This is a comment I left on the Huffington Post in response to an article titled, "Pro-Life Pharmacies Refusing Contraceptives But Selling Viagra". While I don't have an issue with the article, I do have an issue with the misuse of the term "pro-life" ... both here and in general.

Read what the Republicans Wish You Wouldn’t

Today's Daily Flipper - McCain Flips on Environment and Abortion Edition you will read:
If You Don’t Like John McCain’s Environmental Position, Just Wait Five Minutes
McCain Advisor Forced To Resign
Here Comes The Exodus
Another Installment Of McCain 2.0

Read all the detail and take action on the flip. Flip it good.

War and abortion, for better or worse, are part of our reality.  But in both cases, there is a choice to be made.  A lot of Americans oppose, on moral grounds, the elective termination of pregnancy, and consider themselves to be "anti-abortion."  The majority of Americans, however, believe abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.  Those that support a woman’s right to choose are inevitably labeled "pro-abortion" by their detractors and media sympathizers.  No one is pro-abortion.  That label implies that there is a conscious effort to increase the number of abortions; that there is benefit to be derived from abortions.  The label is tired and ridiculous.

Day after MLK day, and I'm on my way to work, half asleep and thinking grumpily about what I have to accomplish today.  But loud voices and crowds at the Metro (subway) station wake me up.  Milling groups of young teens with their school names on jackets, hats or backpacks.  Oh no! I forgot that this is the week we're inundated with parochial school children dragged to Washington D.C. by their priests, pastors, teachers or administrators to protest a woman's right to choose.  
Most of these kids haven't the slightest interest in the subject of their trip to Washington.  Listen in on their conversations and you hear the standard fare of 11-16 year olds.  Who likes who.  What Jenny bought at the mall.  Will they be able to go to the Air and Space Museum?  When they going to get their driver's license.  What Ryan said to Courtney.  Not a word about the "unborn" or dead babies.  They're not here because of what they believe or care about.  They're here because their school instructs them what to believe and obliges them to parade those beliefs.

WHY I REPOSTED: Apologies for reposting this diary from yesterday, and to anyone from the diary rescue (i'm very flattered to have been rescued) who couldn't find it.  Someone had posted some comments that they wanted taken down, and I couldn't figure out how to do it except by deleting the original post.  I'm sorry to lose all the other wonderful comments, and apologize is I broke a serious Kossack rule.  If so, I can delete this again.

My wife Maureen and I have an incredible little girl named Kendy.  She’s three and a half years old, smart as a whip, polite, tall and skinny (how the hell did that happen?), beautiful, funny, happy and playful.  She loves to sing and dance and play, and we caught her singing the old Pete Seeger classic "Which Side Are You On?" and my heart about burst.

Of course, she’s also stubborn and willful (I know where that comes from!) and gets really angry sometimes when things don’t go her way.  She and I have some pretty serious fights (as serious as they can be with a three year old) that always end in hugs and both of us crying.

Today's NY Times has the story of a recent string of terrorist attacks in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A rash of attacks on abortion and family planning clinics has struck Albuquerque this month, the first such violence there in nearly a decade....

The attacks came just weeks after the Albuquerque clinic run by a nationally known abortion provider, Dr. Curtis Boyd, was destroyed by arsonists on Dec. 6.

Someone slipped a little known provision into the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that forbids pharmaceutical companies from selling prescription contraceptives to college and community clinics at steep discounts, causing prices to double or triple for people at the lower income ends.

"What happened here is what happened everywhere: The price went up," said Jeanne Galatzer-Levy of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We are a state institution, so we’re not in a position to do something different."

At the University of Montana, the price of a NuvaRing, another birth control method, rose to $36 from $18, said Allyson Hagen, the state director of Naral Pro-Choice America. "This is a state school where people are on Pell grants and don’t have huge amounts of spending money," Ms. Hagen said. "For them this is like a choice — groceries or birth control."

In a move worthy of Jerry Falwell who blamed 9/11 on "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians", crazed anti-abortion pastor Matt Trewhella of Missionaries to the Preborn sent the following E-Mail out today to his flock:

Subject: The Righteous Judgment of God
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:00:18 +0000

Dear Friends,

Last week I groaned when I read how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill into law in California which foisted homosexuality upon the children of that state through the state school system. The bill was SB777 and it clearly redefines (perverts) what sexuality is, as well as promotes the legitmacy of homosexuality upon children starting from kindergarten on up. He signed the bill on Saturday, October 13th.

Seven days later on October 20th, wildfires broke out across California in  several places.

More of this crap below the fold.

I just received the following e-mail from Planned Parenthood of Aurora, Illinois.

Dear X,

Finally! Just minutes ago we received our occupancy permit from city of Aurora Mayor, Tom Weisner and we will be OPEN FOR BUSINESS TOMORROW!

Instead of holding a rally at city hall tomorrow night, we invite you to attend a press conference at our Aurora health center to celebrate our first day of business! Here are the details

What: Press Conference
Where: Aurora Planned Parenthood Health Center, 3051 E. New York Street, Aurora, IL
When: Tuesday, October 2, at 10 am

*We encourage anyone who is interested to attend the Aurora city council meeting on their own to monitor the discussion, but we will not be rallying outside city hall.
While it's a travesty that the opening of our health center became such a politicized issue, we never could have won this battle without the incredible support of pro-choice residents in Aurora, Naperville, and other local communities, as well as our supporters throughout the state and the nation. Thank you to every person that stood up for us at City Council, that rallied at City Hall, that gave a donation, that signed a petition, and that supported us in so many ways during this fight.

Last night, September 25th, I attended the City Council meeting in Aurora, Illinois to support the new Planned Parenthood facility in my neighborhood.  From the outside of the building, where over 300 of the clinic's supporters were gathered, compared to perhaps 30-50 of the anti-abortion protesters, it all looked just peachy.  Once inside, however, the view was a little different.  

Several days before the scheduled City Council meeting, I called the number provided on the Planned Parenthood website to ask the mayor to sign the occupancy permit, then called and requested to speak at the City Council meeting and was put on the list.  At that point I thought all was fine, and girded my agoraphobic loins to get up in front of strangers to make my salient points on why this clinic is important to the community.

A victory for reproductive rights!

From the NY Times, September 12: Court Won't Rule on Life's Beginnings

A doctor is under no obligation to tell a pregnant woman that she is carrying "an existing human being" before performing an abortion, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled today in a decision that had been eagerly awaited by both foes and supporters of abortion rights in this country.

The 5-to-0 decision came in a case brought in 1996 by Rosa Acuna, who was 29 years old and married when she and her husband, who already had two children, agreed to an abortion about six to eight weeks into her pregnancy.

Convicted anti-abortion terrorists Don Benny Anderson, and brothers Matthew Moore and Wayne Moore, were supposed to be released from jail and into a halfway house yesterday, September 11, 2007.  

Don Benny Anderson was convicted in 1982 of kidnapping the owner of an abortion clinic and his wife in Illinois.  The doctor was forced at gunpoint to make an audio recording urging then President Reagan to oppose abortion, even though Reagan already did.  After 8 days in fearful captivity, the couple were released unharmed, but have remained relatively low profile since then.  Anderson was scheduled to be released yesterday from Federal Prison into a halfway house near the clinic after spending 24 of his 30 year sentence in jail.  The infamous Army of God claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.

While the media is obsessed with foreign terrorists and the Petreaus report and the fear of Iraq, Iran, AlQuida, Osama Bin Laden, and other boogey-men, these three bonafide convicted terrorists will be walking the streets.  But wait, these dudes are "White Christians", so never mind.  The chilling details of their crimes are below the fold.

By Tyler LePard.

Friday morning four Republican 2008 presidential candidates addressed the second day of the annual National Right to Life Convention (NRLC) in Kansas City, Missouri, reiterating their opposition to abortion.

HARD TRUTH, AND ANOTHER HARD TRUTH ABOUT ABORTION  

                By
   William F. Harrison, MD, FACOG

Just after Dr Slepian was murdered in Nov., 1998, I invited a local Pro-Life preacher to join me in a seminar with a four member panel consisting of him, me, a Pro-Choice minister and a Pro-Life physician of his choosing to try to make the issue less prone to incite violence, at least in our community.  (In 1985 my office was firebombed by a 14 year old boy who had just seen The Silent Scream at his fundamentalist Baptist church)  In my proposed formate we were each to select a video from our libraries supporting our position, one to be shown before each seminar.  I requested that he take the first opportunity at setting the tone of the discussion by showing his on the first night.  We were to devote two nights of two hours sponsored by the Political Science student honors group at the University of Arkansas here in Fayetteville.  The Baptist preacher I had asked told me that he was as interested as I in reducing the potential for violence in our community, so he would choose his "least inflammatory video" to showcase on the first evening.  This fundamentalist preacher brought Hard Truth as his contribution to "reducing" the potential for violence.  Both the minister on my side and I were blindsided by the grossly inflammatory nature of this video which neither of us had ever seen nor heard of, but that has been "out there" since just before the first murderous attacks on abortion providers occured in Springfield, MO - about 90 miles from Fayetteville - in 1991.  I responded to Hard Truth the next week before I introduced my video.    

What follows this introduction is what I call, Another Hard Truth.  I wrote this in response to that militantly fundamentalist preacher's inflammatory material that was shown to the 250 people in the hall that night, some of whom, like the Baptist preacher I had mistakenly invited to try to quel the violence in our community, might have been inclined to cause me great harm.  The Rev., instead of attemping to quel the possibility of violence, in my opinion, was doing his passive/aggressive best to get me killed.  Fortunately for me, the entire two night event, without Hard Truth, was shown again and again on our local Open Channel public TV station, for much of the next several months.  I suppose this must have backfired on him, since I am still kicking.

I had a serious head injury in Feb 2004.  It took me 7 months to get back to my practice and another seven months to get all my operating room priviledges back.  After the injury, my wife wanted me to retire.  But I told her I would not retire as long as I could provide abortion care for my patients in need of this service, and as long as I could safely and adequately perform my hospital work.  As I think I said in my recent diary, Why I Provide Abortions, (though if I didn't, I will say it here) I feel I have been given a great blessing in being able to do this work for so many years, and I intend to continue as long as I am able.    

In the Book of Revelation, there are listed the infamous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Traditionally, these Horsemen are thought to represent War, Famine, Pestilance and Death.  Militant Christian fundamentalist religion of the sort this Baptist preacher attempted to foster in my hometown, along with militant fundamentalism of nearly every faith, has created all over the world for thousands of years, all the elements, including war, famine and pestilence, that has led to the suffering and deaths of millions of real sentient human beings all over the world for thousands of years.  

WARNING:  Militant Fundamentalist Religion may be dangerous to
         your health.

I know it is to mine.        

http://members.aol.com/...

Noting the very moving accounts on the abortion threads recently, I thought it would be apt to post an analysis of abortion from the Bible itself.

The website is Biblical Errancy -- the best and most comprehensive website in existence on Biblical errors.  Well, at least I dare you to find a better one.

In order to defend an anti-abortion position from a Biblical perspective, the Biblical apologist would have to wade through a large and varied number of Biblical passages and do interpretation gymnastics to boot -- and in the end -- still would be unable to find anything concrete.

As a woman and the mother of a daughter, I am extremely upset over the decision handed down this week by the Supreme Court on partial birth abortion.  Not only is the decision unbelievably paternalistic in holding that the government should be able to save women from themselves, but it essentially holds that the potential life of fetus is more valuable than the life of the woman carrying it.

But what is really bothering me is the message that is not getting out and which should be trumpeted over and over again by pro-abortion groups.

They say that you should not ask how sausages and laws are made.  Perhaps they should add Supreme Court decisions.  Roe v Wade was decided on January 22, 1973 - one day after Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second, and ultimately incomplete, term.  This was not an accident, but rather part of a complicated dance between Nixon, Chief Justice Warren Burger, and Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion.  The reasoning behind the opinion was the result of long and hard bargaining among the justices, with ego playing almost as large a role as logic.

OK, it's Sunday, January 28, 2007, and Tim Russert has on his show, for openers, Mike Huckabee - former Republican governor of Arkansas. Mr. Huckabee announced to Tim's question that he would be filing on Monday [January 29th] for an exploratory committee and, thus, be throwing his name into the hat for Republican presidential candidacy in 2008.

Now, there have been different comments on DKos.com accusing Tim Russert of playing nice with Republicans and giving Democratic members a hard road to two. But, I won't delve into that any more than to say I think Tim did a very good job of remaining neutral and asking Huckabee some pressing questions from which we'll have to decypher the real answers.

I have organized some key points in very concise format. So, please, follow me over the fold ...