I believe that Mr. Saletan's analysis reflects either a greatly distorted perception or a highly tendentious presentation of what is really going on, but for the moment I will confine myself to a few points of clarification and elaboration.

I referred to the capable Rachel Laser of Third Way as a "career pro-abortion activist" because that is what she is. Before joining Third Way, she was an attorney with the "reproductive rights" project at the National Women's Law Center. Before that she was general counsel to Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, a major abortion provider. In my opinion, nowadays she continues to pursue the same policy goals by other means, utilizing what in military terminology are termed "false flag operations." By this I mean that Third Way is devoted to advancing and consolidating the public policy goals of the pro-abortion lobby, with a methodology that employs misleading rhetoric, labels, and props intended to disguise the substance of that agenda, and to provide political camouflage for the pro-abortion politicians who adopt their approach. As one example, we see a politician (Barack Obama) who has never supported the slightest limitation on abortion, and who is pushing hard for health care legislation that would result in the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade, proceeding behind cover of a Third-Way-style smokescreen that is purely rhetorical (seeking "abortion reduction," "common ground," etc.).

Mr. Saletan fails to appreciate that the Ryan-DeLauro bill is little more than a prop in this political charade. Mr. Saletan is looking square at a Potemkin village, and he is most interested in discussing the details of the plumbing. Why did Third Way sponsor a "common ground" press conference on Capitol Hill on July 23? Ostensibly to promote the Ryan-DeLauro "abortion reduction" bill, but really, for the primary purpose of furthering the abortion lobby's attempts to undercut efforts by bona fide pro-life members of the House of Representatives [led by Chris Smith, Republican of New Jersey; Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan; and Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania] to amend the Obama-backed health care legislation to prevent subsidies and mandates for abortion. (Here again, Ryan is just the front man -- the power brokers are Speaker Pelosi, Congressman Henry Waxman, and the White House.) On July 21, two days before the Third Way "common ground" press conference, Ryan sent a public letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposing a "common ground" compromise on abortion in the health care legislation. I'll spare you the details of the subtext here: the bottom line is, under the Ryan-Pelosi-Waxman scheme, the huge new federal subsidies would flow to health plans that fund elective abortions. That would be a big victory for the pro-abortion side, because currently, nobody has federally subsidized abortion coverage -- not in Medicaid, not the military, not federal employees. Under the Obama-backed legislation, with or without the phony Ryan language, we could see 70 million or more Americans with federally subsidized coverage of elective abortions.

Not to put too fine a point on it: The "common ground" that President Obama and Third Way seek for the pro-life movement is the burial ground.

Mr. Saletan's statement that "Ryan has stood up for unborn life, vote after vote after vote after vote," regrettably does not comport with Mr. Ryan's actual voting record. Early in his congressional career, Ryan cast some pro-life votes and some pro-abortion votes. (As an example of the latter, in 2004 he voted to repeal the ban on elective abortions in U.S. military facilities.) Since 2007, however, Mr. Ryan's record has not been mixed -- he did not cast a single pro-life vote in 2007, 2008, or 2009. Ryan's most recent abortion-related vote occurred in the House Appropriations Committee on July 7, 2009, when he voted against all the real pro-lifers and in favor of repealing the longstanding ban on funding elective abortions, with funds appropriated by Congress, in the District of Columbia. Ryan advocates letting D.C. (a federal jurisdiction) pay for abortion on demand, with funds appropriated by Congress, under a paper bookkeeping scheme. The result, if enacted, will be funding of 4,000 or 5,000 abortions annually with congressionally appropriated funds, including about 1,000 abortions a year that would not happen otherwise. In a subsequent press interview, Ryan said, "This bill doesn't provide public funding for abortions," a transparent falsehood; all D.C. funds are appropriated by Congress.

Ryan got his friend, Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fl.), to sign his July 21 letter to Pelosi, another illustration of the complete phoniness of this initiative. Meek has been in the House since 2003 and he has never, ever cast a pro-life vote on any abortion-related issue -- not even on partial-birth abortion, parental notification, or fetal homicide. He's voted on the other side more than 30 times. In fact, as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Meek actually voted against the amendments to remove abortion mandates and abortion subsidies from the Obama-backed health care bill, on July 16-17.

Obviously, Ryan and Meek are confident that many journalists will accept their self-chosen characterizations on any given day of the week, without really checking their records or their credentials. It appears that this confidence is often well founded. In fact, the entire Third Way "false flag" strategy relies heavily on this sort of willing gullibility that many journalists are willing to adopt on certain issues.

It should be noted that the organization called Democrats for Life of America, not generally described as a "militant" group, kicked Ryan off their advisory board last year -- and no, it wasn't because he supports contraception.

Anyone interested in seeing Mr. Ryan's complete record on NRLC-scored House floor votes can go here:
<link>
Click on the "Votes" tab, then click on "More Key Votes."

The same sort of display can easily be obtained for Meek or for any other incumbent member of Congress, simply by entering the lawmaker's last name into the search tool.

By the way, there is an omnibus "abortion reduction" bill that has been languishing in the Democratic-controlled Congress for months, the Pregnant Women Support Act (H.R. 2035, S. 1032), sponsored by Congressman Lincoln Davis (D-Tn.) and 39 others, and by Senators Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Ben Nelson (D-Ne.), endorsed by Democrats for Life of America and many other groups, which Mr. Saletan failed to mention. That bill does not contain any restrictions on abortion, but there are sections that recognize that there exists such an entity as an unborn child, which makes the bill unacceptable to those pro-abortion advocacy groups.

Douglas Johnson
Legislative Director
National Right to Life Committee
Washington, D.C.
202-626-8820
Legfederal@aol.com
http://www.nrlc.org

My mother is a nurse. She graduated nursing school in 1961 and went to work in a busy emergency room right away, at the age of 20. Blood doesn't freak her out. Gore doesn't bother her, either. All you have to do is work a couple of Saturday nights in an inner-city emergency room and you either get over it or get lost. Good so far?

One thing bothered her, and she saw it over and over for years, generally a couple of cases a month. This is only to demonstrate that the story she tells is not isolated. She had to deal with similar events on a regular basis. Keep in mind that we're talking about a petite blond 20-year old kid who looked about 15 at the time.

One night, just after the dinner hour, a family brought in their 14-year-old daughter. She had gotten pregnant (I guess now it would be statutory rape, at the time, that was the age of consent), and since she was in Grade Nine, decided that she just could not have that baby. Could. Not. Her parents would not help her, they were highly religious and told her that having a baby was proper punishment for being a whore. They pulled her out of school.

The girl was frantic. She managed to get out of the house one day and ran to a friend who had "heard" that you could give yourself an abortion with a Coke bottle. Probably you're too young to remember that old saw. So they did. She started to bleed, and the kids figured that was the baby coming out, so they got her back to her house.

Her mother walked in. By this point the kid was bleeding badly. She was terrified. Her family allowed to to bleed on that bed for four hours while they "prayed on it", before they got scared and took her to the hospital.

That's where my mother came in. She was part of the team that took this child into a room and started to take a history. The parents walked out. They told my mother that this child was a whore and a baby-killer and they were finished with her. An OB/GYN came in. He heard the work "abortion" and walked out. He refused to treat her. He left her bleeding on a gurney. Two other doctors refused to treat her.

My mother was panicking. She couldn't even get someone to hang a unit of blood. She finally managed to get hold of a doctor that was also a friend of hers. He was there delivering a baby and had left the room because it was going to be several hours before he was needed. He ordered a surgical team, blood and was scrubbing for surgery, but it was too late. The girl died while she was being prepped. She had lost too much blood while everyone was heaping abuse on her, and the state of technology in 1961 was not what it is now.

So tell me. Did that little girl deserve to die? Can you honestly tell me that a fourteen year old child should be forced into a situation where the only way she saw to survive was to risk death? Do you think those doctors who looked a kid in the eye as she was crying and begging for help did the right thing? Really?

As I said, there were many young women that came to that emergency room in that condition. Keep in mind that this was only one of three emergency rooms in that area. After the second time my mother (not much more than a kid herself) was left holding the hand of a crying teenager and watching her die, she promised herself that she would do whatever it took to help these little girls.

She, another nurse, and the doctor that did try to help arranged to call each other when these kids came in. Even if they couldn't save their fertility, even if the surgery was a risk, they did what they could to keep these kids from paying the ultimate price. They didn't get them all, of course, since there were times when none of them were on shift and available.

I know that you've somehow managed to twist your mind around this, that you see no moral implications in the way these young women were treated. I'm certain that you think the doctors and nurses who refused to treat them did the right thing. I don't doubt in the least that you'll try and dismiss what I'm saying and pretend that I'm "just another pro-choice nut". I don't really care about what you think, or even what your organization thinks.

I know only one thing. The only pro-life person who showed up to help that crying kid was my mother. Not the doctors who walked away. Not the nurses who pretended not to hear my mother yelling for help. Not the parents, who thought that their daughter deserved to die. None of them. They were the murderers. The very thought that these people managed to convince themselves that they were somehow on the side of the angels sickens me.

When abortion is illegal, women die. If you think they deserve to, or that somehow making abortions illegal will stop desperate women from trying to have them, then you are sorely mistaken. There's nothing "pro-life" about that.

Horrible story. Horrible too that you take the wrong moral from it.

The parents and those with a duty of care to the teenage mother derogated their responsibilities.

The parents worked on the principle “I will give parental care to my child when I decide” rather than the principle “I am a parent because I have a child in my care”. If the parents were professed Christians they failed the “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers or sisters that you do to me” and are at great risk explained further in the passage.

Abortion works on the same principle “I will give parental care to my child when I decide”.

The State when it proposes abortion as reasonable, and doctors (working under the Hippocratic oath) willingly go along they both repeat the hateful principle in loco parentis and propagate it encouraging a vulnerable mother to act on the same principle herself ‘parental care can be taken away when you decide’. In other words “you are at liberty to destroy your child.”

Abortion is not a solution, it is the attempt to make a problem disappear but it makes everything worse. Society cannot take it much longer, it is corrupting the whole nation.

It is for this reason that many great thinkers acknowledge abortion as the abolition of slavery or the civil rights issue of our time.

If abortions had been safe and legal that girl would still be alive. THOUSANDS of women would still be here if they had access to safe, legal abortions performed by physicians who were trained in the procedure.

You will never stop women from having abortions. NEVER. It's going to happen no matter what your fantasy fantasy world looks like. Throughout the history of the planet, women have gotten abortions. A lot of them died, for no other reason than some man decided that they deserved death.

I understand that you think slavery is a good thing, because that's what forcing women to bear unwanted children is. It is slavery. Do us all the courtesy of acknowledging what you really want to happen.

I also understand that you don't have a problem killing young women. You don't mind that they die. You're ok with watching them die.

Answer me this:

1. Could you look your daughter in the eye and tell her that she was bleeding to death because you think it's a better alternative than a legal abortion? Really? If you can, you don't even deserve to be called human.

2. You chose not to answer the base question that I asked in the post. Are you all right with what those health professionals did? Really? Do you think it's all right to ignore a dying child who knows she's dying?



If being "pro-life" means justifying those hundreds of women's deaths by pretending that their fetuses were more important than they are, then I say that you are NOT pro-life in the least. You are pro-death. You are no better than any other mass murderer in history.

That is one fine post you have there Mr. Johnson. But by using the term "pro-abortion" you show that you are one lying dishonest piece of shit.

Pro-abortion, pro-abortion, pro-abortion. And yet Third way uses "misleading rethortic, labels and props intended to disguise the substance of their agenda." Not you though.

To my mind the term pro-abortion means in favor of abortion. I'm still waiting for someone to name one sane person, any sane person who is in favor of abortions.

This debate is about and has always been about the rights of women to determine for themselves what course to take, what options they have when dealing with a pregnancy. nothing more. There may be women who have no qualms about getting an abortion, but that doesn't mean they like it. Unless of course, you can provide a name.

Tell me Mr. Johnson, are you doing God's work?

if better preventative options were easily available to everyone, the entire abortion issue would be moot. but as long as you have women who can't afford and/or get access to birth control, are told by their faith/communities that birth control is wrong, or who feel that the birth controls we have developed are dangerous to their health, abortion (whether legal or illegal) will always be on the table.

Those that call themselves "pro-life" would spend their money and time better by addressing these problems and preventing the need for an abortion rather than making the arguments you espouse.

That was a vile rant with a tiny kernel of an argument. Don’t do that again. Subtracting the inexcusable abuse all that you are left saying is that somehow believing the unborn deserve protection leads to denying medical care to women. It was silly the first time you argued it but I responded politely; you just restated it as if it were a rebuttal.

Perhaps a different approach: one in the form of an appeal, you may find yourself in the position to save a life.

I urge you, if a woman comes to you fearing all that an unplanned pregnancy means (there is no such thing as an unwanted child only adults who do not want to care for the child) that you encourage her that though she may not feel it she can find the courage to deal with her situation. You may be able to help in other ways, there are many organisations too that would go out of their way to help.

Resist the urge to go along with all the voices; family, doctors, her friends, and likely the father – that will be insisting or subtly pressuring her into killing her child; She will already feel isolated. Once upon a time extended family, the father and medical staff felt the strong moral obligation as well as the legal pressure to care for the mother and child. Not anymore – they can defer to the law, which proposes (the law being a moral teacher) that abortion is reasonable and hence, in an evil inversion, suggest giving birth to her daughter or son a selfish imposition on them!

Vincent M. Rue, reported in the Medical Science Monitor, that 64% of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. Another, Frederica Mathewes-Green in her book Real Choices, discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.

You can be one to stop this despicable playing off of the mother against her child. It is a relationship that should be fostered and nurtured, it is one of the most precious things in the world. Women are at the centre of the mystery of creation at this point, all life flows from women, our Saviour entered the world through a woman. Resist the evil misogynistic forces who want to wipe out this female power, who lie to women when they say her freedom lies in the decision to kill her daughter.

You can be one to stop this callousness extending to the elderly, the disabled, the less than healthy. You can be one to stop the attack on the dignity of the human person.

Given all the female children killed in the womb, you can stand up for females in the womb who will grow up to give birth themselves and so reinforce female reproductive rights. You can stand up for the liberty of women by celebrating motherhood celebrating the power and influence of women who we rely on to produce and determine the character of the next generation. You can stand up for women’s liberty by defending their right to life at all stages of development and by defending the right to life uphold universal human rights all over the world.

Abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. It hurts women. It can never be acceptable as a solution to our human predicaments, the billions given to abortion corporations should be used to provide for the women who need help with their pregnancy. And we should all pitch in.

Truely, spoken like someone who will never get pregnant.

If 64% feel pressured from others, what about the other 36%? not a small number.

You might get away with that crap with your wife and daughters, but I am no man's property, and my will is my own. I realize that frightens you, but I find myself not caring about that.

You still haven't answered my question, either, I'm guessing you're frightened of the implications behind that, too. Women are human beings with free will. They aren't going to be breeders for your "adoption only" cause. I understand that you don't think we're capable of taking care of ourselves, but that's your opinion, and truthfully, it doesn't really count in the wide world.

When abortion is illegal, women die. They die because they know and understand that there are circumstances and situations that are clearly beyond your capability to comprehend. They die because men tell them that that they aren't valuable enough to bother with as human beings. They die because men like you treat them like animals and would enslave them by forcing them to bear unwanted children.

You prove in every post you make that you think that is just punishment for anyone who would dare disagree with you. Your hatred and fear of women rings out loud in every sentence. Go away, troll. You have nothing to add to this or any discussion of women or their health.

So, by taking away the right to choose, we would be "stand[ing] up for women's liberty"?

Talk about an "evil inversion"! Is it opposite day, or something? I think I've just been mindfucked to the point where nothing makes sense anymore.

Even if you were right, making abortion illegal isn't going to make parents take care of their kids. Can you honestly say in that situation, when her parents had left her, the state should let that child die? If 'elective abortion' is illegal, doctors will be too scared of prosecution by rabid pro-life groups that theyy will be afraid to perform even those abortions that are 'necessary'.

I find it to be the pinnacle of hypocrisy that American conservatives, who are constantly screeching about their fear of 'big government deciding what I can do,' find it so easy to believe that the government should be able to decide an individual's fate, if that individual is a pregnant woman. I'm sorry, but if you think that story is an argument for criminalizing abortion, then you are sick and heartless.

It's possible to be sane and pro-abortion in some situations. In cases where the mother will die if an abortion is not performed, I'm not just pro-choice, I'm pro-abortion. That doesn't mean I think it would be ok for the government to force someone to decide that way; it means that in those circumstances, that is what I would do, given the options. In most other situations, I am either agnostic or in opposition to abortions. But I will fight to keep them legal, because I'd rather have been aborted than have been born only to live in slavery, undergoing pregnancy regardless of whether I could maintain physical and psychological health by doing so.

Actually, I think it's "Bring Your Crack-Pipe to Work Day." Brought to you by the Coalition of Anti-Choice Morons.