Give Bush his Props for his Embryonic Stem Cell Stance

Charles Krauthammer has a great column on Bush’s principled stance on embryonic stem cells and his current vindication by advances in technology by the very same scientist who first isolated human embryonic stem cells. 

Technology Vindicates Morality
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 30, 2007

"If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough."

— James A. Thomson

WASHINGTON — A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.

Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.

Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, as Thomson puts it, Bush was made "a little bit uncomfortable" by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.

In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity — a "moral ayatollah," as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.

Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn — between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.

History will look at Bush’s 2001 speech and be surprised how balanced and measured it was, how much respect it gave to the other side. Read it. Here was a presidential policy pronouncement that so finely and fairly drew out the case for both sides that until the final few minutes of his speech, you had no idea where the policy would end up.

Bush finally ended up doing nothing to hamper private research into embryonic stem cells and pledging federal monies to support the study of existing stem cell lines — but refusing federal monies for research on stem cell lines produced by newly destroyed embryos.

The president’s policy recognized that this might cause problems. The existing lines might dry up, prove inadequate or become corrupted. Bush therefore appointed a President’s Council on Bioethics to oversee ongoing stem cell research and evaluate how his restrictions were affecting research and what means might be found to circumvent ethical obstacles.

More vilification. The mainstream media and the scientific establishment saw this as a smokescreen to cover his fundamentalist, obscurantist, anti-scientific — the list of adjectives was endless — tracks. "Some observers," wrote The Washington Post’s Rick Weiss, "say the president’s council is politically stacked."

I sat on the council for five years. It was one of the most ideologically balanced bioethics commission in the history of this country. It consisted of scientists, ethicists, theologians, philosophers, physicians — and others (James Q. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and me among them) of a secular bent not committed to one school or the other.

That balance of composition was reflected in the balance in the reports issued by the council — documents of sophistication and nuance that reflected the divisions both within the council and within the nation in a way that respectfully presented the views of all sides. One recommendation was to support research that might produce stem cells through "de-differentiation" of adult cells, thus bypassing the creation of human embryos.

That Holy Grail has now been achieved. Largely because of the genius of Thomson and Yamanaka. And also because of the astonishing good fortune that nature requires only four injected genes to turn an ordinary adult skin cell into a magical stem cell that can become bone or brain or heart or liver.

But for one more reason as well. Because the moral disquiet that James Thomson always felt — and that George Bush forced the country to confront — helped lead him and others to find some ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo alone.

Charles Krauthammer is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner, 1984 National Magazine Award winner, and a columnist for The Washington Post since 1985.

Source:  http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2007/11/30/technology_vindicates_morality

Hat tip to The Anchoress who also has some kind words about Bush; and even Republicans’ failure to give W his due for the good things he has done under incredible pressure during his two terms.

http://theanchoressonline.com/2007/11/30/bush-embryonic-stem-cell-research/

Julia

Aurora, Illinois City Council Approves Parental Notification on Abortion

The city of Aurora, IL has approved a city ordinance that would have parents know when a child is considering abortion. 

Aurora,
        Illinois City Council Approves Parental Notification on Abortion
by
          Steven Ertelt
          LifeNews.com Editor
          November 28,
          2007

Aurora,
          IL (LifeNews.com) — The city council in Aurora, Illinois, the site
          of a national battle over the last few months regarding a massive new
          Planned Parenthood abortion center, has approved a measure endorsing
          parental notification for abortions. The council hopes state lawmakers
          will do more to get the state’s notification law in place.
         

After
            the new abortion business opened, pro-life members of the city council
            said they wanted to approve a city ordinance at least allowing parents
            to know when their daughters are considering an abortion.

         

The
            measure initially covered parental notice for all medical procedures
            but now targets just abortion after the council’s Government Operations
            Committee sent the full council an amended resolution.

         

The
            council unanimously approved the parental notification measure Tuesday
            night and the council wants the state to enforce the Parental Notification
            Act of 1995.

         

The
            law has been tied up in courts. Last year, the Illinois Supreme Court
            issued rules for enforcement but it is now in front of a federal judge.

         

Aldermen
            Chris Beykirch, Rick Lawrence and Richard Irvin, the three behind
            the measure, say there is a problem in the state where too many teenagers
            are getting abortions without telling their parents….

Something the Pro-Choice people don’t want you to see

This is truly amazing.  The BBC had a story about how 2 parents wanted an abortion for their 8 year old daughter, because she was raped.  the BBC and FemiNaizis hailed them as heroes.  We only find out later that the abortion was because the step-father got the girl pregnant.   This is one of the main sticking points that I want the notification law.  Too many fathers, step-fathers, older brothers, and older men are getting away with rape, and the abrtionists don’t care and don’t report it.  This is truly a sick story and the step-father should rot in jail and never see the daylight again.

BBC helped to cover up child molester

There was a story on LifeSite News on Wednesday Man Behind Effort to Legalize Abortion in Nicaragua Gets 30 Years for Step-Daughter’s Rape.
A correspondent has kindly pointed out to me that this is the same man
who was cast as a pro-choice hero on the notorious BBC programme "Sex
in the Holy City", broadcast in 2003 (BBC transcript ) I mentioned David Kerr’s study of this programme earlier this year (Can we trust the BBC – 1). SPUC attacked the BBC’s misleading reporting and bias and Fiorella Sultana de Maria (now Nash) – pictured left – delivered a copy of their report Bias and the BBC.

In
one part of the programme, Steve Bradshaw looks at Nicaragua where
abortion is illegal, and casts Cardinal Miguel Obando Y Bravo as the
baddie who is influencing the government to retain the law. Then the
underdogs are introduced:

But earlier this year one
family took the cardinal on, provoking a national row that split
Nicaragua and capture the headlines for months. Maria and Francisco’s
daughter, Rosa, not her real name, had been raped and was pregnant. At
the time she was just 8. When we met in the capital Managua, Francisco
and Maria, both Catholics, told me why they decided to seek an abortion
for Rosa, despite the opposition of the church.

Then the girl’s "father" (in fact her step-father) is given a chance to speak for himself:

FRANCISCO
Rosa’s father
Well
I did feel very bad about what the church was thinking, and then I said
to hell with the church. I don’t want to have anything to do with the
ministers or priests in the church, I don’t want to know.

Bradshaw adds an editorial voice in case we have not got the message fully.

"BRADSHAW:
Defeat, this time, for the Cardinal. For many in Nicaragua Rosa’s
parents have become heroes, an ordinary couple defying the church and
making a stand for women’s rights. Others in Nicaragua are also defying
the ban on abortion."

Unfortunately for the BBC’s portrayal
of Rosa’s father, Francisco Fletes Sanchez, as the pro-choice hero, it
now turns out that he was in fact the man who raped her. He has been
convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for his crimes. He was in
fact on the run at the time, having escaped from Costa Rica to
Nicaragua.

The parents did arrange a clandestine abortion in
Nicaragua for their daughter with the help of the Women’s Network
Against Violence, a pro-abortion network of feminist groups. The
abortion prevented the authorities from identifying Fletes as the
father of the baby. It is certainly no mystery why he was such a
passionate advocate of abortion. He continued to rape his step-daughter
and finally confessed to his crimes when she had another baby who was
not aborted.

Several members of the Network have now had charges
filed against them for their role in procuring the abortion. One of
these is Marta Maria Blandon, the Director for Central America of the
international pro-abortion agency Ipas. Blandon admitted publicly in an
interview in 2003 that she knew Fletes was being investigated by Costa
Rican authorities when she helped him to escape to Nicaragua.

This
aspect of abortion is one that is not given much publicity. (Do let me
know if there is any public response to this from the BBC, for
example.) Here in England, we have clandestine abortions for
schoolgirls and contraceptive advice given without parents being
allowed to know. How many cases of rape and incest are being covered
up? And how much comfort is given to the perpetrators by the BBC’s
portrayal of the Catholic Church?

The hermeneutic of continuity

Thomas Hearings Shame the Dems – not Vice Versa

Today I heard Rush cite this article in the Wall Street Journal On-line Opinion Journal feature "Best of the Web Today". It’s a great article by James Tarranto about the new trashing people are doing of Justice Thomas – claiming that he a bitter man for no reason.  Rush’s money quote: 

"They imagine him to be "angry" and "bitter" because he holds up a mirror to the darkness in their own souls." 

Here’s the whole thing – he’s got it nailed.

BY JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, October 4, 2007 2:51 p.m.

Here Is a Strange and Bitter Crop
In the coverage of and commentary about Justice Clarence Thomas’s new memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son" (buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore), a predictable theme has emerged: that Justice Thomas is a "bitter" and "angry" man, who really has no reason to feel that way. After all, as a USA Today editorial sneers, "Are we meant to feel sympathy for the plight of a Yale-educated Supreme Court justice with enormous power, long summer holidays and seven-figure book contracts?"Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Perfectly encapsulating this attitude is a letter to the editor that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times (second letter):

If Justice Clarence Thomas had lost his bid in 1991 to be appointed to the Supreme Court as a result of Anita Hill’s testimony about his behavior as her supervisor, it might be understandable that he remembers that testimony with anger and bitterness. However, he was appointed in spite of Professor Hill’s allegations.

It seems that Justice Thomas has spent the last 16 years reliving that testimony and nurturing his wounds, as he reports in his memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son." Perhaps no one warned the Supreme Court nominee that those hearings would be political and acrimonious.

To Justice Thomas, I say: You received the appointment you sought. You are being "touchy" and overreacting to "slights." It is time to move on. The country needs you to focus your energy, attention and intelligence on the work of the Supreme Court.

Janet G. Puente
Newtown, Pa., Oct. 2, 2007

A point of personal privilege: We know Justice Thomas, having met him in 1993; and the caricature of him as "angry" and "bitter" is wildly at odds with our own experience. We have always found him to be warm, gracious and avuncular. The last time we saw him, at the Heritage Foundation on Monday, he was ebullient, smiling widely and laughing often. When we arrived, he greeted us with a vigorous handshake and a "Hey, buddy!" If he is bitter and angry, he certainly hides it well.

This is not to say that he has always been at peace with himself and the world. As a younger man, he went through periods of rage and confusion, as many intelligent and intense young men do. Yet his memoir–which ends in 1991, with his taking a seat on the Supreme Court–is not a lament but a story of struggle and redemption.

It has its bitter chapters, and the bitterest is Chapter 9, "Invitation to a Lynching," in which, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Thomas’s appointment to the high court, a disgruntled former employee named Anita Hill reappears on the scene with tales of ribaldry. This was a bitter experience not, as USA Today and Janet Puente smugly suggest, because it was an effort to thwart Thomas’s ambitions, but because it was an attempt to destroy him personally. As Thomas testified on Oct. 11, 1991:

I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation.

How would any member on this committee, any person in this room, or any person in this country would like sleaze said about him or her in this fashion? Or this dirt dredged up and this gossip and these lies displayed in this manner, how would any person like it?

The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this.

This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace.

And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

Justice Thomas says that Hill’s claims were false. We believe him because we know him to be a man of character and integrity. Also because there was no evidence to substantiate her claims, because (as National Review Online’s Matthew Franck points out) his corroborating witnesses were persuasive, and because, as we noted Tuesday, her statements since the release of his book reinforce his portrayal of her and undermine her credibility further.

You are under no obligation to believe him or to disbelieve her. But no one has suggested that her charges were substantial enough to hold up in court, even civil court. To be sure, Senate confirmation is a political proceeding, not a judicial one, so that the standard is political: not reasonable doubt or preponderance of the evidence but merely whether enough senators can be induced to switch their vote. This standard is so low as to be almost subterranean, but Hill failed to meet even it. Her testimony changed at least three votes; she would have needed three more.

Even by political standards, Justice Thomas was treated unjustly, for Hill’s charges never should have seen the light of day under the procedures designed to protect nominees from unsubstantiated accusations.

To our mind the most telling detail about Hill in Thomas’s book is something he mentions only in passing, on page 242: that when she approached the Judiciary Committee with her accusations, "she initially requested that her name be withheld from the members." Anonymous character assassination was too low a tactic even for Joe Biden, who said no.

Hill gave a confidential statement to the FBI, which conducted an investigation and presented the results to the committee. The charges became public not because senators, after due deliberation, decided they were worth airing, but because some rogue senator or staffer decided to leak them to reporters.

Just days before–and we’d completely forgotten about this, as it was overshadowed by the Hill circus–someone at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where Thomas then served, leaked a copy of a draft opinion Thomas had written. As he explains on page 246:

This breach of confidentiality was unprecedented. One of the hallmarks of the federal judiciary had always been the absolute secrecy in which it worked. Leaks were unthinkable–until now. The case in question involved preferences given to women by the Federal Communications Commission in awarding radio-station licenses, and it was clear that my opinion had been leaked by a person or persons who wanted to portray me as unsympathetic to women’s causes.

With this pair of leaks, Thomas’s political foes managed to violate the integrity of the FBI, the Senate and the D.C. Circuit–that is, of all three branches of government. This behavior was unethical, unconscionable and possibly criminal, and no one has ever been held to account for it.

Thomas’s opponents believed that the end justified the means, as a former foe tells the justice’s wife on page 232:

Years later a young woman who had worked for one of the many groups opposed to my nomination approached Virginia. "We didn’t think of your husband as human, and I’m sorry," she said, tears streaming down her face. "We thought that anything was justified because our access to abortions and sex was at risk." The woman went on to explain that she had subsequently had a religious conversion and now felt that it was her duty to apologize to us.

Now, those who remain unrepentant are reduced to arguing, pathetically, that Justice Thomas–and the rest of us–should countenance the means because they failed to realize the end.

They are uncomfortable being reminded of this travesty because they know it implicates them. In "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century," Sherrilyn Ifill writes of the impunity with which people committed that atrocity:

The willingness of lynchers to act publicly is tremendously significant. It reflects the lynchers’ certainty that they would never face punishment for their acts. The willingness of the crowd to participate in lynching–to cheer, to yell their encouragement, or just to stand and watch without intervention–is perhaps equally terrible.

To be sure, the lynching of Clarence Thomas was only a figurative one, and he managed to slip the metaphorical noose. But we can understand why those who cheered his tormentors on would now feel put upon by his refusal to pretend the whole thing never happened. They imagine him to be "angry" and "bitter" because he holds up a mirror to the darkness in their own souls.

Bar and Hill
Is the District of Columbia Bar Exam one of the hardest, as Anita Hill, who not only passed the D.C. Bar but also graduated from Yale Law School, claims? Or is it one of the easiest, as several of our readers wrote us yesterday? This comment, from a reader who prefers not to be identified, may shed some light on the subject:

The D.C. Bar Exam had a very low pass rate. That does not mean it was necessarily harder than other bar exams (it’s actually not terribly challenging). The low pass rate is explained by the fact that those most likely to pass the exam didn’t have to take it.

Most members of the D.C. bar waived in, without having to take the exam, by virtue of doing well enough on the multistate. So the people actually sitting for the bar were those who hadn’t done well enough on the multistate to waive in. In other words, those who had to take the exam were already more likely to fail than the average candidate elsewhere.

There are a significant number of candidates who take the D.C. Bar Exam as their first exam, of course, and so don’t have a previous multistate score that would get them waived in. These candidates are more likely to be similar in ability to the average candidate elsewhere. But those who take the exam because they didn’t qualify for the waiver certainly skew the pass rate dramatically downward.

If this is right, then passing the D.C. Bar shows Anita Hill that she is smart in the same way that infant-mortality rates show Nicholas Kristof that America isn’t so great.

One complication in all this, though, is that–as even Media Matters acknowledges–Hillary Clinton failed the D.C. Bar. Although maybe that means Miss Hill is better qualified to be president than Mrs. Clinton!

Julia

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Silencing People of Faith?

Mirror of Justice blog opining on the following Philadelphia Inquirer cartoon and its implications:

April 20, 2007

It had to happen . . .

Thanks to the Philadelphia Inquirer (which characterizes as "activist" a decision that declines to invalidate a measure which has always enjoyed broad and bipartisan support):

I’ll forego my lament about the "last acceptable prejudice" .  And, what’s irritating about the cartoon is not only its claim that it is as Catholics — i.e., because they are Catholics, and not because they think, as intelligent and engaged lawyers, that the Constitution does not (and, of course, it does not) disable legislatures entirely from regulating a particularly gruesome abortion procedure  — that the five Justices who voted to uphold the ban.  What is, for me, most striking (and demoralizing) about this cartoon (and about similar "chill wind blowing from Rome" cartoons, blog posts, op-eds, that are already all over the web) is that it suggests something very depressing about the state and future of debate about moral questions.

It is, increasingly, thought to be enough to discredit an argument or position — any argument or position — merely to note that the person who makes it is a religious believer, and to write off any moral argument with which one disagrees as "religious."  (This practice, of course, does not run both ways:  arguments against torture, the death penalty, race discrimination, and income inequality are "secular"; arguments against partial-birth abortion or the creation of embryos for research are "religious.")  It appears, increasingly, that arguments whose trajectory is not in line with the standard liberal / autonomy / choice line are not only rejected, but declared not to be permissible arguments. 

Even in Justice Ginsburg’s dissent, she took the time to complain that there was something improper, and threatening, about the majority’s use of words like "abortion doctor" and "unborn child"; but, of course, the use of these words represents an argument.  To rule out the words is to rule out, as illegitimate, the argument they reflect.

Posted by Rick Garnett on April 20, 2007 at 10:08 AM in Garnett, Rick | Permalink

This business of invalidating arguments on the basis of WHO is making the argument is very worrisome.  The civil rights movement in the 1960s and the abolition movement leading to the Civil War in the 1800s were based on moral arguments, sometimes religious and sometimes just ethically based without reference to religion.  But today even if a religious person is making an ethical argument not based on any strictly religious precepts, the argument is not valid because of WHO the person is and what that person’s religion is.  This decision had no basis on the existence of a soul or any other religious concept.   

Sometimes an ethical argument happens to track principles that are religious and sometimes it doesn’t.  To invalidate an argument on the basis that it shares religious principles is outrageous.  Some of the moral arguments of Socrates, Plato, the Stoics and the like are the same or similar to some moral arguments made by people of our day who are Christians or Jews.  That doesn’t mean that we have to ban Socrates, Plato or Marcus Aurelius from being discussed or used as the basis of  argument.   

It is invalid in our country to argue that because my church teaches certain moral principles everybody should have to follow those principals or because the Bible or the Koran or the Talmud teaches thus and such so our laws should reflect those teachings.  But it is not invalid for a person to argue with logic and moral principles just because that person is an adherent of a religion that holds those views.  If that were the case, then a religious person could never make arguments about murder, stealing, perjury, and thousands of other things that are addressed by law and religious precepts.    Or have we really reached the point where that is exactly what secular people on the Left are wanting to achieve?   Denial of a voice in the public square to people of certain religions?   

Source:  http://www.mirrorofjustice.com/mirrorofjustice/2007/04/it_had_to_happe_1.html

Julia

Partial Birth Abortion

For those of you who do not know what a Partial Birth Abortion is, today at Blonde Sagacity, Ala has a great animation of what it is

  I agree with Ala in that this is a barbaric form of abortion and should nbever be used.  The AMA has said that it is never necessary for the life of a mother.  It is onlyt for convenience of the mother.  They are many other ways to get rid of life besides crushing a skull just before it is born.  And there has never been a proven case where this procedure saved the life of a mother.  It has been a long time for a ruling such as this, far too long this barbaric procedure has been going on.

Finally

The Supreme Court has ruled that the ban on Late Term abortion.  This has been too long incoming.  Late Term Abortion is barbaric and shouldnever be used.  Ther AMA and almost all doctors agree that Late Term Aborions should never be performed and are never medically necessary.  They are many other ways to do abortions, it is that this is just easiest for the doctor.  Congratulations for President Bush in getting Alito and Roberts to join the bench in the Supreme Court.

Court Backs Ban on Abortion Procedure

Apr 18 10:18 AM US/Eastern
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long- awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court’s conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how—not whether—to perform an abortion.

Abortion rights groups have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although government lawyers and others who favor the ban said there are alternate, more widely used procedures that remain legal.

The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions.

More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States each year, according to recent statistics. Nearly 90 percent of those occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not affected by Tuesday’s ruling.

Six federal courts have said the law that was in focus Wednesday is an impermissible restriction on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The law bans a method of ending a pregnancy, rather than limiting when an abortion can be performed.

BREITBART.com

A big Fat Slob has a differnt take on the ruling

Political Vindication agrees with me

I am a whore a slut and a hypocrite

Her is a post at Blonde Sagacity about the depression and mental anguish from a girl who got an abortion. 

I am a whore a slut and a hypocrite

"On January 6, 1997 at exactly 11:47am in Harrisburg Pennsylvania I had an abortion. I know the exact minute, the exact second I allowed my child to be murdered.

But let me back up a bit to October 11, 1996. I think it was a Saturday night it had to be a weekend because it was the night of my boyfriend’s fraternity social of which I was a guest. Boyfriend and I had actually been very good at abstaining because I had suffered a miscarriage the previous March. We had decided after that we were going to abstain because we were not ready to get married and I already had one child I could barely support. Also because he used my miscarriage as the reason he was stressed out and screwed up officer candidate school (which he didn’t go to until 3 months after that anyway). Well, I guess we had too much to drink or maybe it was because he wore his Charlies to the semi formal, but one thing led to another and you get the picture.

Two weeks later I am puking my guts up. Crap. The first test came back negative, phew. Kept puking went to student medical center… yep pregnant. Oh damn WTF again? It was like De Ja vue all over again. I was only a couple of months from college graduation. Roughly 7 years prior, when I was a senior in High School, I got knocked up just a couple months before graduation. I was a walking after school special.

Back to my sin. I really wanted to keep this child. I refuse to make excuses for what I did. Yes my boyfriend manipulated me terribly. He said my father would disown me and that I would finally confirm in my father’s eyes that I was a whore. Then he blamed the pregnancy on me because I had decided to try Depro Provera (even though we were abstaining just in case.) He said I wasn’t even a good mother to child I had and that he was going to enlist active duty and I would never see him because he would be on a ship. He said he would have to do that in order to support a child. He screamed at me that I was trying to manipulate him or trap him. If I were a gold digger I’d have picked a much better target then an unemployed college student. He screamed that I would ruin his chances at returning to officer school. In my typical fashion I stuck my head in the sand almost convincing myself I was not pregnant although my clothes didn’t fit and I was puking my guts up and failing all of my classes. Boyfriend and I both walked at graduation in the Fall. It was a mock graduation, meaning we could walk because we were only a few credits shy, but he wanted his dad off his butt. I remember keeping my graduation gown on the entire day even through dinner to hide my expanding waist from his family. I remember his female cousin looking at me funny because I was puking in the ladies.

Ok let’s move forward to the night before he was a real sweetheart saying he would marry me someday and that he promised to give me my baby back (like that is possible). I am weak and pathetic and I fell for it. I did what he wanted. So we traveled from school to the closest clinic which was in Harrisburg. I remember stepping out of the car and seeing the protestors looking at me I wanted to run to them , to say "save me, help me please, take me back to school, please help me". But I was scared I wouldn’t be able to get back to my child who was in daycare an hour and a half away. I was scared what boyfriend would do if I ran. So I went in. Boyfriend paid the blood money: $425 on his Alumni MasterCard. I still have the receipt. I remember sitting quietly in the waiting room I think Jerry Springer was on. I was wearing one of boyfriend’s T shirts and a pair of his green sweatpants. None of my clothes fit anymore and they said to wear loose clothing. The nurse called me back. I thought just to fill out paperwork, but they took me to the murder room. I didn’t even get my last ditch effort to beg boyfriend, "please do let me do this". I still wonder what he would have said if I was permitted to go back out to the waiting room. I will wonder for the rest of my life.

They made me strip, put on a horrid paper gown and I had to lie down with my arms crossed like I was dead. No pain medicine. I didn’t deserve it. I was a sinner. I deserved to hear every sucking sound and feel every cramp as my child was ripped from me piece by piece. I remember the doctor was foreign, maybe Indian, he was kind of mean and impatient. No one asked me if I was sure if this is what I wanted. I wanted to bolt off that table. I stared at the clock and made myself keep staring so I would remember the exact moment that I murdered my own child. When it was over I was in bit of a daze. I remember feeling cramping and gushing and I was crawled up in a ball on the backseat of my boyfriend’s car. He actually got pulled over for speeding and true to form he used what had just happened as an excuse. It wouldn’t be the last time. (He used it as excuse for running out of an exam with test paper in hand and he dragged me to talk to the professor to pretend I was still pregnant and get him out of being thrown out of school. He also used it to help him get an "F" changed to a "C" in Russian so he could graduate.)

I vaguely remember getting back to campus just in time to get son from daycare. I was dizzy and nauseous and I could barely stand up. You would think after what I had gone through boyfriend would have stayed with me right? Nope he said he had a closed fraternity party to go to. I was like you have got to be kidding me. He said because of the last couple of months "he felt it was important for him to work on socialization". Not so much because of the pregnancy thing but because he was still so distraught about screwing up officer school and not being able to get back in and that he would never get to fly jet airplanes. Friggin airplanes. A child died so he could have chance to play fighter pilot? His dream killed my dream of a whole family and in the end neither of us would ever get what we wanted. I have been tormented by this for ten years. I hate myself for it. I have spoken to many a counselor, priest, etc. all saying that God will forgive me that I am punishing myself worse than God ever would, but the thing is I deserve to go to hell. I deserve to be called a whore and worse. I deserve to never meet anyone. I deserve the fact I have a disorder that prevents me from conceiving again. I deserve to lose all of my friends many of which know this story and some who do not. The ones that didn’t know, I suspect, after reading this will call me every name in the book, go ahead, I deserve it. There is nothing you can say to me that I haven’t said to myself or felt about myself. You see I am still Pro Life but I was a hypocrite, a murderer and I know that every pain that God inflicts on me is no more than I deserve. If I could go back in time I would go to that moment when I stepped out of his car and ran as fast as I could to the elderly protestor standing apart from the crowd, silently pleading with me from across the street…"

What kind of a man would do this to a woman.  This is totally wrong and the guy should be strung up.  This is waht is wrong with society today.  Everyone must have ittheir way, and fi you get someone pregnant, you can just get rid of it, to make your life better.   Why is your life so much better than that of the most innocent among us.  The foetus is not just a bunch of cells, if you seen the National Geographic show where they show the babies inside the womb, you can see that there is life in there.  Life has come to cheap in our world.  If it going to effect my career, I might as well get rid of it.  This is for medical reasons.  WTF???  Even if you do not have the means to take care of the child, you can always give it up for adoption and bring life into someone elses family.  What is wrong with a society that make sthis kind of procedure a normal every day thing.  It should only be doine in the most extreme cases, such as rape, incest or if the mother’s life is in danger.  Still, I think that abortion iw wrong on almost all cases. 

I do pray that this woman’s pain and sufferingwill go away.  I hope that she will some day forgive herself and finds a man that can treat here right.  No woman deserves to be treated this way.