Mon. May 13th, 2024

Abortion

Trick Spending Bills Are Voodoo Economics II

The annual “trick-or-treat” ritual is over. Not so the “tricks” perpetuated by congressional Democrats about their tax-and-spend ritual, and their phony numbers.

Consider the latest spending measure cobbled together by the House Democratic leadership, or more accurately their staffs. It is 2,400 pages long, much longer than the longest book I ever read. I doubt most members have read much if any of it. It, combined with the coming social spending bill, is a Democrat wish list that addresses problems that don’t exist (climate change), the supposed inability of parents to care for their own children (“free” daycare), and creation of new entitlements that will addict voters to their party in perpetuity, which seems their goal.

The language is foreign to most English speakers and was likely poll-tested along with false promises it will not cost a dime. Forget pennies from Heaven. These are borrowed and printed dollars from Washington.

You’ve heard of the kitchen sink. This is that, the bathroom sink, and the tub. If it becomes law, the country will sink deeper in debt from which we are unlikely to recover. Even worse is yet to come with the massive social spending measure.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on CNN that the administration’s proposed tax hike on billionaires is “… not a wealth tax, but a tax on unrealized capital gains of exceptionally wealthy individuals.” Word games.

Christian Mysliwiec, commentary editor for The Daily Signal, a publication of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has written an analysis of the $1.75 trillion bill. Here are three of his lowlights:

“Childcare and Pre-K: Actual 10-year cost is likely more than twice the reported cost of $400 billion.

“Obamacare Tax Credit: Actual 10-year cost is likely much more than three times the reported cost of $130 billion.

“Child and Earned Income Tax Credits: Actual 10-year cost is likely more than 10 times the reported cost of $200 billion.

“In total, these programs would likely cost well over $2.3 trillion above the estimate in this framework over 10 years. This excess would be more than $18,700 of new spending per American household.”

This is, to recall a phrase, “voodoo economics.”

Aside from the monetary cost, there would also be a sociological price to pay. Children will be raised with the values of paid daycare workers and without parental love. The measure would discourage work, as we have seen with checks going to people during the pandemic, who have been reluctant to return to their jobs.

Mysliwiec also notes the bill will “subsidize single parenthood, including among teens, thereby weakening the probability that children will be raised by a married mother and father … fewer children will experience social success and upward mobility, and low-income Americans will be left behind.”

This advances the liberal (aka progressive) “soft bigotry of low expectations,” because it tells especially minorities they have little to no chance of succeeding without federal help. We have heard this for decades. If government alone, or even government mainly, could cause people to make decisions that are good for themselves and the country, would it not have by now? Trillions of dollars have been spent on programs that have not fulfilled the promises of those who created them. What about the numerous people who have succeeded on their own by making right decisions? Forget them, because they don’t help the Democrats’ narrative.

I am not a pessimist, but if these spending bills become law, which is still in doubt given the opposition of some Democrats, it will only advance our decline, massive debt being one of the contributing factors to the demise of other nations that engaged in profligate spending.

Our enemies, which now include domestic enemies, as well as foreign, are eager to reach their goal of “fundamentally transforming America.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trick-spending-bills-are-voodoo-economics-ii_4081816.html

City Council Votes to Make Mason Ohio a ‘Sanctuary for the Unborn’

Mason became the second city in Ohio to criminalize abortion within city limits after a tense city council vote on Monday evening.

Located 25 miles northeast of Cincinnati, Mason, with a population of about 30,000 people, voted to ban abortions after four out of seven members of the city council supported the ordinance, which goes into effect in 30 days.

Mason now becomes the 41st city in the country and the second one in Ohio to offer “sanctuary for the unborn,” an initiative started by a Texas nonprofit. There are currently no abortion clinics in the city, but supporters of the ordinance say that this will ensure no facilities are set up in Mason.You May Also Like

There was a split between Republicans who believe in banning abortions and those who don’t, which was unexpected, according to Council member T. J. Honerlaw. Honerlaw, along with Tony Bradburn, Mike Gilb and Mayor Kathy Grossmann voted in favor of the ordinance, while council members Ashley Chance, Diana Nelson, and Josh Styrcula voted for abortion rights.

“I’m here to protect life. For me it’s a fundamental issue. If the foundations be destroyed, what do we have left,” said Vice Mayor Gilb at the meeting. “I’m not just here to decide how bright the street lights should be or where the next roundabout goes. Those things are certainly important issues, but they’re not as fundamental as protecting life.”

“America has a legal system in place to create order in our country. We must follow and abide by that system,” Nelson, who has served on the council for five years, said. “The supreme court has made a ruling on abortion, regardless of one’s opinion on abortion, creating local laws that contradict with federal laws is illegal and unconstitutional.”

There were demonstrators from both ends of the aisle displaying fierce support with banners that read, “Protect the Unborn,” and “Bans Off Our Bodies.” Speakers were allowed to voice their opinions while some constituents shouted to vote out the members who supported the ordinance.

The ordinance makes it illegal for anyone in Mason to “aid or abet” an abortion, including the possession and distribution of abortion-inducing drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol. Violators can be punished with up to 180 days in jail or $1,000 in fines. There are no penalties for someone seeking an abortion.

Exceptions include dangerous, disabling, and life-threatening situations for the mother, and accidental miscarriages.

While Kersha Deibel, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, said to AP that the Mason ordinance opened up the city to “public ridicule, promised boycotts, and costly litigation,” Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, said that this decision by the city council was a “a stand against the violence of abortion and for the protection of women and babies.”

Other smaller Ohio cities like London in Madison County and Celina in Mercer County are also considering implementing similar measures, and banning abortions within their city limits.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/city-council-votes-to-make-mason-ohio-a-sanctuary-for-the-unborn_4075906.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

New Numbers Show Texas’ Pro-Life Law Works – Thousands of Lives Saved in First Month

With a new law on the books, abortions in Texas dropped roughly 50 percent in September, according to a new report.

Research from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project compiled from 19 of Texas’ 24 abortion clinics said that there were 2,164 abortions performed in Texas clinics in September. In September 2020, there were 4,313 abortions performed, the report said.

“The decrease in the number of abortions provided in Texas during the first 30 days that SB8 was in effect was considerably larger than previously documented decreases that followed the implementation of other restrictions, which created widespread disruptions to abortion service delivery in Texas,” the authors of the report concluded.

“This large decline indicates that SB8’s very narrow criteria for providing in-state abortion care have excluded many pregnant people from obtaining abortions at Texas facilities.”

SB 8 is the legal shorthand for the Texas “heartbeat” law that makes it illegal to perform an abortion after a baby’s heartbeat is detected, which is usually around the sixth week of pregnancy.

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Although heartbeat laws in other states have been swatted aside by the courts, Texas used an unprecedented enforcement mechanism. Individuals can file suit against anyone who has broken the law and collect $10,000 if they win.

The Supreme Court reviewed the law before it took effect and rejected efforts to prevent it from taking effect on Sept. 1. At that time, the court said its decision was based upon procedural grounds and was not a full-fledged decision on the constitutionality of the Texas law.

The court also has refused to block the law from remaining in effect as the Biden administration joins with abortion supporters in trying to do so. The law faces a challenge before the Supreme Court on Monday.

“S.B. 8 was designed to nullify this court’s precedents and to shield that nullification from judicial review,” the federal government’s argument to the Supreme Court claimed.

Will Texas win when the Supreme Court next rules on this law?

“So far, it has worked: The threat of a flood of S.B. 8 suits has effectively eliminated abortion in Texas at a point before many women even realize they are pregnant, denying a constitutional right the court has recognized for half a century,” the Biden administration argued.

“Yet Texas insists that the court must tolerate the state’s brazen attack on the supremacy of federal law because S.B. 8’s unprecedented structure leaves the federal judiciary powerless to intervene.”

The Biden administration’s effort to block the law is “a striking power-grab with no basis in precedent,” Texas argued in its brief.

“The Constitution does not guarantee pre-enforcement review of state (or federal) laws in federal court,” attorneys for the state wrote. “And there is nothing unprecedented about vindicating constitutional rights as a state-court defendant. To the contrary, that is the normal path by which constitutional issues come to this court.”

Texas said it is not trying to get a pass on the usual system of testing a law only to have its laws treated fairly.

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“A time will come — and no doubt soon — for the state courts to rule on the constitutionality of SB 8, and this court will, in turn, retain the last word on the correctness of their adjudication of federal law,” Texas wrote. “But the United States does not get a free pass around long-settled federal-courts doctrines because it would prefer to litigate in a federal forum just a bit faster.”

Jonathan F. Mitchell, a lawyer who helped draft the law, said in a friend-of-the-court brief that the federal attempt to block the law has no merit, The New York Times reported.

“The constitutionality of the statute must be determined in the lawsuits between private parties,” he wrote, “not in a pre-emptive lawsuit brought against the sovereign government, which is not ‘enforcing’ the statute but merely allowing its courts to hear lawsuits arising under the disputed statutory enactment.”

In their brief filed to support Texas, 20 Republican-led states noted that a district court ruling that had sided with the Biden administration but was later overturned “threatens to expose every State in the Union to a suit by the federal Executive Branch whenever the U.S. Attorney General deems a state law to violate some constitutional right of someone, somewhere,” according to CNN.

Abby Johnson: Terry McAuliffe Claims There Are 0 Pro-Life Female CEOs – The Only Problem Is That I Am One & There Are Many More!

Logic seems to have been thrown out the window in today’s culture and society.

The Babylon Bee, a hilarious satirical news site, does not seem so far-fetched nowadays with headlines like “Finally: San Francisco To Require Proof Of Vaccination To Poop On The Sidewalk” or “Oh No! Someone Replaced Joe Biden’s Copy Of The Constitution With A Copy Of ‘1984’.” Sounds legitimate honestly.

Then we have Democratic former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is in a very tight race with Republican Glenn Youngkin, denying the existence of pro-life female CEOs.

He said to the Virginia Chamber of Commerce last week that, “There’s not a woman CEO in America that wants to go to a state where someone’s banning abortions.”

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Could he or his staff not do a Google search on this one? There are plenty of CEOs, who also happen to be both pro-life and women, who would love to set up shop in a state that bans abortion. You’re reading the words of one right now.

I founded And Then There Were None in 2012, a ministry that helps abortion workers leave their jobs and find new, life-affirming ones. I founded ProLove Ministries in 2019 as an umbrella organization to stand in the gaps in the pro-life movement. I’m a CEO who lives in Texas because it is the great land of freedom and the first in the nation to effectively ban nearly all abortions.

I exist, Mr. McAuliffe. And I’m not the only one. Marjorie Dannenfelser, Cheryl Bachelder, Kristan Hawkins, Melissa Ohden, Janine Marrone, and Jeanne Mancini are all leaders of their respective organizations and are pro-life. Imagine that. Being a woman in charge of an organization and being pro-life. They do exist after all.

I understand that abortion is a huge, divisive issue in politics. I worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years and can attest to the urgency of both sides wanting to hold power in government.

Do you think McAuliffe will win his election?

But flatly denying the very existence of women in influential positions who hold the view that all life is precious and should be protected? At best that is ignorance; at worst, willful deception.

Abortion is almost always a big deal come election season, and this year, it is perhaps all the more crucial given the Texas law that bans abortion once a heartbeat is detected in the fetus, which is around six weeks.

In Virginia, abortion looms large as it should. Abortion ends the life of an innocent unborn baby and often harms the woman in emotional, physical and spiritual ways. It is the most imperative human rights issue of our time.

According to CNBC, McAuliffe is spending an extraordinary amount of money attacking his opponent for his pro-life stance.

“Three of McAuliffe’s most expensive ads, which cost from $510,000 to $922,000 to produce and run, have attacked Youngkin for his abortion stance,” the outlet reported. The ads have already run more than 1,100 times.

Roe v. Wade Perverts Justice the Same Way Nazi & Soviet Courts Perverted Justice to Kill Millions in the Name of Equity

Polling also indicates McAuliffe’s support among suburban women is less than enthusiastic, which is problematic for him since it’s these women who have typically put candidates in his party into office.

Monmouth University Polling Institute president Patrick Murray attributes this lack of enthusiasm due in part to “a shift in key issues important to these voters and partly to dampened enthusiasm among the party faithful.”

Well, when you directly insult pro-life women and indirectly insult anyone who holds actual facts in some sort of relevance, what can one expect?

Terry McAuliffe is betting on the idea that Virginians cannot fathom a female CEO who is also pro-life. He’s wrong, obviously, but it’s up in the air whether his denial of reality sinks in with the women of Virginia come voting day.

GOP Congress Members Demand Answers From DOJ about Parents’ Free Speech Rights

House Judiciary Committee Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding an ethics review and public report regarding the AG’s memo, which directs the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Attorneys to use law enforcement to investigate parents who “intimidate” school board members.

“This letter is to express our serious concerns about your recent decision to involve federal law enforcement entities in local school board debates and to stifle First Amendment-protected political speech. Your actions are not just inappropriate, but also appear to have been improperly influenced by politics and by your family’s interest in the matter,” wrote the Republican Judiciary Committee members in their letter (pdf), including Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.).

jim jordan mike johnson
L: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in Baltimore, Md., on Sept. 12, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) R: Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 27, 2020. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The letter is referring to the memorandum that Garland sent to federal agency heads on Oct. 4 directing the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to mobilize their states’ law enforcement to investigate parents who “threaten violence” toward school board members or administration officials.

“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” stated Garland’s memo.

Garland’s memo came only days after the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to crack down on parents who are “threatening” school boards.

“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” stated the NSBA’s letter.

Parents across the United States and most prominently in Loudon County, Virginia, have been speaking out at crowded school board meetings to oppose some of the curriculum being used in their children’s public schools and divisive ideas such as America is systemically racist. Parents in many areas have also been questioning some of the sexual content in the books being used at their children’s schools.

Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) one of the Reps. who signed the letter to Garland, said he attended Loudon County public schools for most of his childhood but that now the curriculum being taught is an “embarrassment.”

school board meeting
A crowd is seen at a Loudoun County School Board meeting in Ashburn, Va. (File Photo/Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

“I also want to know where he thinks he has the power to send FBI into communities to go after parents who are simply going to the school board to express their discontent with what’s happening in school boards,” Roy told Newsmax on Thursday.

A Virginia mother, Asra Nomani, told The Epoch Times those parents are only advocating for what they think is best for their children.

She is the vice president of strategy and investigation with Parents Defending Education, an organization working to “reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas,” their webpage states.

Nomani said in an Oct. 8 interview that parents going to school board meetings are, “asking the school board serious questions about how money is spent, the ideology that’s being promoted in the classroom, and these school board members don’t like getting these hard questions.”

“What’s happening in Loudoun County, Virginia, is incomprehensible. … And parents obviously have a right to exercise free speech and demand accountability from public officials. … This should be the time for all parents to get engaged. Do it lawfully, exercise your free speech, but certainly, we have to have some accountability at these local school boards,” Rep. Johnson said during a recent interview with Fox News.

Nomani’s advice to parents is to not be intimidated by the DOJ’s directive but to continue to voice their opposition to the ideas they disagree with, at public school board meetings and videotape their interactions.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Republicans’ letter to the AG.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/gop-congress-members-demand-answers-from-doj-about-parents-free-speech-rights_4051237.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Meet the Nebraska Parents Who Exposed Sex-Ed Activists

‘It sucks that there are so many CRAZY people’: private emails reveal school bureaucrats’ contempt for parents

Jason Martinez, a nurse anesthetist in Nebraska, has work in two hours. It is 4 a.m. and Martinez is sifting through hundreds of pages of government documents he obtained through a public information request. His wife is worried about his sleep, that is until he starts reading aloud the messages, the snide remarks state bureaucrats and their activist allies made as they wrote a curriculum that would teach the couple’s daughters, aged 13 and 15, about transgender hormone therapy and the merits of abortion. Mrs. Martinez was no longer worried about her husband, but her children.

“I would have never dreamt a year ago that I would be caught up in something like this,” Jason Martinez told the Washington Free Beacon. “It’s terrible. It’s demoralizing. It’s taking away morality for an ultimate agenda.”

The emails obtained by Martinez show how a state board of education member successfully lobbied for a deeply connected progressive advocate to participate on the advisory team for the state’s new health standards. Lisa Schulze, a Friends of Planned Parenthood board member and former Planned Parenthood employee, not only served on the advisory board for the standards, but connected members of the Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) with national activists to draft the state’s sex-education curriculum. The internal communications contradicted the agency’s public denial that activists shaped the controversial standards.

 

Nebraska father Jason Martinez

When the first draft of the sex-ed proposal was released in March, hundreds of parents rallied at school board meetings. Emails show that NDE employees privately belittled concerned parents. One NDE employee referred to a complaint from a grandmother as “a load of crap” and said, “It’s literally science and anatomy that she has a problem with!!!” The employee told a colleague he would send her a “self-care” package to make up for the distress parents have caused.

“It sucks that there are so many CRAZY people!” an NDE employee emailed a colleague.

The first draft of the standards detailed a plan to teach gender identity in first grade, transgender hormone therapy in fifth grade, sexual orientation in sixth grade, oral and anal sex in seventh grade, and abortion in eighth grade. That draft mirrored a sex-ed curriculum designed by leading liberal groups. Some children’s health experts expressed concern about the provocative material in the lesson plan. Dr. Sue Greenwald, a retired pediatrician in Nebraska who worked with childhood victims of sexual abuse for 35 years, said the standards are like a manual on child grooming. 

“This is exactly the type of graphic material that a pedophile would use to groom a young child to be their next victim,” Greenwald told the Free Beacon. “Young sexual abuse victims do not know they are being abused, they think they are being taught.”

NDE said its staffers’ private remarks do not reflect the agency’s approach to parental feedback, pointing to the curriculum’s evolution since the first draft was released.

“Parental engagement is encouraged and sought after,” an NDE spokesman said. “We continue to encourage parental engagement, not only with state standards, but also within local communities where decisions about curriculum are made.”

Deborah Neary, the state board of education member who coordinated with Schulze, complained to NDE employees and fellow board members that public feedback on the standards played too significant a role in its development. The second draft of the standards toned down some of the language on sexuality but retained lessons on gender identity. Concerned parents continued to press board members on the sex-ed content. Neary, who did not return requests for comment, lamented that parents were able to have any input on what their children are taught.

“Most of the testimony we have heard has been hate-speech—not facts,” Neary emailed the education board president. “I hope they are not going to merely leave the decisions up to public testimony as you are asking our board to do.”

Martinez began sharing petitions against the standards in March. He eventually met Greenwald and other concerned members of the community. Together they founded a Facebook group called Protect Nebraska Children, which now has more than 21,000 members. Katie McClemens, a mother of four, said the original goal of the group was to make parents aware of the standards.

“They didn’t anticipate the storm that would come against them because for so long they had been able to work in the shadows,” McClemens told the Free Beacon

The state education board suspended the standard draft process during a September meeting. It attributed the decision to concerns about the pandemic rather than public outcry. 

Leaders of Protect Nebraska Children said they plan to launch a political action committee to endorse board of education candidates in the state. Justin Thiel, an electrician in rural Nebraska, signed his daughter up for a private school the day he read the standards. He said he hopes parents across the nation follow the lead of Nebraska in taking on activist educators.

“They are counting on us to become complacent,” Thiel told the Free Beacon. “Stand up, make yourself heard, go to the board meetings, send emails, make phone calls, and fight for the future of this great country. It takes courage but once you stand you might find yourself surrounded by 20,000 like-minded people ready to protect the innocence of our children.”

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/meet-the-nebraska-parents-who-exposed-sex-ed-activists/

Horrifying New Sex Ed Standards Mean You Need to Get Your Kids Out of Public School Now

School used to be the place where you would send your children to get a proper education.

It was a place where they could learn basic sciences and critical thinking skills.

Today, however, public schools are nothing more than propaganda centers indoctrinating children into the latest far-left ideologies.

Nowhere has this been made more evident than in the sexual education standards currently being disseminated to schools nationwide.

Developed by a coalition of left-wing nonprofit groups, the second edition of the National Sex Education Standards aspires to teach school children about various ideas many parents would likely object to, according to The Federalist.

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For instance, the standards require kindergarteners through second graders to learn about ideas related to transgenderism, including “gender” and “gender identity.”

Third graders are taught about “the role of hormone blockers” for transgender minors, an often irreversible procedure many consider to be tantamount to child abuse.

Starting in sixth grade — an age group of 11 and 12-year-olds — and by the end of eighth grade at age 13, students “should be able to” define oral, anal and vaginal sex.

This age group is also required to learn about the withdrawal method as a form of contraception.

What is quite possibly the worst aspect of these standards is their promotion of killing unborn children.

Starting in sixth grade, students are taught about abortion — not as the horror that it is, but rather as a common option when faced with pregnancy.

Even worse, teachers are forced to provide information about local abortion clinics to students in ninth grade and up.

When it comes to standards on gender identity, the standards go as far as to subvert parental authority.

“No one else is qualified to label or judge another person’s sexual identity, including their sexual orientation or gender identity, and it is important that the language and terms young people use to identify themselves is respected by the adults in their lives,” the standards state.

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These ideas may soon be taught at a public school near you — that is, if they aren’t being taught there already.

The group’s previous standards — the National Sexuality Education Standards — were used by roughly 41.3 percent of school districts, according to a 2016 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If these new standards are followed by a similar percentage of schools, it may be time to pull your child out of public school.

Roe v. Wade Perverts Justice the Same Way Nazi & Soviet Courts Perverted Justice to Kill Millions in the Name of Equity

Innocence is no longer a shield against injustice.

Separating the guilty from the innocent — that was always at the heart of the U.S. constitutional justice system.

No longer so.

Roe v. Wade corrupted that basic principle and substituted equity for justice.

A “progressive” Supreme Court contended that stage-managing equity is a higher duty than delivering justice. It fabricated a new purpose — a compelling duty to achieve equal outcomes between pregnant women and more “privileged” men unencumbered by pregnancy.Trending:Lawmakers: CDC May Be Manipulating COVID Data, Underreporting Vaccine Side Effects by Factor of 5

True, the Constitution’s Article III, Section 2, accorded judicial power to “all Cases, in Law and Equity.”

In 1938, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure fused the distinctions between actions at law and suits in equity.

Historically, the difference with equity cases was that judges were allowed a wide exercise of their own discretion rather than strictly adhering to actual laws.

Justice Harry Blackmun, in Roe v. Wade, abused that discretionary power. Authorizing the taking of innocent life is never a matter to be decided by judicial discretion.Has the concept of “equity” replaced the ideal of justice?Yes No
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Equal Outcomes Through Unjust Killing

Caught up in the rhetoric of the sexual revolution and with zero experience in abortion jurisprudence, Justice Blackmun sought to redress the unequal outcomes allegedly suffered by a pregnant woman with “the unwanted child” by granting her a compensatory right to commission the killing of that child “lawfully.”

It was an equity without justice that introduced a pregnant woman’s killing rights over her “unwanted child” as a legitimate resource needed to reach an equal outcome with men.

Now “equity” has become a popular woke term being misapplied under the guise of correcting alleged discrimination in a huge number of new areas.

The upshot?Related:Here Are the Errors of Roe v. Wade: Now SCOTUS Will Have a Chance to Fix It

Our courts now thrash about trying to impose equal outcomes, too often through unjust means.

Substituting Equity for Justice Is Unconstitutional

Substitution of equity for justice in Roe v. Wade subverted the pre-eminent purpose of the Constitution — to “establish Justice.”

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice … and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

But a progressive Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade narrowed these constitutional obligations. It demoted justice and declared equity to be a better road to forming a more perfect union.

Progressives altered the Supreme Court to be primarily a court of equity rather than a court of laws. To this end, Roe v. Wade introduced an overriding endeavor — the establishment of a new kind of equity for women by inventing for us a vile “right” to commission the prenatal killing of the innocent in our power and under our care.

“Equity” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “justice according to natural law or right, specifically: freedom from bias or favoritism.”

The Roe v. Wade court was lured into adopting a facile remedial equity that abrogated justice by introducing a most unjust bias against laws protecting the natural law rights of those the Founders called infants in their mothers’ wombs.

The Women’s Health Protection Act: Abortion Rights as Absolute Rights

Recently, in the passing of the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021 (Yeas and Nays: 218 – 211), we saw a majority of the House succumbing to that unconscionable bias.

“It is the purpose of this Act … to promote access to abortion services and women’s ability to participate equally in the economic and social life of the United States.”

The constitutional commitment to justice and the rule of law crumbled as the House agreed to sacrifice innocents to the radical feminists’ 21st-century idol — equity.

The Constitution’s original and primary goal “to establish Justice” has been revised. Now the new “build back better” goal has been erected to correct through abortion on demand the “inequity” of pregnancy, ostensible source of imbalance between women and men.

The act condemns state laws protecting the unborn child as “tool[s] of gender oppression … rooted in misogyny.” Protective laws against killing little ones in their mothers’ wombs somehow “reinforce harmful stereotypes about gender roles.”

Should the act pass in the Senate, a mother’s optional commissioning of the prenatal killing of her child becomes an absolute right — no questions asked.

The act specifies there must be no requirement to “disclose the patient’s reason or reasons for seeking abortion services” and no limitation “based on any actual, perceived, or potential reason or reasons of the patient for obtaining abortion services.”

Achieving Equity Justifies the Death Penalty?

For Justice Blackmun, the innocence of “the unwanted child” was insignificant. His ambitious eyes on the rosy picture of achieving equity for women, he declared a new higher priority for courts of law than separating the innocent from the guilty before imposing a death penalty.

In that one appalling decision, abortion jurisprudence collapsed into anarchy.

The Supreme Court was transformed from a court of justice sworn to the constitutional protection of the innocent to a court of obsessive equity dealing out killing rights.

These killing rights were awarded as faulty compensation for alleged social and economic injuries quite innocently visited prenatally by a child upon the child’s mother.

Since Roe, innocence is no longer adequate protection in law against arbitrary deprivation of life.

How Did We Fall for This?

How did we come to tolerating a Supreme Court-approved death sentence carried out “lawfully” by the mother’s abortionist on the mother’s innocent child?

How did we allow a multi-billion dollar abortion industry to profit out of the programmed “lawful” killing of over 62 million American children since Roe?

A progressive-dominated Supreme Court shifted radically from its constitutional requirement to establish justice. From decisions executing the guilty while protecting the innocent, it “progressed” to decisions executing the innocent as compensation for “victims” of unwanted pregnancy.

It was all about legalizing the killing of the innocent for what we were conditioned during the sexual revolution to believe was a higher good — equal outcomes for pregnant women. It was about permanently removing from the disadvantaged pregnant woman the immediate cause of her disadvantage measured against men’s superior advantage of never having to be burdened by pregnancy.

But history teaches us: To do what is wrong — to kill the innocent — never delivers equity.

Women’s Equity Valued Above Legal Protection for Innocents?

In Roe, the whole constitutional justice system collapsed and was replaced with a system that pursues a superficial equity at the expense of true justice.

The court’s discretion was used in an unjust way. It was dead set on awarding compensation to pregnant women by visiting the guilt of women’s “inequality” upon the innocent unborn and pronouncing them deserving of the death sentence if their mothers so choose.

The Supreme Court must reject these inane demands that continue to dribble down to us from the sexual revolution. It must reject extreme socialist justice — the idea that justice is no longer about separating guilt and innocence but rather about enforcing a radically socialist transformation of our nation.

The progressives’ justice is now about reconfiguring our very nature as human beings. It’s about recklessly mutating natural law to the alleged social and economic advantage of selected “victim” groups.

On just such a perversion of justice did the highest courts in communist Russia and in Nazi Germany predicate their disastrous reforms also deemed necessary to redress inequities.

We must turn back from this madness. Supreme Court justices are jurists — not social workers.

As long as we are endowed by nature with differences, the goal of perfect equity is out of reach. Maybe one day the scientists can homogenize us into identical robots, all with the same color, sex and abilities.

But right now that’s not the work of Supreme Court justices. They must return to being faithful to the Constitution — “in Order … to establish Justice” once again.

AT&T Responds to Attacks Over Texas ‘Heartbeat’ Abortion Law

AT&T over the weekend responded to criticisms from two progressive advocacy groups, which recently launched ads against the telecom giant for allegedly donating to Republican Texas lawmakers who backed the state’s new “heartbeat” abortion law.

The two groups, Corporate Accountability Action and American Bridge 21st Century, ran television and digital ads in Texas highlighting AT&T’s donations to lawmakers who sponsored what was previously known as Senate Bill 8. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the bill into law last month, allowing citizens to sue abortion providers they suspect of performing abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected.

Corporate Accountability Action claimed that AT&T donated more than $645,000 over the past two years to nearly 22 Texas lawmakers who sponsored the bill. It also took issue with the role the company played in founding and financing the pro-Trump One American News Network.

AT&T, registered in Delaware, is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It has remained silent about Senate Bill 8, while some other Texas-based companies, such as dating app Bumble and ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft, openly opposed the legislation.

“This is a moment in our country where there is no middle ground. You really can’t be on the sidelines,” Cecile Richards, co-chair of American Bridge 21st Century and former president of Planned Parenthood, told the Associated Press.

In a statement to Fox Business on Sunday, an AT&T spokesperson said the company has been donating to both Democrats and Republicans and has never picked a side in the debate over abortion.

“AT&T has never taken a position on the issue of abortion, and the Texas legislation was no exception,” the spokesperson said in the statement. “AT&T did not endorse nor support passage of Senate Bill 8 in the Texas legislature.”

“AT&T’s employee political action committees have never based contribution decisions on a legislator’s positions on the issue of abortion, and employee PAC contributions to Texas legislators went to both opponents and supporters of Senate Bill 8,” the statement read.

According to OpenSecrets, a website that tracks political donations in the United States, the AT&T PAC contributed $1.27 million to Democrats and $1.47 million to Republicans at the federal level during the 2019-2020 election cycle. The company itself donated $4.1 million to Democrats and $1.8 million to Republicans during that period.

The two groups are planning to run similar ad campaigns against Walt Disney Corporation and NBC-Universal over donations they made to lawmakers who supported a similar abortion bill in Florida, according to the Associated Press.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/att-responds-to-attacks-over-texas-heartbeat-abortion-law_4043207.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Sonia Sotomayor Exposes the Lie of an ‘Apolitical’ Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term this week, which means all eyes have again returned to the justices’ marble palace at 1 First Street, N.E. This Court term, unlike the last one, promises to be a blockbuster: The hot-button issues of abortion, gun rights, and potentially affirmative action will all be on the justices’ docket. By the end of this term, we should have a definitive answer as to just how “conservative” the putatively conservative, 6 to 3 Republican-nominated majority Court actually is.

And just as all eyes have returned to the Court, observers of all stripes have been presented with a timely reminder as to how the Court’s progressives view their jobs: to wit, as unabashed liberal partisans. That reminder has now come courtesy of the current Court’s most far-left justice, Sonia Sotomayor. It follows an entire career’s worth of similar comments from Justice Sotomayor’s former colleague, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

According to reporting from both CNN and The Washington Post, Sotomayor recently offered what can only be interpreted as a substantive public policy position on S.B. 8, Texas’ recent anti-abortion fetal heartbeat law that has garnered much national attention. That Sotomayor would now offer a forthright political opinion on the topic is hardly unexpected: She dissented from the Court’s correct recent decision to deny Texas pro-abortion plaintiffs’ emergency request to enjoin any enforcement of S.B. 8, lambasting the law at the time as “flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Speaking at an American Bar Association event about diversity, the loose-lipped jurisprude allegedly said, according to CNN: “You know, I can’t change Texas’ law, but you can and everyone else who may or may not like it can go out there and be lobbying forces in changing laws that you don’t like.” Perhaps then realizing in real time that she had overstepped, Sotomayor allegedly then tried to half-walk back her comment: “I am pointing out to that when I shouldn’t because they tell me I shouldn’t. But my point is that there are going to be a lot of things you don’t like.”

It is difficult, likely impossible, to interpret these comments as anything other than Sotomayor actively encouraging the ABA audience to work to alter or repeal S.B. 8. Under standard canons of judicial ethics and federal law (28 U.S.C. 455) itself, Sotomayor should now be forced to recuse from future S.B. 8 litigation at the Supreme Court. She almost assuredly will not do so, of course.

Indeed, similarly left-wing Ginsburg was infamous for making precisely these sort of comments. As but one example, during pending same-sex marriage litigation at the Supreme Court, she haughtily dismissed a Bloomberg interviewer’s question about the Court possibly moving too quickly by constitutionalizing same-sex marriage under the Fourteenth Amendment. “I think it’s doubtful that (constitutionalized same-sex marriage) wouldn’t be accepted” by the whole country, Ginsburg said just a few months before she joined Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion constitutionalizing same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. It is just as ludicrous to now expect erudite “impartiality” from Sotomayor on the Texas Heartbeat Act as it was to expect such impartiality from Ginsburg on same-sex marriage.

The legal left’s long-standing “realist” approach to jurisprudence and judicial philosophy stands in marked contrast to the legal right’s traditionally more wooden “formalist” approach. That approach can be encapsulated by a quip from the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who once wrote: “Long live formalism. It is what makes a government a government of laws and not of men.” In a similar vein, then-Judge John G. Roberts famously said at his 2005 confirmation hearing to be Supreme Court chief justice that the role of a judge is analogous to a baseball umpire whose “job” it is to “call balls and strikes.” (Query whether the chief has since lived up to that standard.)

Sotomayor’s “gaffe” is yet another eye-opening insight into the legal left’s view of the courts: that of transparently political institutions pliable to political (read: judicial) actors’ sheer force of will. The remedy, at this increasingly late hour of the American republic, is not for the legal right to wholly abandon its more traditional, “formalist” fidelities to constitutional text, structure, and history, but rather to embrace a more holistic, morally imbued and substantive conception of the relevant text, structure, and history. The time for an avowedly “neutral” legal positivism has long passed, if it was ever felicitous to begin with. The legal right should not stoop to the legal left’s level, but it must get comfortable with a jurisprudence unabashedly rooted in the morality and justice of the American Founding and substantively oriented to reclaiming that morality and justice from those who seek to destroy it.

There are now foxes guarding the marble palace henhouse. Legal conservatives must wake up to that challenge, lest they be complicit in their own subjugation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/sonia-sotomayor-exposes-the-lie-of-an-apolitical-supreme-court_4033137.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Despite WHO Preaching ‘Good Behavior’ During COVID, Employees Allegedly Committed Numerous Sex Crimes

The World Health Organization is one of many groups that have attempted to take the moral high ground throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. A new report, however, has alleged that multiple WHO employees maliciously abused women they were supposed to be helping.

According to Reuters, a 2020 investigation from the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian saw over 50 women accuse WHO employees of propositioning them for sex in exchange for jobs from 2018-2020.

This led to an investigation from an independent commission, which found 83 aid workers who were suspected of sexual abuse and exploitation during an Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At least 21 of them were employed by the WHO, Reuters reported.

The full extent of the misconduct is unknown, but at least one of the 21 WHO employees has been accused of rape.

“The review team has established that the presumed victims were promised jobs in exchange for sexual relations or in order to keep their jobs,” commission member Malick Coulibaly said.

Skin Problems, Neuropathy, Paralysis All Part of Over 500,000 Adverse Events Reported After COVID Vaccine

Further details of the abuse are even more horrifying. Reuters said many of the alleged abusers refused to wear condoms, resulting in 29 of the women becoming pregnant. At least some of the perpetrators then allegedly forced the victims to have abortions.

“What happened to you should never happen to anyone,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, addressing the victims. “It is inexcusable.”

“It is my top priority to ensure that the perpetrators are not excused but are held to account.”

According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, sexual harassment, sexual violence, rape and any gender-based violence are crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It is not clear whether the alleged perpetrators will face prosecution. At least one of the victims named in the report was a minor.

“One girl, a 14-year-old named as ‘Jolianne’ in the report, told the commission she was selling phone recharge cards on the side of the road in April 2019 in Mangina when a WHO driver offered her a ride home,” Reuters reported.

“Instead he took her to a hotel where she says he raped her and she later gave birth to his child.”

According to The Associated Press, four WHO employees have been fired over their alleged abuse, and two others were placed on leave. But these actions came after the WHO reportedly failed to act on its initial knowledge of the situation.

Investigation co-chair Aïchatou Mindaoudou said some higher-ups within the WHO “were aware of what was going on and did not act,” Reuters reported.

Ex-CDC Chief Supported Lab Leak Theory, Gets Firsthand Brush with Thuggish ‘Scientists’

She added that the women interviewed in this investigation were separate from those interviewed in last year’s investigation by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian, which suggests the abuse could be a widespread problem.

The WHO can issue all the scripted apologies it wishes, but that will not change the fact that the organization is garnering a reputation of serial sexual abuse. Meanwhile, Tedros has taken a holier-than-thou attitude about his organization’s response to COVID-19.

On Friday, he suggested wealthier countries are being selfish by failing to produce vaccines not just for themselves but also for every country that has not been able to afford enough vaccines.

“High-income countries who are vaccinating their population significantly are starting to see COVID-19 pandemic as if it’s not their problem,” he said. “That is dangerous.”

“When they say that the problem is not affecting us anymore, meaning the rest of the world will be ignored. … If there is one word that can explain it, it’s ‘greed.’”

“Self-interest is natural, but there is enlightened self-interest. Vaccines can be produced and the world can be opened up. It’s in our hands. We can end it [#COVID19] soon”-@DrTedros #VaccinEquity

Share doses.
Share know-how.
Share technology.
Waive intellectual property. pic.twitter.com/Ylz5mOkt1W

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) July 14, 2021

In Tedros’ mind, countries like America are evil for not providing the rest of the world with a vaccine we created. Meanwhile, his employees were raping African women during the last four years instead of helping fight a disease that is far more deadly than COVID-19.

According to Global Finance, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the sixth-poorest country in the entire world. If the WHO really wants to help poverty-stricken countries, it can begin by stopping its employees from exploiting some of the world’s most impoverished women instead of ignoring the scandal until it becomes public.

Tedros and the WHO as a whole are so obviously hypocritical that it is hard to imagine they cannot see it. But as is often the case, those who have the most inflated egos have become blind to their own shortcomings.

Biden Reverses Trump Ban on Federal Funds for Clinics Referring Women for Abortion

The Biden administration on Monday rolled back a Trump-era rule that bans clinics that receive federal family planning funding from referring women for abortions.

Beginning Nov. 8, clinics receiving federal funds will be allowed to refer pregnant women for abortions. It revokes former President Donald Trump’s February 2019 regulation that required organizations that perform abortions and make referrals do so in clinics that don’t receive Title X federal funds. Title X is a half-century old federal family planning program that offers around $286 million in grants each year for clinics serving primarily low-income individuals.

“Today more than ever, we are making clear that access to quality family planning care includes accurate information and referrals—based on a patient’s needs and direction,” Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement of the updated rule, adding that it is “a step forward for family planning care.”

HHS originally proposed the regulation change in April, but it was required to undergo a notice-and-comment period and additional review before the rule could be finalized.

A federal appeals court in California in 2019 ruled in favor of the Trump administration and its expressed action to “ensure that taxpayers do not indirectly fund abortions,” despite legal challenges from more than 20 states.

Upon taking office in January, President Joe Biden criticized his predecessor’s rule, saying in a memo that it “puts women’s health at risk by making it harder for women to receive complete medical information.”

The Biden administration estimated that annually, the program served about 1.5 million fewer women as a result of his predecessor’s regulation. According to the Guttmacher Institute, about one in four clinics that previously operated on Title X funds closed in 2019 in response to the Trump-era policy, reported The Washington Post.

Planned Parenthood’s acting president at the time called it a “unethical rule that will limit what providers can tell our patients,” although the Trump administration argued its rules did not include “the so-called ‘gag rule’ on counseling about abortion that was part of the Reagan Administration’s Title X rule.” According to The Post, affiliates of the organization serve roughly four in 10 patients funded by Title X.

“The end of the Title X gag rule is a major victory,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, said in a statement on Monday. “Title X is a critical piece of our social safety net that can, and should, ensure that people with low incomes can access essential health care without forcing providers to withhold referrals for all of the options available to them.”

“Given the attacks on abortion in Texas and across the country, it’s more important than ever that patients can access their choice of birth control and other health care through Title X—and that it is easily available,” Johnson added.

She said it was “disappointing” that the government didn’t rule against contentious objections, allowing for doctors to refuse to counsel or refer patients for abortions procedures according to their religious or personal convictions.

Connor Semelsberger, a director of federal affairs at the Family Research Council, told The Post that “it comes as no surprise” that the Biden administration “moved at lightning speed to … send millions of taxpayer dollars to America’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-reverses-trump-ban-on-federal-funds-for-clinics-referring-women-for-abortion_4032008.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Abby Johnson: What Always Happens in the Waiting Room After an Abortion Is What Ends Many Abortion Careers

When I walked out of Planned Parenthood after working there for eight years and climbing the ladder within the organization, so many people on the pro-life side had endless questions for me, not just about the internal working of Planned Parenthood but how I could do the things I did, persuading women that abortion was their only option, putting together the body parts of aborted babies and then somehow sleeping at night.

Valid questions. It’s important to understand how the other side thinks, how they justify those choices and how to approach them with love and truth.

Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a board-certified OB-GYN and abortion doctor, told the House Oversight Committee, in a hearing on the Texas abortion law last week, that “abortion saves lives. For the thousands of people I’ve cared for, abortion is a blessing.”

There is no possible scenario where abortion saves a life or is a blessing or an act of love. Zero.

Yet this is how the abortion industry justifies the killing of innocent life and even the harming of women during an abortion.

Through my ministry, And Then There Were None, almost 600 abortion workers have left the industry, and nearly every one of them went into those clinics with the intent of wanting to help women, a noble goal.

We were taught that abortion is indeed a blessing to a woman in crisis, dealing with abuse or in college. We told a woman that she needed to have an abortion so she could take care of her other kids, so she could continue working to provide for her family, so she could get her education and find her dream job. Kids would get in the way of her dreams and abortion would give her freedom.

All lies. This was the exact opposite of empowerment.

Several of our former abortion workers decided to quit their jobs after spending a lot of their time in the recovery room where women were placed after their abortions.

They all had similar stories: Women were always crying, bleeding, had blank stares, some immediately voicing their regret. They looked like completely different women than the ones who had walked into the clinic.

When you see firsthand the devastation of abortion and allow even a tiny smidgen of truth to seep into your heart, those first cracks in the lies you’ve been told start to form.

When you’re told lies everywhere you look — your job, the media, celebrities, friends, family, supervisors — it can be difficult to see the truth. And especially for people working in abortion clinics, it can seem like they have no options to get out for family, financial or other reasons.

But for those who do leave, the freedom they experience is worth it.

As much as we on the pro-life side want to snap back at people who scream at us on the sidewalk or yell in our faces at marches, we need to approach them with both love and the truth.

Justice Sotomayor’s ‘Gaffe’ Exposes How the Left Really Plans to Use the Courts

I didn’t leave Planned Parenthood because of the people who showed up on the sidewalk dressed like the Grim Reaper (true story). I left because God was softening my heart and because the sidewalk advocates I talked to were kind and loving. One of them even works for my ministry now.

This also means we must be bold in speaking the truth, which we have on our side, and pray for the conversion of those inside abortion clinics. Where sin abounds, God’s mercy abounds even greater.

Abortion is never acceptable. It is never health care. Killing an innocent human being is never a blessing. The death and dismemberment of an unborn human being is never an act of love.

Joe Biden’s Approval Rating Sets Another Record, Is Now Lower Than Trump’s

For a guy with the support of billionaires, millionaires, China, Mainstream Media, and Social Media, his numbers are WAY worse than Trump ever [US Patriot]

President Joe Biden’s approval rating has hit a new record low at just 40 percent, according to a poll released on Monday by Rasmussen Reports.

The poll of likely U.S. voters also revealed 58 percent of likely voters disapprove of the president’s job performance.

Among those, 50 percent selected “Strongly Disapproved.”

In contrast, only 21 percent selected “Strongly Approve.”

The current approval rating places him below former President Donald Trump, who was at 43 percent approval at this point in his presidency, according to Rasmussen.

Biden National Security Advisor May Be Guilty of Perjury Related to Clinton Campaign’s ‘Collusion’ Claims Against Trump: Report

Today’s #bidenapproval numbers are out, continuing down to a new record low:https://t.co/uzsUlTESNa

Sponsored by The ANTIFA by @JackPosobiec pic.twitter.com/Z4rpISTdj7

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) September 27, 2021

The daily poll has followed Biden’s approval rating since his first day in office.

He ranked as high as 55 percent approval on May 26. Since then, his approval has dropped by 15 percent.

According to a Rasmussen Reports Twitter post Monday, the majority of Americans oppose Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill, his plan to raise the debt ceiling and his pandemic restrictions.

Coming Up Today:@JoeBiden daily presidential job approval % is – now at a new record low.

– Majority Oppose $3.5 Trillion Spending Bill
– Majority Against Raising Debt Ceiling
– Majority Now Believe Pandemic A Trojan Horse For Permanent Socialism pic.twitter.com/XB2r7zFGQF

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) September 27, 2021

The Democratic spending bill will be a central focus this week as Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeks a House vote on Thursday. The California Democrat has claimed to have the votes to pass the bill, but some House members remain uncertain.

Biden’s recently announced vaccine mandates for federal workers and companies with 100 employees or more has also led to widespread frustration with many Americans. Several states have opposed the measure through letters and across social media.

Taliban Endgame: Former National Security Advisor Warns Extremists Could Secure 150 Nuclear Weapons

Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem have both vowed to sue the Biden administration over the issue.

Daily tracking results for the daily poll are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis, according to Rasmussen Reports.

The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.

A poll from Fox News last week showed Biden’s approval rating with independent voters had experienced a strong drop. Since January, his approval rating plummeted 24 points.

WATCH: Joe Biden’s approval rating collapses 24 points among independent voters. pic.twitter.com/a8YxNMmyQJ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 23, 2021

“Very, very weak numbers,” Fox News host Martha MacCallum said in the report.

Joe Biden’s Approval Rating Sets Another Record, Is Now Lower Than Trump’s (westernjournal.com)

Democrat Has Absolute Meltdown When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Confronts Her on Abortion on Capitol Steps

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sent one of her Democratic colleagues into a meltdown on Friday after House Democrats overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill to legalize all abortion without restrictions nationwide.

Greene, of Georgia, is a pure fighter, especially with regard to protecting children. That much was obvious on the Capitol steps when she got into a verbal spat with Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan.

NPR reported 218 Democrats voted to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act. The bill is more or less the party’s answer to state laws that restrict the ability of physicians to kill children in the womb up until birth.

The bill won’t go anywhere in the Senate without 60 votes. That didn’t stop Greene from savaging Dingell for being vehemently pro-abortion, and for attempting to chastise her over decorum following the vote.

At first, Democrats disregarded Greene, reported Bryan Metzger of Business Insider, who shared video of the confrontation on Twitter.

A number of congresswomen, including Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, reportedly refused to interact with Greene amid an argument that started out with barbs about the border crisis and which party stands up for women. Omar declined to interact with the conservative firebrand, but Dingell stuck around to receive a verbal melee, Metzger’s video showed.

“Congresswoman, I wish you would stand with women,” Dingell said to Greene, who wasn’t in the mood for any lecturing from a left-wing abortion proponent.

“Stand with women? I do.  Stand with motherhood, how about that?” Green fired off at Dingell. “You know, there’s unborn women, do they not have a right to life? Killing babies up until birth — are you serious right now? Why don’t you stand with women? Stand with mothers.”

this was one of several exchanges Greene had with Democrats on the steps. as they were lining up below, Greene got into a spat with another woman over who stood with women more while muttering that “Build Back Better for Women” is a “joke” pic.twitter.com/uIOBii1ya4

— bryan metzger (@metzgov) September 24, 2021

After Greene told her Democratic colleague she should be “ashamed” for supporting the killing of unborn children, Dingell responded, “You should be ashamed of your incivility.”

As if civility matters when lives are on the line. These people are disgusting, and Greene let them have it.

“You know what? Killing a baby up until birth is a lack of civility, it’s called murder,” Green reminded Dingell.

She added: “Hey, how about the border down there? Lack of civility — how about lack of laws?”

Republican Rep. @mtgreenee gets into a shouting match with Democrats, incl. @BettyMcCollum04 and @RepDebDingell at the Democrats’ “Build Back Better for Women” photo-op pic.twitter.com/S3AZX1zfJg

— bryan metzger (@metzgov) September 24, 2021

Report Exposes FDA’s Purchase of Fetal Heads, Organs Used for ‘Humanized Mice’ Project

Dingell, the abortion proponent, then attempted to portray herself as being a steward for Christ.

“We have lots of laws we follow, and you should practice the basic thing you’re taught in church — respect your neighbor,” the Democrat stated.

“Taught in church, are you kidding me? Try being a Christian and supporting life!” Green shouted.

Greene, who regularly shares videos of her fitness regimen, then told Dingell — who appeared to stumble on a step — “Watch your step, lady, you’re going to fall down. Control yourself.”

At one point just a few years ago, seeing two members of the House shout at one another on the Capitol steps might have been viewed as beneath the office of an elected official. In this day and age, it’s refreshing.

Democrats have challenged every social and governmental more throughout the last several years. This month, they’re coming after unborn children like never before.

Greene, a first-term congresswoman and fighter, isn’t going to let them get away with it — at least not without sharing a few words.+

Democrat Has Absolute Meltdown When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Confronts Her on Abortion on Capitol Steps (westernjournal.com)

Feds Give Planned Parenthood Millions in Pandemic Relief After Ruling it Ineligible for Gov’t Aid

Abortion giant has received $100 million in small business loans

Isn’t Abortion really Unplanned Parenthood? [US Patriot]

The Biden administration used the COVID relief package to give tens of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood even after the federal government determined the billion-dollar abortion provider was ineligible for the program.

The Small Business Administration has given $23 million to 10 Planned Parenthood affiliates in 2021 through the Paycheck Protection Program. The agency sent those payments even though it ruled Planned Parenthood did not qualify for the funding, which was designed to aid small businesses dealing with government shutdowns and the coronavirus pandemic.

SBA, which did not respond to requests for comment, had previously ordered the nation’s top abortion provider to return $80 million in taxpayer-backed PPP funds. The agency has not provided evidence that those funds were returned by any of the 37 Planned Parenthood affiliates that cashed the checks in 2020.

Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) said the agency is ignoring its own ruling—which held that affiliates of organizations with more than 500 employees are ineligible for PPP—to reward a political ally.

“I think Democrats know it is illegal to give small business loans to the big business, that is Planned Parenthood, but they are completely in the tank for taxpayer-funded abortions,” Paul told the Washington Free Beacon.

Planned Parenthood did not respond to a request for comment.

Planned Parenthood has more than $2 billion in net assets, according to its 2019-2020 annual report. The organization pledged more than $45 million to support Biden and other Democrats in the 2020 campaign. It has already spent nearly $700,000 on lobbying in 2021, an effort that is already bearing fruit after congressional Democrats and the Biden administration put forward budget proposals to overturn longstanding bipartisan bans on taxpayer-funded abortion.

Republican members of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship announced Monday that they will refuse to vote on the SBA’s nominee for deputy administrator until the agency takes action to ensure Planned Parenthood returns the tens of millions in funds. The nominee for the position, Dilawar Syed, served on the board of directors of an organization tied to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which targets Israel with economic pressure.

Mallory Quigley, vice president of communications for the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, said it is “unconscionable” that the federal government wasted $100 million in relief funds on a billion-dollar business like Planned Parenthood.

“This money was intended to help small businesses survive during the deadly pandemic, not subsidize our nation’s largest abortion business which daily harms women and takes innocent lives,” Quigley told the Free Beacon. “It’s time to hold those who let this happen accountable.”

Feds Give Planned Parenthood Millions in Pandemic Relief After Ruling it Ineligible for Gov’t Aid (freebeacon.com)

Epoch TV Review: Is Your Child Addicted to Their Phone?

How to protect yourself and your kids from the harmful effects of technology

Every generation worries about the upcoming youth, but does the age of smartphones and digital addiction pose a more serious threat than ever before? In an episode of NTD’s “The Nation Speaks,” host Cindy Drukier interviews teacher and author Jeremy Adams, as well as psychologist Hilarie Cash, to answer this question.

It has only been 14 years since we’ve had computers in our pockets that are available every moment of our lives. In his book “Hallowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation,” Jeremy Adams, a civics teacher of 24 years, brings awareness to what he is seeing in the classroom and how he believes the younger generation is negatively affected by technology.

Adams says when you work in the classroom, you get to know kids and you notice if there are troubling trends. He believes the most disturbing thing about kids today is the value system they are embracing. The way they look at their country, the way they spend their time, and the values they hold are not helping them live purposeful and meaningful lives. In fact, they are hindering them.

Being a civics teacher, Adams says he worries about the American experiment.

“America is not like other countries. We can’t have a single lost generation that doesn’t understand what it means to be an American and what those values are and how you perpetuate the American experiment,” he says.

He is worried about the values that have emerged in young people over the past 10 years. These include the extent to which young Americans live their lives completely untethered to adult values, influences, or role models.

Adams says that although it doesn’t matter to him whether the youth are religious or not, he is bothered that young people don’t seem to know anything about religion.

Other troubling trends are that the younger generation is extremely unpatriotic, they don’t have the desire for relationships, marriage, or family, and they are radically individualistic.

He says that when you think about the things that make life enchanting and grand, you think of friendships, love, learning, and going out and seeing and doing things. Yet today’s youth are lonely and isolated.

Adams stresses how unhappy this generation is, citing rising suicide rates.

“It is shocking,” he says.

He was worried about these things prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but now these problems have been amplified and accelerated.

Kids today don’t go out and socialize, they don’t have meals with their parents, and they often spend 9 to 10 hours a day on their phone.

Adams says kids post-COVID-19 are zombies in the classroom and don’t know how to engage in academic and social environments.

Adams believes the reason for much of this falls on the adult generation. He says that we have given young people freedom but haven’t stepped forward and given them the values, knowledge, or insight needed to use that freedom well. If adults give youth the freedom to do whatever they want, we have to also teach them that freedom allows them to commit to what is important and meaningful. When we fail to do that, we are left with a generation that sees freedom as tantamount to indulgence or licentiousness, and doesn’t connect it to important things.

Being a parent, spouse, teacher, or person of faith, is hard. It may be the hardest thing a person does, but it will also likely be the most meaningful. Youth today often aren’t able to make the connection between struggle and purpose.

Acknowledging that high expectations usually come from adults, Adams points out that the parent generation, in our zeal to be compassionate and empathetic, have actually let our youth down. Being kind is a good thing, but it should help students feel secure so they can achieve good things.

Now in schools, teachers are also friends, counselors, and often act as parents to their students.

Teachers today need to understand that compassion and empathy should serve youth in a way that prepares them to show up, study, work hard, and have success. Adams says many teachers think they’re being compassionate by giving students a diploma without making them learn anything.

Any form of success requires diligence, knowledge, and skill. Robbing young people of what they need to stand tall in the world and achieve what they want in their lives is not kind.

Thankfully, Adams does believe there is still time to turn the situation around. He says we all want to do better. Young people know they are addicted to their phones and need to live life more. The adults know better and know they need to do things like insist on family time, church, and community. He says parents and teachers need to start “adulting” again, which means putting ourselves in the physical, intellectual, and moral spaces of young people. Awareness is the key to breaking the phone addiction, because once we are aware, we can intervene.

Teacher Warns of Troubled Next Generation; Tackling Digital Addiction | The Nation Speaks [Full Episode]Play Video

Watch the full episode here.

To learn more about how bad the digital addiction in our youth is and what can be done about it, Drukier interviews psychologist Hilarie Cash, co-founder of reSTART: Internet Addiction Recovery Program.

Cash, who has been seeing addicted patients for over 25 years, says the addiction problem has been growing steadily as technology has entered everyone’s lives. The software is designed to be addictive, and kids are now exposed to technology from early ages, which affects their development.

Cash says there are tell-tale signs if there is an addiction problem. One of the disorders is called “Gaming Disorder,” which often happens to people who become addicted to video games. It can be recognized when gaming begins to take over a person’s life: they no longer have control over how much they use it, they lose interest in other things, and they continue with their behavior despite negative consequences.

Cash says that grades going down, not getting enough sleep or exercise, not having many friends or offline activities, or fighting with family about technology-use rules, are all indicators that there is a problem.

Cash says technology affects brain development in young children. Today, many parents are handing devices to their babies, which has never been the case in past generations. This impacts social development substantially, because a person doesn’t develop good social skills unless they are actually interacting socially with other people.

Cash also explains the attachment issues that result from being exposed to too much technology. A child needs to be attached to their caregivers, but if the caregivers are on their devices too much, or putting the kids on devices to keep them distracted, this affects the attachment a child develops with their caregiver, which in turn affects mental health later on down the road.

She says that from ages 13 to 20, many have intimacy disorders, not having the skills and confidence to initiate, develop, and maintain emotionally intimate relationships.

Sexuality is also impacted because there is a blending of activities online, with many users looking at pornography, gambling, gaming, and social media all at the same time.

On top of this, there are physical problems, such as sleep deprivation, inadequate exercise, and poor diet.

In regards to social development, there is a lack of skill in communication, as well as attention problems.

Technology gives us immediate gratification, which negatively affects academic work by not having the ability to stay focused, persevere to get projects done, and look forward to getting a good grade.

So what can we do? Cash says there are apps that help at least monitor phone use, and these can be helpful if a person is actually motivated to make changes.

She recommends that parents don’t give smartphones to their children before high school. The software parents can put on phones to monitor kids is easy for smart kids to get around. She says to make sure kids don’t have smartphones until they have developed a well-rounded life and can sustain that once they get a smartphone.

Cash also says it is wise to have boundaries around phone and screen time, such as checking your phone at certain times and otherwise leaving it off, and making sure times at home are intentional and not surrounded by screen time and devices. Make sure kids are getting time outdoors, exercising, doing their chores, having down time, and in-person social time.

Cash says the key is to focus on giving your kids the proper rules and guidance so they can live a well-rounded life.

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The Biden Administration’s Attempt to Immediately Shut Down Texas Abortion Law Just Crashed and Burned

A federal judge has rejected the Biden administration’s attempt to shelve the Texas anti-abortion “heartbeat” law that took effect Sept. 1.

The law has the effect of making it illegal to have abortions in Texas after about the sixth week of pregnancy — when the heartbeat of a baby can be detected. The law, which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed to take effect, allows citizens to bring complaints, in effect making them whistleblowers on behalf of the unborn.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice made an emergency court filing demanding the law be blocked.

“The State of Texas adopted S.B. 81 to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights,” the filing said, adding that “Texas has banned abortions months before viability — at a time before many women even know they are pregnant.”

“When other States have enacted laws abridging reproductive rights to the extent that S.B. 8 does, courts have enjoined enforcement of the laws before they could take effect. In an effort to avoid that result, Texas devised an unprecedented scheme that seeks to deny women and providers the ability to challenge S.B. 8 in federal court,” the filing said.

In rejecting the government’s demand in a tersely worded order, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman refused to let the Biden administration have its way.

“Consistent with the Court’s previous Order, (Dkt. 12), that set a hearing on the United States’ Emergency Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order or Preliminary Injunction, (Dkt. 8), this case presents complex, important questions of law that merit a full opportunity for the parties to present their positions to the Court. Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED that the United States’ Opposed Motion for Expedited Briefing Schedule, (Dkt. 13), is DENIED,” the judge wrote.

Pitman, who was nominated to the bench by then-President Barack Obama in 2014, had earlier agreed that before he would rule on the federal motion to block the Texas law, he would hear arguments from both sides, setting a deadline of Oct. 1 for paperwork to be filed, according to Newsweek.

The Department of Justice did not want to wait that long and filed the request for action immediately, which Pitman rejected.

Since the law took effect, Texas abortion clinics have canceled appointments for abortions, according to The Texas Tribune.

“For all the bluster about Roe v. Wade being a matter of women’s rights, note how quickly clinics abandoned the clients they claim to champion once their profits were actually at stake,” wrote Roger Severino, senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, in an Op-Ed for Newsweek on Thursday.

“So naturally, Planned Parenthood and other abortionists have asked their friends in the Biden administration to try again to block the law on their behalf so the cash can start flowing again,” he wrote.

Severino said that the Department of Justice was way off base legally when it suggested that the law made citizens into some form of legalized vigilantes.

“Giving citizens the power to sue and recover damages from lawbreakers doesn’t entitle them to carry some sort of Texas deputy badge. It doesn’t turn them into Dog the Bounty Hunter either,” he wrote. “Like other whistleblower laws, the Heartbeat Act merely incentivizes them to uncover and prove serious wrongdoing. And there are few wrongs more terrible than intentionally stopping an innocent child’s heart.

“Instead of waiting to see if a Texas citizen will bring an enforcement action with enough proof of a violation, DOJ seeks to enjoin every person in the state from filing a suit against any abortion clinic at the front end, no matter how egregious or blatant the violation.

“In the name of defending an invented constitutional right to abortion, Attorney General Merrick Garland wants to suspend an actual right found in the Constitution — the due process of law.”

As the Texas legal fight plays out, other states are watching.

Georgia Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller said Georgia might consider a similar law next year, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Biden Administration’s Attempt to Immediately Shut Down Texas Abortion Law Just Crashed and Burned (westernjournal.com)

FDA Fetal Organ Purchases Violated Federal Law, Experts Say

The FDA shopped from a menu of aborted fetus organs to insert into lab mice as part of taxpayer-funded experiments, according to government records—a practice that watchdogs said may violate federal law.

From 2012 to 2018, Advanced Bioscience Resources, a nonprofit fetal tissue supplier, charged the FDA $340 per aborted fetus liver and $515 per intact skull. The FDA originally redacted these price listings, but a judge later unsealed the documents containing them, which were made public Tuesday by Judicial Watch. Federal law Bans any institution from profiting off the sale of aborted fetuses. Meredith Di Liberto, the lead attorney in the lawsuit to obtain the government records, said the unredacted documents reveal a clear line of business between the FDA and a leading fetal tissue provider.

“I don’t know how you get around that not being a violation of federal law,” Di Liberto told the Washington Free Beacon. “Why are they charging per organ? What work is involved that requires you to charge a separate cost for a thymus and a liver?”

Neither the FDA nor ABR responded to a request for comment.

The FDA study established human immune systems in mice with aborted fetus organs to test the effectiveness of pre-approved drugs. Scientists made specific requests to the supplier to keep the harvested organs “fresh” and “shipped on wet ice.” Abortion providers often charge fetal tissue providers the labor cost for harvesting the organs from an aborted fetus, but David Prentice, a professor of molecular genetics at the Catholic University of America, said the listed prices of fetal organs revealed in the contract are “ludicrous.”

“Basically you’re trafficking baby body parts using our taxpayer funds, and it’s being done at our federal agencies,” Prentice told the Free Beacon. “I think it’s an open question if they’re making a profit off of this tissue, and that obviously borders on the illegal.” 

The DOJ began an investigation into ABR in 2017 after undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress showed Planned Parenthood employees negotiating prices and methods of harvesting organs from aborted fetuses. The DOJ declined to comment on the investigation. 

Two California medical companies were ordered to permanently close all business operations in a $7.8 million settlement in 2017 after a local district attorney found they were “viewing body parts as a commodity and illegally selling fetal tissues for valuable consideration.” David Daleiden, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, said ABR should be shut down too for similar illegal behavior revealed in its contracts with the FDA. 

“The federal court has found probable cause that ABR illegally trafficked baby body parts based on the records publicly available—it’s time for these cases to be filed now and for the human trafficking of aborted infants to stop,” Daleiden told the Free Beacon

The Trump administration ended the FDA’s partnership with ABR in 2018. The administration stopped government scientists from conducting experiments on fetal organs and established an ethics committee to review all funding requests for fetal research. The Biden administration reestablished this research and dissolved the ethics committee in April, which Prentice said leaves reason to believe the FDA and other federal agencies have resumed purchasing fetal organs. 

“It’s sad for science that the Biden administration did away with the ethical review—it moved science backward,” Prentice told the Free Beacon. “People’s eyes need to be opened and stomachs need to be churned to know this is going on and demand that it’s stopped. It’s antiquated science and medieval research.”

The National Institutes of Health gave at least $2.7 million in taxpayer money to the University of Pittsburgh to establish a “Pipeline” for fetal research that sought out minority babies. Another study funded by the NIH at the university took the scalps of aborted fetuses and grew them on rats. 

Judicial Watch submitted the original FOIA request to the FDA in 2018. Di Liberto said the documents obtained Tuesday is the final information they were seeking after a series of lawsuits over three years. She said the continual refusal from the FDA to provide the requested information despite the termination of the ABR partnership leads her to believe this may not be the only instance of shady fetal organ purchases. 

“If you’re the government and you don’t have a relationship with this organization, why are you redacting information unless you are covering up your own role in it? Maybe the problem is that it’s still going on—just not with this contractor,” Di Liberto told the Free Beacon.

FDA Fetal Organ Purchases Violated Federal Law, Experts Say (freebeacon.com)

Abortion Clinic’s Supreme Court Defense Rests on Debunked Study

A Mississippi abortion clinic is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the state’s fetal pain abortion law based in part on a debunked medical study.

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which sued Mississippi over a 15-week abortion ban, argued in a Supreme Court brief filed Monday that a 2010 review of research proved that pre-viability babies could not feel pain, but it failed to mention that one of the study’s architects repudiated the findings. “This medical consensus reflects the conclusions of a multi-disciplinary team of physicians and scientists from all relevant fields after a years-long examination of all peer-reviewed data relevant to the issue,” the brief states. 

Neuroscientist Dr. Stuart Derbyshire, who was a lead author in the literature cited by the clinic, updated his findings in a 2020 study after finding that fetuses feel pain at 12 weeks. John Bockmann, who co-authored the 2020 fetal pain study with Derbyshire, said the idea that there is a medical consensus on fetal pain is absurd. He said the brief is an example of abortion advocates disregarding updated science on fetal development. 

“If there were a rebuttal to our paper, which posits fetal pain beginning at 12 weeks, they would have put it front and center,” Bockmann told the Washington Free Beacon. Derbyshire, a professor at the National University of Singapore, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Supreme Court will take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in the fall term. Legal precedent since Roe v. Wade has declared abortion bans prior to fetal viability to be unconstitutional, but the Court did not intervene to stop a six-week abortion ban in Texas from being implemented in September. 

Mississippi state officials and pro-life activists encouraged the Court to consider updated science on fetal development that was not around during past abortion decisions. Derbyshire, who is pro-choice, previously told the Washington Free Beacon that his 2010 research paper is outdated. Chuck Donovan, president of the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, said abortion advocates are fearful that previous abortion cases may not hold up thanks to updated scientific understanding of fetal development. 

“The Mississippi abortion center brief only reinforces that Roe and Casey are based on outdated science,” Donovan told the Free Beacon. “Sadly, the abortion industry wants to keep it that way. Citing outdated science, ignoring medical advancements, and putting aside the consensus judgment of the American people, the abortion industry is asking the Court to close their eyes, their minds, and their hearts to the modern miracles of science and the dynamic lives of the unborn.”

Abortion Clinic’s Supreme Court Defense Rests on Debunked Study (freebeacon.com)

CDC Director: Agencies Urgently Working on COVID-19 Vaccine for Younger Children

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky says the federal health agency is working quickly on a COVID-19 vaccine for younger children between the ages of 5 and 11.

“We’re waiting for the companies to submit the data to the FDA, we’re anticipating that will happen in the fall,” she told the “Today Show” on Sept. 13. “We will look at that data from the FDA, from the CDC, with the urgency that we all feel for getting our kids vaccinated and we’re hoping by the end of the year.”

Her comments contrast with health advisory panels in several other countries, including the United Kingdom, that haven’t recommended COVID-19 shots for children aged 5 to 11. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted emergency authorization to vaccinate children aged 12 to 17.

Last week, FDA executives, including Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock and Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research chief Peter Marks, said in a statement that the agency will carefully look at data for younger children once it becomes available.

The officials said the FDA is then “prepared to complete its review as quickly as possible, likely in a matter of weeks rather than months,” adding that “the agency’s ability to review these submissions rapidly will depend in part on the quality and timeliness of the submissions by manufacturers.”

Should the CDC hand down a recommendation that younger children get vaccinated, it’s likely that some school districts will mandate them for in-person classes. Already, the Los Angeles Unified School District last week voted to mandate vaccines for children aged 12 and up in order to attend classes on campus.

But in other countries, some officials have noted that children have an extremely low risk of becoming seriously ill, hospitalized, or dying from COVID-19, the illness caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

The UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) earlier in September said it will take a “precautionary approach,” saying that “given this very low risk, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced.”

In June, scientists from University College London, as well as the Universities of York, Bristol, and Liverpool, discovered that most children who died of COVID-19 had underlying health problems. Overall, the COVID-19 mortality rate among children is 2 deaths per 1 million children in England, they found.

“We hope this data will be reassuring for children and young people and their families,” said Dr. Elizabeth Whittaker, from the Centre for Paediatrics and Child Health and Imperial College London, reported the BBC. She said that even after the emergence of the Delta variant, it hasn’t affected the child mortality rate.

CDC Director: Agencies Urgently Working on COVID-19 Vaccine for Younger Children (theepochtimes.com)

CCP Is Sinicizing Christianity, Other Faiths to ‘Align’ Them to Its Ideology: Chinese American Pastor

With the launch of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) five-year “sinicization campaign” in 2018, the regime has been working to “re-create” spiritual beliefs that are compatible with its ideologies, according to a Chinese American pastor.

Bob Fu, the founder and president of the U.S.-based Christian nonprofit China Aid, told The Epoch Times in an email that his organization has “clearly detected intensified persecution every year” since the first year of the campaign.

“The Chinese government under the guidance of President Xi Jinping has escalated the persecution of people of faith with the ‘sinicization’ campaign, or to re-create religion to better align with the CCP ideals,” said Fu, who was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and a house church leader in Beijing. Fu and his wife fled to the United States as religious refugees in 1997.

Fu added that the sinicization campaign has “impacted those of all faiths in China.” “Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners, house church Christians, and Catholics have all been targeted by the Chinese government because of their religious beliefs,” he said.

With only a few months left until the 2022 Winter Olympics, Fu says it is “egregious” that China will be hosting the Games despite its record of “gross human rights abuses.” He said the 2022 Beijing Olympics “will be a test of the world’s conscience to see how we respond.”

Epoch Times Photo
A Three-Self Church in Shuyang County was converted into a place to commemorate the Red Army, and Mao Zedong’s statue was placed near the entrance. (Courtesy of Bitter Winter)

Sinicization of Christianity

According to Fu, the sinicization of Christianity is “directly linked” to the escalated persecution of house Christians. He said the act of sinicization is centered on gaining “control”—the key goal that the CCP “desires the most.”

“Sinicization gives the CCP a chance to re-imagine Christianity with the government at its center. That’s why we see portraits of Jesus being replaced by Mao and Xi in state-sanctioned churches,” Fu said.

However, Fu added that despite the communist regime’s “best efforts” to persecute Christians, “Christianity continues to grow rapidly.”

Epoch Times Photo
The Hancheng Church in Hanshan County had its cross removed on April 28, 2020. (Courtesy of Bitter Winter)

A week after the CCP marked its 100-year anniversary, the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement held a national conference on July 8 where churches were provided with “a model sermon” based on Xi’s centenary speech of July 1.

The pastors were instructed to hail “Long live the great, glorious and correct Chinese Communist Party,” and Christians were required to “trust the CCP,” reported Bitter Winter, an online magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China. A few days later in another conference on July 13 in Shanghai, the participants discussed speeding up the “sinicization of Christianity,” according to the magazine.

The communist regime has reached this key phase of distorting the Christian faith over the long years of persecution. Just in the year 2020, over 900 crosses were removed from churches and Bibles were confiscated. Apart from demolishing the crosses, the CCP also raided and closed down many house churches, including state-run churches.

“In 2020, we saw a rise in cases involving authorities threatening or detaining Christians, outlawing house churches, as well as increases in demolishing church buildings and crosses,” Fu said. “2020 is the worst year in persecution since the end of the Cultural Revolution.”

In the same year, it was reported that a state-owned university in China distorted a biblical story from John 8 about how Jesus forgave a woman who had committed adultery. The altered version, published by the University of Electronic Science and Technology Press, states that Jesus stoned the woman, saying “I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead,” reported Bitter Winter.

According to UCA News, Catholics in China are “upset” over the incident. An anonymous priest said in the report that such distortion of the original text “is against morality and the law.” Another Catholic in China said that events distorting Christian faith and history have been “repeated every year,” but the Church has never received the “respect and apology it deserves.”

Fu doesn’t find it surprising, either. “It is sadly unsurprising to me that the CCP would go through such lengths to alter the Gospel,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that the true teachings call for “sacrificial change” and for one’s life to be centered on the Divine, “not the CCP.”

Some of the other instances of Christianity being sinicized include the following: the replacement of a painting of Mother Mary and the Christ child with a portrait of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, religious believers being forced to attend compulsory training to memorize Xi’s quotes, and the portraying of Jesus and Mary in ancient Chinese attire, reported Bitter Winter.

“My eyes widened when I saw Mary with her hair tied in a bun like an ancient Chinese woman. It’s so bizarre,” a Three-Self churchgoer told Bitter Winter after seeing the illustrations of Jesus and Mary published in Tian Feng, a monthly Christian magazine.

Another 70-year-old Christian said: “The CCP has always talked about de-Westernization; it doesn’t allow Chinese people to believe in the God of foreigners, but I never expected that the Lord Jesus and saints through the ages would be transformed into Chinese people. The CCP has gone totally crazy.”

According to a 2019 report by Bitter Winter, a Three-Self church in Jiangxi province was “completely altered.” One house church leader said in the report that sinicization aims at “eliminating pure religious beliefs.”

“The ultimate goal is to eliminate Christianity, and also to eliminate Taoism, Buddhism, and Islam, with only communism remaining in the end,” the anonymous leader said.

Epoch Times Photo
In the first half of 2020, crosses were removed from many Three-Self churches across Anhui province. (Courtesy of Bitter Winter)

Sinicization of Other Religions

The CCP’s sinicization campaign is multi-targeted; Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims aren’t spared either.

For instance, the China Islamic Association in Puyang County, Henan province, issued a notice in 2019 that the mosques’ Arabic-style domes and structures must be changed to ancient Chinese-style architecture to fit in well with the rest of the buildings located on the South Ring Road, reported Bitter Winter. The dismantling of the domes and minarets began thereafter.

“This is nationwide. Anything with these symbols must be altered. If you obstruct [the dismantling work], the mosque will be torn down,” an officer from the Religious Affairs Bureau told local Muslims, according to the report.

To force religious leaders to conform to the CCP’s ideologies of Marxism and atheism, they are required to undergo training at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences in Yinchuan City, an imam told the magazine in another report.

“The regime doesn’t allow us to preach in accordance with the teachings of the Quran and requires us to talk about state policies before expounding scriptures,” the imam said, adding that their preaching has to be recorded and sent to the authorities.

The sinicization campaign has equally impacted Tibetan Buddhism since the campaign’s beginning. According to Bitter Winter, the CCP has since intensified the demolition of temples and the removal of symbols related to Tibetan Buddhism.

In June 2020, the authorities in Qingdao City, Shandong province, issued an order to hide a white Tibetan Buddhist stupa on the Xiaolong Mountain because the stupa distracted the drivers and “affected the traffic on the nearby highway.”

According to the same report, other elements or words related to religion were also removed. The “wisdom eyes” that were painted on a signboard, which hangs at the entrance of a temple in Shandong province, were painted over in red color.

In the same year, authorities in Hebei province instructed Tibetan words to be removed from the Xingguo Temple, which was built in the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234), according to the report.

Arshdeep Sarao contributed to this report.

CCP Is Sinicizing Christianity, Other Faiths to ‘Align’ Them to Its Ideology: Chinese American Pastor (theepochtimes.com)

Four Glaring Inconsistencies

One sign that you don’t believe what you say—or that you aren’t abiding by any of the principles you invoke—is when you behave in a manner that is utterly inconsistent with your stated beliefs. Another sign is when you invoke one set of principles in one context, but an entirely contradictory set of principles in another. These are all marks of a deeply unprincipled individual.

I’ve been closely observing the debate around the Texas pro-life law that makes abortion unlawful in virtually all cases beyond six weeks of pregnancy, and empowers private individuals and entities to sue, not the women who have the abortions, but the clinics, doctors, nurses, and all other enablers who facilitate and perform the abortion. The effect has been to create something that has not existed in America since 1973, a state in the union where abortion is largely prohibited and largely unavailable.

Now let’s turn to four glaring contradictions in progressive and liberal condemnation of the Texas law. Vice President Kamala Harris declared that the law was a gross violation of people’s rights to control their own bodies. Such a right, she insisted, is “not negotiable.” This is an obvious repetition of the slogan, “My body, my choice.” Yet Harris said this virtually on the eve of the Biden-Harris administration announcing a nationwide vaccine mandate. Everyone in the federal government must be vaccinated. Private companies with more than 100 employees must vaccinate all their employees.

Wait! What happened to people’s rights to control their bodies? What happened to “My body, my choice”? Evidently, the very same principle that is invoked to protection in one context is completely jettisoned in another context to impose vaccine mandates on penalty of fines and other punishments.

Another progressive line of attack on the Texas law is that it’s an attack on democracy. Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) went so far as to allege that the Texas law represented “tyranny.” Yet the law was passed by an elected Texas House of Representatives, an elected Texas state Senate, signed by an elected Texas governor, and upheld by Texas courts. Even the Supreme Court refused to issue an injunction preventing the law from going into effect.

So how does a law that is the very expression of democracy—the will of the people, as expressed by their elected representatives, and upheld by the judicial branch as consistent with the rule of law—somehow become tyrannical? Not only is Swalwell using terms loosely, he is using them in an inverted or Orwellian sense. War is peace. Lies are truth. Democracy is tyranny.

A third contradiction. Two prominent figures from the United Nations have deplored the Texas law on the grounds that it constitutes sex discrimination. Melissa Upreti, chair of the U.N.’s working group on discrimination, called the law “gender based discrimination at its worst.”

At its worst? All around the world, there are manifestly graver forms of discrimination against women. In Indian villages, the practice of wife-burning and bride-burning is depressingly common. Afghanistan under Taliban rule now severely restricts education for girls. In other Islamic countries, women are discriminated against in multiple ways. In many places, from Thailand to Mexico, there is massive sex trafficking and forced prostitution.

Can anyone with a straight face say that laws that require women to have their children, and put them up for adoption if they can’t or don’t want to care for them, somehow constitute sex discrimination “at its worst”?

But evidently the U.N. is severely behind the times here. Not only in America but throughout the Western world, we have seen the rise of a “woke” sensibility that insists that “gender is a social construct” and that there are not two but multiple—perhaps as many as 75 or more—genders, and that “men” and “women” strictly speaking do not exist.

So if men and women don’t exist, and no distinction can be made between the two, and gender is a spectrum that has nothing to do with biology but depends entirely on which gender on the menu you “identify” with, then how can the Texas abortion law, or any law, constitute sex discrimination? How can you discriminate on the basis of a category that itself does not exist?

A fourth—and to me, this is the most interesting one—contradiction concerns the progressive critique of the most novel and innovative aspect of the Texas law, namely, its empowerment of private entities to enforce the law. President Joe Biden said that the Texas approach “creates a vigilante system.” The left-wing Texas Tribune interviewed legal scholar Jon Michaels who said that for Texas, “It’s a way of back-dooring and winking while constitutional violations are occurring.”

The basic charge here is that Texas is using private entitles to impose restrictions that the state itself is constitutionally prohibited from imposing. And this is true. But does the charge sound familiar? It should, because this is precisely what the Biden administration is doing when it uses private digital platforms to impose censorship and other forms of speech restriction. In that case, too, the state is using private entitles to impose a regime of censorship that the state itself is constitutionally barred from imposing.

Of course, there’s an important difference in the two situations. There is in fact a clear free speech right in the Constitution. It’s right there in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But where is the clear abortion right in the Constitution? It does not exist.

My goal in this article is not to take a stance on the Texas law, but rather to expose the unprincipled lines of attack on it. Soon the Supreme Court will take up the issue not via the Texas law but rather a Mississippi law restricting abortion after 15 weeks. Let’s hope our highest Court gives the matter the careful scrutiny it deserves, and rules in a principled manner that protects our core values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Four Glaring Inconsistencies (theepochtimes.com)

Former Pro-Life Dem Wants To Enshrine Abortion in Federal Law

Rep. Jim Langevin said he made decision after Supreme Court did not interfere with Texas’s heartbeat law

A Democratic congressman who campaigned as pro-life for years pledged to support a bill to permanently legalize abortion. 

Rep. Jim Langevin (D., R.I.) on Thursday said he will vote to codify Roe v. Wade in a Thursday op-ed in the Providence Journal, despite insisting on the campaign trail that he is a committed pro-life Christian. Langevin said he made this decision after the Supreme Court decided not to interfere with the enactment of a six-week abortion ban in Texas.  

“In light of this inaction by the Court—and as the conservative majority seems increasingly likely to take the extraordinary step of overturning Roe v. Wade—I have reconsidered my position on reproductive rights,” Langevin wrote

Langevin’s announcement drew sharp rebukes and cries of betrayal from activists and longtime supporters. Kristen Day, executive director of the Democrats for Life of America, said Langevin seemed passionate about representing pro-life Democrats in Congress when she met him. But his views on abortion shifted more toward pro-choice the longer he was in office, which she attributed to the radical leadership in the party. 

“I think a lot of these members still do believe life begins in the womb,” Day told the Washington Free Beacon. “The political pressure is brutal.” 

Langevin said in his op-ed that he will support House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D., Calif.) drive to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would make legalized abortion permanent in federal law. Pelosi said she will soon introduce the bill in response to the enactment of Texas’s heartbeat law. 

Langevin was elected in 2000 with the support of prominent abortion opponents. He entered office with a 0 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which shifted to 100 percent by 2007 and has fluctuated slightly since then. The National Right to Life Committee rated him at 88 percent during his first year, then dropped him to 0 percent by 2008. Langevin has consistently supported expansion to abortion access in the past decade. He did, however, support the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortion, as late as 2016. 

The Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization, donated to Langevin’s original campaign in 2000 when he opposed abortion. Mallory Quigley, vice president of communications for the group, said the Rhode Island Democrat should be ashamed for allowing his once pro-life views to flip in the most radical manner possible. 

“Langevin once supported common sense, common ground pro-life proposals including stopping taxpayer funding of abortion—but how the times have changed,” she told the Free Beacon. “Rep. Langevin is now a pro-abortion extremist who votes in lockstep with Speaker Pelosi.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) was the only Democrat in the Senate to vote in favor of a provision to keep the Hyde Amendment in August. The House voted to remove the Hyde Amendment from appropriations bills in the same month. Day said the key for pro-life Democrats moving forward is to make their voices known and support the few elected officials they have left. A quarter of Democrats identify as pro-life.

“It’s very unfortunate that my party says we need to include everybody then takes this position against pro-life Democrats,” Day told the Free Beacon. “That’s exactly against what they’re for, which is diversity and inclusion.”

The Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments over a Mississippi abortion ban in the coming weeks. State officials have asked the Court to not only uphold the law, but overturn Roe v. Wade and subsequent federal rulings preventing states from restricting abortion.

Former Pro-Life Dem Wants To Enshrine Abortion in Federal Law (freebeacon.com)

Rose McGowan Goes Scorched Earth on Hillary Clinton: You Represent No Soul, You Eat Hope, You Twist Minds

Actress Rose McGowan is not afraid to speak her mind when it comes to Democratic politicians, and one of her latest tweets takes aim at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“@HillaryClinton You are a shadow leader in service of evil. You are the enemy of what is good, right and moral,” McGowan said.

“You represent no flag, no country, no soul. You eat hope, you twist minds. I’ve been in a hotel room with your husband and here comes the bomb.”

@HillaryClinton You are a shadow leader in service of evil. You are the enemy of what is good, right and moral. You represent no flag, no country, no soul. You eat hope, you twist minds. I’ve been in a hotel room with your husband and here comes the bomb. https://t.co/K3ZDQYBXPn

— Rose 🌊McGowan (@rosemcgowan) September 3, 2021

Trending

White House Staffers Can’t Bear to Watch ‘Gaffe Machine’ Biden, So They Mute His Speeches: Report

In the tweet, the actress linked a Breitbart story titled “Hillary Clinton Rages over Texas Abortion Law: ‘We’ll Fight’ for Abortion.”

She is certainly not winning the trophy for politeness, but McGowan has not shied away from sharing what she truly thinks in recent months.

Although McGowan is not a conservative, she has stood tall against Hollywood elites and the Democratic Party — referring to them as a “cult.”

Following the Texas heartbeat bill, which has banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, the left has lost its collective mind.

McGowan has called out the faux outrage from both Clinton, a seasoned politician, and celebrities when it comes to the Lone Star State’s pro-life legislation.

“This is really going to help for sure- absolute moron achievement unlocked,” she tweeted with a screenshot of a Deadline article headlined “Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, and Alyssa Milano Among More Than 100 Stars Expressing Outrage Over Texas Abortion Law.”

This is really going to help for sure absolutely moron achievement unlocked pic.twitter.com/eVxnapMNWm

— Rose 🌊McGowan (@rosemcgowan) September 3, 2021

The “Charmed” and “Scream” star publicly said in 2019 that she had an abortion and is “not ashamed”, so it appears that her anger is catered toward the lack of authenticity liberal elites have when expressing outrage over social issues.

Related:

Hillary 2.0: Biden Used Private Email While VP to Send Government Intelligence to Hunter Biden – Report

I do not regret my decision and it was not made lightly. If you do not want an abortion, don’t get one. My body, my choice, my life. Have you had to make a choice? Let’s talk and use hashtag #HonestAbortion

— Rose 🌊McGowan (@rosemcgowan) March 1, 2019

However, based on her comments toward Clinton, it would not be surprising if McGowan is now against abortion.

McGowan should be applauded for her courage to speak out against the Democratic establishment and its grip on the entertainment industry, as much of Hollywood’s political fervor is staged.

There are plenty of non-leftists in entertainment, but the mob mentality of the industry has left them terrified to share their opinions for fear of being cancelled and blacklisted.

While her comments are certainly provocative, hopefully McGowan is prompting others to make their voices heard.

Progressive Classrooms, Subtler Than You Think

“What constitutes a family?”

That’s one of the “Sample Guiding Questions” for Kindergarten to 2nd-grade students in the project called the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap (pdf). The Roadmap is a well-funded, amply sponsored initiative to boost civics learning in primary and secondary education, which everyone agrees is in poor condition. The goal is to get the Roadmap adopted in one way or another in school districts across the country, and it looks like the initiative has good odds of succeeding.

I have written about the Roadmap in City Journal and on RealClearPolicy, and I debated the project leader, professor Danielle Allen, in a webinar moderated by the Fordham Institute, each time arguing that the Roadmap is an ideological endeavor that will inject progressivist ideas into the classroom in a seemingly neutral way.

I won’t rehearse all those points here. But just consider the question above. The Roadmap advises teachers to bring it into class presentations and encourage discussion, which might raise immediate questions about the civic goal of the exercise. To be sure, the Roadmap contains many traditional topics such as the content of the Constitution and historical takes on immigration, expansion, voting rights, and political parties. But this query about the family doesn’t quite fit. Why would civics sessions with 7-year-olds turn on the definition of something many would regard as both irrelevant to civics learning and inappropriate to children of that age?

After all, the family is a contentious subject. The traditional conception of it—father, mother, married and with children, all in the same home—has been one of the left’s prime targets in the 50-year Culture War that continues today. That nuclear model is accused of being sexist, heteronormative, homophobic, reactionary, and denigrating to all those households that don’t have a traditional mother-father set-up. It is said to put down single mothers and same-sex couples. The controversies have been heated, as we saw in the 2008 passage of Proposition 8 in California. The current mandates against the nuclear preference, in fact, will prevent you from getting a job in certain fields if you don’t reject the old-school notion as the best family formation (jobs in academia, for instance, require of applicants a “diversity-equity-inclusion” statement in which you better not signal anything but a liberal attitude toward social issues).

Why bring those tensions to children who haven’t the equipment to understand them? For the obvious reason: This is good old-fashioned proselytizing. It follows a standard leftist tactic: get ‘em while they’re young. For let’s not be callow enough to believe that “What constitutes a family?” is a genuine question. Imagine what would happen if a student were a fundamentalist Christian, an Orthodox Jew, or a devout Muslim. That student would rise and state a definition of the family that runs squarely against the liberal one, and the teacher wouldn’t let that stand. The ideology of the social studies profession and of the schools in general wouldn’t allow it. A refutation would begin; it would have to in a world that has embraced diversity and tolerance as binding norms. The adoption of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools (and many private ones) tells you where all the momentum is going, notwithstanding scattered incidents of parents fighting back. This traditionalist child will have to be disabused and re-educated. The teacher will lead the process and lots of fellow students will join in. No diversity on this one, no pluralism.

We know that’s what will happen because we’ve seen it a thousand times before. More than any other site in our country, for the last half-century the classroom has been the place where traditional conceptions of family, men and women, God and country, marriage and parenting have begun to slip and fall. When guests on CNN speak of Western Civilization as white supremacy, they may believe that they are cutting-edge commentators, but in truth they are parroting ideas that had become academic dogma (and cliché) by 1995. When young, energetically left-wing members of Congress opine about imperialism, they say nothing you couldn’t find in every average “studies” class in the 1980s.

For a long time, with a few exceptions such as William Bennett, prominent Republicans paid little attention to the advance of political correctness in the classroom. Or, rather, while all of them realized the bias going on, they did nothing about it. Either they didn’t fully understand how it was happening, or they didn’t know what to do to counter it, or they didn’t want to take action and face the inevitable smears of the media and activists.

And so the leftist colonization of the classroom inched forward, sometimes in dramatic ways, such as the widespread adoption of the 1619 Project, but more often, however, in small incursions such as this little family question in the Roadmap. It will move ahead, I’m sure, as progressivism has so triumphantly done in the education sphere, and we will see more of this indoctrination of schoolchildren into the new dispensation. Republican politicians have shown that they can’t stop it. They don’t want to fight this battle. It’s now quite clear that what happens in classrooms comes to happen in the public square 20 years later, but Republican leaders are too old or too poorly equipped to think in “long march” terms (as the left does). Besides that, their corporate donors have signaled their compliance with progressivism on social matters, and they don’t want their politicians to cross lines of political correctness. If the leftist momentum is to be stopped, it will have to be the people who do it.

That means getting them to recognize the tendentiousness, the tactical character, of small gestures such as “What constitutes a family?” We have people going to school board meetings and denouncing overt CRT exercises, which are easy to recognize as abominations. It’s not so easy to see the small ones as likewise dangerous. But they are. I can hear the leftist educator scoffing at the worry, claiming that the family question is just a discussion prompt about an important topic. Relax—lighten up!

But in cases such as this one, we have two renditions, one ideal and one actual. The ideal one, which progressives offer the public, is benign and non-partisan and open-ended. “We’re just talking about important things—that’s all,” we’re told. And then there’s the truth, what really goes on in real situations. There, the direction of righteousness is clear, and it’s always to the left. The curt query, “What constitutes a family” signifies one thing in the abstract—in the Roadmap document, for instance. It signifies a whole other thing in a classroom with a left-leaning teacher at the front and a captive group of 7-year-olds looking to her for guidance.

Do not believe the promises of the educators—they have broken their promises too many times in the past. Progressives regard the schools as an opportunity to spread the word, their word. Most liberals don’t see the classroom that way, but they have decided to let progressives call the shots when it comes to the social contents of the curriculum. The Woke Revolution is the result of decades of this leftist push in higher and lower education. Conservatives, then, must accept themselves as counter-revolutionaries. No more compromises, no more benefits of the doubt. Flood those school board meetings, yes, and tell the authorities that you don’t trust them and you don’t like them—and you’re going to stop them.

Progressive Classrooms, Subtler Than You Think (theepochtimes.com)

Top Medical Group Pushes Late-Term Abortion With Misleading Studies

OB-GYN association touts fetal pain study repudiated by co-author

One of Planned Parenthood’s top medical allies cites debunked scientific studies to advocate for late-term abortions, according to medical experts. 

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading membership organization for OB-GYNs with deep ties to the abortion industry, cites two studies to support its position that fetuses are unable to feel pain until roughly 24 weeks—a widely held view contradicted by recent studies. Dr. Stuart Derbyshire, who helped write the 2010 study cited by ACOG, has since repudiated his findings. In 2020, Derbyshire co-authored a peer-reviewed analysis that concludes fetuses begin to feel pain at 12 weeks, the end of the first trimester. The National University of Singapore neuroscientist, who is pro-choice, said ACOG’s stance fails to acknowledge updated scientific understandings of pain.

“If they want to maintain a webpage on fetal pain then they probably should update it and start rethinking it,” Derbyshire told the Washington Free Beacon. “They’ve dug a bit of a hole for themselves because they’ve indicated that in some sense [fetal pain] does matter—I think that’s a tactical error.”

ACOG’s position on fetal pain could play a major role in setting abortion policy as the Supreme Court case prepares to decide a legal challenge to Mississippi’s fetal pain law, which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks. The state contends the law reflects updated scientific understandings of fetal development since the Court established the trimester approach to regulation when it legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade. ACOG has called for the Supreme Court to strike down the ban—a position that could shape how justices approach the issue. The Supreme Court cited ACOG research on abortion safety in the majority opinion of Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which ruled against a Texas law that required abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the organization for its expertise in her opinions on issues ranging from contraception to late-term abortion.

A spokeswoman for ACOG told the Free Beacon that the organization maintains its position that fetuses are unable to feel pain prior to viability. That position, according to the group’s Website, is based on Derbyshire’s 2010 paper, as well as a 2005 Study that collected and reviewed medical literature dating back Decades. The 2005 study, which was led by a lawyer, was dogged by ethical and conflict of interest Scandals. Two of its authors failed to disclose their abortion-industry ties to the medical journal prior to publication. Its lawyer worked for abortion lobbyist NARAL and one of its doctors was a practicing abortionist.

ACOG released a joint statement Wednesday with other medical lobbying organizations in opposition to the Texas law banning abortion after six weeks, which the Supreme Court declined to block in a 5-4 decision.

ACOG advocates for legal abortion until fetal viability at roughly 24 weeks. The group insists that fetuses cannot detect pain until viability because the cerebral cortex of the brain, which activates when pain is detected, does not develop until 24 weeks. This understanding has been contradicted by two more recent scientific discoveries: Those without a cerebral cortex feel pain, and those unable to feel pain still have an active cerebral cortex. The organization has ignored such findings even as it Lobbies Congress to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would overturn pro-life state laws.

Dr. Donna Harrison has practiced as an OB-GYN for more than three decades. She said doctors are aware of the reality of fetal pain. They administer pain medications when performing surgeries in the womb and have long seen unborn children physically react to needles and other painful medical instruments since the dawn of the ultrasound in the United States in the 1970s. Harrison said ACOG’s position on fetal pain proves the group is more focused on promoting abortion than providing accurate medical expertise.

“ACOG has positioned itself as a rabidly pro-abortion organization,” Harrison, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told the Free Beacon. “Their abortion advocacy has blinded them to scientific reality. … It’s clear that fetuses react to pain.” 

ACOG has spent $15.5 million on lobbying since 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The group spent $2.7 million on elections since 2010, with roughly two-thirds going to Democrats.

ACOG has advocated in recent years to protect government funding of Planned Parenthood, which it has been heavily connected to for decades. One of its founding fellows, Jane Hodgson, was convicted in 1970 of performing an illegal abortion and was later awarded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Margaret Sanger Award for her advocacy. An extensive list of the group’s presidents worked with Planned Parenthood before, during, and after their tenures.

Derbyshire and Harrison emphasized that there is still much to learn on the topic of fetal pain. The idea of what exactly defines pain is a much-disputed question at the core of this debate. The definition of pain can vary from the signal sent to the brain, to the reaction from the body, or more simply to the personal feeling.

“It’s something that’s way beyond and way deeper than something we can express,” Harrison told the Free Beacon.

Derbyshire’s co-author of the 2020 study, John Bockmann, said he has no problem with groups like ACOG advocating on certain medical issues, but is concerned when that advocacy disregards crucial information.

“What I do have a problem with is distorting their authoritative role in the debate in favor of something that is not right,” he told the Free Beacon. “And I think that to the extent that this information is out there, they owe it to the medical community and the public at large to state the facts.”

The Supreme Court is set to take up a key abortion case later this year, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which regards a 15-week abortion ban. Defendants for the case filed a brief to the Court detailing the updated science of fetal development, which they argue proves the necessity to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Top Medical Group Pushes Late-Term Abortion With Misleading Studies (freebeacon.com)

Game Developer CEO Steps Down After Pro-Life Tweet on Texas Abortion Law

Once again, popular opinion of pro-murder is surrendered to… (US Patriot)

The CEO of an American video game developer stepped down after he issued a statement supportive of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of a law in Texas that bans abortions after detection of a fetal heartbeat.

The company, Tripwire Interactive LLC, announced in a statement on Monday that John Gibson “has stepped down as CEO” of the company, effective immediately.

Gibson said via Twitter on Saturday, “Proud of #USSupremeCourt affirming the Texas law banning abortion for babies with a heartbeat.”

He added, “As an entertainer I don’t get political often. Yet with so many vocal peers on the other side of this issue, I felt it was important to go on the record as a pro-life game developer.”

Two days later, Tripwire issued a statement distancing itself from Gibson’s views.

“The comments given by John Gibson are of his own opinion, and do not reflect those of Tripwire Interactive as a company,” said the statement.

“His comments disregarded the values of our whole team, our partners and much of our broader community. Our leadership team at Tripwire are deeply sorry and are unified in our commitment to take swift action and to foster a more positive environment.”

Alan Wilson, the current vice president of Tripwire, will take over as interim CEO.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Texas Heartbeat Act (Senate Bill 8), signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May. It bans doctors from performing or inducing an abortion unless he or she has determined whether the unborn child has a detectable fetal heartbeat, which can be detected as early as six weeks after conception.

If a heartbeat is found, the doctor can only carry out the abortion in a medical emergency. The measure does not have an exception for a pregnancy due to incest or rape.

Under the law, state officials cannot enforce the measure.

The legislation bans state officials from enforcing the provisions. Instead, private citizens—except for an individual who impregnated a woman through incest or rape—may file lawsuits against doctors, clinics, and anyone who is allegedly involved in an abortion that violates the law.

Those found to have violated the law would have to pay $10,000 to the private citizen who filed the lawsuit.

The law went into effect on Sept. 1. The Supreme Court on the same day denied an effort to stop the measure from taking effect, in a 5-4 ruling. A district court and an appeals court had also previously declined to intervene.

“The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue,” the majority said. “But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden” to get a preliminary injunction issued.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

Game Developer CEO Steps Down After Pro-Life Tweet on Texas Abortion Law (theepochtimes.com)