Tag: abortion

UK Government Set to Ban Silent Prayer Outside Abortion Clinics

As the crackdown on free speech accelerates, the UK government is set to ban people silently praying in their heads outside abortion clinics.

MPs voted for legislation last year that would ban silent prayer within ‘buffer zones’ 150 metres around the location of a clinic or hospital providing abortion services.

However, this has not come come into force and guidance was subsequently published allowing silent prayer within ‘safe access zones’ where activists would be able to hand out leaflets and engage in conversations with women considering abortions.

The guidance stated that, “Silent prayer, being the engagement of the mind and thought in prayer towards God, is protected as an absolute right under the Human Rights Act 1998 and should not, on its own, be considered to be an offence under any circumstances.”

The issue shot to public attention in March 2023 when campaigner Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested by police for silently praying in front of a British Pregnancy Advisory Services clinic that was subject to a ‘buffer zone’ order.

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Banning Abortion Completely Backfired, Data Shows

If the goal of striking down Roe v. Wade was to decrease the number of abortions, the move has backfired spectacularly.

Why? Because the number of American women getting abortions has actually increased since the right to abortion was overturned by the US Supreme Court in June 2022, according to new research.

Specifically, according to the WeCount study published this month by the Society of Family Planning, the number of abortions nationwide has risen significantly from 86,830 at the time of the reversal to just shy of 100,000 in March 2024.

The increase, the organization says, is largely due to doctors in more abortion-friendly states providing abortion pills to patients in more restrictive states via telehealth care.

“Telehealth abortion is making a critical difference for people seeking abortion care in this increasingly restrictive environment,” WeCount cochair and University of California, San Francisco reproductive science professor Ushma Upadhyay said in a statement about the report. “Telehealth also eases the surges and cuts down on wait times at abortion clinics providing in-person abortion care, which continues to be a critical route to abortion access, accounting for 80 percent of all abortions.”

The report, which analyzed data from April 2022 to March 2024, found that abortions crested over 100,000 in January this year — the first time ever since WeCount started measuring abortion volume and data in 2022 when the US Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in the Dobbs v Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization case.

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PURE EVIL: Newly Released Undercover Video Exposes Planned Parenthood Employees Joking and Laughing While Allegedly Admitting to Selling Aborted Baby Organs and Dismembered Parts

Newly released undercover footage from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) exposes Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of aborted fetal body parts with chilling nonchalance.

The footage reveals the gruesome and inhumane practices carried out by Planned Parenthood’s Houston branch.

The footage was recorded in 2015 by David Daleiden and his team at the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) during a 2015 National Abortion Federation trade show and has only recently been made public after an eight-year legal battle.

According to CMP, “This clinic aborted babies up to 6 months and sold them for experiments until the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson ended Planned Parenthood’s abortion practice in Texas on June 24th, 2022, saving countless lives.”

In the undercover video, Dr. Ann Schutt-Ainé, Chief Medical Officer of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, and Tram Nguyen, RN and Vice President of Abortion Access at Planned Parenthood Houston, are seen discussing the gruesome details of their procedures.

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How Did Planned Parenthood Become One of the Country’s Largest Suppliers of Testosterone?

For Cristina Hineman, the situation felt urgent: the 17-year-old needed treatment at Planned Parenthood, where she knew she wouldn’t be subjected to humiliating questions, or an unnecessary waiting period, or lectures, or prying about her certainty. But it wasn’t an abortion she sought. It was testosterone.

Planned Parenthood was founded a century ago to promote birth control. Today, its nearly 600 clinics nationwide make it the largest single provider of abortion, contraception, reproductive care, and sex education in the U.S. 

It has also, in less than a decade, become the country’s leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults, according to insurance claim data. In 2015, around two dozen of their clinics began offering this service. Now it’s available at nearly 450 locations. Insurance claim information provided to The Free Press by the Manhattan Institute shows that at least 40,000 patients went to Planned Parenthood for this purpose last year alone, a number that has risen tenfold since 2017. The largest proportion, about 40 percent, were 18- to 22-year-olds.

Faced with her parents’ skepticism, Hineman waited to make an appointment for just after her 18th birthday in November 2021 at the Planned Parenthood in Hudson, NY. Some clinics offer hormones starting at age 16 with parental approval, but as a legal adult Hineman wouldn’t need their consent.

After she filled out forms in the Planned Parenthood waiting room, a nurse led her to an exam room and handed her a consent form for “masculinizing hormone therapy.” 

Records show that a nurse practitioner asked about Hineman’s identity and desires; she noted that “patient has consulted with a mental health provider”—meaning Hineman had previously talked to therapists. The two discussed the “expected changes” related to testosterone—growing a beard and body hair, deepening voice, and that “changes to fertility may be permanent or reversible.” 

Then the first nurse took Hineman’s blood, and she was given a prescription for testosterone gel. She remembers all this taking under 30 minutes. 

Like many others in the rising wave of female teens seeking to masculinize, she had been battling a cluster of mental health problems: self-harm, depression, and anxiety. Also like many of these teens, Hineman has autism. The Covid lockdown exacerbated her troubles. She told me, “I couldn’t see my friends, I couldn’t see my girlfriend. I was depressed and scared, in my room ruminating all the time.” 

The viral YouTubers she was watching convinced her that gender was the problem. “I was like, oh my god, trans includes all the things I’ve been feeling—my discomfort with my chest, my discomfort with being called ‘young woman,’ not being sure of who I was or what I wanted to be,” she said. 

Just over a year into treatment, Hineman realized she had made a terrible mistake, and that gender was not the source of her problems. “I was brainwashed,” she says now. “A lot of people say that adults should be able to do whatever they want. But if you have mental illness that’s clouding your view, or you’re so misinformed about what gender dysphoria even means, then you cannot consent to such invasive treatments.”

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Outrageous: Biden’s Defense Department Labels Pro-Life Organizations as “Terrorist Organizations” During Anti-Terrorism Briefing

The Biden regime’s Defense Department has taken an unprecedented step by categorizing pro-life organizations as “terrorist organizations” during an anti-terrorism briefing held at Fort Liberty’s Directorate of Emergency Services, formerly known as Fort Bragg, on Wednesday.

This deeply concerning slide from an anti-terrorism brief was first exposed by citizen journalist Sam Shoemate, or @samour, on X.

“An anti-terrorism brief was held on Fort Liberty (Bragg) today where they listed several Pro-Life organizations as “terrorist organizations.” The slide you see here followed right after a slide about ISIS, a terror group in the Middle East,” Shoemate wrote on X.

The presentation slide, which has since circulated widely on social media, lists these pro-life organizations that oppose “Roe[sic] v. Wade” under a headline reading “TERRORIST GROUPS.”

The presentation specifically targets groups like National Right to Life and Operation Rescue, which have long been pillars of the pro-life community.

These organizations are dedicated to peaceful advocacy against abortion, grounded in the belief that every life is valuable and worth protecting.

The slide shockingly equates their activities, such as demonstrations, protests, mass demonstrations, Life Chain, The Rescue, The Truth Display, and picketing, along with counseling efforts at sidewalks and crisis centers, with terrorism.

It lists these legitimate forms of protest and counseling alongside heinous crimes like bombings and attempted murders.

Demonstrations, mass gatherings, and sidewalk counseling are all constitutionally protected activities under the First Amendment. Yet, this presentation portrays them in the same light as violent acts.

The pro-life movement has a rich history of non-violent advocacy, including iconic events like the March for Life, which draws hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators to Washington, D.C., each year. Yet, the presentation disregards this legacy, instead painting a skewed picture that associates pro-life advocacy with violence and extremism.

The slide also displayed a New York license plate bearing the text “IM4IT” and a design promoting the “Choose Life” message.

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New Survey Finds Abortions Increased Slightly in 2023, Despite Widespread Bans

According to new research, about 8,000 women per month obtained abortion pills in late 2023, despite living in states that have bans or severe restrictions on telemedicine abortion or abortion access. The survey also found that the abortion rate in 2023 was slightly higher than in 2022, despite total abortion bans in more than a dozen states.

“The number of abortions in the United States remained consistently elevated compared to pre-Dobbs levels, even as 14 states have banned abortion completely,” reads a Tuesday press release. “This elevated volume of abortion may be due in part to the expansion of telehealth abortion care, which made up 19% of all abortion care nationwide by December 2023.”

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, a rash of states jumped to ban abortion entirely or place severe restrictions on the practice. Nearly two years later, 14 states have completely banned abortion, and three more have banned it after six weeks into the pregnancy.

However, research has indicated that the total number of U.S. abortions didn’t necessarily go down following Roe‘s overturn. In the one survey released Tuesday by the abortion-rights group Society of Family Planning, the total number of abortions seemed to increase modestly in 2023 when compared to the year before.

The survey, called #WeCount, found that in 2022, there were around 82,000 abortions per month. In 2023, the rate had gone up to 86,000—even after excluding a bump in abortion numbers coming from women who obtained otherwise illegal telemedicine abortions under abortion-provider-protecting “shield laws.”

Further, the survey found that by December 2023, almost one in five U.S. abortions are provided through telehealth. Surprisingly, around half of these abortions occurred in states where telehealth abortion is otherwise illegal or severely restricted. While the survey found that around 17,000 women per month from October to December 2023 were prescribed abortion pills by telehealth, 8,000 of these prescriptions went to women who lived in states where telehealth abortion is banned.

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SCOTUS shocked by Biden administration’s view of federal power over states in ER abortion challenge

To convince the Supreme Court that the Biden administration could use federal Medicare funding to force hospitals to perform abortions in violation of Idaho law, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar conceived and gave birth to some unusual arguments Wednesday.

She reached for a 129-year-old precedent that crippled the labor movement for decades, neutered legal obligations to the “unborn child” in the federal law that allegedly requires abortions in certain situations, and didn’t deny a Republican administration could use her rationale to functionally ban abortion and even transgender care nationwide.

Such is the federal government’s interest in ensuring that abortion-minded women can use emergency rooms to terminate pregnancies as conservative states approve new abortion restrictions, or reinstate old ones, under the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Backed by 22 conservative states and sued by the feds, Idaho challenged the Biden administration’s use of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act as a “super-statute” that overrides its Defense of Life Act, which includes criminal penalties and loss of license, and “turns emergency rooms into a federal enclave where state standards of care do not apply.”

While Prelogar faced skepticism from GOP-appointed justices about the massive expansion of federal power her argument implied, a recurring point of confusion for the whole bench was how much “daylight” stood between EMTALA, designed to stop “patient-dumping,” and Idaho’s law.

The former requires “immediate medical attention” when the health of the individual or “unborn child” would otherwise face “serious jeopardy, serious impairment to bodily functions, or serious dysfunction of bodily organs.” The latter has one health-related abortion exception: “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

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Arkansas reveals plans for new ‘monument to the unborn’ at state capitol which will commemorate fetuses aborted between 1973 and 2022 before procedure was outlawed

Arkansas officials have unveiled plans for a ‘monument to the unborn’ to commemorate fetuses aborted in the years before the procedure was outlawed in the state.

The monument will be situated at the state’s Capitol to mark pregnancies terminated from 1973 to 2022 when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Arkansas made abortion illegal except to save a mother’s life.

Proposals for the memorial included a bronze statue of a blindfolded baby sat atop an umbilical chord and placenta, an empty tomb and a monument incorporating facts about children in the care system.

Nine submissions were received in total, with the Capitol Arts and Grounds favoring a living wall composed of flora and fauna designed by local artist Lakey Goff. 

Secretary of State John Thurston will make the final decision on the $55,472 monument.

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Governor poised to sign law making kids watch animated fetal videos from anti-abortion group

In Tennessee, whether parents like it or not, Republican Gov. Bill Lee is poised to sign a law that will make public school children watch an animated video on fetal development backed by an anti-abortion group, or some equivalent of it, after lawmakers in the state vaulted the legislation to passage.

The law, known as the Baby Olivia Act, first passed in the state’s House in March on a 67-23 vote and then sailed through the Senate last week, 21-6. The roughly three-minute animation created by the nonprofit anti-abortion group Live Action bills itself as a “Never Before Seen Look at Human Life in the Womb” and would be shown to public school children as part of the state’s family health curriculum.

Among other features in the video, it depicts sperm fertilizing an ovum and it is here that it declares: “This is the moment that life begins. A new human being has come into existence.” The animated video states that a fetus can recognize lullabies in the womb and depicts a purported fetus at 27 weeks gazing through a translucent womb while pressing its fingers against it. The shadow of the mother’s fingers press back.

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Frozen Embryos Are Now Children Under Alabama Law

Frozen embryos are “children” under Alabama law, the state’s Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state.

Frozen embryos are “unborn children” and “unborn children are ‘children,'” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court’s main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos.

The ruling seems to represent a turn toward judicial activism among members of Alabama’s Supreme Court, which for a long time held that the law’s text could not justify reading it to include “unborn children”—let alone frozen embryos.

It also portends a creeping Christian conservatism into court decisions, with Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker citing the Bible in his legal reasoning. In a concurring opinion, Parker justifies prohibitions on murder not by invoking classical liberal principles, like natural rights, but rather on the basis of “Man’s creation in God’s image” and the “you shall not murder” edict of the Sixth Commandment. “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself,” Parker writes.

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