My faithful and long-suffering readers will have noticed that the technical aspects of adding a comments feature to this blog has not gone entirely smoothly. As a result, some comments have disappeared. Please accept my apologies.

Want to know how your U.S. Representative voted on the partial-birth abortion ban? Click here.

Nice news story in the Times Daily of northwest Alabama.
"In the past 20 years, Lee Ezell and Rita have both thought about the babies conceived in their bodies but never held in their arms.

Neither was married at the time. Ezell placed her baby for adoption. Rita was hustled to Atlanta, where she underwent an abortion."

Tuck vows to sign no-abortion oath from the Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger.

"Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck on Thursday said she will sign an affidavit that she's never had an abortion.

Tuck, a Republican, also blasted her Democratic opponent, state Sen. Barbara Blackmon, for her 'personal attacks and innuendo' that Tuck has had an abortion."

Strange. I can only imagine how this must make all the women in Mississippi who have had abortions feel, as they watch the two leading female politicians in Mississippi hasten to deny that they would ever have done such a thing.

This would be a good opportunity for Silent No More women in Mississippi to speak up.

Update: Some additional stories here and here:

"Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck says her Democratic opponent's challenge that she sign an affidavit swearing she has not had abortion 'could be one of the sleaziest political attacks in Mississippi history.'"

House Acts to end Partial-Birth Abortion.

Washington, Oct. 3--(AP) The House voted Thursday to ban a type of abortion that for years has been at the center of the debate over a woman's reproductive rights. President Bush has promised to sign the bill into law and opponents say they will immediately challenge it in court.

The bill, passed 281-142, could be taken up by the Senate as early as Friday. Bush's signature would make it the first federal law since Roe v. Wade in 1973 to restrict a specific abortion procedure.document.

The drive to stop partial birth abortion 'will finally become law and the performance of this barbaric procedure will finally come to an end,' said House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis."

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished by Zoe Heller.

Make sure to read the entire article.

It was brought to my attention by the Traditional Christian Gentleman who writes the Times Against Humanity blog. He comments:

"It was only a matter of time until a woman with child would be refused the protective solicitude her condition demands."

Traditional Christian Gentleman chalks this up to a general devaluation of motherhood.

In specific cases, though, refusing to aid a pregnant woman in the easy and obvious ways is something that women I know have shamefacedly confessed after they have started to deal with their own sense of loss from abortion.

"Why should I stand up on the bus for her? She chose to continue her pregnancy; let her deal with the consequences."

That's an attitude some of us have had.

Abortion law riles English from the New Zealand Herald:

"National leader Bill English will wage a personal fight to overturn a law that lets young girls have abortions without their parents being told.

Mr English said mothers and fathers should be able to help their children cope with the psychological effects of terminating a pregnancy.

'How is an 11- or 12-year-old going to deal with an event they're old enough to understand, but they're certainly not mature enough to just get over it and move on.'"

Sound familiar? as my token atheist pal said in an email alerting me to Smoke Shock TV Ads, an article in the New York Post about an effort to discourage smoking through portraying the regrets of former smokers.

"An internal memo sent to the anti-smoking group Smokefree NY, and obtained by The Post, shows that the American Legacy Foundation is looking for New Yorkers whose lives have been harmed by smoking to appear in 'a few powerful, reality-based smoke-free commercials.'"

Smokefree NY is looking for a teen who during his life lost a parent to smoking, a woman who has lost her hair due to treatment for a smoking-caused disease, a hospitality worker with lung cancer caused by exposure to secondhand smoke at work, and a woman who uses an oxygen tank to breathe.

"We are actively looking for people in those positions to speak to a camera," says casting director Mimi Webb Miller. "Those kind of truth ads are real effective with kids."

The money that will be used to pay for the ads comes from a settlement with tobacco companies. That is, tobacco profits are underwriting the ads.

However, not everyone is happy with these ads. As the article reports:

"Smokers called the coming ads exploitive. 'They have no shame,' Audrey Silk, co-founder of a New York City-based pro-smoking group, CLASH. 'They'll do anything for the cause.' Silk added the anti-smoking groups 'are starting to sound desperate to me. Oh, I hate them.'"

I am entertaining myself by envisioning a day when abortion clinics will be taxed to pay for television ads written, directed and produced by Silent No More.

Update: Right Left Whatever mentions this and adds a nice illustration of the point.

Pretty Stones and Dead Babies.

Chuck Colson of Breakpoint weighs in today on the "November Gang" abortionists.

Colson has a good list of links at the end of his article.

Sanitizing the snuffing of a nascent human life by Herman Goodden in the Toronto Sun and London Free Press is worth looking at.

Goodden writes:

"The policy for November Gang counsellors is to take their language cues from the clients. If a pregnant woman speaks about the new life within her in terms that would be verboten in most such clinics, the counsellors will honour that perspective and draw the client out some more. They believe such non-neutral, value-laden vocabulary bespeaks a woman's true state of mind and that to suppress such concerns and pretend there's nothing more going on than an utterly benign procedure like the removal of a pesky hangnail will only be asking for trouble further down the line.

Many women who've undergone abortions without ever holding such deeper discussions have slipped into tailspins of depression and guilt years later when they come to see the issue from a larger perspective, or go through with a complete pregnancy and understand in a visceral and irrefutable way what gets snuffed out with every abortion."

Thanks to Dogman at The Rough Woodsman for alerting me to the Colson article.

Carl Jung: "A lie makes no sense unless the truth is felt to be dangerous."

My list of resources on the left was getting unwieldy, so I have changed it. It now has four lists: National groups, regional groups, miscellaneous groups, and pro-choice groups.

Here's a round-up of commentary about the September article in Glamour magazine profiling "the November Gang", a group of abortion clinics who attempt to do some counseling with their clients about emotions associated with abortion.

From the Culture of Life Foundation,
Abortion Workers Use New Marketing Techniques to Quell Women’s Regrets.

Requiem for a Fetus from the Waterglass Blog.

Abortion renamed loving kindness from the Fringe Smoke Alarms in Abandoned Hotels blog.

Abortion clinics counsel women from the Kaiser Network.

Feel-good abortion in U.S. Clinics from an Australian bioethics institute.

It's been awhile since I updated you on the trial, now in Week Eight, of Arizona abortionist Brian Finkel for molesting his patients. Let's remedy that oversight with Expert: Tugging Women's Nipples Not Orthodox Medical Care.

The October issue of Vogue is out. I told the girl at the counter I was buying it for the articles but she was too young to get it.

It has a cover story "Roe vs. Wade: Are We Losing the Right to Choose?"

The subheading says that "the most effective antiabortion campaigns are run by names you've never heard of, in places you may have never seen."

The thrust of the article is that those wascalley antiabortionists have come up with a new idea that they are using to manipulate Americans into thinking that abortion is Not the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Toast.

What is this new idea? It is that abortion hurts women.

The article starts out interviewing Allan Parker of one of my permalinks, Operation Outcry, and Norma McCorvey. Their comfortable working relationship is a leitmotif throughout the four-page article.

Norma's Rule 60 Motion is discussed, as are the over one thousand regretful women who have filed affidavits with Operation Outcry.

The way that these women (that's us! that's me!) are discussed is a hopeful sign, because we are seriously misrepresented in the article.

It's hopeful because it suggests that Robert Sullivan, who wrote the article, didn't want our straightforward views and words to reach the ears of his audience. Why not?

Here are the two ways we are misrepresented.

First of all, Sullivan writes that when we filled out Operation Outcry affidavits, we were asked leading questions. The implication is that we don't actually regret our abortions but that we inadvertently said we did because of the leading questions. I mean, really. How absurd. Read the affidavits and it is perfectly clear that WE REGRET OUR ABORTIONS no matter how anyone asks the question.

Another section of the article (p. 164) implies that the women testifying on behalf of the Rule 60 Motion were women testifying that we were glad we had not had abortions:

"Even Parker's method of questioning is questioned. 'It is a very prejudicial way of getting a subject to say what you want,' says Nada Stotland, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist and board member of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. As for the women who testified about being glad about not choosing abortion, she notes, 'It is a very rare person who will be able to say I shouldn't have had this child.'"

Apparently, the reality that we are testifying not that we are glad we didn't have abortions, but are regretful that we DID have abortions, is too much for Nada Stotland, MD, PhD to even take in as a fact.

This is a profoundly revealing misapprehension. It does make you wonder what Nada Stotland would think if she understood how many women feel about their abortions after the fact, when reality has set in.

Hope Alive...a post-abortion ministry that I'll add to my "resources" permalinks.

At the end of August, I posted this about an article in the National Catholic Register called "The Other Church Abortion Teaching: Mercy".

That article has sparked a spate of letters to the National Catholic Register. One week after it was published, the NCR ran a letter to the editor by Ginalynne Mielko bitterly complaining about it. Mielko's say that the article "put a spin on sin" by referring to "loss" rather than "murder". Mielko claims that by favorably covering post-abortion ministry, the NCR is "lessen[ing] the severity of this sin."

The following week, NCR published a letter from a woman who is part of Rachel's Vineyard. Her name was withheld, but she mentioned that she had had two abortions and had been able to come back to the Church because of the efforts of ministries like Rachel's Vineyard. She encouraged Mielko to seek out "authentic church teaching" on post-abortion ministry.

This week, NCR has published two much longer letters-to-the-editor fisking Mielko AND a full-length feature article about another of the ministries I feature here on my blog, Lumina.

One letter-writer, Nancy Montgomery, said "Abortion is loss and post-abortive women do suffer intensely, often after being deceived about fetal development during a time of crisis, despair, isolation and coercion. In post-abortion ministry, a focus on this aspect of the experience--loss--is a necessary part of therapeutic experience. Identifying loss means recognizing the value of human life and the extent of abortion's harm. Isn't this what pro-lifers want?"

Another writer said: "The epidemic of post-abortion grief, injury and death is denied by abortionists and censored by the media for a reason: They know it will be abortion's downfall. Polls show that Americans (finally) understand that abortion kills a child, but they still support legal abortion because they think abortion helps women. Americans don't realize that abortion is killing women, too."

Finally, the article about Lumina is a needed corrective to the focus of the earlier NCR article on non-post-abortive Church members who "provide care" to what is often portrayed as a permanently wounded, rather pathetic, population of needy post-abortive women. The article is a profile of Theresa Bonapartis and is fittingly titled, "Another Church Abortion Teaching: Hope."