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Where Abortion Stands Legally Today

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As giant abortion provider Planned Parenthood celebrates its 100th anniversary this week, pro-lifers led by The Stream are commemorating #100forlife to remember all who have died due to abortion.

It comes forty-three years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade — permitting abortions during the three trimesters of pregnancy, and allowing greater regulatory power by states during the second and third trimesters. To come up with this odd, three-tier ruling, the court relied upon a tortured interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, finding in the “penumbras” of the Constitution a right to privacy fundamental to the concept of liberty.

While abortion remains legal in the U.S., the laws governing it have changed significantly in recent years. Some of those modifications are state laws that impose additional requirements before having an abortion, or restrictions on when or how an abortion may be procured. Most of the laws came as the focus of the pro-life movement expanded from abortion center protests and sidewalk counseling to include passing state and federal legislation.

The movement was emboldened to take this route by Gonzales v. Carhart in 2007, in which the Supreme Court upheld a nationwide ban on partial-birth abortions.

These laws, which added new requirements and regulations for abortions, have successfully resulted in the shutdown of abortion centers. Five states now have only one abortion facility. According to the abortion rights research organization Guttmacher Institute, in the late 1980s, there was a high of 705 centers nationwide. By 2011, that number had dropped to 583, and others have closed since.

The laws may also be contributing to a decrease in the number of abortions. The Guttmacher Institute reported a high of 1,590,750 abortions in 1988. That number has declined almost every year since then, to 1,058,490 in 2011, equivalent to the level in the mid-1970s shortly after abortion was legalized.

Significant Supreme Court Victories That Reversed the Abortion Trend
Since Roe v. Wade, there have been several Supreme Court decisions that struck down or upheld state laws regulating abortion — overall, in balance favorable to the pro-life movement. In the 1980 decision Harris v. McRae, the court upheld the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits most federal funding of abortions, except in the case of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life.

Nine years later, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the court upheld Missouri’s ban on the use of public facilities and employees for abortions, and the state’s requirement that doctors test for fetal viability at 24 weeks.

A Supreme Court case in 1992 dealt the biggest blow to Roe v. Wade. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court backed off from the convoluted, messy Roe precedent prohibiting states from regulating abortion during the first trimester. It permitted states to implement laws requiring such things as pre-abortion counseling, waiting limits and parental consent, so long as the requirements did not impose an “undue burden” on women.

A Legal Setback in 2016

Despite years of strides, the pro-life movement suffered a significant defeat in June when the high court struck down two abortion center regulations in Texas. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court invalidated laws that required abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and held abortion facilities to the standards of outpatient surgical centers. The court held that the onerousness of the regulations outweighed the state’s interest in regulating health.

Will the Generally Pro-life Trend Continue?

The Supreme Court ultimately has the final say, rightly or wrongly, on abortion laws. Whether pro-life advocates will be able to continue the trend of stripping away parts of Roe v. Wade depends on the future makeup of the Court. If Democrat Hillary Clinton becomes president, she will appoint left-leaning justices who will make up a majority of the court and strike down pro-life laws. If Republican Donald Trump wins the election, he has promised to appoint mostly right-leaning justices who will have the opposite effect. (For more from the author of “Where Abortion Stands Legally Today” please click HERE)

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Firms Charged in California for Profiting off of Baby Part Sales

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Orange County, California District Attorney Tony Rackauckas has filed charges against two companies he says illegally profited off of the sale of fetal tissue.

In a press conference held on Wednesday, Rackauckas laid out what he called a “profit-making … scheme” conducted by DaVinci Biosciences and sister company DV Biologics. According to Rackauckas, employees used discounts “to close a sale,” and prices changed to match market value of fetal tissue.

“This is not about politics,” Rackauckas told The Orange County Register before the press event. “This is about a clear violation of the law.”

According to The Register, the lawsuit highlights an employee writing in an email that “…it costs us roughly $25 per unit to manufacture, and we are selling from $170.” Additionally:

From 2009 to 2015, the companies collected $56,678 in “packing and handling” fees marked up by roughly 50 percent over the actual cost of packaging and handling, according to the suit. Employees were paid a commission on profits they earned from the packing and handling charges, the lawsuit says.

In a press statement, Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden said that Planned Parenthood also acted illegally. “The wheels of justice are beginning to turn against Planned Parenthood and their corrupt business partners in the illicit trade in aborted baby body parts.”

According to Daleiden, “For eight years, Planned Parenthood supplied aborted baby hearts, lungs, brains, and intestines to DV Biologics, which DV Biologics then resold for profit. In exchange for merely providing access to aborted baby body parts, Planned Parenthood received kickback contributions from DaVinci Biosciences over the course of their eight-year contract.”

Rackauckas disagreed, telling a reporter at the press conference that Planned Parenthood donated bodies. Another reporter asked whether the donations were legal, to which the DA replied that not only are donations for research allowed, but “our evidence indicates that, no, no money was exchanged between these companies and Planned Parenthood.”

“We’re not indicating Planned Parenthood did anything unlawful,” Rackauckas clarified. His office is seeking a $1.6 million fine against the companies.

House Select Panel on Infant Lives Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said in a statement, “Based on the evidence uncovered during our Panel’s investigation, we have been deeply troubled about the relationship between DaVinci and PPOSBC, which appears to have created a market for the donation of human fetal tissue.”

Blackburn continued: “As a result, our Panel is continuing to look at connections between Planned Parenthood and tissue procurement companies. The lawsuit filed by the Orange County DA shows that there is also broad support at the state and local level to uncover the truth about what is going on in the abortion and fetal tissue industries.”

Earlier this year, Daleiden’s group released an undercover video highlighting activity that led to Rackauckas’ investigation. In that video, a Center for Medical Progress investigator was told by the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties that the abortion giant attempts to use ultrasound to create circumstances where a baby’s parts can be harvested.

Lila Rose of Live Action also commended the Orange County DA. “I hope this sets a precedent for prosecutors and law enforcement across the nation.” she said in a statement, “Abortion is a barbaric and cruel practice, and it should come as no surprise that those callous enough to profit off killing defenseless children in the womb would allegedly profit off selling their organs piecemeal.”

A phone call requesting comment from Da Vinci Biosciences was not immediately returned. (For more from the author of “Firms Charged in California for Profiting off of Baby Part Sales” please click HERE)

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Opinion: Time to Address Alaska’s Corrupt Judiciary

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When the Alaska Supreme Court recently overturned the law that returned to parents the right to be involved when their minor daughter was seeking an abortion, many people were deflated and irate wondering what they could do to counter such an egregious act of judicial overreach. This blatantly partial ruling thwarted the will of more than 90,000 Alaskans who had voted back in 2010, in overwhelming fashion, to make it law through a statewide initiative.

Now is your chance to do something.

When you vote November 8th, you will have a constitutional given opportunity to retain or non-retain Alaska Supreme Court Justices Joel Bolger and Peter Maassen – two members of the Court who took away the God-given authority parents have to look out for the safety and welfare of their very own children.

In the Bible, the essential role of judges was to rule according to a law external to themselves. God told Ezekiel that the priests would act as judges saying “In a dispute they shall take their stand to judge; they shall judge it according to My laws and My statutes.” Ezekiel 44:24. Judges do not act above the law. They are under the law of a Holy God.

Many will claim that Justices Bolger and Maassen are fine Alaskans with wonderful “judicial temperaments” but that is not what Alaskans are voting on. Just as U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Samuel Alito are far apart when it comes to judicial philosophies and most often differ in their opinions, so do Justices Bolger and Maassen differ from the 90,000 Alaskans who knew in 2010 and still know that the law should protect the right of parents to be involved when their minor children are making major medical decisions.

Your voice matters and should be counted.

In the Alaska Supreme Court’s ruling in 2007 that overthrew a parental consent law, the Court had the audacity to tell to the people that a parental notice law would be constitutionally permissible. It was basically an invite to pass a parental notice law. That is what was done. When it got back into the Court’s hands, they flip flopped ruling that the parental notice law was unconstitutional.

Here are just a few of their corrupt statements from their parental consent ruling –

“And contrary to the arguments of Planned Parenthood, we determine that the constitution permits a statutory scheme which ensures that parents are notified so that they can be engaged in their daughters’ important decisions in these matters.”

“There exists a less burdensome and widely used means of actively involving parents in their minor children’s abortion decisions: parental notification. The United States Supreme Court has recognized, in a different context, that ‘notice statutes are not equivalent to consent statutes because they do not give anyone a veto power over a minor’s abortion decision.’ And many states currently employ this less restrictive approach.”

“As we have recognized in the past, the State has a special, indeed compelling, interest in the health, safety and welfare of its minor citizens and may take affirmative steps to safeguard minors from their own immaturity.”

“Currently, fifteen states have notification statutes in place. Although the precise details of these statutes vary, they all prohibit minors from terminating a pregnancy until their parents have been notified and have been afforded an appropriate period of time to actively involve themselves in their minor children’s decision-making process. Stated another way, these statutes seek to involve parents, not by giving them ‘veto power’, but by giving them notice and time to consult with and guide their daughters through this important decision. As such, although parental notification statutes undoubtedly burden the privacy rights of minors, they do not go so far as to shift a portion of those rights to parents.”

Although Justices Bolger and Maassen were not part of that 2007 ruling, their agreement to throw out the parental notice law shows that the Constitution and democratic decisions of the people mean nothing to them. This latest decision that threw out parental notice is incredibly dishonest and is the product of an intellectually and morally corrupt judiciary.

But have hope. You have the authority and opportunity to right a wrong. To, in their words, “veto” these two from ever making such a ruling again.

On November 8th, please VOTE NO on Alaska Supreme Court Justices Joel Bolger and Peter Maassen.

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Eight Months After Abortion Flap, Lands’ End CEO Out

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Almost eight months after angering activists on both sides of the abortion fight and losing at least two religious schools as customers, Lands’ End CEO Federica Marchionni is stepping down.

In a press release, the clothing retailer’s Board Chairman Josephine Linden said that Marchionni’s “creative vision has helped Lands’ End begin its transformation as a global lifestyle brand with a broader merchandise offering that is more relevant in today’s marketplace. Federica is stepping down at this time, leaving Lands’ End well positioned to continue its evolution and capture the growth opportunities that exist for our iconic brand in this dynamic retail environment.”

According to Marchionni, “I am honored to have led this extraordinary company and proud to have succeeded in providing a vision to expand its positioning in the industry with a multi-dimensional strategy.”

Marchionni was hired in early 2015 to revamp Lands’ End’s struggling brand; the company’s valuation dropped from $1.9 billion in 2002 to $780 million last year. Market Watch shows that the company’s stock has dropped precipitously in the last two years, from over $55 per share in late 2014 to less than $16 per share today, and as low as $14.03 in the last year.

This spring Lands’ End ignited an uproar in the pro-life community when it promoted abortion feminist icon Gloria Steinem in its Easter catalog. The decision cost the company business from at least two schools, and pro-life outrage convinced its executives to apologize and pull Marchionni’s interview with Steinem off of its website.

The reversal made things worse, from the company’s perspective — abortion supporters slammed Lands’ End on social media and traditional news outlets, leading several branding and public relations experts to call the controversy an unforced error.

The stock price dropped in late April, and hasn’t recovered. Over the summer, Marchionni told the abortion-backing fashion magazine Marie Claire that she didn’t regret bringing “women’s equality” into the public eye, though she did say abortion promotion was not intended with the Easter catalog. (For more from the author of “Eight Months After Abortion Flap, Lands’ End CEO Out” please click HERE)

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House Debates Protections for Babies Born Alive After Attempted Abortions

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An abortion survivor urged Americans to “wake up” to the reality that some babies born alive after an attempted abortion are left to die, the survivor testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill last week.

“Many Americans have no idea that babies can even live through abortions and are often left to die, but this does happen,” Gianna Jessen, 39, said at the hearing. “I know this, because I was born alive in an abortion clinic after being burned in my mother’s womb for 18 hours.”

Jessen, who has cerebral palsy due to her attempted abortion, added at a House Judiciary Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee hearing on Sept. 23:

My medical records clearly state the following: Born during saline abortion … Apart from Jesus himself, the only reason I am alive is the fact that the abortionist had not yet arrived at work that morning. Had he been there, he would have ended my life by strangulation, suffocation, or simply leaving me there to die.

“Often when I’m in the midst of abortion advocates, they never can answer this one question and it is this: If abortion is merely about women’s rights, then what were mine?” Jessen said.

In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, making it illegal to kill any babies born alive.

“Unfortunately, incidents involving born-alive children being killed after an attempted abortion have continued after this law [was passed] and into the present,” Arina Grossu, director for the Center of Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, testified at the hearing. Grossu’s written testimony says:

Abortionist Kermit Gosnell operated his dirty and dangerous Philadelphia abortion business and committed horrendous crimes in Philadelphia for over three decades. … His heinous and murderous practices of snipping the spines of born-alive children were only discovered by accident when federal and state authorities raided his facility in 2010, not because he was illegally killing born-alive infants, but because of his illegal prescription drug activity.

Grossu says Gosnell is “not an outlier.”

“Not one person to date has been charged or convicted under the current federal [Born-Alive Infants Protection Act] law,” Grossu testified.

The House passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., in September 2015. An identical bill in the Senate, introduced by Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., was referred to the Judiciary Committee.

“The abortion industry has labored for all of these decades to convince the world that unborn children and born children should be completely separated in our minds, that while born children are persons worthy of protection, unborn children are not persons and are not worthy of protection,” Franks, chairman of the subcommittee, said at the hearing.

Franks’ legislation would protect the rights of infants born alive after an abortion and leave criminal consequences for health care professionals who violate the law. The legislation would also require proper medical care be given by the health care practitioner present when an infant is born alive.

The legislation “explicitly requires health care practitioners to treat born-alive abortion survivors with the same care they would treat any other born-alive baby and admit such babies immediately to a hospital.” The law would also hold abortionists accountable for killing born-alive infants, Grossu testified.

President Barack Obama’s administration “strongly opposes” the passage of this bill, according to a statement from September 2015.

“The White House has promised that it would veto the born-alive legislation, citing it would have a ‘chilling’ effect,” Grossu testified. “I cannot think of a more chilling effect than continuing to let U.S. abortionists commit infanticide.”

Grossu urged support for the legislation to stop infanticide, or intentionally killing an infant child, in the United States.

The Hyde Amendment, also under examination at the hearing, prohibits the use of certain taxpayer dollars in abortion cases, except in rape, incest, or to save the mother’s life.

“Today we will hear testimony on existing statutory language prohibiting taxpayer funding from paying for the taking of the lives of preborn children through abortion,” Franks said. “There is concern that the Obama administration or a potential Clinton administration may intend to reinterpret the plain and longstanding meaning of the Hyde Amendment.”

The Hyde Amendment, an appropriations policy rider that has been passed each year since 1976, has its 40th anniversary this week.

“As a black woman, I am outraged that the morally bankrupt Hyde Amendment has been permitted to persist for so long,” Kierra Johnson, executive director of Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, testified. “It is a source of pain for many women and should be a source of shame for those who support it.”

“The Hyde Amendment prevents women from even being able to make a decision about their health care,” Johnson said.

While Genevieve Plaster, a senior policy analyst at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a pro-life nonprofit organization, testified that the Hyde Amendment has saved over 2 million lives since 1976, or approximately 60,000 lives per year.

“America was founded on the concept that our rights come from God,” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said at the hearing. “When our rights come from God, how would it be possible that those rights would confer a right to kill a baby?” (For more from the author of “House Debates Protections for Babies Born Alive After Attempted Abortions” please click HERE)

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Congressional Panel Recommends the House Hold StemExpress in Contempt

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Former Planned Parenthood fetal harvesting partner StemExpress should be held in contempt of Congress, according to Republicans on a panel investigating the fetal harvesting industry.

The House Select Panel on Infant Lives’ vote was based upon a report Republicans say outlines cause to hold StemExpress and its CEO Cate Dyer in contempt for not responding to the Panel’s subpoenas and other requests and demands for information, including accounting records. The recommendation for contempt was successful, 8-0, after the Panel’s six Democrats staged a walk-out.

“Nearly one year ago our Panel was established and given the important task of investigating very disturbing allegations that some abortion clinics and middleman procurement organizations, including StemExpresss, were violating federal law by profiting from the sale of human fetal tissue,” said Panel Chair Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) in a statement after the vote. “In order to determine if these entities were in violation of federal law or if the relevant statute needs to be updated, our Panel must review all accounting and banking records.”

The Panel issued requests, then subpoenas, to StemExpress, starting in December 2015. Subpoenas were issued starting in early 2016, according to a timeline provided to the press by the Panel. A final attempt to contact StemExpress’ lawyer was made in early September.

“Nine months is enough time for an entity to produce accounting documents,” said Blackburn. “A subpoena is not a suggestion. It is a lawful order that must be complied with. If StemExpress continues to obstruct, then we will work with House leadership to determine the necessary next steps.”

For its part, StemExpress said in a statement that it has complied with the Panel’s investigation. “StemExpress offered to testify before the Select Panel, but this offer was ignored. Several House and Senate Committees have reviewed our accounting records and closed their investigations. We have provided hundreds of documents to the Select Panel, including accounting records, both voluntarily and in response to subpoenas.”

A spokesperson for StemExpress did not answer The Stream’s follow-up question about whether the company had explicitly provided the accounting information demanded by the Panel. The harvesting company’s former bank, Five Star Bancorp, likewise did not respond to a request for comment.

Press staff for the House Panel did not answer The Stream’s follow-up question about StemExpress’ claim about testifying before the Panel.

StemExpress has been in Republicans’ sights since the Center for Medical Progress’ undercover videos showed the company possibly engaging in illegal harvesting of fetal organs and other body parts. While Planned Parenthood and StemExpress parted ways shortly after the videos were made public, the Panel’s investigations show that StemExpress was providing Planned Parenthood clinics with profit in exchange for fetal parts.

It is the profit that concerns the Panel, since it violates a 1993 federal law authored by former Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman of Massachusetts. However, StemExpress said it could not cooperate with the Panel, claiming it was “gravely concerned about the safety and security risks of identifying StemExpress personnel involved in the procurement of fetal tissue.”

Blackburn and Panel staff say StemExpress’ concerns are unnecessary. “The Panel staff and the Chairman have represented publicly and to StemExpress counsel that the Panel’s policy was to keep the names of lower-level staff and researchers redacted from any public documents or reports. Indeed, the directions to such subpoena recipients provide a methodology to protect the identities of persons in functional positions.”

All of the Panel’s Democrats walked out before yesterday’s vote. In a press release, top Panel Democrat Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) said, “Chair Blackburn has manufactured a controversy over information that she does not need,” accusing Blackburn of making a “McCarthyesque threat. …” (For more from the author of “Congressional Panel Recommends the House Hold StemExpress in Contempt” please click HERE)

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Amid Fetal Tissue Investigation, Republicans Seek Legal Action Against StemExpress

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Republicans on a special House panel are recommending that StemExpress and its CEO be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over accounting records. The company came under scrutiny after last year’s undercover videos of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s top abortion provider.

Republicans on the panel, which is investigating the market for tissue from aborted babies, see the accounting records as crucial for the investigation.

“To date, the panel has never received a single accounting record from StemExpress,” Republicans on the Select Investigative Panel said in a new staff report. “No names of key personnel have been provided by [StemExpress CEO] Ms. Dyer so that the panel might conduct interviews, and the cost estimates have been ambiguous and inadequate.”

StemExpress is a for-profit biotechnology company that procures tissue from abortion clinics such as Planned Parenthood. StemExpress then transfers that tissue to medical researchers.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, chairman of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, will hold a procedural vote on Wednesday to hold the biotechnology company in contempt of Congress. Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, is aiming to force StemExpress and its CEO Catherine Dyer to comply with congressional subpoenas by using the force of the U.S. Justice Department in order to make the company release its full accounting records.

Before the Justice Department would take action against StemExpress, several more steps would need to occur after Wednesday’s vote. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will also need to hold a procedural vote before it can advance to the full U.S. House of Representatives. It is unclear when Republicans would schedule those votes with the House planning to recess at the end of September or earlier.

The Daily Signal reached out to StemExpress, which claimed it has already complied with congressional records requests.

“StemExpress offered to testify before the select panel, but this offer was ignored,” a spokesman for the company said. “Several House and Senate committees have reviewed our accounting records and closed their investigations. We have provided hundreds of documents to the select panel, including accounting records, both voluntarily and in response to subpoenas. All Americans should be concerned that a congressional panel can use the threat of contempt proceedings to support a narrative that flies in the face of the facts.”

Republicans claim that StemExpress has failed to provide investigators complete copies of accounting records in an attempt to slow walk or stonewall their efforts.

Instead, as they outlined in their latest staff report, StemExpress has provided investigators summary documents of the company’s financial records that “fell far short of actual accounting documents.” Throughout the investigation, StemExpress has maintained that releasing documents with personal information could put individuals at risk.

Questions about whether middleman companies such as StemExpress profit off the sale of fetal tissue were raised in a series of undercover videos produced by the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress. The videos featured employees at StemExpress and Planned Parenthood discussing the sale of fetal tissue. Both companies have denied illegal activity, and Planned Parenthood has since stopped taking reimbursements for fetal tissue donations.

Accounting documents, Republicans say, are needed to determine whether StemExpress profited from the sale of fetal tissue, which the 1993 National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act prohibits. However, it is legal to provide and accept payment to cover reasonable costs for “transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.”

The panel’s ranking member Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, blasted Blackburn and the select panel for attempting to hold StemExpress in criminal contempt of Congress.

“Chair Blackburn has manufactured a controversy over information that she does not need,” Schakowsky said in a press release. “Her threat to punish a small biotechnology company and its owner is particularly outrageous given the company’s compliance with her unilateral subpoena demands. The McCarthyesque threat that StemExpress ‘name names’ of all employees or face congressional contempt is disgraceful.”

Republicans sent StemExpress multiple document requests—including subpoenas—since the panel was established on Oct. 7, 2015. On Sept. 8, 2016, Blackburn “provided one last offer to Stem Express and Ms. Dyer to comply with the subpoenas.”

“Having exhausted its efforts to obtain compliance from the subpoena recipients,” the majority’s staff report reads, “Chairman Blackburn recommends that StemExpress, LLC, and Catherine Spears Dyer be held in contempt for their willful failure to fully comply with the panel’s subpoenas issued to them.” (For more from the author of “Amid Fetal Tissue Investigation, Republicans Seek Legal Action Against StemExpress” please click HERE)

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Study: Graphic Abortion Victim Images Swayed Pro-Abortion Views

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Will seeing the dismembered body of an aborted child cause people to oppose abortion? According to a new study in Canada, showing people graphic images of abortion victims convinced some to be more pro-life. And while many claim that the use of what is called “abortion victim photography” makes people react against the pro-life movement, the study found that it had the opposite effect.

Seeing pictures of the unborn victims of abortion was linked to an increase in both the pro-life worldview and pro-life political views, and made many feel more negatively about abortion and thus favor less permissive abortion laws, according to the study. This was true of everyone from those who identified themselves a completely pro-life to those who were completely pro-abortion.

Pro-abortion sentiment dropped by about seven percent, according to the study’s executive report, which also claims that the use of such images is now “scientifically established as an effective tool.”

The study, commissioned by the group Created Equal and analyzed by Jacqueline Harvey, an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, was sponsored by the Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform. Both the institute and the center are openly pro-life. Harvey also teaches political science at Tarleton State University in Texas.

A Split Movement

The study was conducted using postcards with graphic images of abortion victims distributed at mailboxes across an entire zip code and before and after phone surveys. “Most of the items were statistically significant,” Harvey told The Stream, explaining that term means that the study “rules out the possibility that the random sample interviewed the second time just ‘happened’ to be more pro-life.”

Harvey noted that the pro-life movement has long been split on whether graphic images of abortion victims sway minds in a positive way. The respondents “indicated that the change they reported was due to the images,”she said, adding that “this confirms that the images were responsible for the change.”

“The graphic images are powerful and effective,” Human Life Review’s Ifeoma Anunkor told The Stream. “I attended the National Sidewalk Counseling Symposium in August. During a training session, a leading sidewalk counselor shared that in order to make the ideal pamphlet for abortion-minded women, she asked the abortion-minded women themselves, what pictures made them change their minds about abortion. The majority of the women said the picture of an aborted fetus.”

Former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, however, was more critical. “This study does not look at the effectiveness of graphic imagery in front of abortion facilities, which is where I do not support their use,” she explained in an e-mail to The Stream.

In my experience, and the experiences of almost 300 former abortion workers, we find them to be counterproductive in front of abortion facilities. They appear threatening and only present the abortion facility as a safe haven from the protestors outside. The majority of women who have abortions have already had children. They aren’t having an abortion because they think it’s a “mass of cells.” They are having an abortion because they lack resources or support.

Graphic images have been effectively used in other human rights campaigns, such as when fighting to end slavery in the United States. However, some pro-life advocates say showing images to children is inappropriate, and that post-abortive women could face PTSD and other issues when seeing the images.

According to Johnson, “I believe we should obtain consent before ever showing any graphic material. I do not oppose people using graphic imagery in some situations, but only where the person using the images has gained consent to show them.”

Though the debate within the pro-life movement over the wisdom of using such images will continue, the study establishes that they do move people to become more pro-life and less supportive of abortion. Indeed, the study found that people who identified as “liberal” shifted more in favor of life than conservatives. (For more from the author of “Study: Graphic Abortion Victim Images Swayed Pro-Abortion Views” please click HERE)

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US Senator Introduces Bill to Ban Dismemberment Abortions Nationwide

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Dismembering a child in the womb is not merely ghastly, it should be punished with potentially crippling financial damages and multiple years in prison, according to one of the nation’s foremost pro-life leaders.

Earlier this month, Sen. James Lankford, R-OK, introduced a nationwide ban on dismemberment abortions (S. 3306).

The proposed law would make it illegal for an abortionist to “knowingly dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.”

Any abortionist found guilty of performing the procedure, commonly known as dilation and evacuation, or dilation and extraction (D&E) abortion, would be subject to fines and up to two years in prison.

The mother, or her parents if she is a minor, could also file a lawsuit in civil court against the abortionist, opening the door to massive fiscal settlements. (Read more from “US Senator Introduces Bill to Ban Dismemberment Abortions Nationwide” HERE)

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Trump Makes YUUUGE Pro-Life Commitment

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By Bryan Fischer. Voters who have wondered where Donald Trump stands on the abortion issue need wonder no longer.

Trump today made perhaps the most pronounced pro-life move a presidential nominee has ever made by declaring a specific pro-life platform for his presidency and putting a prominent and unapologetic pro-life leader in charge of his pro-life coalition . . .

Here are [some of] the specific things he pledges to do if elected president:

Nominating pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Signing into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would end painful late-term abortions nationwide.

(Read more from “Trump Makes YUUUGE Pro-Life Commitment” HERE)

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Donald Trump Calls for Permanently Banning Taxpayer Funding of Abortions

By Steven Ertelt. Donald Trump today has issued a call to make permanent the Hyde Amendment that bans almost all federal taxpayer funding of abortions and is credited with saving the lives of over 1 million Americans from abortion. Trump-‘s call comes as Hillary Clinton is campaigning in reversing Hyde and forcing Americans to fund free abortions for women with their tax dollars.

Every year, Congress is forced to fight the battle to protect Americans from being forced to pay for abortions with their tax dollars. Democrats annually fight the pro-life budget provision and hope they can eventually reverse it should they take control of both the White House and Congress.

That has led to pro-life groups calling to the adoption of a permanent law putting Hyde in place long-term and making it more difficult for pro-abortion forces to reverse. Today, Trump announced his support for such a law.

The call for banning taxpayer funding of abortions comes in a new letter from Trump. Trump commits to a new policy: “Making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions.” (Read more from “Donald Trump Calls for Permanently Banning Taxpayer Funding of Abortions” HERE)

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