Of slippery slopes and not having the common decency to put it out with the trash

When merely linking just won't do, here's Mark Steyn on fourth trimester abortion tic-tac-toe logic:

From the Court of Queen’s Bench (the appellate court) in Alberta:

The Wetaskiwin, Alta., woman convicted of infanticide for killing her newborn son, was given a three-year suspended sentence Friday by an Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench judge.

Katrina Effert was 19 on April 13, 2005, when she secretly gave birth in her parents’ home, strangled the baby boy with her underwear and threw the body over a fence into a neighbour’s yard…

Effert will have to abide by conditions for the next three years but she won’t spend time behind bars for strangling her newborn son.

Indeed. As Judge Joanne Veit puts it:

“While many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support,” she writes… “Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother.”

Gotcha. So a superior court judge in a relatively civilized jurisdiction is happy to extend the principles underlying legalized abortion in order to mitigate the killing of a legal person — that’s to say, someone who has managed to make it to the post-fetus stage. How long do those mitigating factors apply? I mean, “onerous demands”-wise, the first month of a newborn’s life is no picnic for the mother. How about six months in? The terrible twos?

Speaking of “onerous demands,” suppose you’re a “mother without support” who’s also got an elderly relative around with an “onerous” chronic condition also making inroads into your time?

And in what sense was Miss Effert a “mother without support”? She lived at home with her parents, who provided her with food and shelter. How smoothly the slick euphemisms — “accept and sympathize . . . onerous demands” — lubricate the slippery slope.

No further commentary needed.




This made us recall a piece we posted a while back and Jonah Goldberg's reflections on abortion tic-tac-toe logic:

I’m something of a product of my times. In the 1980s and 1990s I heard a lot of putatively honest liberals insist that the one zone of life that was absolutely sacrosanct was our own bodies. The state simply had no business getting involved in “our bodies.” Admittedly, this was mostly the rhetoric of abortion. I still remember Anna Quindlen on one of those Fred Friendly seminars waxing terribly righteous about the absolute sovereignty of a woman’s body. There was some spill-over into such topics as euthanasia and assisted suicide (remember “Whoes Life Is It Anyway?”), but the passion and heat was over abortion.

Flash forward to today and pretty much the entire edifice of liberalism insists that our bodies — what we put into them, how we maintain them — are fair game not just for Congress but for bureaucrats.

So, is it rank hypocrisy, intellectual disingenuousness (back in the day) or all just a way of making "the pro-abortion stance sound more highfalutin'?"

Who says liberal activism is dead?

Earlier this week, we blogged about the de-funding of Planned Parenthood not being in the budget agreement that was passed yesterday by the House of Representatives.

To the liberal-Left: we're proud of you guys. With tax-payer funding of Planned Parenthood being threatened, you all stepped up and showed what really matters to you by increasing donations 500%. 500%!


Those must've been some pretty righteous bake sales in the upper east side and some cracklin' celebrity date auctions in Santa Monica proving all the more why PP don't need no stinking tax dollars.

Your decline of Western civilization update

We meant to get around to this last week but never got the chance. By now, you are aware of the charges being brought against the Philadelphia abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, so consider the following a bit of a refresher.

A West Philadelphia abortion doctor, his wife and eight other suspects are now under arrest following a grand jury investigation.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, faces eight counts of murder in the deaths of a woman following a botched abortion at his office, along with the deaths of seven other babies who, prosecutors allege, were born alive following illegal late-term abortions and then were killed by severing their spinal cords with a pair of scissors.

Here is one of the introductory paragraphs from the grand jury's report:

This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.

Because he destroyed so many of his records no one knows for sure just how many babies he murdered. So, how was he able to get away with it? The grandy jury report (which can be found here) details the following:

● The Pennsylvania Department of Health knew of clinic violations dating back decades, but did nothing.

● The Pennsylvania Department of State was “repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell” — including the clinic’s unclean, unsterile conditions, unlicensed workers, unsupervised sedation, underage abortion patients, and over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street — “and repeatedly chose to do nothing.”

● Philadelphia Department of Public Health officials who regularly visited Gosnell’s human-waste-clogged offices did nothing.

● Nearby hospital officials who treated some of the pregnant mothers who suffered grave complications from Gosnell’s butchery did nothing.

● An unnamed evaluator with the National Abortion Federation, the leading association of abortion providers that is supposed to uphold strict health and legal standards, determined that Gosnell’s chamber of horrors was “the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected” — but did nothing.

Hey, look. A pricing menu. How thoughtful.

A cock-fighting ring would not have received such generous treatment.


Our good friend Leslie of Temple of Mut has started up an alternate faith-based blog where she intends to take on the culture of death that surrounds this particular case and which informs much of the debate on the pro-abortion side. Please go check out her post on the subject at Flight into Egypt.


The liberal-Left wanted desperately for the Tucson shooter to be a tea-partier and when they had to settle for him merely being an apolitical loon, they still insisted that a culture of incivility bred by the right wing spurred him to his violent and murderous act. Epic fail on both counts.

However, after decades of this abortion clinic butcher shop existing and operating in the manner it was and with full knowledge of the authorities who still did nothing about it - how can this whole sick and wretched situation not be ascribed to the culture of death bred by the abortion-industrial complex in this country?


H/T: MM



Addendum #1: Via KT, commenter flataffect at Chicagoboyz:

Here I thought the benefit of legalized abortion was that women wouldn’t be forced into the butchery of back-alley abortions, but could go to clean, professional facilities. Now it turns out that the thing was really just about killing babies, after all.

When politics goes global

Do you remember when they told us if we voted for McCain, it would result in a continuation of American cultural imperialism? Well, they were right.

On the agenda at the G8 summit in Canada is promoting maternal and infant health in the poorest parts of the globe. The high rates of maternal and infant mortality in many countries are an impediment to democracy and social development, to say nothing of a human tragedy for these communities. Commitments of resources from the G8 countries to address these problems should be welcomed and commended. Why, then, is the Obama delegation threatening to derail these agreements?

The numbers are shocking: In Sierra Leone, 16 percent of all infants perish, and 28 percent of all children die before they reach the age of five. In thirteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 1,000 women die in childbirth for every 100,000 live births. In Afghanistan, one in eight women will die as a result of bearing children. All in all, 99 percent of maternal deaths worldwide occur in developing countries.
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Given this, one would expect there to be universal support for Canada’s leadership in taking on these problems and working to meet these critical needs. But the Obama administration is obstructing this positive consensus. Hillary Clinton, when asked about Canada’s G8 plan to address infant and maternal health in the developing world, said the following: “You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.”

It is surprising that Hillary Clinton would insist on funding for abortion and risk derailing an initiative that is poised to generate unprecedented commitments in both the private and public sectors. It is especially surprising considering the body of recent scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of various straightforward, uncontroversial, and achievable means to reduce maternal and infant mortality.

What is surprising is that the authors would find it surprising that a committed leftist like Clinton would hold aid to historically disadvantaged poor women and children in order to advance her abortionist agenda.

Whether the deaths are due to infant mortality or abortion, they're just numbers and it's the politics that count, right Secretary?

A time-honored BwD tradition just got a little more interesting (UPDATED)

We love rating the Super Bowl ads that run during the big game, though the rating of "totally retarded" might have to be junked for the time being.



The people at Focus on the Family have probably got their money’s worth already for their Tim Tebow/pro-life ad that will air during the Super Bowl as we’ve never seen such reaction to an ad that nobody’s even seen.

Reaction that has spurred a response to this ad which no one has seen by Planned Parenthood and which can be seen below.



Sean James and Al Joyner? The biggest ad in the history of Planned Parenthood and that’s the best they can come up with? We’re avid followers of both the college and pro game and we know not this Sean James dude and our recollection of Al Joyner is a hazy Olympian one from a quarter century ago at that.

Maybe even A and B-listers know Planned Parenthood to be the abortion mill that it is and from which, wish to keep a wide berth.

No matter. We understand the argument of critics of the Tebow ad: on a day that is otherwise fully committed to crass bikini-clad commercialism and good ol’-fashioned wife-beating who wants to be lectured about family values or anything resembling it?



(UPDATE #1): The ad itself is becoming almost immaterial as the reaction to the ad becomes more and more the story. The ubiquitous “coalition of women’s groups” has been calling for CBS to pull the ad stating that the message of the ad they have not yet seen is “hate masquerading as love”.

Ah, yes. As aliens visiting from another planet and witnessing our political discourse will soon find out, tolerance is a one-way street.

H/T: W.C. Varones

Keeping the mills humming

Hey, gang – looks like we’re implementing some of those “mandatory conservation measures” at the end of a pink slip right here in America.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Catholic nurse who was forced to participate in an abortion, despite voicing her moral objections.

Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, was instructed to assist in a late second-trimester abortion for a woman 22 weeks into her pregnancy.

The hospital had known of the nurse’s religious objections to abortion since she was hired in 2004.

Cenzon-DeCarlo reminded her supervisors of her religious objections, but was told that if she did not participate, she would be charged with “insubordination and patient abandonment,” which could result in disciplinary action and the possible loss of her job and nursing license.

The hospital trys to explain this away by saying it was an “emergency” but the hospital itself categorized this case as “Category II” which means the operation needed to take place within six hours, surely enough time to find a nurse who has no moral qualms about assisting with an abortion.

One would think that even a pro-choice advocate would be outraged by this as this action is the antithesis of “choice”. Don’t count on it, though, as the abortion-industrial complex makes fundamentalist evangelicals and Catholics look as soft as a bag of wet mice when it comes to advancing an agenda.

Cassy Fiano, blogging at Hot Air, rightly likens this to cruel and unusual punishment as the hospital has known of Cenzo-DeCarlo’s position on this for years.

Stand by for more of this trampling of conscience provisions put in place by President Bush but since stripped by a man who voted three times against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

Privacy for thee but not for ye?

The New York Times is suddenly worried about Patient/Doctor privacy in Pelosi-care.

When the House narrowly passed the health care reform bill on Saturday night, it came with a steep price for women’s reproductive rights. Under pressure from anti-abortion Democrats and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, lawmakers added language that would prevent millions of Americans from buying insurance that covers abortions — even if they use their own money.

The restrictions would fall on women eligible to buy coverage on new health insurance exchanges. They are a sharp departure from current practice, an infringement of a woman’s right to get a legal medical procedure and an unjustified intrusion by Congress into decisions best made by patients and doctors.

(emphasis, ours)

It’s rather convenient to address this concern with respect to federally funded fetus reductions as Pelosi-care, on the whole, is nothing more than an intrusion into the patient/physician privacy peg upon which Roe v. Wade proponents have hung their hats for years.

How does the liberal-Left square the inconsistency presented here: The idea that it’s acceptable for, say, a decision on eye surgery to fall under the purview of a comparative effectiveness board but restrictions on your tax dollars going to fund abortions represents an “unjustified intrusion”.

This needs to be explained as otherwise we will just chalk it up to blatant hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty when it comes to justifying a federal take-over of health care.

She's making our job way too easy.

Thanks to Arianna Huffington and NARAL, we're closer and closer to gettin' this thing done. But first, we’re beginning to wonder if she can make it through an entire article without dropping a pop culture reference. She’s treading into that uncomfortable area where older people in an attempt to appear relevant start quoting Cartman and hip-hop lyrics. Don’t let this happen to you. Its embarrassing and everyone can see through the shameless pandering to youth.

Anyway, Ari’s bent because McCain received a “0” score from NARAL while Obama maxed out at 100… for the 3rd straight year. Yaaaaaayyyy……

Obama on limited government and potential voters:

"A woman's ability to decide how many children to have and when, without interference from the government, is one of the most fundamental rights we possess. It is not just an issue of choice, but equality and opportunity for all women." Well, not all women, eh Barack?

And with respect to his two daughters: if they were ever to “make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” Can’t say we’ve heard that particular verb tossed around when talking about a pregnancy. Note to self: Call Mom just to make sure.

We’ll keep saying this for as long as we have to but reasonable people can disagree over Roe v. Wade or abortion in general but to chalk up 3 straight perfect seasons in the eyes of a group that is wholey unwilling to accept in any small degree and will fight savagely any sensible restrictions on abortion, such as, late-term abortions or parental notification, leaves us cold. Sorry. Can’t say we’d be real stoked to have that person representing this country in the Oval Office

Keeping the Mills Humming

Headline of the Day:

“Why NARAL Pro-Choice America Endorsed Barack Obama”





UPDATE #1: Silky's Onboard, too. Yaaaaay!

P.S. Please let this be the ticket. Please. Not that nasty little rumor we heard about Obama/Webb. That would be bad... very bad.