Personhood Rights for Needy Chimps but Not Baby Humans

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Isn’t it ironic that the very people who would oppose the pro-life, Personhood Bill, which provides “that human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization,” are the same ones who would advocate for the “personhood” rights of animals?

I was reminded of this today while reading a column in the Daily Mail that announced that animal rights lawyer Steve Wise “will argue chimpanzees should have personhood rights in front of Manhattan appellate division of New York’s Supreme Court.”

According to Wise, “A ‘person’ is the law’s way of saying that entity has the capacity for rights. A ‘thing,’ which chimpanzees are now, don’t have capacity for any kind of rights. To treat them as things destroys them.”

Now, I don’t know anything about Wise or the advocacy group he founded (it’s called the Nonhuman Rights Project), but if my past experience is correct here, Wise would not likely be a supporter of the Republican-sponsored Personhood Bill, since, as a general rule, the more staunchly someone supports animal rights, the more likely they are to be pro-abortion.

Compassion for Furry Creatures

How can this be? And how is it that people who are so moved to compassion when it comes to our furry friends can be so hard-hearted when it comes to their tiny, precious, still-in-the-womb, fellow-humans? And why is this often the case with radical environmentalists as well? Why are tree-huggers so often baby-aborters? (In the words of Kirk Walden’s October 14, 2016, op-ed piece on LifeSite News, “Radical Environmentalists: Save the Earth, Abort Babies.”)

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 13, 2016, Sherry F. Colb and Michael C. Dorf, both law professors asked, “How can someone who condemns animal farming, hunting, and experimentation favor a right to abortion?”

Conversely, they wondered how pro-lifers could “eat and use the flesh, skin, and secretions of feeling creatures like cows, pigs, and chickens whose lives were filled with unspeakable suffering, ended only by horrific deaths?”

For Colb and Dorf, abortion is justified while meat-eating is not, because the baby in the womb is not sentient whereas animals are sentient, and anything that causes unnecessary pain for an animal is not justifiable. (Their article was released in conjunction with their book, Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights.)

Ligia De Jesus Castaldi responded to Colb and Dorf on November 29, 2016, noting that their book, “ends by applauding the extravagant proposal that domestic animals should be granted citizenship rights (with some limitations) and other animals be granted an alternative legal status, including territorial sovereignty for wild animals.”

And she notes that,

Ultimately, the authors do not make any new arguments for abortion rights, and they fail to make a logical or persuasive case for the compatibility of animal rights and abortion rights advocacy. What the book mostly does is expose the inherent contradictions of the pro-choice animal rights position. Sadly, the book also illustrates the extent to which abortion rights dogma can obscure human reason and harden the human heart to the point that the same person who feels empathy and sensitivity for animal suffering can utterly lack compassion for the lethal violence and excruciating pain that unborn children experience when their lives are ended in the womb.

Rejection of a Creator God

And what is the root cause of this confusion? It is, in short, the rejection of a Creator God, because of which human beings are not recognized as being created in His image — and therefore of intrinsic value, no matter how small or weak or handicapped or aged — and animals and the earth are not recognized as having been created by God for human beings.

Of course, one can worship the Creator and be pro-life as well as oppose animal cruelty and be an ardent environmentalist, since there is no contradiction between those positions. In fact, it makes sense that these positions would go hand in hand, since the principles of kindness, compassion, and good stewardship are some of the essential characteristics that define our God-given humanity. (By opposing animal cruelty and being an ardent environmentalist, however, I don’t mean embracing the extreme positions of those respective groups.)

But when God is left out of the picture, “compassion” can take the form of euthanizing a depressed adult or of terminating an unwanted pregnancy just as easily as it can take the form of opposing the consumption of meat or fighting against chopping down a tree. And since human beings are just another evolved species, just as a badly injured horse is put down, a handicapped fetus can be put down. Why not?

I asked on Twitter, “Can someone tell me why the most radical animal rights activists are often militantly pro-abortion?”

One of my Twitter followers named Royce responded, “I think that was probably a rhetorical question but the answer is clearly worshipping the Creature rather than the Creator.”

Precisely so.

A few decades ago, some representatives for the radical-left Greenpeace organization came through the neighborhood of one of my good Christian friends, asking him if he would like to donate money to have save the baby whales.

He replied that he was much more interested in saving the baby humans, and the Greenpeace rep turned away instantly and left in a huff.

Is anyone surprised? (For more from the author of “Personhood Rights for Needy Chimps but Not Baby Humans” please click HERE)

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This Week’s Best ‘Feminist’ Moments — and How They Put Women to Shame

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This week was one for the history books! From International Women’s Day being overshadowed by the A Day Without a Woman strike, to a paper towel campaign sure to empower aspiring housewives, it’s hard to choose the moment from this week that best proved how far women’s rights have truly come. There are just too many! Let’s take a look.

Feminism for the Kitchen

On Tuesday, the day before International Women’s Day (sorry — #ADayWithoutAWoman), the paper-towel company Brawny debuted its limited-time ad campaign “celebrating strong women who inspire us all.” How? By putting a woman on its paper towel packaging!

This move is truly brilliant. After all, I know that I personally, as a woman, constantly felt belittled walking past Brawny’s paper towel packaging in Wal-mart with that plaid-wearing man staring me down and telling me that I’m weak. Kind of like how I feel when my husband washes the dishes. As if I’m not strong enough to do those dishes myself!

Brawny’s “strength has no gender” campaign gives me hope that one day, my husband will also get a “feminist makeover” and acknowledge that “women can be ‘brawny’ too.” Maybe then he’ll stop viewing me as some weakling and will let me clean the kitchen by myself for once.

Feminist Fashionista Victim

Friday morning National Review did us all a favor by showing us this stunning and, frankly, sobering photo of one of the “victims” of America’s backward, sexist, oppressive culture. Just look at the tweet below.

This woman, marching in New York while presumably striking from a job for which she is underpaid, is obviously dedicated to the feminist cause since she is wearing red (beautiful shade, might I add). The fact that her eyebrows, peaking defiantly above those daring sunglasses, appear to have been recently groomed to perfection proves how above and beyond she is willing to go for a feminist photo-op.

But I think the icing on the cake — the thing that really shows her dedication — is that Michael Kors jacket she’s flaunting. (While there is no way of knowing exactly how much was paid for this piece of rally garb, a quick Google search reveals that other jackets in the popular designer line run between $200-$1,000.) Inspiring!

It’s easy to see that life is hard for this victim of oppression. It was brave of her to show up Wednesday.

TIME Celebrates Female Accomplishment

On Thursday, TIME Magazine, the same publication that featured Hillary Clinton’s “The Future is Female” speech and recently reminded us that “women are shouting at the tops of their lungs” for equality, tweeted that Amal Clooney “shows off her baby bump at the United Nations.”

Incidentally, Clooney was at the U.N. as a lawyer representing a victim of ISIS crime, admonishing world leaders “to stand up for justice.” Nice, I guess, but not as important as her baby bump!

I’m just glad, especially since it’s National Women’s History month, that TIME is dedicated to reminding us women that our career accomplishments matter. As famed feminist Gloria Steinem told Newsweek, “All over the world we are struggling as females to be valued for our brains as well as our wombs.”

All Kidding Aside — There is a War on Women

It’s amusing to laugh at these feminist faux pas, but I think they underscore just how ridiculous and even counterproductive the modern American feminism movement has become, considering that a very real and violent war rages against millions of women all over the world.

I have no shame in calling myself a feminist, since I wholeheartedly endorse and refuse to ignore its true definition. I understand, however, that many women today don’t want to identify themselves as a “feminist,” given that the liberal political agenda is not only hijacking the term, but putting women everywhere to shame.

Claiming that not having access to abortion is “violence” while women like Yue Zhang are held down on an operation table and their children aborted against their will puts us to shame. Demanding free birth control while women and girls are mutilated and forever prevented from experiencing sexual pleasure puts us to shame. Walking out of your job while other women wish they were legally permitted to drive a car puts us to shame.

Is there sexism in America today? Of course (unfortunately, there always will be). But unlike so many females around the world, we already have all the empowerment we need to fight back, work hard, and prove the sexists, misogynists and chauvinists wrong.

Maybe we can start by looking into organizations dedicated to helping our sisters around the world, or by helping our under-privileged American sisters reach the opportunities available to them. No man — not even the president of the United States — is preventing us from doing so. (For more from the author of “This Week’s Best ‘Feminist’ Moments — and How They Put Women to Shame” please click HERE)

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My Local School Board May Begin Silencing Parents Over Transgender Agenda

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In Fairfax, 10 parents have just three minutes each to give their views to the county school board each meeting.

Earning one of these coveted slots is like buying concert tickets: You get up early on the Monday before the meeting and click frantically, hoping to be among the first 10 when the school board opens its sign-up line.

Since the school board imposed its gender identity politics on unwilling Fairfax families nearly two years ago, it has heard from dozens of angry parents. More come forward every month.

For school board members on the receiving end of the discourse, this must be getting old. But that’s the price of freedom, right?

Maybe not. Parents have learned that bureaucrats on the Fairfax County School Board have had just about enough of this free speech, and are meeting to discuss how best to curtail it.

This week, board member Ryan McElveen, chief proponent of the transgender policy, is calling a meeting to discuss the public speaker process. Nothing good can come from that.

Last month, a citizen speaking before the Fairfax County School Board made the charge that nonresidents frequently appear at school board meetings—meaning people who do not reside in Fairfax County. He was referring to some who voiced criticism of school board action.

I’m a Fairfax County resident, and to my knowledge, all the speakers who have spoken out against the gender identity policies of the board have been Fairfax County residents. But if they want to require ID, I’m all for it.

But I wonder, do they also favor IDs for voting in Fairfax? Do you have to show proof of legal residency to receive school services? Those are good questions for the board, if I ever get the chance to ask them.

The gentleman who made the complaint claimed that Loudoun County residents were testifying in Fairfax County.

Perhaps he thought I was from Loudoun, since I testified before the Loudoun school board back in December. But I was speaking as a Fairfax County resident and as a sexual assault victim, to warn them that allowing men and boys into women’s and girls’ locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms is not only disrespectful, but dangerous.

Thankfully, Loudoun did not go the way of Fairfax.

I actually had to withdraw my daughter from her Fairfax County public elementary school over concerns for her personal safety and privacy. Her former school is currently allowing a biological boy to use the girls’ facilities, without any parental notification.

When Fairfax County School Board Chairman Sandy Evans says the transgender guidelines are “on hold,” she gives a false impression. The policy is being implemented right now, behind parents’ backs.

And now, a new speech policy against parents is being considered. This would affect parents who are not only constituents, but also the taxpayers who pay the school board’s salaries.

As a taxpayer, I am entitled to voice my concerns. I am a strong believer in giving both positive and negative feedback.

I called Fairfax County Interim Superintendent Steve Lockhard’s office this week to thank him for keeping schools open Wednesday—unlike our neighbor city, Alexandria, which closed schools for the leftist women’s protest, putting politics above children.

The Fairfax County School Board does not seem interested in listening to constituents who do not share their political views. When a single citizen makes the unfounded claim that non-Fairfax parents are speaking, McElveen shows deference and schedules a meeting to address it.

Yet when hundreds of parents and citizens with diverse cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds have gathered in one room to voice their concerns about adding “gender identity” to the so-called nondiscrimination policy, no meeting is ever called.

The school board hasn’t even shown us the courtesy and respect to acknowledge that we’ve been heard. All we’ve heard is their silence—and now they want to silence us?

The school board needs to develop some respect for parental input. Rather than shutting down citizens who would defend the privacy of their children, the Fairfax County School Board should make good on its commitment to openness, respect, and the democratic process. (For more from the author of “My Local School Board May Begin Silencing Parents Over Transgender Agenda” please click HERE)

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Trump Made Cecile an Offer She Had to Refuse: Stop Aborting Babies or Lose $500 Million

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I don’t like vague language and euphemisms. They’re the weapons of the dishonest and manipulative. Say what you mean and say it clearly.

For a long time now I’ve been cringing every time I hear the weasel words “abortion providers.” I’m begging prolifers to stop using the other side’s pet euphemisms. Stop saying Planned Parenthood “provides abortions” or “is the nation’s largest abortion provider” or any other such combination of those two words.

No one provides an abortion. It is not a beneficial, or necessary service, but an act of violence. It can only be committed. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest perpetrator of abortion. It does not provide the deaths of millions of unborn children; it causes those deaths. Planned Parenthood commits violence against the child in the womb, and against women, every single day.

The only thing being provided is the obscene profit these medical hitmen rake in for perpetrating the violence of abortion. As George Orwell warned, fuzzy language can obscure horrendous crimes, so let’s be precise in ours, for the sake of the truth.

Just How Much Do You Love Abortion?

This brings me to President Trump’s recent offer to Planned Parenthood: Want to keep your funding? No more abortions.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards replied on Twitter:

There it is. “Providing” abortions is just as important to the mission of PP as cancer screenings. (And again, for the record, for the umpteenth time, not a single PP in the nation can provide a mammogram. They may be able to do a Pap smear and an HPV test, but that’s about it.) The marketing of Planned Parenthood as a magnanimous and comprehensive health care provider for untold scores of women who will otherwise never see a real doctor and thus die of cancer … it’s all a lie. Women have thousands of other options – and far better ones.

The mission of Planned Parenthood is not cancer screenings. It’s abortion. If tomorrow Planned Parenthood could no longer commit abortions, they would close their doors. It’s that simple. The organization exists for the purpose of profiting from abortions. And at least now Cecile is finally admitting it. She wants that half a billion in taxpayer dollars, all right, but to keep it she’s not about to melt down Planned Parenthood’s golden calf. Its mission is abortion.

Cancer screenings are not lucrative. Abortion is a monumental golden cash cow. No doubt Cecile is quite fond of her nearly $600,000 annual salary, so she’s determined to keep the bloody lucre flowing. She knows that so far, no administration has had the fortitude to cut Planned Parenthood off and withstand the cutthroat retaliation she would unleash. She’s counting on that to keep our lawmakers obediently underwriting her “mission.”

Drop the vague, specious language that anesthetizes the conscience. We are talking about bloodshed, not health care. There is no possible definition of health care that can include deliberate violence against a tiny child.

It is not in the interests of a woman’s health to kill her defenseless child. Chopping tiny humans into pieces cannot be considered “care.”

The Euphemisms in Our Mouths Leave Blood on Our Hands

Amazingly, many Americans, including our lawmakers, still refuse to admit that abortion actually involves literally tearing a baby apart. We have convinced ourselves that the Reproductive Freedom Fairy comes and makes the baby disappear, with no body, no blood, no harm, and no foul. We will not even take abortionists at their own word that babies are strategically dissected so as not to crush the really valuable body parts like brains, hearts, kidneys and tiny eyes that can be sold for still more profit.

We console ourselves by clinging to the statistic that most abortions are committed before the baby’s heart or brain is big enough to be profitable. “Fetal tissue” or better yet, “clumps of cells” are simply flushed away like a bad menstrual period. It’s “terminating a pregnancy,” which is just a weird condition that happens to women sometimes but is totally unrelated to a developing baby in the womb.

People may rant about health care and choices and autonomy and “reproductive justice” (oh, the irony of that word!), but we are no better than pagan Romans, who left infants exposed on rocks to be picked apart by crows. In fact, we are worse because we cloak our “exposure” in lab coats and euphemisms, and protect the predators with the force of law. Then we top it all off with a $500 million dollar annual tithe to Margaret Sanger’s Moloch.

Planned Parenthood has admitted that it really isn’t interested in anything other than abortion. Is that what we want to pay for? Let’s at least be honest and admit it. (For more from the author of “Trump Made Cecile an Offer She Had to Refuse: Stop Aborting Babies or Lose $500 Million” please click HERE)

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Youtube, Amazon, HBO, Even the American Library Association Are Part of the ‘Dirty Dozen’

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“No corporation should profit from or facilitate sexual exploitation,” but many do, and every year twelve make the “Dirty Dozen” list. Created by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the list is intended to “to name and shame the bad corporate actors in America that perpetuate sexual exploitation — whether that be through pornography, prostitution, or sex trafficking.”

This year’s “Dirty Dozen” are (in alphabetical order): Amazon, the American Library Association, Amnesty International, Backpage.com, Comcast, Cosmopolitan, EBSCO, HBO, Roku, Snapchat/Snapcash, Twitter and YouTube.

The NCSE, founded in 1962, describes itself as “the leading national organization opposing pornography by highlighting the links to sex trafficking, violence against women, child abuse, addiction and more.” Until 2015, it was named Morality In Media. It also directs the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation. The Coalition’s members include the American Family Association and many of its state branches; Alliance Defending Freedom; several Catholic dioceses, including the Archdiocese of Washington; the Family Research Council; and 96 other organizations.

The Dirty Dozen

Some are obvious choices, like Backpage.com, Cosmopolitan and HBO. The NCSE describes Backpage.com as bringing “the seedy street corners of America’s red-light districts to home computers.”

As a classified advertising website known as ‘the hub’ for prostitution advertising, Backpage.com serves as a virtual auction block where sex buyers can shop for human beings for sex from the privacy of their home, office, hotel room, or cell phone. Many of those bought and sold via the website are sexually trafficked women and children. The website facilitates this activity by editing ads to conceal the illegality of underlying criminal activity

The NCSE does praise Backpage.com for blocking the ads for prostitution in the U.S., while noting that doing so was “arguably a publicity stunt.”

Other choices are not so obvious. The American Library Association, for example, is included because it “zealously encourages public libraries to not install Internet filters on public-access computers, thereby granting patrons — including children — the opportunity to view obscene material.” The ALA appears on the list for the fifth straight year.

Amnesty International is included for supporting “the full decriminalization of prostitution [which] prioritizes the special interests of pimps/sex traffickers and sex buyers over the human rights of people in prostitution.” The policy Amnesty International supports would let pimps and brothel-keepers operate “as mere ‘sex business operators,’ and creates a de facto right for men to buy people for sex. Amnesty also views prostitution as ‘sex work,’ transforming the violence inherent to prostitution into an ‘on-the-job’ requirement.”

The library resource company EBSCO supplies online resources to schools. Some of its products, according to the list, “provide easy access to hardcore pornography sites and extremely graphic sexual content. Innocent searches provide pornographic results. Via a system that bypasses school Internet filters, EBSCO brings the dark world of XXX to America’s elementary, middle, and high school children.”

Amazon, Comcast, Roku, Snapchat/Snapcash, Twitter and YouTube are all included for providing easy access to pornography and sex products (which we will not list here). The anti-pornography group Fight the New Drug recently highlighted Twitter’s “Massive Porn Problem.” This includes over 14,000 active accounts “involved in the creation and distribution of child porn.”

The Contenders and the Victories

The Dirty Dozen list includes three “contenders” on the “Watch List.” The Watch List includes corporations that might join the Dirty Dozen and those who have made some but not enough progress to stop their participation in sexual exploitation. This year the three enterprises included are Hyatt Hotels, the Department of Justice and Verizon.

Hyatt and Verizon are praised for making some progress. The DOJ is cited for its failure over the last eight years to “enforce existing federal obscenity laws (hardcore pornography) despite the fact that these laws have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and previously enforced. This gross negligence gave a free pass to producers and distributors of pornography and enabled the culture of sexual exploitation to flourish.” The Family Research Council noted that Attorney General Eric Holder dissolved the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force.

Some in the Dirty Dozen and on the Watchlist also appear in NCSE’s list of “Victories” for making real steps to reduce their involvement in sexual exploitation. These are Backpage.com, Comcast, Hyatt, Snapchat, Verizon and Youtube.

Other “Victories” — a list that covers the last several years — are American Apparel, the Department of Defense, Google, GooglePlay, Hilton, Marsh and Walmart. The DoD is praised for having “stopped the sale of pornography in all Army and Air Force base exchanges” and also for ordering “regular search and removals of all sexual materials in public and workspaces … all military branches.” (For more from the author of “Youtube, Amazon, HBO, Even the American Library Association Are Part of the ‘Dirty Dozen'” please click HERE)

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While Women ‘Strike,’ Victim of Chinese Forced Abortion Shares Her Story

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Many women in the United States and other parts of the world are commemorating International Women’s Day by striking under the hashtag battle cry #ADayWithoutAWoman. The organizers declared that during the strike, arguably replete with problems, “women and our allies will act together creatively to withdraw from the corporations that harm us and find ways to support the businesses, organizations and communities that sustain us.”

But while elitist feminists took a day off work (even forcing some schools to shut down), Yue Zhang, a Chinese immigrant and victim of forced abortion, participated on a panel at the Heritage Foundation about the gross human rights violations intertwined with China’s family planning policy.

Zhang’s Story

“Today I understand that the victim must be grave enough to share the truth,” Zhang began Wednesday afternoon.

In August 2013, she found she was pregnant. Her initial reaction of surprise and happiness was quickly followed by worry. Zhang, 28 at the time, was not married. In China, giving birth out of wedlock is illegal. “I was worried for the future of my child,” she said.

If a woman does give birth out of wedlock, her child will not receive registration, or hukou —meaning they can never attend school, receive healthcare or even be officially married. “They are illegal persons for their entire lives in China,” Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and a fellow panelist, explained.

Nevertheless, Zhang wanted her child. But five months into her pregnancy, she found government officials waiting outside her home. They’d discovered she was pregnant, and informed her that she would need to have an abortion or pay a social maintenance fee. The next month they returned, this time breaking into Zhang’s house. Again, family planning officers told Zhang that she would have to have an abortion or pay a fee. They also threatened to call her bank, have her house confiscated and tell her employer to fire her.

Zhang inquired about the family planning policy and social maintenance policy of her province. “I learned that with my annual income and in order for my child to get hukou, I needed to pay over $60,000 U.S. dollars of social maintenance fee, a penalty I simply couldn’t afford,” she said. “But I never wanted to give up [my child’s] innocent little life.”

To the Chinese government, what Zhang wanted didn’t matter. For a third time, government officials came to Zhang’s home, pulling her into a vehicle outside. At the hospital she was placed on an operation table. “I kept shouting and struggling,” Zhang said. The doctor administered an injection into her abdomen.

“After a few hours of stomach pain, I started to see blood,” Zhang, struggling through visibly painful emotion, recalled before the panel. Hours later she gave birth to her lifeless baby.

“I dared not open my eyes to see the child. … I cried when the doctor and the nurse took away the little life. I wanted to beg them to leave this with me, but I couldn’t speak. After a while the doctor gave me another shot saying it was to stop the pain, but the pain did not stop. … Lying on that bed, I felt my body was cut open and broken.”

Zhang’s pain continued long after the abortion as she experienced nightmares, hallucinations and feelings of guilt. “Sometimes I believed it was my fault,” Zhang confessed. “I hated myself for getting pregnant without getting married and causing my child to die.”

The Continued Abuse and Extermination of Chinese Women

Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ 4th District) is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Congressional Executive Commission on China. Even though in 2016, China adopted a two-child policy to replace their one-child policy, Smith said nothing has changed.

“There has been no change in the basic structure of coercive population control in China,” he said, pointing out that women’s menstrual cycles are still monitored, and that women are required to get regular ultrasounds to ensure that they are not pregnant without permission.

“When a woman is so maltreated by her own government … that has psychological impacts on her that are lifelong,” Smith said, noting that between 25 and 40 percent more women than men kill themselves in China. “The cruelty is just unimaginable.”

Olivia Enos, a research associated at Heritage, said during the panel that China’s child limitation and anti-female policies are leading to a future shortage of workers in the labor force and an increasingly older society. “On average China has 114 boys for every 100 girls,” Enos said, adding that in some provinces, as many as 126 boys are born for every 100 girls.

As Smith pointed out, it’s estimated that by 2020, 40 million men will be unable to find wives “because they have been exterminated” through sex-selective abortion.

So why does China continue to maintain child limitation policies? Littlejohn suggested that “terror is the purpose of the policy. … I believe this is social control masquerading as population control.”

What the United States Should Do

Even though “it’s easy to think that there’s nothing more that can be done,” Enos said, the U.S. government could do three things to help end China’s child limitation policies and human rights violations.

The first thing, Enos said, is to create working groups in China to work with Chinese officials to roll back and eventually eliminate the coercive family planning policies. Secondly, Enos said the new presidential administration should engage on human rights issues in any forum possible. Third, the U.S. should stop sending contributions to UNFPA — the United Nations Population Fund.

Federal taxpayer contributions to UNFPA have funded coercive family planning in China, Enos said. Smith added that rather than condemning human rights violation in China, the UNFPA actively encourages other nations to adopt child limitation policies. “When you whitewash crimes against humanity, you become complicit,” he said.

The Rest of Zhang’s Story

With her mother’s help, Zhang came to the United States at the end of 2014.

“As a stranger in this country, I feel the culture of open society. I feel the air of freedom, democracy and human rights,” she said.

One day during a class at a language school in the U.S., a classmate asked Zhang whether it was true that China enforced child limitation policies. When Zhang explained the policy to them and witnessed their indignation, she realized she was blameless for what happened in that hospital.

“It was at that time I realized it was not my fault,” she said. “In fact, my children always had the rights to come into this world. On the contrary, it was the Chinese government’s fault. China’s family planning policy prosecuted me and violated my legal rights. It is the government that represents Chinese Communist party that should feel ashamed.”

Watch the entire panel discussion below.

(For more from the author of “While Women ‘Strike,’ Victim of Chinese Forced Abortion Shares Her Story” please click HERE)

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Trump Makes Planned Parenthood a Deal Only an Abortion Business Would Turn Down

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Half a billion dollars in federal funding isn’t enough to keep Planned Parenthood from what it does best — abortions. This week, Planned Parenthood proved once again that, for all their talk of “women’s health,” their business IS abortion.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration made an informal proposal to the nation’s largest abortion provider: You can keep your federal funding if you stop taking the lives of unborn children.

PP refused, as abortion services are simply “nonnegotiable.”

“Let’s be clear: Federal funds already do not pay for abortions,” Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept. Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”

That’s at least the talking point. But money is fungible (as anyone who has ever handled currency ought to understand).

GOP officials, of course, promised relentlessly on the campaign trail that they’ll get taxpayer dollars out from under the abortion giant. It was an issue that found new life in 2015 after undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress purported to show PP involved in a large-scale fetal tissue racket.

This all begs the question: If Planned Parenthood was really concerned about vital low-cost health services for women, and really thought the organization would not be able to adequately service patients without an enormous taxpayer kickback, why would it put said handouts on the chopping block for something it says is such a negligible part of its entire existence?

Because it’s all a crock.

This latest development of a White House proposal blows yet another gigantic hole in the hull of Planned Parenthood’s image and racket.

The most popular example of this is, of course, their infamous “3 percent” lie, but has also taken the form of an ad released last year of women AND men touting the abortion mill’s flu and asthma treatment services.

Planned Parenthood – :30 from Wexley School for Girls on Vimeo.

Add that to the 2015 discovery that they don’t provide mammograms (which was even backed up by The Washington Post’s fact-checkers) and the more recent admissions by PP staffers that several of its locations do not provide prenatal care (contrary to claims) … and it all becomes ever more clearer that “women’s health” to this organization is little more than a high-scoring buzzword.

Given what the public now knows about the kind of operation that Planned Parenthood is running all over the country, and the Republican promises made to voters in the 2016 election cycle, there’s absolutely no reason that they should continue receiving a red cent of public money.

There are more than enough places for women to receive basic health care without underwriting this grisly termination business, and their fundraising efforts since Election Day show they do just fine funding themselves.

But no, when the cards are down, abortion is Planned Parenthood’s summum bonum. Everything else – up to and including actual health services – are little more than window dressing. (For more from the author of “Trump Makes Planned Parenthood a Deal Only an Abortion Business Would Turn Down” please click HERE)

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A Nude Photo Scandal Has Shaken the Entire Marine Corps

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The U.S. Marine Corps is investigating allegations an unspecified number of military personnel and veterans allegedly distributed nude photos of female colleagues and other women as part of a perverse social media network that promotes sexual violence.

The explosive revelation was first reported by The War Horse and published Saturday via Reveal, part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Potentially hundreds of Marines may be caught up in the scandal, which has shaken top Pentagon officials and prompted death threats against the Marine veteran who disclosed it. An undetermined number of nude photos were shared online by way of a Facebook group titled Marines United, according to the report. The community has nearly 30,000 members, mostly comprising active-duty U.S. Marines, Marine Corps veterans and British Royal Marines.

The unseemly episode is deeply embarrassing for the Marine Corps and the Defense Department, proud institutions that, like many college campuses around the country, have struggled to curtail widespread problems with sexual assault. At the same time, it exposes an unsettling rift within a segment of American society consistently regarded as reputable, honorable and trustworthy.

A Marine Corps spokesman at the Pentagon confirmed that an investigation is underway, telling Marine Corps Times on Saturday night that military officials are uncertain how many personnel may be involved. The spokesman, Maj. Clark Carpenter, referred additional questions to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, but that agency’s spokesman was not immediately available. (Read more from “A Nude Photo Scandal Has Shaken the Entire Marine Corps” HERE)

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Vice Cop Talks Facts, Myths of Sex Trafficking in America, and How We Can Fight It

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Actor Ashton Kutcher delivered a moving speech before Congress last month on the global problem of human trafficking. Kutcher called on America’s leaders to come together and address the “bipartisan issue” that is, at least for now, universally recognized as a gross injustice.

But what does the average American know about human trafficking? Where is it happening, and who is it affecting? It’s one thing to agree that there is a problem, but how do we even begin to solve an issue that we don’t understand?

Corporal Jon Doherty investigates sex trafficking cases for the Gwinnett County police’s vice unit. He recently spoke with Conservative Review about his efforts to combat sex trafficking in Georgia, and how it’s shaped his views on how communities and individuals can address this epidemic.

Doherty explained that technology has transformed “the game” of sex trafficking in America. Thanks to social media and websites like Craigslist and Backpage, perpetrators have been able to expand their operations to prey on women and seek clients across the country.

“[Predators] can look at girls’ Facebook pages,” Doherty told CR. “They can see what type of bait they need to give these certain girls. They can read the things they post, and know what’s going on maybe in the girl’s life or in her mind, or what she’s thinking about.”

Modern “pimps” aren’t walking around with top hats and canes, either, he warned of the stereotypical image. In many cases, they’re average-looking men (and sometimes women), some as young as college age. They lure and manipulate victims by feigning interest in a romantic relationship, or pretending to have connections in the modeling or acting industry.

And it’s not just the predators who have evolved. Doherty explained that the “type” of women targeted for trafficking today varies dramatically from decades past. There are “the girls you would expect it to happen to” — victims of abuse or poverty, with little or no support system. But in his experience, Cpl. Doherty has found that women from well-to-do families and privileged backgrounds can be just as vulnerable. Trafficking is prevalent in places like Atlanta because the excitement of big-city life is an easy sell for most victims, he said.

“These guys do their homework,” Doherty said. “They know their targets; they know what they’re looking for: the girl with the low self-esteem, the girl who’s got some kind of family issue going on. There’s so many things out there nowadays that it can happen to anybody.”

“We’ve recovered girls before that are police detectives’ — long-time police detectives’ — daughters that have come in from other areas,” he told CR. “It can happen to anybody.”

Doherty and his team view their work as a rescue operation — freeing victims from the abuse and deception of their captors. He remembers the victims he’s saved — as well as those he couldn’t. He recalled the case of a young woman named Crystal, who he and his partner arrested and successfully rescued. Years after they brought Crystal into custody, the two ran into her at a restaurant.

“My partner said, ‘You know who that is?’ He said, ‘That’s Crystal over there.’ I said, ‘Gosh, she doesn’t look the same […] She looks a lot different.’ When our food came, we were sitting there — she was the hostess. She came over to me, and she said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I said, ‘Of course I remember you,’ and I called her by her name. Tears just started running down her face.”

Many individuals forced into the sex industry become addicted to drugs, and therefore grow dependent on pimps, for both work and their next fix. The biggest challenge officers face is convincing these individuals to part with their abusers, Doherty said:

We explain to them that there’s no future in this. The things we can guarantee if you continue in this lifestyle are horrible things. There’s no retirement, and there’s no health insurance. There’s guaranteed beatings, rapes, robberies, just a bad life. But the hardest thing we have to compete with, other than the drugs, is the connections, sometimes of just love, and the pimp telling them, “I love you. We’re a team. It’s you and I against the world.” It’s that. They’re almost brainwashed. That’s one of the hardest things to break, right there.

Doherty explained that often the only way to pry these individuals away from the deceptive vortex of prostitution — the lure of money, the promise of emotional fulfilment, and a sense of belonging — is to detain them. Only then can Doherty and his team offer resources to help get the victims back on their feet.

“I know that one of the big, hot issues is, ‘Why do we arrest these girls? Why do we go after the victims?’” he said, addressing a very common attack on law enforcement. “A lot of times, we just go after them because that’s the only time we can get them, and we can separate them from the lifestyle. We can separate them from the pimp.”

Every year, Doherty and his team from the Gwinnett County force attend anti-sex trafficking conferences, where they’re often greeted with opposition from advocacy groups.

“When we go to these conferences, it’s almost like the police feel like … I mean … they hate us,” he said. “They do not like us. They’ll say, ‘Are you still locking up the victims?’”

According to Doherty, these advocates are simply unaware of how “the game” works: “They think these girls, if you just sat down and talked to them, that you’re going to talk them out of that life.”

“Something needs to be done with the courts and with law enforcement and with the advocate groups,” Doherty continued. “If we don’t get a hook in these girls — even if we just get them into probation or get them into drug treatment, or get them into something — we’ll never get them out of it.”

Doherty stressed that the effort to fight trafficking in America requires that law enforcement, advocacy groups, political leaders, and families work together to address the problem holistically.

“It’s a social issue where the community and the law enforcement have to come together and work for the better of reforming this person, and turning their life around,” he said, adding, “I don’t think we’ll every stop it [completely].”

Cpl. Doherty said that, like drugs, the demand for prostitution and the greed of sex traffickers will always be around. But the more the issue is discussed and understood, the better the chances are of reducing the threat.

Further, he believes “there needs to be a platform for educating young girls on the dangers of social media, besides the guy who wants to send you creepy pictures or ask you for creepy pictures.”

“They need to be educated in what’s out there, these are sharks in the water, and what these guys that are out there, and the lifestyle they can get dragged into. Before they even get a chance to look up, they find themselves in the middle of it.”

As Cpl. Jon Doherty said, we will never completely eradicate human trafficking — or any form of evil, for that matter. But by drawing attention to the breadth and depth of the problem, and by being aware of the modern threats facing young women especially (and their most effective solutions), lives can be saved. (For more from the author of “Vice Cop Talks Facts, Myths of Sex Trafficking in America, and How We Can Fight It” please click HERE)

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Will Trump Act to End Common Core’s Disastrous Math Slump?

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The verdict is in on Common Core and it’s bad. International tests towards which Common Core was supposed to be “benchmarked” show that American students’ reading and science scores are stagnant. And math scores are tanking badly. Of the 35 industrialized nations, U..S. students have slipped into the 31st place in math achievement.

“We really are doing a lot worse in math than we are in science and reading,” Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, told The Hechinger Report. Students across the board in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests are doing worse, from bottom to middle to top performance.

The sharp drop in math performance on the international test confirms the lower scores seen on the United States’ National Assessment on Education Progress, in which both 4th graders and 8th graders posted lower math scores on the 2015 test.

Why the Drop in Math Performance is Not Surprising

To critics of Common Core this should come as no surprise. The “Common Core moms” were repeatedly derided by the experts for noticing the sudden strange collapse in math teaching standards. I first wrote about one such mom, Heather Crossin, in 2013:

In September 2011, Heather suddenly noticed a sharp decline in the math homework her eight-year-old daughter was bringing home from Catholic school. “Instead of many arithmetic problems, the homework would contain only three or four questions, and two of those would be ‘explain your answer,’” Heather told me. “Like, ‘One bridge is 412 feet long and the other bridge is 206 feet long. Which bridge is longer? How do you know?’ She found she could not help her daughter answer the latter question: The “right” answer involved heavy quotation from Common Core language. A program designed to encourage thought had ended up encouraging rote memorization not of math but of scripts about math.

When Heather and other parents complained to the principal — at a private Catholic school mind you — he threw up his hands and said he didn’t like it either but they had to teach to the state test which was now based on Common Core standards. Yet Common Core advocates persist in the Big Lie that national standards leave states free to develop their own curricula. Here’s the truth: If you control the standards you control the curriculum.

Mothers like Heather Crossin were called ignoramuses. They were told that the experts had developed wonderful new standards that were “internationally benchmarked,” that is, that they were the kind of standards countries with high performing math students use. That was also a Big Lie. The one actual mathematician on the board that developed them, Stanford mathematics professor R. James Milgram, rejected the Common Core math standards. Prof. Milgram concluded that the Common Core standards are, as he told the Texas state legislature, “in large measure a political document that … is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”

The education school math education “experts” managed to impose on almost the entire country standards based on untested education theories, not empirical evidence. Most of its advocates probably had no clue. They trusted the “experts” in spite of the fact that such progressive education theories get it wrong time after time. (Remember “whole language” reading wars?)

They should have known better: When most states adopted Common Core the standards had not yet been written. They were buying a pig in a poke. And students are paying the price.

Trump Recognized Common Core’s Problems — At First

Donald Trump, to his credit, acknowledged the problem.

Or at least on the campaign trail he did. He opposed Common Core from the first moment he announced his campaign in June 2015, to the closing argument on his whirlwind tour the day before the election. He used it as a club to beat back Jeb Bush (the leader of the Republican support for Common Core, whose protégé, Betsy DeVos, now heads up the Education Department).

As Breitbart’s Dr. Susan Berry reported, “Numerous reports have observed the presence of Jeb Bush supporters and Obama holdovers in the federal education department. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos herself was both a generous contributor to and board member of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), which promoted Common Core nationwide. Bush himself said of DeVos’s nomination, ‘I’m so excited.’”

Common Core critics are now increasingly concerned that President Trump has gone silent on Common Core.

As Fred Barnes pointed out, “He didn’t mention it … in his hour-long speech to a joint session of Congress. He didn’t repeat his promise to end it in his inaugural address a month ago. And he neglected to cite it in his rousing talk at the Conservative Political Action Conference.”

Trump’s education policy since taking office has been all school choice, with dramatic silence on Common Core. But school choice has little meaning if “common standards” put pressure on virtually every public, charter, and private school to create Common Core curricula, driven by state-imposed standardized tests.

Republicans who originally supported Common Core meant well. They thought they were endorsing high academic standards that would help students learn. That’s why they made a deal with the Obama administration. But now we know the truth.

Will President Trump care enough about the Common Core moms like Heather to deliver on one of his most-frequently repeated campaign promises?

Common Core Re-branded is Still Bad

As Frank Cannon, president of the American Principles Project (where I am a senior fellow) told Breitbart, given the Jeb-heavy cast of his education appointments, “I think it’s important for Trump to personally drive to completion on this promise, as he has on so many other promises.”

There are practical steps that can be taken immediately to ease the federal pressures on states to continue with failed math standards and the curriculum craziness produced by those standards. (Given the failure of Common Core to improve reading and silence standards, states should be free to experiment across the board.)

Jane Robbins, a senior fellow at American Principles Project (see full disclosure above) has been working with state legislatures on what they can do to undo Common Core. She finds the heavy hand of the federal government is still playing an outsize role:

DeVos can ease federal mandates on standards and testing, letting states choose their own standards — that is, ditch Common Core — without fear of federal penalty, and giving them a waiver from testing requirements while they revamp their standards and aligned tests. She should also comb through all 1,061 pages of Every Child Succeeds Act passed in 2015 and push Congress to eliminate its mandates.

“What we can’t have is the components of Common Core and have it be rebranded as something else. We can’t have the testing, we can’t have the lowering of standards that is part of Common Core, we can’t have the one-size-fits-all and pretend because the words Common Core have been removed from the education lexicon, that we removed the content and substance of that,” says Fank Cannon.

Here’s the thing: Unless Trump takes a personal interest in delivering on his campaign promise, nothing in Betsy DeVos’ background as a Bush protégé makes it likely she will act. A good first step would be getting Common Core critics like Prof. Milgram, Sandra Stotsky, Jane Robbins, and Heather Crossin in a room with the President and the Education secretary to share their concerns about what must be done. (For more from the author of “Will Trump Act to End Common Core’s Disastrous Math Slump?” please click HERE)

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