From Jill Stanek, quoting American Life League’s Jim Sedlak:

Despite its protestations that abortion is only a small part of its services, Planned Parenthood has increased its number of abortions for 15 straight years. During that time, it has gone from committing 9.3 percent of all abortions in the United States to committing 27.5 percent… The records show that Planned Parenthood has committed 5,320,095 surgical and medical abortions from 1970 through the end of 2009.

5,320,095 is slightly more than the 2010 population of the State of Minnesota.

Turns out, a 2009 study by the journal Contraception found, in a 10-year study of women in Spain, that as overall contraceptive use increased from around 49 percent to 80 percent, the elective abortion rate more than doubled. This doesn’t mean that access to contraception causes more abortion—though some believe that—but that it doesn’t necessarily reduce it.

In the U.S., the story isn’t much different. A January 2011 fact sheet by the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute listed all the reasons that women who have had an abortion give for their unexpected pregnancy, and not one of them is lack of access to contraception. In fact, 54 percent of women who had abortions had used a contraceptive method, if incorrectly, in the month they got pregnant. For the 46 percent who had not used contraception, 33 percent had perceived themselves to be at low risk for pregnancy; 32 percent had had concerns about contraceptive methods; 26 percent had had unexpected sex, and 1 percent had been forced to have sex. Not one fraction of 1 percent said they got pregnant because they lacked access to contraception. Some described having unexpected sex, but all that can be said about them is that they are irresponsible, not that they felt they lacked access to contraception.

Lack of knowledge of contraception also isn’t a reason that American women get abortions. Guttmacher reported that only 8 percent of women who undergo abortions have never used a method of birth control.

This deception smacks of a fleecing of taxpayers in an effort to promote an ideological agenda, rather than a sincere effort to help women plan families.

The “fleecing of taxpayers” to which Powers refers is the federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood received $349.6 million in tax dollars in the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2008, and it paid its president, Cecile Richards, $385,163, plus another $11,876 in benefits and deferred compensation.According to a “fact sheet” published by the organization, Planned Parenthood Affiliate Health Centers performed 324,008 abortions in 2008.

Planned Parenthood’s fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2008 is the latest year for which the organization has publicly released an annual report and published the annual sum of grants and contracts it received from the government.

The $385,163 in pay Planned Parenthood President Richards received in the organization’s fiscal year ending June 30, 2008 was recorded in the group’s publicly available Internal Revenue Service Form 990 filed for that year.

[It] is becoming increasingly apparent that abortion is about family relationships, not simply a contest between the state and a woman who happens to be pregnant. Scientific discoveries about human development and the testimonies of women who have had or have considered an abortion suggest that it is family law rather than constitutional law that provides the best means of understanding the issue of abortion.

You can read the rest of the article at The Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse blog. Good stuff!

Pope Benedict XVI has issued what Catholic pro-life advocates are calling an unprecedented request for prayers worldwide from all pro-life people against abortion.

The head of the Catholic Church will begin Advent by celebrating a solemn “Vigil for all nascent human life” at St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, November 27.

The call is not limited to Catholics as the Pope is asking that “all Diocesan Bishops (and their equivalent) of every particular church preside in analogous celebrations involving the faithful in their respective parishes, religious communities, associations and movements.”

Mary McClusky, the Special Projects Coordinator at the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, says the call is especially important at a time when attacks on the dignity and worth of human life seem to be at an all-time high.

There she goes again, “putting her silver foot in her mouth,” to reverberate her late mother’s (former Texas governor Ann Richards) criticism of the first George Bush.

Chief Planned Parenthood wordsmith and president, Cecile Richards, has released a doozie just in time for the barbecue and fireworks. Here, she infers that abortion at U.S. military hospitals and bases is a “basic freedom”; denial of said freedom is an “outrageous injustice.”

Of course, Richards does not afford children in the womb the “basic freedom” of life, nor does she consider the destruction of such life an “outrageous injustice.”

Twisted, perverted, unpatriotic thinking, y’all.

On July 1, the ACLU Legislative Office accused Catholic hospitals of potentially violating the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act by refusing to provide “abortion services.” In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, ACLU counselors argued:

Religiously affiliated hospitals across the country inappropriately and unlawfully deny pregnant women emergency medical care.

That’s a heavy charge, and the ACLU’s intent could not be clearer: (1) force Catholic hospitals to comply with their interpretation of federal law, which includes abortion under “emergency medical care”; or (2) penalize Catholic hospitals by accusing them of violating the ACLU’s interpretation of federal law.

These folks will not be stopped in their thinking and feeling. Here, St. Paul couldn’t be clearer:

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened (Romans 1:21; ESV).

Stop idolatry, because “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

HT: Left-leaning RHRealityCheck.org.

In what should come as no surprise, the US resumed its trend of following Europe in a declining fertility rate. A portion of “Table 1″ is provided above. From the report:

The 2008 preliminary estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR)) was 2085.5 births per 1,000 women–2% ower than the rate in 2007 (2,122.5) (Table 1). The TFR summarizes the potential impact of current fertility patterns on completed family size by estimating the average number of births that a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have over their lifetimes, based on the age-specifi birth rates obeserved in the given year. The TFR for the United States in 2008 was below replacement after being above in 2006 and 2007. Replacement is the rate at which a given generation can exactly replace itself,k which is generally considered to be 2,1000 births per 1,00 women. The U.S. rate had been below replacement from 1972 to 2005.

Source: Hamilton BE, Martin JA, and Ventura SJ. “Births: Preliminary Data for 2008.” National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2010;58(16):1-17.

Also, from the Washington Post:

The nation’s overall birthrate fell 2 percent from 2007 to 2008, when about 4.2 million babies were born. The dip pushed the fertility rate below 2.1 per woman, meaning Americans were no longer giving birth to enough children to keep the population from declining.

Here’s a paragraph from an article I recently wrote for The Hausvater Project. Titled “Medicating against Motherhood: As the Pill Turns 50, a New Generation Seeks to Rediscover Marital Chastity,” the article offers an explanation why the Lutheran Church eventually accepted contraception. Included within the article is the connection between Professor Alfred Rehwinkel’s book, Planned Parenthood, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of what today is known as Planned Parenthood. From the article:

[Author Alfred] Rehwinkel’s approach to Scripture, to which he and others had acquiesced in the decades prior to writing Planned Parenthood, is nowadays commonplace among conservative Christians. It is therefore instructive. First, define the moral issue. Second, consult the Scriptures. Third, if the Scriptures do not specifically mention the issue, or they do not specifically prohibit a given practice, then the conclusion: the Christian is free to engage. Savvy believers will recognize that this sort of biblical interpretation has been used by politicians in order to support clear moral wrongs. Recall that President Bill Clinton, a Baptist, suggested, “Nowhere in those Ten Commandments will you find anything about homosexuality.” Of course, the Bible explicitly condemns homosexuality in numerous places, and even says that God’s creation shows that same-sex relations go against nature. But for Clinton, that wasn’t the point. The point was that where he chose to look in the Bible, the prohibitions were not there.

You can read the whole article here.