Tag Archive for: abortion

Feds Charge Man With Firebombing Pro-Life Group’s Office After Dobbs Decision Leak

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A Wisconsin man was arrested Tuesday in connection with an attack on a pro-life organization’s office just days after the leak of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.

Authorities identified the man, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, as responsible for a May 8 firebombing of the Wisconsin Family Action office based on DNA samples recovered from a partially eaten burrito that matched those found at the scene, according to the court filing obtained by Reuters. Roychowdhury was arrested at a Boston airport Tuesday and will appear today in the U.S. District Court in Boston, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Wisconsin Family Action’s office was damaged after Molotov cocktails were thrown into the building, a fire was started, and the building was painted with the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”

“According to the complaint, Mr. Roychowdhury used an incendiary device in violation of federal law in connection with his efforts to terrorize and intimidate a private organization,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a press release. “I commend the commitment and professionalism of law enforcement personnel who worked exhaustively to ensure that justice is served.”

The leaked Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which found “no constitutional right to abortion,” was published by Politico on May 2.

Roychowdhury was identified earlier as a suspect for graffiti painted on Wisconsin State Capitol grounds during a Jan. 21 protest, which read “We will get revenge,” according to court documents. He faces a minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted.

“This group of local and federal law enforcement officers has worked, with the federal prosecutors, diligently and creatively to move the investigation forward,” said U.S. Attorney Timothy M. O’Shea for the Western District of Wisconsin in a DOJ news release. “This case is an example of the results law enforcement can achieve when local and federal law investigators work as a team.”

In January, the DOJ indicted two suspects in vandalisms that occurred at three Florida pro-life pregnancy centers following the overturn of Roe v. Wade last June, Catholic News Agency reported. The indictments were the first known since the string of attacks on pro-life clinics, churches, and organizations, which the Family Research Council records have reached over 100, began last summer.

Wisconsin Family Action did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

KATELYNN RICHARDSON

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICEL: Pro-Life Group Alleges The FBI Is Spying On Its Operations

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Supreme Court Vacates Ruling that Minors Have Constitutional ‘Right’ to Abortion; One Justice Dissents

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The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated a lower court’s opinion asserting that underage girls possess a constitutional right to have an abortion without notifying their parents. Only one justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented that her colleagues effectively erased the pro-abortion decision from the books, preventing lawyers from citing it as a binding legal precedent in future cases.

Justices on Monday wiped out an appeals court’s decision in the Chapman v. Doe case. In 2018, a 17-year-old referred to as “Jane Doe” sought a Missouri court ruling to bypass the state’s law requiring that she obtain parental consent before undergoing an abortion. But a Randolph County court clerk named Michelle Chapman told the minor that the judge said her parents must be notified before the court hearing. Doe traveled to Illinois, where she received a judge’s permission and underwent an abortion.

She then contracted the ACLU to sue Chapman for placing an “undue burden” on her unalienable “right” to abortion, violating the terms of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 1992 opinion in Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

Hearing Doe’s case, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals contended last April that the right of a minor to bypass parental input or knowledge is an established part of U.S. citizenship. Jane “Doe’s constitutional right to apply for a judicial bypass without notifying her parents is clearly established by Supreme Court precedent,” said the appeals court. “Chapman’s refusal to allow her to apply for a judicial bypass without parental notification violated her Fourteenth Amendment rights.”

Two months later, the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision, which ruled that “procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our [n]ation’s history.” Chapman and Dobbs agreed the decision made their case moot — but Chapman then appealed to have the lower court ruling thrown out.

In Chapman’s legal filing, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) noted, since Roe v. Wade had not established a minor’s right to obtain an abortion without her parents’ involvement, the lower court’s ruling “carries legal significance on parental notification requirements that this Court has not” established. Bailey requested the justices issue a vacated judgment, known as a “Munsingwear vacatur,” which Bailey noted, “prevents the decision from spawning legal consequences for similarly situated persons.”

Justices on Monday remanded the case to the Eighth Circuit with instructions to vacate and dismiss it as moot. That halts others from citing the Eighth Circuit’s pro-abortion ruling as precedent in future cases.

“We are still seeing the trickle-down effects of the Dobbs decision — both saving unborn children’s lives and now protecting the right of states to protect parental notification laws,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “When a minor is considering a decision as tragic, terrible, and dangerous as allowing an abortionist to kill her unborn child, her parents should be there to help their daughter choose life and to speak up in defense of their grandchild’s life.”

President Joe Biden’s only Supreme Court appointee to date, Associate Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, issued the lone dissent. “[O]ur common-law system assumes that judicial decisions are valuable and should not be cast aside lightly, especially because judicial precedents ‘are not merely the property of private litigants,’ but also belong to the public and ‘legal community as a whole,’” she wrote. She argued, since Chapman agreed the case was moot due to Dobbs, Dobbs did not play the definitive role in making the ruling moot.

Jackson represented NARAL Pro-Choice America, the League of Women Voters, and the Abortion Access Project of Massachusetts during the time she belonged to Boston’s Goodwin Procter law firm.

Jackson also generated headlines during her confirmation hearings, when she said she felt incapable of defining the word “woman,” because she is “not a biologist.”

The issue of parental notification and consent for their young daughter’s abortion continues to play a part of the national debate over parental rights, which has expanded to public school curriculum, school library book choices, and gender transitions.

The high court remains largely sympathetic to parental rights. Last June, Chief Justice John Roberts allowed Indiana to begin enforcing its parental notification law as the case made its way through the court system.

Yet lower courts remain mixed. A Montana judge permanently enjoined that state’s parental consent law as “unconstitutional and unenforceable” last month but said a trial must determine the fate of its 2012 Notification Act. Lewis and Clark County District Court Judge Chris Abbott was appointed to the bench by former Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat.

The debate has also engulfed potential judicial appointees. Democrats have signaled concern over Biden’s appointment of Michael Delaney, nominated for the Boston-based First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, because he once signed a petition for a parental notification case. As deputy attorney general of New Hampshire in 2005, Delaney signed a brief in Ayotte vs. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, which required parents to be notified before minor daughters had an abortion.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said, since he sees abortion as “a fundamental, core issue … I’d want to know why he put his name on the brief.” Another, unnamed Democratic senator also told the Associated Press of their hesitancy because of Delaney signing the brief, and the National Council of Jewish Women opposes Delaney’s nomination, saying his role in the 2006 Supreme Court ruling proves he lacks “fairness, independence, fidelity to constitutional values, and respect” for plaintiffs.

A total of 36 states require parental notification of one or both parents before an unemancipated minor can have an abortion, including 21 states that demand at least one parent’s consent, but 35 of those states provide for a judicial bypass, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

“We should give thanks for the Dobbs decision that continues to positively impact other Supreme Court decisions and allows states to do whatever possible to protect the unborn,” said Szoch.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Murder!’: Jane Fonda’s Homicidal Call to Action Against Pro-Lifers

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Friday morning, on the infamously progressive talk show “The View,” 85-year-old actress Jane Fonda made a disturbing recommendation for dealing with pro-lifers: murder. The remarks came amid a conversation regarding Fonda’s pro-abortion activism, particularly in the months following the Dobbs Supreme Court decision last June. As hosts Sonny Hostin and Joy Behar simpered sweet nothings about Fonda winning a Nobel Prize, the conversation quickly turned awkward when Behar asked Fonda how to extend pro-abortion activism beyond merely marching and protesting.

“Well, I’ve thought of murder,” Fonda asserted, repeating the word “murder” as the women gathered around her laughed uncomfortably.

Despite the audience’s amusement and assurances from the show’s hosts that the actress was simply joking, viewers were left to wonder — does Fonda really believe that advocating for life in the womb is justification for someone to be murdered? And in a culture where progressives are keener than ever to claim that mere words can be violence, how can Fonda get away with literally suggesting murder?

Perhaps Fonda’s comments wouldn’t hit home for pro-lifers so acutely were it not for the barrage of terrorism that the pro-life community has suffered in the last year. Family Research Council has tracked over 125 instances of pro-abortion violence against pro-life pregnancy resource centers, churches, and individuals in the past year; just this week, a pregnancy resource center in Minneapolis was vandalized with the same familiar message that pro-lifers have learned to expect: “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.”

In many instances, pro-abortion harassment has gone far beyond vandalism and threats. A CompassCare pro-life pregnancy resource center in Buffalo, New York was firebombed in June of 2022; the attack caused $500,000 in damages and forced the center to spend the next 52 days rebuilding. Despite the violence already occurring against these charity centers, radical abortion lover Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) accused pregnancy resource centers of “torturing” women and called for their doors to be closed — a move that, were the partisan tables turned, would certainly have been characterized as an incitement of violence.

In light of Fonda’s incurable enthusiasm to do harm to those who advocate for the life of the unborn, it’s important to consider her personal background on the issue. Fonda’s mother, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and eventually died by suicide, aborted nine of Jane’s older siblings before finally giving birth to her. Both Fonda and her mother suffered sexual assault and childhood sexual abuse. While there is certainly zero excuse for her abortion advocacy, much less her calls for violence against pro-lifers, understanding Fonda’s background helps paint a fuller picture of why she is so desperate to preserve social acceptance and celebration of abortion as a moral good rather than as the affront to human dignity that it truly is.

Just last week, conservative pundit Michael Knowles was accused of advocating genocide against people who identify as transgender because of a statement he made during a speech at CPAC. Even White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slanderously accused Knowles of calling for the “eradication of transgender people.”

What Knowles actually said was, “For the good of society and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology — at every level.”

While Knowles’s circumstances are more akin to misrepresentation, given that he never actually proposed violence against human beings, the incident still serves to prove a significant cultural point: progressives can’t have it both ways. Either words must be chosen with extreme delicacy and sensitivity because they will be construed as calls to violence — or not. And, if calls for political violence against other human beings are something to be condemned, then they must be universally condemned — even when the call is coming from inside the house.

A final (and significant) point to consider is that, even when pro-abortion advocates are not calling for murder against born people, they are nevertheless fighting desperately to perpetuate the shedding of innocent blood. Every “successful” abortion ends the life of a unique, unrepeatable human being. There can be no peaceful or nonviolent support of abortion, because to support abortion is inherently a promotion of violence.

Thankfully, given what the pro-life movement has demonstrated the willingness to withstand in the last year for the sake of protecting unborn children, it’s clear that the thoughtless snark of a Hollywood celebrity will do little to deter pro-life activism.

AUTHOR

Joy Stockbauer

Joy Stockbauer is a correspondent for The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

GOP Primary Voters Want Candidates to Embrace Cultural Issues, Poll Finds

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A new poll reveals that the overwhelming majority of Republican primary voters want future GOP presidential contenders to embrace hot button issues like gender transition procedures for minors and implementing restrictions on pornography.

The survey, conducted by OnMessage Inc., found that 93% of respondents want candidates to confront parents rights issues, including increased transparency with school curriculums and school activities. A full 76% also want candidates to ban gender transitions procedures for minors, such as surgeries to remove healthy organs, puberty-blocking drugs, and cross-sex hormones.

The poll also found 86% of respondents saying they are more likely to support a candidate that advocated for requiring age verification in order to access pornographic websites.

In response to issues that are considered less contentious, voters showed less enthusiasm, with 59% saying they want a candidate who will push for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and 50% saying they want an emphasis on supporting Ukraine through military aid.

“The fight against the woke issues … that’s where the intensity really was,” said Jon Schweppe, director of Policy and Government Affairs for the American Principles Project, during “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” last week. “Ultimately, voters are looking for someone who’s going to defend the family, who’s going to fight the woke Left, who’s going to fight to stop these horrific sex change procedures that are being performed on kids. … I think a Republican candidate who emerges from this presidential primary is going to have to be strong on all those issues.”

Perkins pointed to a particularly notable result in the survey indicating less than expected support for protecting women’s sports from men who identify as transgender women. “Sixty-nine percent [who support prohibiting males from competing in girls sports], that’s still a good number. But what was surprising was that it’s even stronger when it comes to these sex change medical procedures. People understand what’s going on and what really matters.”

Schweppe, whose organization released the results of the poll, concurred.

“When you’re talking about puberty blockers as young as seven, eight years old, that’s where voters are really animated,” he observed. “They see it as an issue of life and death because it is. Women’s sports is important and we want to protect these opportunities for girls, but I think it’s a little bit lower stakes. [Gender transition procedures] are a horrific thing that’s being perpetrated on these kids. And it really, really animates Republican voters. And what we’ve found is that in our polling of the general electorate, it’s actually really important to independents and even some Democrats too. It’s a great issue for Republicans to lead on and hopefully do the right thing as we try to stop this from happening across the country.”

The survey’s results appear to rebuke the strategy taken by some Republican candidates and strategists ahead of 2022’s midterm elections, which was to steer clear of divisive social issues. That strategy did not appear to pan out in the midterm results.

The poll also found that GOP primary voters prefer Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over former President Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup, with DeSantis garnering 53% and Trump receiving 38%.

Schweppe asserted that the growing rivalry between the two men will benefit conservative voters in the end.

“The encouraging thing, especially for social conservatives, is that as Trump and DeSantis fight each other, they’re going to continue to try to outflank each other on all of these issues. [Even with] the Big Tech issue today, they’re kind of outflanking each other with that, trying to do a digital Bill of Rights to make sure censorship doesn’t happen online.”

“I think folks should be excited about the primary. Let’s make sure that we get a strong candidate that can finally take Joe Biden out of office and make sure we can save this country,” Schweppe concluded.

Matt Carpenter, director of Family Research Council Action, was also encouraged by the message voters appear to be sending to presidential candidates through the latest poll results.

“GOP primary voters want to hear their presidential candidates address cultural issues,” he told The Washington Stand. “Many of these voters are motivated by what their children are exposed to in the classroom, or the obsession of the current administration to fund abortion through all stages of pregnancy. They want their nominee to provide a clear contrast to the radical anti-family, anti-faith, anti-life agenda of the current administration.”

“Americans, in general, have opted to vote with their feet and their wallets, by leaving liberal states in favor of more conservative ones and by cancelling subscriptions or deciding to shop elsewhere in order to avoid woke corporations,” Carpenter concluded. “It follows that the GOP would see a similar pattern emerge among their likely primary voters in the upcoming presidential primary.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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A Japanese professor at Yale floats the idea of mass suicide for the elderly

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

San Francisco Cries Uncle on Seven-Year Boycott of Red States

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When San Francisco decided to boycott the country’s red states, they were hoping it would have an economic impact. Trouble is, it did. Just not on conservatives. For seven years, the city has stubbornly clung to its travel bans and contracting blackouts for states with sane policies on life and gender — only to find out that the side paying the biggest price is their own.

In the latest sign that Republicans are winning the woke wars, city officials are quietly trying to walk back their petty payback of conservative states who’ve passed laws protecting the unborn, election integrity, girls’ sports, and privacy. At a city meeting February 13, leaders poured over a new report about the effects of the boycott policy, known as 12X, from the last several years. In a damning assessment, San Francisco’s City Administrator’s Office (CAO) said it was “not able to find concrete evidence suggesting 12X has influenced other states’ economies, or LGBTQ, reproductive, or voting rights.”

On the contrary, the authors wrote, “12X has created [an] additional administrative burden for City staff and vendors and unintended consequences for San Francisco citizens. … Few, if any other jurisdictions implement travel or contracting bans as expensive as the City’s.”

By refusing to outsource or partner with red states, San Francisco’s contracting costs went through the roof — up 10-20% just over the past few years. “It’s an ineffective policy that complicates the business of San Francisco government,” Supervisor Rafael Mandelmanm insisted, “and makes it very likely that we pay more than we should for goods and services.”

In a state where residents are already running for the exits, the last thing cities should be doing is giving people another excuse to leave. And a 20% surcharge for San Francisco’s intolerance is just one in a long line of absurdities. Since COVID, the moving vans have been in a perpetual, one-way convoy out of California, as 508,903 people called it quits on the state with sky-high costs, crime, taxes, and regulation.

This latest revelation, that even the city’s cultural retaliation is a failure, will only push more locals to the brink. A whopping 30 states are on San Francisco’s official blacklist now (up from eight in 2016), making it virtually impossible for the city to conduct national business. If the idea was to create a “compelling deterrent to states considering [conservative] policies,” COA admitted, it failed. In the game of chicken between deep-blue California and the rest of America, San Francisco is blinking. More than one official has said they’re moving to either strike the seven-year-old policy or, at the very least, repeal the most onerous parts of it.

That’s a major coup in California where the radical dogma is thicker than smog. But then, this isn’t the first time the forces of wokeness have been backed into an embarrassing corner. Ever since 2016, when North Carolina became ground zero in the bathroom wars, Democrats have been eating crow. One of the Left’s biggest lies — which they repeat to this day — is that passing pro-family laws will cost states billions of dollars in business. The opposite is almost always true.

For all of the Left’s hyperventilating, the aftermath of the H.B. 2 debate was nothing like the Chicken Littles predicted. North Carolina’s tourism numbers broke records; its population grew faster than any state in the union; and the state’s GDP was even higher than the national average. The booming economic climate even caught Forbes’s attention, who ranked the Tar Heels the second best state for doing business that year, a title it won the next three: 2017, 2018, and 2019. Suddenly, the tough talk about retaliation from corporations and other organizations was being exposed for what it was: empty threats from big-mouthed bullies.

Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Nick Jonas, and Demi Lovato and other musicians did their typical chest-thumping, pulling out of tour stops in places like Raleigh over their insistence that men be allowed into girls’ restrooms — but at the end of the day, the financial damage was small enough to be considered a “rounding error.” Experts crunched the numbers and found that “concerts, conventions, and sports” don’t actually bring much to the table in terms of state revenue. “Let’s suppose you buy some tickets, and you pay $100 per ticket,” John Connaughton, a professor of economics, explained. “Well, $80, $90 of that ticket gets on the bus and leaves with the performer the next day. Or later that night.”

College sports promised more of the same when the fight over girls’ sports and kids’ gender transitions broke out a few years later. “The NCAA threatened states over anti-transgender bills,” the big print of The Washington Post read. “But the games went on.” All of the tough talk proved toothless when so many states passed conservative legislation that NCAA had nowhere left to go. Suddenly, tournaments that weren’t supposed to be awarded to places like Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee got the news that they would still be hosts after all.

“I guess the NCAA boycott of Florida is over after two weeks,” state Rep. Chris Latvala tweeted. Turns out, the tug of the Left may be strong, but so is the $730 million in revenue from the Southeastern Conference. Conservative influence as red states, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) pointed out, is bigger than we think. “Will they even be able to have sports events anymore in the United States [if they boycott us]? I don’t think so.”

And who could forget Hollywood, who, after Alabama and Georgia passed their strongest pro-life laws in 2019, vowed to take their filmmaking elsewhere? It was all very theatrical when Netflix, Disney, WarnerMedia, and Sony Pictures started shaking their fists at red states and making hollow threats about canceling productions. For most conservatives, it was a familiar scene. After all, the entertainment industry had been using the same script since North Carolina, when celebrities climbed on their moral high horses to browbeat voters who believe in biological gender.

They would be reevaluating their projects, Disney’s Bob Iger promised at the time. “We are watching it very carefully,” he reassured his allies. In the end, most CEOs’ posturing amounted to nothing. Even when California tried to dangle new tax breaks over producers — “Move your film to a state with a better appreciation for killing babies!” they seemed to say — the modest incentives were still offset by the state’s suffocating regulations and higher costs. Deep down, even Hollywood understood: they stand to punish themselves more than the locations they theatened to leave.

“It speaks to the unsustainability of the Left’s wokeness,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told The Washington Stand. “They’re painting themselves in a corner.”

He’s right. Ultimately, these stunts hurt the social extremists more than they’ll ever scare conservatives, especially in this refuse-to-be-intimidated era sponsored by governors Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) and Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.).

FRC Action Vice President Brent Keilen agreed. “The move by San Francisco is the latest example that, despite receiving a lot of attention from the media, boycotts of pro-family and pro-life states don’t have much of an impact.”

In today’s climate, even San Francisco’s giants of liberalism are coming to the realization: the biggest losers of the culture wars will always be the bullies.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Biden Urges Congress to ‘Restore Soul of This Nation’ by Expanding Abortion, Transgenderism in SOTU

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During his State of the Union Address Tuesday night, President Joe Biden called on Congress “to restore the soul of this nation” by making abortion legal nationwide until birth and passing a bill that would force religious employers to hire people who identify as transgender. His administration’s focus on pushing polarizing social issues clashes with Republicans’ more mainstream views of abortion and gender identity, a contrast that Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) said gives Americans a clear choice “between normal or crazy.”

“Congress must restore the right the Supreme Court took away last year and codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman’s constitutional right to choose,” said Biden, an apparent nod to the “Women’s Health Protection” Act, which would erase 1,381 pro-life protections including parental notification requirements. “The vice president and I are doing everything we can to protect access to reproductive healthcare and safeguard patient privacy.” He went on to chide states for enacting “extreme abortion bans” and threatened to veto any national pro-life legislation.

The president also urged Congress to “pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.” The bill, a longstanding goal of the LGBT lobby, would amend landmark civil rights acts to equate sexual orientation and gender identity with race, sex, and religion. It effectively places homosexuality and transgender status above religious liberty by denying protections of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The extreme bill, once supported by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, “would eradicate freedom of thought, conscience, and belief — resulting in the penalization of anyone who disagrees with the ideologies,” wrote Mary Beth Waddell, director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council.

Passing such social legislation, Biden said, would enhance “the power of our example. Let’s remember the world is watching.”

Biden symbolically gestured toward left-wing social issues with his guest list, which included Gina and Heidi Nortonsmith, the lesbian couple whose lawsuit foisted same-sex marriage on the state of Massachusetts by judicial fiat in 2004. The couple also spoke at the signing ceremony of the so-called “Respect for Marriage” Act, which struck down marriage protection laws nationwide.

Biden also invited Amanda and Josh Zurawski of Austin, who say doctors denied them medical treatment for a miscarriage due to confusion over the state’s Heartbeat law. SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser says the president has weaponized their “tragic” story to further his “deeply misleading” allegations. “Every pro-life law in the country allows necessary and timely medical treatment to save the life of a pregnant woman in an emergency,” she said. “There are no laws in any state that prevent timely and compassionate care for a miscarriage,” added the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG). “Denying proper healthcare to patients facing miscarriage complications is not complying with the law. Miscarriage care is not abortion.”

Some members of Congress made statements of their own, with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) inviting acquitted pro-life activist Mark Houck, who found himself swarmed by federal agents at his home in front of his family for allegedly violating federal laws against blocking access to an abortion facility.

Even as he discussed bipartisanship, Biden tied conservatives and Republicans to civil war, insurrection, and the attack against Paul Pelosi by a hammer-wielding man with a mental illness. “Two years ago, our democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War,” he said, referring to the January 6 riot. “Today, though bruised, our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken,” apparently quoting the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” He claimed Pelosi’s assailant had been “unhinged by the Big Lie.”

“This kind of provocative rhetoric has only served to fuel the spread of violent attacks on churches and pregnancy help centers since Biden took office. While ignoring these attacks and their victims, the Biden administration has openly weaponized the federal government against pro-life Americans like Mark Houck and his family,” said Brian Burch of CatholicVote.

Biden also proposed a massive federal intervention into the way families raise children by “providing access to pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds,” a proposal repeatedly made by President Barack Obama during successive State of the Union addresses. Multiple studies have found Pre-K attendance inflicts a number of harms on young students, and polls have found most mothers would like to stay at home. “No public preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue,” said James J. Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist frequently cited by those who support universal pre-K.

Those references aside, Biden’s 70-minute-long address largely focused on economic issues, showing uncharacteristic “restraint,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. Biden “tried so hard to seem like a 1980s Democrat but it’s just not believable.”

The president often cited his economic success by comparing his results to the worst days of the 2020 recession, caused by a government-mandated shutdown to “slow the spread.” Biden said he had “created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years,” he said.

Biden has added 2.7 million jobs over the prepandemic high of 152.4 million reached under President Donald Trump. By comparison, Trump added nearly 5 million jobs in his first two years in office, and 13.4 million in the 22 months rebounding from the COVID-19 lockdown. The labor force participation rate under President Biden remains below prepandemic levels (62.4% this month compared to 63.3% in January 2020).

“The state of our union is miserable, and the blame rests squarely with President Biden and the Democrats,” said Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chair of the Tea Party Patriots Action. “Whether it’s record deficit spending causing the worst inflation in four decades, an ‘open borders’ policy causing a record stream of illegal immigrants crossing our border, or a weak foreign policy emboldening China and other adversaries, President Biden is always doing the wrong thing and American families always end up paying the price.”

President Biden urged Congress to “pass the PRO Act, because workers have a right to form a union.” The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a sought-after legislative goal of labor unions, would strike down all state right-to-work laws and compel workers in a unionized shop to pay union dues, even if they do not want to belong to a union. Federal legislation has protected workers’ right to join a union since the 1936 Wagner Act. Yet only 6% of the private sector workforce belonged to a union in 2022, while one-third of government employees have unionized, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor unions contributed $65 million in union dues to Democratic candidates during the 2020 election cycle, including $27.5 million to Biden’s presidential campaign. The president was also the top recipient of campaign donations from teachers unions.

At two points, Biden paused mid-speech as Republicans opposed his caricature of their platform, accusing Republicans of wanting to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. A legislative proposal to that effect, from Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.), received little legislative support.

Biden made a brief reference to the border, which has seen record-breaking levels of illegal immigration and virtually non-existent deportations during both of his years in office. “America’s border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts,” particularly “if you won’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform,” which includes a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, he told lawmakers.

On foreign affairs, Biden pledged continued financial and military aid to Ukraine despite flagging public support, and boasted of a supposed hardline against China. “Before I came to office, the story was about how the People’s Republic of China was increasing its power and America was falling in the world. Not anymore,” he said. “As we made clear last week, if China’s threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.” Biden shot down a Chinese spy craft this weekend after it had completed its surveillance of areas that included U.S. nuclear installations.

Biden gave a nod to COVID-19, which defined the first few months of his presidency. “We have broken COVID’s grip on us,” he said. “And soon we’ll end the public health emergency.” Biden announced the federal government would end its emergency in May, shortly after the House of Representatives passed legislation ending the government’s state of emergency immediately. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) invited as his guest a U.S. serviceman briefly dismissed from the military for refusing to take the COVID shot.

“Biden’s comments aimed at the need for a world ‘solution’ on certain topics (which understandably concern people) continue to imply the legitimacy of world power centers like the UN, WHO, and the like. Yet this takes power further from the people that true democracies are supposed to represent. If we have a ‘crisis of democracy’ as some think we do, such ‘solutions’ only exacerbate the problem,” Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “To the extent that the Biden administration’s priorities (like abortion or gender transitions for minors) are injected into these centers of world power, we will be exporting spiritually harmful activities to other nations. Social liberals’ intended solutions for these young people only keeps them imprisoned … and they need to find true freedom from the clutches of the enemy of their souls,” Weber said.

The spiritual condition of America figured prominently in his remarks. “Because the soul of this nation is strong, because the backbone of this nation is strong,” he said. Americans “are a good people, the only nation in the world built on an idea: that all of us, every one of us, is created equal in the image of God.”

“I appreciated the president’s affirmation that everyone is ‘created equal in the image of God.’ Unfortunately, for two years the president has demonstrated that he really doesn’t believe that,” David Closson, director of FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview, told The Washington Stand. “Against the moral teachings of his own church, President Biden has pursued the most radical pro-abortion agenda in our nation’s history, and he made it clear tonight that he remains beholden to the abortion lobby by indicating he would veto any federal efforts to protect unborn life.”

“When it comes to protecting life, I wish the president’s policies matched his rhetoric,” said Closson.

“Americans want common sense from their leaders, but in Washington, the Biden administration is doubling down on crazy,” said Governor Sanders.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Guilty! Prosecutors Link Abortion to Infanticide

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Pro-life leaders have always said legalized abortion devalues life and paves the way to infanticide — a view verified by a recent tragedy and upheld in a court of law.

First, the tragedy: A young mother has been convicted of delivering twin babies in her home and letting them die of neglect. Maya Caston, then 25 of St. Louis, gave birth while sitting on her toilet on January 6, 2020. Caston then wrapped her newborns’ mouths and noses in a towel and did not wash or feed them for two days. (She testified that she tried to feed the children but, when they refused to take a bottle, she took no further action.) When they died two days later, she called the police to say she had given birth to two stillborn children, a boy and a girl. Officers soon realized the infants had not died from a miscarriage.

The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office initially charged Caston with two counts of second-degree murder and child abuse. Last Friday, a jury found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment.

Now, the remarkable legal admission: The court directly tied her double infanticide to legal abortion. The district attorney’s office highlighted how, in the months before she gave birth, Caston searched the internet for such terms as “cheap abortion pills,” “free abortion clinic,” and “can you cause a miscarriage if you hit yourself in the stomach hard enough?” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, “Prosecutors argued that Caston’s extensive internet searches for miscarriages and abortion methods in the months before she gave birth, her initial lie to police and her lack of action to get care for the twins proved she caused the deaths.” Within hours of her children’s birth, she searched tips about burying them in her yard.

Jurors also dismissed claims that Caston, who is cognitively delayed, lacked the ability to understand her actions were wrong. (Defense attorneys had submitted an IQ test placing her in the bottom one percentile of intelligence.) “It’s a sad situation, but it’s still murder,” said Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Thomas Dittmeier in his closing argument.

Caston’s shocking actions cut to the heart of the matter in a way only possible for the truly simple. She intuitively understood and applied the messages sent by American culture and laws, only to be punished for exposing the tragedy that lies at the heart of those institutions.

Infanticide Mirrors Abortion

The only criteria separating abortion from infanticide is timing — and, for now, legality. If an unborn child is a “parasite” with no right to demand that her mother assures her survival, why should she have any claim on her mother’s “autonomy” after her birth?

Desperately clinging to DIY chemical abortion, the abortion industry and its political allies ask women to administer their own abortions at home. Caston took that to its logical conclusion and did not pay the abortionists for miscarriage-inducing pills.

Even the location of her infanticide mirrored the advice of abortionists such as Carmen Landau. She told an undercover Live Action employee seeking to abort a viable, 27-week-old unborn baby that, if she feels she’s going to give birth before the late-term abortion is completed, she should “sit on the toilet.”

“If it comes out, then it comes out. Flush it,” an employee of a New York City abortion facility, Dr. Emily’s Women’s Health Center in the Bronx, told Live Action during another late-term abortion sting. If the child were born alive inside the abortion facility, she explained, the abortionist would “put it in a container — like, a jar — with solution and send it to the lab.”

What would happen, the mother asked, if the newborn is breathing or moving after the abortion? “The solution will make it stop,” the abortion industry employer responded. “That’s the whole purpose of the solution.”

… And that’s the whole purpose of the towel. Legal abortion apparently allows newborns to die; Caston merely cut out the middleman. The Democratic Party platform demands taxpayer-funded abortion until birth; Caston simply extended those parameters by 48 hours.

Caston’s conviction serves as an indictment against much of our political class. When the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act came before the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month, all but one Democrat voted against punishing abortionists who would treat newborn babies the same way Caston did. At least one Democrat introduced a bill that would have effectively decriminalized Caston’s actions. An alleged “oversight” in a California’s Assembly Bill 2223, introduced by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D), banned police from investigating any “perinatal death” that took place anywhere from a few days, up to 30 or “60 days following delivery.”

Caston’s heartbreaking experience should cause Christians to reflect deeply on the Bible’s neglected teachings about the role our laws play in shaping our national character.

The Law Is Our Teacher, For Better or Worse

Political philosophers have long cited the didactic and catechetical aspects of the law in shaping and forming the consciences — and behavior — of citizens. Aristotle wrote, “It is difficult for one to be guided rightly towards virtue from an early age unless he is brought up under such laws. … [T]he nurture and pursuits of the young should be regulated by laws, for when they become habitual they are not painful.” Government does more than regulate the commercial interactions of atomized individuals. “The state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern” of commerce, said Edmund Burke. It is, instead, “a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection … linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world.”

Burke’s oration echoed biblical injunctions. Earthly laws should punish evil and reward those who do well (Romans 13:3). In the process, they teach us right from wrong. The Apostle Paul tells us even the Old Testament law acted as “our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ” (Galatians 3:24). When unjust laws reign, they teach citizens to call good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20) … and they bring us to the Antichrist. In the process, consciences become degraded, morality becomes warped, and society fills with the blood of the innocent. Wicked laws inflict the deepest wounds on those who, like Caston, most rely on society’s cues to lighten their darkness. “If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23.)

American society taught that life, made in the image of God, deserves no more dignified treatment than a bowel movement; that DIY abortions are the path to liberation; and that an infant’s life begins “when the mother thinks it begins.” Then it punished Maya Caston for taking that message to heart and holding up a mirror to the culture of death. The abortion-political complex shows no signs of mitigating its rhetoric, or its actions. Heartrending stories like Caston’s will continue until America learns to apply Dittmeier’s summation to every abortion: “It’s a sad situation, but it’s still murder.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished. All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Kamala Harris: ‘We Love’ Abortionists

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Former President Bill Clinton tried to soften the Democratic Party’s image as extreme liberals by insisting, “I am not pro-abortion.” Over the weekend, Kamala Harris opened a widely panned speech on abortion by saying she and President Joe Biden “love” abortionists, before concluding her speech, “God bless America.”

The vice president went on to imply that Americans’ unalienable rights do not come from our Creator; omit the right to life from the Declaration of Independence; hint that the national anthem supports abortion; accuse pro-life advocates of attacking the “foundations of freedom; and claim an LGBT riot, in which drag queens tried to burn policemen alive, represents “the strength of our nation.”

Harris delivered an address in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday to mark what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, an anniversary aborted last summer when the Supreme Court overturned the case, which first invented a constitutional right to abortion. Planned Parenthood had already planned to hold a “Rally in Tally” before Harris joined their lineup; Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson spoke earlier in the event. An abortionist with Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, named Sujatha Prabhakaran, introduced Harris after leading the crowd in a rousing chant of “Abortion is health care!” (In reality, the Hippocratic Oath states, “I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my art.”)

“We love” abortionists. Arriving at the podium, a confused Harris began by asking where Prabhakaran had gone. “We love all of our frontline folks,” said Harris, referring to abortion industry employees. “And this room is filled with them.”

Harris then delivered a speech that rang alarm bells nationwide for its secularism and historical revisionism.

Erasing the Creator and the right to life. Harris seemed to state that Americans’ unalienable rights do not come from God but from a social contract among voters. “America is a promise; it is a promise of freedom and liberty, not for some, but for all — a promise we made in the Declaration of Independence,” she said. Harris then left out our founding document’s reference to the right to life, saying, “We are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Be clear: These rights were not bestowed upon us. They belong to us as Americans.”

The Founding Fathers designed a form of government that would restrain the government from violating Americans’ God-given rights, including the right to life. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” (Emphases added.)

Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama regularly omitted the Declaration’s reference to “the Creator” — a rhetorical gambit that critics say undermines freedom and liberty.

“We need to know our history and challenge those who want to selectively edit or change our founding documents, because it matters that our rights come to us from God — that they are not a grant from government,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Monday. “When you take God out of the equation … it enables these power-hungry bureaucrats and politicians to try to usurp those rights.”

Secularism also attacks the foundations of our freedoms, said a lifelong student of the Founders’ views. “In every nation in the history of the world, there’s only really been two options: They either have a really big government or a really big God. They don’t have both, because if you have a really big God, you don’t need a really big government,” Tim Barton of WallBuilders told Perkins Monday. “You don’t need it to be God in your life.”

“But if there is no God, then you need a big government,” Barton continued, “because instead of, ‘My God shall supply all my needs,’ it tends to be, ‘My government shall supply all the needs.‘”

Star-Spangled abortion? Harris continued reimagining the nation’s founding when she implied that abortion rings through every line of our national anthem. “Here is a collection of words that mean everything to us as Americans: the heartfelt words of our great national anthem, that America is ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave,’” she said. “But let us ask, can we truly be free if a woman cannot make decisions about her own body?” Abortionists destroy a child’s body by suction/aspiration or dismemberment; they have also injured or killed the mother.

Protecting 6.9% of babies from abortion is extreme? Harris chided “so-called leaders at the statehouse here in Tallahassee” for passing “a radical abortion ban.” Thanks to the bill, she said, “health care providers face prison for up to five years for simply doing their job.”

Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill last year protecting unborn babies from abortion after 15 weeks, or slightly after the first trimester. Abortionists commit “nearly all” U.S. abortions (93.1%) before 13 weeks gestation, according to the Biden-Harris administration’s most recent abortion surveillance. A full 72% of Americans support such a law, according to a Harvard/Harris poll.

The “health care providers” Harris mentioned were abortionists, whose job entails ending the life of a child, which begins at fertilization.

“How dare” Republicans protect life? Pro-life politicians “attack the very foundations of freedom,” Harris continued. “Republicans in Congress are now calling for a nationwide abortion ban. Some even from the moment of conception” — which, embryologists agree, marks the moment a child’s life begins.

“How dare they?! How dare they?!” Harris bellowed.

Allowing abortion-on-demand does not contradict any faith? Harris once again tried to appeal to Americans to lay aside faith-based objections to abortion. “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government should not be telling people what to do with their own bodies,” she claimed. Christians have held that abortion violates their faith, and should be illegal, for 2,000 years. Orthodox Jews also say they hold a pro-life faith. However, the Satanic Temple regards abortion as a sacrament.

The “strength of our nation” was secured by LGBT rioters who attacked police. Harris told the crowd of abortion industry employees and lobbyists that they must have “the kind of determination” that motivated “our greatest patriots,” including “those Americans who fought a Civil War to end the sin of slavery, who organized at Seneca Falls to secure a woman’s right to vote, who launched the Freedom Rides to advance civil rights, and spoke out at the Stonewall Inn to defend human rights.”

On June 29, 1969, six New York City police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a seedy bar operated by the Mafia without a license, on a morals charge. Thousands of LGBT rioters surrounded the half-dozen cops, pelted them with bottles, and attempted to burn the bar to the ground with them inside. “Our goal was to hurt those police,” said rioter John O’Brien. “I wanted to kill those cops.”

In 2016, Barack Obama named the Stonewall Inn a national monument.

Harris attempted to encourage the crowd, dispirited by pro-life gains since the Dobbs ruling. “We’re on the right side of history,” she told the crowd.

“May God bless you, and may God bless America,” she concluded.

Inverting historical, moral, and religious truth so completely is not accidental but an attempt to demonize the Founding Fathers, repeal the Constitution, and establish an alternate form of government, Barton said.

“I think it’s very hard to argue that Kamala Harris or President Biden don’t understand the positions they’re taking, and they’re doing it intentionally to promote a political ideology philosophy,” Barton told Perkins. “They are working, as President Obama once said, to fundamentally transform America.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

3 Out of 4 Women Support Stronger Pro-Life Legislation, Poll Finds

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A strong majority of Americans support stronger pro-life laws, according to a new poll released just days before the annual March for Life. More than two-thirds of Americans (69%) would support ending all abortion no later than the first trimester, including nearly three out of four women (72%) and nearly half (49%) of all surveyed Democrats.

The poll found 44% of people want increased abortion restrictions, including not allowing abortion at all (8%), allowing abortion only to save the life of the mother (10%), or in the case of rape or incest (26%). Only one in five voters believe abortion should be available at any point in pregnancy, without restriction.

The Marist poll, sponsored in partnership with the Knights of Columbus, shows a strong pro-life majority more in line with recent Republican pro-life legislation than the Democratic Party platform, which calls for taxpayer-funded abortion until birth. Additionally, the survey, conducted earlier this month, found:

  • 78% of Americans oppose forcing taxpayers to fund abortion overseas;
  • 60% of Americans oppose forcing taxpayers to fund abortion in the United States;
  • 94% oppose sex-selective abortions (because of the child’s sex);
  • 77% say people with religious objections should not be legally required to carry out abortions
  • 60% of Americans oppose aborting a child because the child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome;
  • 55% say employers with religious objections should not be forced to pay for abortion coverage in their employees’ insurance; and
  • 91% of Americans, including 88% of Democrats, support the work of pro-life pregnancy resource centers.

Those results show a Republican legislative agenda is in the mainstream, or perhaps slightly behind, public opinion.

For instance, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act (H.R. 7) which restricts federal funds from going to “any abortion” (except in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother), stops taxpayer dollars from funding health benefits that cover abortion, and bars doctors who work for the federal government from carrying out abortions. The House had been poised to vote on the bill — which has attracted 113 co-sponsors, all Republicans — in its first two weeks in session. The vote on the bill has yet to be rescheduled, as of this writing.

On the other hand, nearly all House Democrats voted against the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (H.R. 26), which would compel abortionists to offer lifesaving care to newborn babies born alive during botched abortions. It passed the House 220-210 on January 11.

The same day, the GOP-controlled House also passed a resolution condemning violence against pro-life churches and pregnancy resource centers 222-209. The Family Research Council has documented 101 such attacks since last May. Only three Democrats voted for the measure, which merely expressed the consensus of the body against violence.

“Life is winning in the Dobbs era. The American people overwhelmingly reject the extreme abortion lobby-Democratic Party agenda of abortion on demand until birth, paid for by taxpayers,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “The pro-life movement will fight for the strongest protections possible, in legislatures across the land and in our nation’s capital. We will continue to grow the pro-life safety net, which includes nearly 3,000 pregnancy centers and maternity homes nationwide. We will hold elected leaders and candidates to a high standard, urging them to cast a clear and ambitious pro-life vision and to go on offense.”

The poll found active faith, participation in college, and party registration to be the most important factors in whether one supports abortion-on-demand or protects life in the womb. Those who practice a religion oppose abortion 61% to 39%, while the irreligious describe themselves as pro-choice by a margin of 70% to 21%. Two-thirds of practicing Roman Catholics oppose abortion (67% to 33%), while non-practicing Catholics describe their views as pro-choice 83% to 17%.

The groups most likely to identify as “pro-choice” included registered Democrats (88%), non-practicing Catholics (83%), and college-educated white people (72%). No other faith was surveyed by the poll, which was sponsored by the Catholic fraternal organization. Rural voters were twice as likely to be pro-life as those who live in large urban areas (62% to 31%). White Americans were modestly more likely (42%) to describe themselves as pro-life than non-white Americans (34%).

The Marist poll came out the same day as a separate poll, conducted by WPA Intelligence, showed that 60% of self-described pro-choice likely voters in Virginia supported a bill that protects unborn babies from abortion after 15 weeks. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) supports legislation codifying these pro-life protections.

“In the face of pro-abortion extremism, we are more expectant than ever before that we will protect our victories, advance our leaders, and make new gains that will save countless lives,” said Dannenfelser.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Joe Biden: The Bull Connor of the Pro-Abortion Movement

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For a man who ran for president to save the soul of America from racism, former segregationists’ buddy Joe Biden resembles few people more than the infamously abusive police chief Bull Connor. Both allowed domestic terrorists aligned with the Democratic Party to vandalize, bomb, and set fire to their opponents’ churches with impunity while using maximum force to arrest peaceful, Christian, protesters.

Sixty years later, little more than the names and faces have changed: Connor’s allies rallied behind the banner of white supremacy, while Biden’s supporters mobilize around “abortion on demand without apology.” The Biden administration’s refusal to protect pro-life Christians bears an eerie resemblance to Bull Connor’s collusion and selective prosecution. Imagine how civil rights protesters would have fared if George Wallace won the 1964 presidential election, and you get a sense of Biden’s treatment of peaceful, prayerful, pro-life advocates.

‘We’re Going to Allow You 15 Minutes….’

The Freedom Riders, who tested Southern segregation laws from Virginia to New Orleans, planned to stop in Birmingham on May 14, 1961. The Ku Klux Klan — and the Alabama lawman they helped elect Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor — had other plans. The KKK plotted a series of coordinated strikes against the protesters spanning multiple cities. Klansmen knew the details of the demonstrators’ travel itinerary, because the Birmingham sheriff’s department told them — and the sheriff’s department knew, because the FBI told them. As the protesters departed Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. warned the Freedom Riders, “You will never make it through Alabama.”

In the days leading up to their arrival, Bull Connor personally gave the Klan the green light to rough up Yankee “meddlers.” Connor’s right-hand man, Birmingham Police Department Sgt. Thomas H. Cook, arranged for a meeting with a man named Gary Thomas Rowe, a member of a violent chapter of the Klan — but also an FBI informant. Historian Raymond Arsenault recounts the scene:

Unaware that Rowe planned to relay his words to the Birmingham FBI office, Cook laid out an elaborate plot to bring the Freedom Ride to a halt in Birmingham. He assured Rowe that other members of the Birmingham Police Department, as well as officials of the Alabama Highway Patrol, were privy to the plan and could be counted on to cooperate. “You will work with me and I will work with you on the Freedom Riders,” he promised. “We’re going to allow you 15 minutes. …You can beat ‘em, bomb ‘em, maim ‘em, kill ‘em. I don’t give a s***. There will be absolutely no arrests. You can assure every Klansman in the country that no one will be arrested in Alabama for that fifteen minutes.”

“By God, if you’re going to do this thing,” Cook later told the Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Shelton, “do it right.” Similarly, Bull Connor instructed the Klan to “make them look like a bulldog got a hold of them.”

The Klan didn’t have to be told twice; they planned to strike twice. They swarmed the first of the two vehicles, a Greyhound bus, when it arrived in nearby Anniston, breaking its windows and slashing its tires. Police escorted the protesters as far as the city limits … where the Klansmen were waiting. One Klansman threw an explosive device into the back of the bus and, as protesters scurried out of the door for their lives, the mob beat them savagely. “Then, God Almighty intervened,” remembered Hank Thomas: The bus’s gas tank exploded in two bursts, frightening the crowd away. “A miracle happened in Anniston.”

Klansmen posed as passengers of the Trailways bus carrying the other group of Freedom Riders. In Anniston, the Klan insisted the riders segregate the bus and pummeled several passengers — including Walter Bergman, then age 61 — to make their point. Although Bergman would remained partially paralyzed for the rest of his life and have to learn to feed himself again, a local policeman told his assailants, “Don’t worry about no lawsuits. I ain’t seen a thing.”

Unfortunately, the real violence awaited in Birmingham. Confident they would face no repercussions, the Klan invited CBS News reporter Howard K. Smith to witness the violence as the bloodied protesters descended the bus stairs to desegregate the terminal’s lunch counters. A mob of Klansmen (including the FBI informant, Rowe) and members of the National States Rights Party swarmed, sometimes beating protesters 12-on-one. The melee continued until one of Connor’s detectives, Red Self, told the Klansmen: “Get the boys out of here. I’m ready to give the signal for the police to move in.”

Faced with local intransigence, the FBI would soon arrest the four people responsible for firebombing the Greyhound, but it would be far from the last act of unpunished violence. A tragic 40 unsolved bombings over two decades earned the city the nickname “Bombingham.”

Not content to outsource his brutality to the Klan, Bull Connor ordered his police to use all means necessary to quash the message of Christian civil rights protesters.

Release the Guilty, Jail the Innocent

Bull Connor’s police proved more likely to arrest peaceful protesters than the Klansmen perpetrators. In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” courtesy of Connor’s constabulary. As King and his supporters went to jail for “parading without a permit” (holding unauthorized demonstrations), Connor said:

[W]e are not going to stand for this in Birmingham. And if necessary we will fill the jail full, and we don’t care whose toes we step on. I am saying now to these meddlers from out of our city, the best thing for them to do is stay out if they don’t want to get slapped in jail. … I’ve never seen anyone yet look for trouble who wasn’t able to find it.

Volunteers evaporated from the desegregation campaign. King’s group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), responded with “The Children’s Crusade,” recruiting more than 1,000 schoolchildren to march through Birmingham on May 2 and 3, 1963. As the youngsters left the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church carrying signs with such messages as, “Segregation is a sin,” Connor’s men arrested 959 the first night. But they did not merely apprehend the marchers: Police blasted young children with high-powered firehoses, beat them with batons, and sicced police dogs on them.

The cruelty was the point. The pretense of law masked ruthless hatred, as segregationists used overwhelming force to discourage them from ever again publicly voicing views disfavored by the powerful.

As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Joe Biden Bull-ies the Pro-Life Movement

Fast forward 60 years, and violent hatemongers with powerful political allies have again received free rein to terrorize their nonviolent, Christian foes. But Jane’s Revenge has enjoyed more than a 15-minute reign of terror. Since the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling last May 2, pro-abortion fanatics have launched a wave of arsons, vandalism, and death threats against at least 101 pro-life churches or pregnancy resource centers. Abortion activists firebombed pro-life pregnancy resource centers in the same way Bull Connor let the Klan firebomb Freedom Riders’ buses — with the same number of arrests: zero. Leftist extremists perpetrated 52 attacks before the FBI even announced its investigation.

This wave of violence, like most cowardly violence, targets the powerless — unborn babies, their desperate mothers, and the nonviolent Christian churches and nonprofits that serve them — but this wave also victimized the powerful with impunity. On June 13, two people threw a lit flare into the offices of Washington State Rep. Andy Barkis (R). Eight days later, vandals smashed the windows at the local office of U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.). Like the Klan in Alabama, pro-abortion fanatics feel confident enough to leave their calling card — often scrawling, “If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you” on pro-life women’s centers and churches — and to alert the media they will take “increasingly drastic measures.”

Biden’s nonfeasance embodies the administration’s defiant message that its ideological opponents enjoy no legal protection — a far cry from the promise Biden made the day after the media declared him winner of the 2020 election: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.” The atmosphere of hatred has resulted in an 84-year-old pro-life woman being shot. (The male suspect said he shot her by accident.)

At least one congressman has connected the dots. The wave of anti-life terrorism represents “the death cult’s echo of the KKK’s burning cross — brazen, violent intimidation,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “But the federal government responded to the KKK. Where is the Biden Justice Department amid this violent campaign of national scope?” The administration, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), instead aim to “put a stop” to pro-life pregnancy resource centers.

“To my knowledge, no one — no one — has been prosecuted under the FACE Act,” noted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as House Republicans passed a resolution condemning violence against pregnancy resource centers on January 11. J. Edgar Hoover, who shared the racial views of his time, arrested the Anniston bombers in a matter of days. In a world of high-definition security cameras and facial recognition software, Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have apparently arrested no one in eight months.

At least, no one who shares the administration’s extreme commitment to abortion. “But if you’re a pro-life activist, and you’re praying outside of an abortion clinic like Mark Houck, guess what happens to you?” asked Jordan. “The FBI kicks in your door, arrests you, puts you in handcuffs, and does it in front of your wife and seven children,” using dozens of heavily armed agents. Biden’s DOJ meted out similar treatment to Paul Vaughn, a 55-year-old father of 11. Just as black-and-white footage of Bull Connor unleashing his dogs on children inspired national revulsion of segregation, Biden’s overreach should inspire outrage at federal collusion with the abortion industry.

As pregnancy resource centers burned, in July Biden’s Justice Department established the Reproductive Rights Task Force to take “proactive and defensive legal action” to protect the abortion industry (and punish its foes) — and tapped as its leader Vanita Gupta, who as a “civil rights” officer in Obama’s DOJ tried to force all public schools to allow men to use women’s restrooms, showers, and overnight accommodations or lose all federal funding. She applied her ideological fervor equally well to abortion. Biden’s Justice Department arrested 26 pro-life advocates by last October, with more following, including:

  • Franciscan friar Fr. Fidelius Mocinski (whose birth name was Christopher), just as local New Jersey prosecutors dropped charges for conducting his “Red Rose Rescues”: entering abortion facilities and giving mothers red roses. In this case, he lay down in front of an abortion facility’s entrance, just as protesters in the ‘60s laid down in front of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential limousine. (“If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car,” cracked segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama (D) during the 1968 presidential campaign, “it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of.”);
  • Nine defendants who entered a Washington, D.C., abortion facility and sang “let there be peace” (as a live-stream of the event shows) in October 2020. At least one of the women had participated in Rose Rescues;
  • Eleven defendants who entered an abortion facility in Tennessee in March 2021. If convicted, some of the defendants stand to serve up to 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars;
  • Pastor Daniel Courney of Enfield, N.J., one month after it wrung an agreement out of him not to commit “future FACE Act violations” — which, out of fear, would effectively cause him to end his presence outside abortion facilities; and
  • Bevelyn Williams and Edmee Chavannes, who happen to be black women from the South, for allegedly violating the FACE Act as far back as June 2020. (Curiously, their indictment begins with peaceful pro-life activity in 2019.) In one alleged violation in the indictment, Chavannes told an abortion facility employee, “Do not touch me.”

The arrest total seems all the more lopsided, since pro-life women’s centers are 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion facilities. Both Gupta and Garland touted their work prosecuting pro-life advocates at a civil rights assembly last December. Both invoked Martin Luther King Jr.

As noted, in many cases the Biden administration presses pro-life advocates to sign agreements not to protest any more — a similar tactic employed by the Obama-Biden administration. A federal judge questioned whether the Obama-Biden administration’s prosecution of Mary Susan Pine “was the product of a concerted effort between the Government and the [abortion provider], which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities.” (Ultimately, the DOJ paid Pine $120,000 in legal fees.) One could be forgiven for asking the same question of these cases.

A trial may conclude some of these acts violated the law, just as civil rights protesters violated the law of their day — the law their peaceful, prayerful actions aimed to change. But today’s prayerful pro-life advocates see their homes raided, not aided, by the federal government led by a vice president who raised bail money for the BLM’s “mostly peaceful” rioters. They face enormous legal bills, a criminal record, huge fines, and perhaps more than a decade in prison.

Despite these pressures, the pro-life movement has not buckled, as the terrorists and their federal government enablers wished. When bombed, they have rebuilt. When denied protection, they have secured their ministries of mercy. When denied justice, they hired their own private investigators. They have suffered long and done good. They have emerged from the fiery crucible of persecution with a stronger resolve to help the weak and save the innocent. The pro-life movement is “hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed — always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” … And, one day, manifested in our laws.

We shall overcome.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Top 5 Biden Administration Fails This Week

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The new year began on a grim note for the Biden administration. On the first day back in the office after the New Year’s holiday, news broke that almost 80% of Americans projected 2023 to be a “year of economic difficulty.” Things haven’t gotten much better since then for the White House. It has indeed been a particularly rough week for the Biden administration. Here are five of their biggest fails.

1. Mishandling of Classified Documents

It was discovered this week that President Biden apparently mishandled top secret classified documents, which could be prosecuted as a federal offense. Some were found in his garage in Wilmington, Del. next to his Corvette, while others were found in “a box, locked cabinet — or at least a closet,” according to the president. Still other top secret documents were found at Biden’s think tank in Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that an investigation would be opened into the matter and appointed a special counsel to lead the probe.

2. FAA System Failure Grounds Thousands of Flights

In the largest single incident of grounded flights in one day since 9/11, a failure of the Federal Aviation Administration’s pilot alert system led to the agency halting all domestic departures on Wednesday. Over 2,900 flights were cancelled, while almost 8,000 more flights were delayed. The reason behind the system outage is still being investigated.

Numerous pilots have contended that the grounding of all domestic flights was an “overreaction” by the Biden administration, as multiple backup systems are available to ensure the safety of flights. “They didn’t have to ground all the flights. We would have been fine,” one pilot told Fox News.

3. Administration Official Considers Banning Gas Stoves

On Monday, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg News that gas stoves are “a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” With around 40% of all homes in the U.S. using gas stoves and with the appliances considered to be the industry standard for restaurant food preparation nationwide, the backlash to the news was swift.

“This is a recipe for disaster,” tweeted Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). “The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner. I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.” His comment encapsulated the outrage, and even left-wing late-night host Stephen Colbert couldn’t help but quip, “You can have my gas range when you pry it from my hot, sizzling hams.”

On Wednesday, the Biden administration walked back the possibility of a proposed ban. “To be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so,” said CPSC Chairman Alex Hoehn-Saric. A White House spokesman also stated, “The president does not support banning gas stoves.”

4. Biden Team Shields President from Immigrants while Visiting Overrun Southern Border

On Sunday, President Biden made a “tightly controlled” three-hour visit to the southern border in El Paso, Texas. He visited a deserted section of the border wall with Border Patrol agents, a processing center, and had brief meetings with CBP officials and leaders of local NGOs.

Curiously, the processing center that Biden toured was inexplicably deserted at the time of his visit. In response to a CNN inquiry as to why the president visited this specific center and did not interact with any migrants, an administration official said, “There just weren’t any at the center when he arrived. Completely coincidental. They haven’t had any today.”

Shortly after Air Force One touched down in El Paso, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) greeted the president and handed him a letter, which noted that Biden’s “visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs,” adding that the city “has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis.” The Daily Signal reported that “[c]ity officials dismantled homeless migrant encampments in El Paso ahead of Biden’s visit.”

5. Biden White House Fails to Comment on Whether Babies Born Alive Should Be Saved

It appears that the White House has no official comment on the passage of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which was passed in the House on Wednesday. The bill simply requires medical personnel to administer lifesaving care to an infant that is born after a failed abortion attempt, just as they would any other infant in any other life-threatening circumstance.

Biden’s second in command, Vice President Kamala Harris, was unimpressed by the bill’s basic attempt to establish a baseline for humane treatment of infants. “House Republicans passed an extreme bill today that will further jeopardize the right to reproductive health care in our country,” she tweeted, despite the fact that the bill does not address abortion law. “This is yet another attempt by Republican legislators to control women’s bodies.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Oops! Democratic ‘Oversights’ Would Legalize Polygamy, Infanticide

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One of the most famous illustrations in all of literature comes from “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” when Sherlock Holmes notes “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”: the dog that did not bark. The canine’s silence revealed the watchdog’s familiarity and comfort with the criminal. “Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well,” remarks Holmes.

Voters can glean the inner disposition of our lawmakers, learning which issues they consider vital and which never enter their minds, through a similar device: the “errors,” omissions, and oversights politicians make when drafting legislation. Allegedly inadvertent “oversights” and “drafting errors” by Democratic lawmakers over the last year alone would have decriminalized infanticide, legalized polygamy, and suppressed sacred religious liberty rights enshrined in the First Amendment.

Lest I be accused of overstatement, let’s look at the record:

1. Infanticide

En route to becoming an “abortion sanctuary,” California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 2223, introduced by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks. The original draft forbade law enforcement from prosecuting or investigating any mother for the death of her child through “miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death.” Pro-life legal scholars noted that California state law extends the term “perinatal death” up to 30 or “60 days following delivery,” essentially decriminalizing infanticide. Wicks retorted that her law could never be construed to support child murder, because “one of the tools judges would use in that case is legislative intent.” (Then again, if judges valued original intent, Roe v. Wade would never have been written.) Wicks called pro-life concerns “absurd and disingenuous” … but then the Assembly’s overwhelmingly Democratic Judiciary Committee released its official analysis, which put the matter as gently as possible:

[T]he “perinatal death” language could lead to an unintended and undesirable conclusion. As currently in print, it may not be sufficiently clear that “perinatal death” is intended to be the consequence of a pregnancy complication. Thus, the bill could be interpreted to immunize a pregnant person from all criminal penalties for all pregnancy outcomes, including the death of a newborn for any reason during the “perinatal” period after birth, including a cause of death which is not attributable to pregnancy complications, which clearly is not the author’s intent.

That is, pro-life critics were right all along: The language of her bill would legalize the murder of newborns. Wicks amended the “perinatal death due to a pregnancy-related cause.” Despite this change, the law “still prevents law enforcement from investigating ‘perinatal death,’ and the amendments Ms. Wicks” added proved “woefully inadequate,” Jonathan Keller, president of California Family Council, told me at the time.

Nonetheless, Governor Gavin Newsom (D), an undeclared 2024 presidential hopeful, signed the amended bill into law alongside a pack of 12 other abortion-promoting bills. These bills underscore the need for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on January 11: national lawmakers must correct the “oversights” of far-left state legislators. Unfortunately, they must also correct their own.

2. Legalizing Polygamy Nationwide

After then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hustled the drastically misnamed Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA) through the House of Representatives in one day, U.S. senators noted something curious: The original draft of the bill did not limit marriage to two people. While one provision mentioned “2 individuals,” another section of the bill would have amended federal law to say simply “an individual shall be considered married if that individual’s marriage is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into,” with no numerical limit.

The bill’s chief Republican sponsor, Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), chalked the oversight up to a “drafting error,” though she admitted “the language needs to be clarified” that the bill does not permit polygamy/polyandry. The authors said, in effect, they intended to redefine the most fundamental institution in human society, just not quite that far. Again, legal scholars say the new legislative patch sewn into the old garment of the RFMA failed to fix the problem. The “clarified” final draft of “the bill leaves open the possibility that one person can be in multiple two-person marriages at the same time, which would trigger federal recognition if a state legally were to recognize such consensual, bigamous unions as separate family units,” noted the Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino. Nonetheless, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (R-N.Y.) exclaimed “Praise God!” as President Joe Biden signed the bill into law last December 13. That would not be the bill’s only oversight.

3. Erasing Religious Liberty

The Respect for Marriage Act makes a second appearance, as the bill’s authors also ignored all concerns about religious liberty. Despite years of litigation aimed at bringing Bible-believing Christians to heel, and warnings that the bill will usher in “a new era of oppression” of Christians like Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, Senate Democrats only entertained the notion of a religious protection amendment as a fig leaf for wavering Republicans. They insisted they did not mean to wage culture war against believers; they just crushed your religious freedom all accidental-like. Once again, the “cure” proved inadequate, as the Senate rejected Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) amendment in favor of an irrelevant and legally ambiguous substitute.

Like Holmes, we can deduce from these silences that when social liberals ponder transforming life, marriage, and society, they give not one thought to the lives of newborn children, the nuclear family, or a Higher Power (Who, in His sovereignty, might restrain and hold them accountable for their actions). Their ideological fever to revolutionize everything from marriage to human nature blinds them to any negative consequences — or convinces them these results will be tolerable, even desirable.

That analysis would explain how Democrats omitted the word “God” from their 2012 platform and then booed when His Name was restored. It might make clear why candidate Joe Biden referred to the benevolent Creator as “you know, The Thing,” apparently likening Jehovah to a 1950s monster movie — much as the man most responsible for inflicting Biden on the nation, Barack Obama, regularly elided the Almighty from his quotations of our founding documents (which Obama demeaned as “the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day”).

A platform that doubles as a photographic negative of God’s Word might offer some insight into why the Left “did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Romans 1:28).

Such hostility to the God of the Bible has led liberals into the legislative wilderness for two more years. One of the most overlooked upgrades the Republican congressional majority will have over previous management has gone unappreciated: Even the quality of legislative errors will improve.

The Democrats’ radical “oversights” should also warn every thoughtful statesman against hastily voting for any bill promoted by social liberals, lest they risk placing their own stamp of approval on polygamy, atheism, infanticide, or other evils they cannot see while blinded by left-wing bias.

Finally, the fact that many of these oversights come as news, even to well-informed conservatives, serves as an eloquent indictment of the nation’s Christians. It is not merely Sherlock’s dog that held its peace. The prophet Isaiah condemned the inert watchmen of his day as “blind,” “ignorant,” “greedy,” and “dumb dogs [who] cannot bark; Sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.” They “have no understanding” and look only unto their “own gain” (Isaiah 56:9-12; compare with John 10:11-12).

Like the self-serving shepherds of Isaiah’s day, too many people who know better did not expose the implications of these bills for the sake of political favoritism, for fear of offending the Facebook algorithm (and its sweet, remunerative traffic), or sheer timidity. Some modern evangelicals also love dreams — fantasizing of being hailed as the “reasonable” and “winsome” Christian, of their leftist overlords granting their children a safe haven from endless culture wars, even of being invited to “a seat at the table” to carve out their rights as an ideological minority. They may have even been promised these things — but then, empty promises were the one thing the devil never lacked.

The other side’s silences show their fealty to their masterplan. Let our speech prove our fidelity to our Master’s plan. Now is no time to remain silent.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Abortion Survivors Praise the GOP Born-Alive Act

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In the eyes of abortionists, every “successful” abortion ends in the death of a child — but, thankfully, not every abortion goes according to their plans. Countless abortion survivors, each one condemned to death as an innocent baby in the womb, walk among us every day. For pro-life advocates like Melissa Ohden and members of the Abortion Survivors Network, legislation that ensures protection for infants born alive after abortions holds deep personal significance.

On January 11, House Republicans successfully passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act by a 220-210 vote. The bill passed entirely along party lines, with all Republican representatives voting in favor of the bill and all but one Democrat voting against it (with one Democrat voting “present”). The Born-Alive Act seeks to “prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.”

To Sarah Zagorski, communications director of Louisiana Right to Life, the Born-Alive Act “puts the penalty on the right party” by “criminalizing doctors who do not get medical care for the child.” In my interview with Sarah, she described how an abortionist delivered her breech at 26 and a half weeks gestation. She shared, “He told my mother to let me die on the table because I wasn’t breathing. Thankfully, my birth mother resisted his coercive efforts and decided to tell him, ‘I’m going to sue you if you don’t get my daughter breathing right now.’” Sarah was sent to a trauma birth ward, where she thankfully survived.

Zagorski is part of the Abortion Survivors Network founded by fellow survivor Melissa Ohden, who lived through a failed saline infusion abortion at seven months gestation. Melissa’s organization has connected with over 600 abortion survivors in their journey of hope, healing, and educating others on the human dignity of all unborn children.

“I just want to thank members of Congress who are voting yes on that bill today. This has been years in the making, double digits of failure to get it to the floor in the making,” Melissa told me. “We are just grateful for members of Congress and their leadership showing that, as this legislative session is beginning, pro-life bills are front and center — and that means the world.”

While abortion survivors are grateful for the progress that the House GOP has made in passing the Born-Alive bill, it is significant to note that every survivor’s story is profoundly unique. Lauren, another survivor who shared her story with me, described how the Lord worked in her mother’s heart to change her mind during the middle of a second-trimester abortion. After leaving the abortionist and seeking medical care from a pro-life obstetrician, Lauren’s mother miraculously sustained the pregnancy for another five weeks — until she found herself in preterm labor at 26 weeks.

“The doctor told my mom that there was a very small chance that I would survive such a premature birth,” Lauren told me. “I was rushed to the NICU, where I weighed in at 2 lbs. 6 ounces. I had a small brain bleed and underdeveloped lungs, but I was stable. Miraculously, I had no brain damage or complications from the abortion attempt or my premature birth. My mom saw my tiny body and decided to keep me. I spent 53 days in the NICU, but I made it home from the hospital just in time to attend my parents’ wedding.”

Lauren concluded, “I can truly say that God intervened in my life in a miraculous way. He saved me physically from death, and He saved my mom spiritually.”

Another abortion survivor, Karen, turned 65 last month, having survived her mother’s multiple abortion attempts that predated Roe v. Wade. Growing up unaware of the abortions she had survived, Karen struggled with the distance she perceived between herself and her mother — until her mother revealed the truth when Karen was 61 years old. In her youth, Karen had experienced three of her own abortions, which drove her to contemplate suicide on multiple occasions.

“God intervened in my life by allowing me to finally go back to church and hear a pastor talk about life and love —something he kept saying kept me going back,” Karen told me. “I was introduced to a young lady there who herself had gone through abortions, and she introduced me to a crisis pregnancy center in our area. I was so overwhelmed by what they do, thinking, ‘I would love to share my story with others who have gone through this.’”

For six years, Karen has taught a class for women who have experienced abortions. She serves on a board with an organization that reaches out to the African-American community about the truth of abortion and providing life-affirming alternatives. She joyfully shared with me that she is completing a master’s degree in mental health counseling and plans to use her degree to continue supporting women who have undergone abortions.

Through learning about her past as an abortion survivor, Karen says, “God let me know that my ‘purpose,’ which I thought was to try to please and make my parents happy, was not the reason why He has me here. My real purpose is to serve Him and do the work that He has for me to do.”

As Congress advances legislation to ensure that infants who survive abortions receive life-sustaining medical care, it is more important than ever to hear the voices of abortion survivors reminding us that life is precious — and that every baby deserves a chance to experience it.

AUTHOR

Joy Stockbauer

Joy Stockbauer is a policy analyst for the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Two Of The Abortion Industry’s Biggest Myths Exposed

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Much of what you think you know about who has abortions is wrong.

Apart from some radical outliers, most folks with pro-choice views regard abortion as a necessary evil. Apart from moral considerations, it’s evil because for the mother it’s gut-wrenching, risky and stigmatized. But it’s necessary because there are so many of these women.

It’s a curious fact, but despite the intensity of the debate over abortion in the United States, not much is known about women who have abortions. Public policy is shaped by assumptions supported by many poignant anecdotes, but not by much rigorous data.

For instance, last year the New York Times asked “who gets abortions in America?” That’s a big question for a country of 330 million, but two of its answers stand out.

First, America’s newspaper of record states that: “Six in 10 women who have abortions are already mothers, and half of them have two or more children”.

Second, “25 percent of women will have an abortion by the end of their childbearing years”.

This is a fair summary of the conventional wisdom. Most women who have abortions are mothers and a huge proportion of women will have an abortion at some point in their lives. Since the numbers are so huge and the procedure is so common, abortion is clearly a necessary evil.

Questioning the narrative

But what if the conventional wisdom is not true?

In 2021 several scholars, mostly associated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a pro-life think tank, studied Medicaid data on women who had abortions between 1999 and 2014. Their analysis, with the formidable title of “Estimating the Period Prevalence of Mothers Who Have Abortions: A Population Based Study of Inclusive Pregnancy Outcomes”, was published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology.

They examined numbers representing 15 years of the reproductive histories of 4,884,101 women with 7,799,784 “pregnancy outcomes” — meaning births, abortions, miscarriages, and “unknown”.

What they found differed radically from the media consensus. Why? One reason is that they relied on Medicaid data. Most statistics cited in the media are based on surveys of women’s intentions or memories, rather than what actually happened. But the Medicaid data represents real confirmed events. “No survey data comes close in terms of face validity or granularity,” the lead author of the Charlotte Lozier Institute study, James Studnicki, told MercatorNet in an email.

So, are most abortion patients really mothers, as the New York Times says? The media frequently makes claims like “the typical abortion patient is a mother.” But this is not what the Medicaid data showed. Here are the marquee results:

  • Women who had live births but no abortions represented 74.2% of the study population and accounted for 87.6% of total births. In other words, three-quarters of women who become pregnant never have an abortion.
  • Only 5.7% of the study population had both births and abortions; these women have 7.2% of total births. This shoots down the notion that “the typical abortion patient is a mother.”
  • Women who have only abortions but no births constitute 6.6% of the study population, but they are 53.5% of women with abortions and have 51.5% of all abortions.

Let that sink in.

This is an astounding figure. If it is correct, there are women who have abortion after abortion after abortion. Some must be having as many as 10 or a dozen. Even a diehard supporter of abortion must surely concede that a dozen abortions could be damaging to a woman’s mental and even physical health.

Are these women being abused by boyfriends or pimps? Are they suffering from mental health disorders? Why aren’t abortion rights activists campaigning to rescue these women? They are not an insignificant statistical sliver. If the Medicaid data is right, they accounted for half of America’s abortions.

Public policy on abortion in the United States may be seriously misguided. When it is government funded, only small percentage of women “benefit”. But some of those have so many abortions that that they clearly need social or psychological help, not the phone number of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Normalizing abortion

What about the normalization of abortion – the often-cited figure that one woman in four will eventually have one? This is a meme which is based on a 2017 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. It was written by researchers from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights think tank, and based on data from the period between 2008 and 2014. Their surveys found that “nearly one in four women in the United States (23.7%) will have an abortion by age 45.”

That’s not what the Medicaid data showed.

After crunching the data, it appeared that only 12.3% of women have ever had an abortion, including both those with and without children. The authors admit that the two figures are not directly comparable, but they point out that “this number is half the estimate of the often-reported lifetime abortion incidence (24%), also derived from projections based on survey data.”

Yes, the Medicaid database has limitations. The authors acknowledge this. Amongst them is the fact that it tends to capture the experience of low-income women. Higher-income women who pay out of pocket are invisible.

But this also means that abortion is not as “necessary” for low-income women as abortion activists would have us think. Three-quarters of them are unlikely ever to have an abortion. In fact, the authors say flatly that “abortion among low-income women with children is exceedingly uncommon, if not rare.”

The picture painted by the media – that abortion ought to be legal, safe and accessible – normalizes this choice. It happens to everyone; it’s part of life; mothers need them to take better care of the kids they already have.

But it’s false.

This study ought to ring alarm bells across America. If it is true, much of what Americans have believed about women’s need for abortion crumbles.

Most recent developments

Unfortunately, recent moves by the US Food and Drug Administration to make medication abortion, the so-called abortion pill, available in pharmacies will change the abortion landscape in unpredictable ways. Even though mifepristone and misoprostol are potent drugs, it will become harder to track their use if they are dispensed through tele-medicine.

Chemical abortion is an “existential threat to abortion science”, Dr Studnicki told MercatorNet. It currently accounts for more than half of all abortions in the United States. “Unless we develop a national registry of pregnancy outcomes which can be linked to other datasets (health services, death registration, etc), soon we will literally have no idea how many induced abortions are occurring nor will we be able to track their adverse outcomes.”

“At that point,” he warns, “the abortion industry will be able to create its own narrative, unchallenged by objective, data-driven science.”

AUTHOR

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He lives in Sydney, Australia. More by Michael Cook

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘An Indefensible Assault’: Conservatives Call for Halt to Omnibus

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As an impending snowstorm in the Washington, D.C. area and Senate Democrats put mounting pressure on Congress to push through a last-minute 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill before the Friday deadline and Christmas recess, conservative lawmakers are voicing strong opposition to the measure, citing irresponsible delays and reckless spending on progressive special interest projects.

“These people, I would not put [them] in charge of a Minute Mart and three gas stations, much less a $6 trillion economy,” said Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “They know the deadlines, they fail every year. They bring it to Christmas and then they blame conservatives.”

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) took to Twitter to lambast the bill in a series of tweets. “This omnibus spending bill is the worst of business as usual in Washington and is an indefensible assault on the American people. We will not abide it,” he said. The congressman pointed to a host of inclusions he deemed wasteful, including “$982k for motel vouchers in LA”; “$817k for partnerships with ‘justice-involved individuals’ in Glendale, CA”; “$2 million for ‘improving coordination’ in the NYC Mayor’s office”; “$8.6 million for ‘gender advisor programs’” at the Pentagon; “$65 million for salmon”; and “$3 million for bee-friendly highways,” among other controversial insertions.

Other GOP lawmakers, including Reps. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) as well as Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind.) slammed a provision for $3.6 million to be spent on a “Michelle Obama Trail.”

Multiple earmarks amounting to millions of dollars have also been designated for LGBT-themed special interest projects, along with millions more allocated for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-themed ventures.

Still, despite the multitude of progressive priorities embedded in the spending bill, pro-abortion groups like NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and others expressed dismay Tuesday that it did not include specific new funding for abortion. “At a time of great crisis for reproductive health in this country, Congress has again utterly failed to safeguard access to the birth control and sexual health services made possible by the nation’s family planning program,” said Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.

Family Research Council, however, has argued that language is included in the omnibus that paves the way for abortion expansion. On Tuesday, FRC sent a letter to senators informing them that the organization would score against the bill for a variety of reasons, including language that “seems intent on making clear that VA [Veterans Affairs] facilities need to upgrade to be ready for an influx of abortions by female veterans and their families. The Omnibus should not be a vehicle for the Biden administration’s abortion expansion priorities.”

The letter went on to note that a section of the omnibus dedicated to funding for future pandemic response includes “grant programs that use vague, undefined terms such as ‘health equities,’ leaving the door open for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to gain access to taxpayer dollars.” The letter included the example of the city of Rochester, N.Y. recently setting aside a “$5 million grant of federal COVID-19 relief funding for Planned Parenthood for being an ‘anti-violence organization.’”

Connor Semelsberger, FRC’s director of Federal Affairs for Life and Human Dignity, underscored that final passage of the omnibus is in the hands of the GOP, which has the choice to delay passage of the spending bill until next January when Republicans will control the House.

“Senate Republicans really control the cards,” he explained on Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch.” “No piece of legislation can get through the U.S. Congress without bipartisan support thanks to the filibuster. And so, the Republicans really could band together [and] help their friends out over in the House to set them up for a good spending opportunity [that is in] their own interests next year.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.