencies are indulged, encouraged and even celebrated. In our society, women’s desires are treated as entitlements, so that to deny her what she wants is an infringement of her “rights.” Women are considered to be so morally superior that they are incapable of lying (#BelieveAllWomen) and a woman’s anger is always legitimate.

This is the Red Pill perspective on contemporary culture, and you are free to argue with Rollo — don’t bother arguing with me, as I am merely the messenger — but my point in raising this topic involves the feminist reaction to the recent enactment of laws restricting abortion in several states, particularly Georgia and Alabama. Professor Donald Douglas calls attention to Rebecca Traister, feminist author of Good and Mad:
The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.

Keep in mind, even the draconian law in Alabama only applies to Alabama, a conservative state with a population of about 4.9 million, which is about 1.5% of the U.S. population of 328.9 million. In other words, 98.5% of American women are unaffected by Alabama’s abortion law and, if a woman in Alabama wants an abortion, she can go to another state and obtain one. Rebecca Traister doesn’t live in Alabama and yet, believing abortion to be a fundamental right (because anything a woman wants is a “right”) she has worked herself into a towering rage over a law that doesn’t affect her or any of her liberal friends in New York. Speaking of places where Rebecca Traister doesn’t live, did you know abortion is completely illegal in El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic? Also, with the exception of where necessary to prevent maternal death, abortion is illegal in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Honduras, and many other countries.

Now, I suppose since Ms. Traister cares so doggone much about abortion rights, she’ll soon be venting her rage at leaders of all those countries. But of course she won’t, because what she wants is to continue the relentless slaughter of American babies. She hates Americans so much, she wants all American babies to be aborted, and she especially hates babies in Alabama, because a lot of Christians and Republicans live there.

You might say I’m unfairly exaggerating Ms. Traister’s enthusiasm for abortion, but what else can explain her rage? The U.S. abortion rate has been declining for several years, partly because of more effective contraceptives (e.g., the so-called “morning after” pill). While I don’t know the total number of abortions performed in Alabama last year, I don’t think it’s a particularly large number, and so it is unlikely that many women in Alabama will be inconvenienced by this new law.

Maybe you should read Rollo Tomassi’s books. Just sayin’ . . .



 

Violence Against Women Update

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An elderly pro-life woman in Kentucky was doing “sidewalk counseling” outside a Louisville abortion clinic when she was assaulted, suffering a broken leg and other injuries:

Kentucky police are investigating an alleged assault on an older pro-life woman who was hospitalized after being pushed to the ground outside the state’s last abortion facility.
A surveillance video of outside EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville also provides new evidence of the April 13 incident, WLKY News reports.
Louisville Metro Police told the local news that they are investigating the incident that left pro-life sidewalk counselor Donna Durning with a broken leg and head injuries.
According to a Facebook post about the incident, Durning has been a pro-life sidewalk counselor for 23 years and, on April 13, she was assaulted outside the EMW abortion facility in Louisville.
The surveillance video confirms what Durning and other pro-lifers said: A young woman exited the abortion facility and, as Durning approached her and attempted to give her literature with information about abortion alternatives, the woman grabbed her and pushed her to the ground.
“I had a little card from Little Way Crisis pregnancy center, and I just offered it to her. And I said, ‘Honey, if you need to talk to anybody, there’s a number on here,’” Durning told the local news.
On the video, viewers can hear someone scream after Durning was pushed to the ground. The woman quickly gets in her car and drives away, as another sidewalk counselor walks to the vehicle, supposedly to write down the license plate number.
“Police officers were across the street at the time and came over as soon as they saw the attack. They took the abortion facility’s surveillance tapes. Witnesses wrote down the license plate number of the car Durning’s attacker left in,” according to LiveAction.

WLKY quotes Durning: “I saw a lot of hatred in her face and, I’m not exaggerating, I saw the face of Satan in her eyes.”



 

Operation ‘Unplanned’ Maintenance

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by Smitty

Conservative Twitter was aflame on Sunday with people wondering why the follower count for UnplannedMovie was all over the place. Quick notes:

  • I do Amazon Web Services work by day
  • I ain’t an apologist for @jack
  • I have no insight into the specifics of Twitter’s architecture.

My points:

  • Old-style relational databases strove for a single point of truth. To scale globally, the first thing one does is relax that. So, even though there is one URL for the @UnplannedMovie account, you aren’t guaranteed to be looking at the same data.
  • This reality of NoSQL storage is exacerbated by everyone and their sibling querying at the same time for the same data, and also following that account. When you do a cloud system, you employ rules to throw more resources at fresh demand.
  • I daresay that conservative twitter just offered a fantastic stress test of Twitter’s infrastructure. While they to events and hashtags all the time, I’m unaware of another case where they’ve thrown account following into the mix.

This is all probably too generous. We’d like to think that conservatives are a force to be reckoned with. But it’s not likely that the follow frequency was ever that significant. Again, I have no insights into what’s really afoot.

That said, let’s all just take a deep breath and understand that Unplanned got some great free advertising out of all that. Plan an informal event for your church to go support these kinds of movies.

 

Pro-Choice Activist of the Year

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Close the nominations. I think we have a winner:

An Indiana high school football player told investigators that he killed a 17-year-old schoolmate because he was angry that she waited so long to tell him she was pregnant with his child that it was too late to get an abortion, authorities said Monday.
Aaron Trejo, 16, was charged as an adult with murder in the Sunday killing of Breana Rouhselang and the fetus. He was arrested Sunday, scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday and had no attorney on record.
In a court filing supporting the charges, prosecutors say Trejo told police that he stabbed Rouhselang during a fight over her pregnancy and that he put her body in a restaurant dumpster in their hometown of Mishawaka, which is next to South Bend and about 80 miles (130 kilometers) east of Chicago. . . .
Trejo told investigators he had been planning the killing for about a week and hadn’t told anyone.
Rouhselang, who was a manager of the Mishawaka High School football team, was last seen at her home at around 11 p.m. Saturday. Her family called police about 4:30 a.m. Sunday after they “got the feeling that something wasn’t right,” said Lt. Alex Arendt of the St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit.

This boy might be eligible a Planned Parenthood grant, except for the fact that he’s probably going to prison for a long time.

(Hat-tip: Jim Christian in the comments.)