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.

One bars abortions at and after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on assertions that fetuses feel pain at that time. The current standard is viability, or when a fetus is able to survive outside the womb.

The other. . . will require doctors or other health professionals to assess whether women have risk factors that could lead to mental or physical problems after an abortion.

HT: Rev. Micah Gaunt.

The White House’s proposed executive order to “deal” with the abortion problems in the Senate health care reform bill reveals that the President will not even attempt to ensure that there is no federal funding for abortion or mandates for abortion coverage in the bill.

The first section of the proposed executive order provides that that “it is necessary to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism” to prevent federal funding for abortions “consistent with . . . the Hyde amendment.”  While this acknowledges that the Senate bill is not consistent with the Hyde amendment, the language of the executive order fails to describe accurately and to mirror the scope of the Hyde Amendment.

While the Hyde Amendment comprehensively prohibits the use of all federal funding that flows through Labor, Health and Human Services (LHHS) appropriations for both abortion and insurance plans that cover abortions, the Senate health care bill does not.  The executive order does not remedy this problem.  First, the executive order only addresses the insurance exchanges (section 2) and the Community Health Center (CHC) funding (section 3).  In other words, the executive order still leaves open the possibility that other funds authorized or appropriated through the bill could be used to directly pay for abortions.

Second, while the executive order addresses the insurance exchanges, it utterly fails to apply Hyde to them.  Section 2 of the order provides guidelines for “strict compliance” with the provisions in the bill that address how federal subsidies are handled in plans that cover abortions in the exchanges.  However, these guidelines do nothing to prevent federal subsidies from going to plans that cover abortions, which directly violates federal principles embodied in the Hyde Amendment and other federal laws, including the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP).

Current law forbids federal dollars from going to insurance plans that cover abortions, regardless of whether or not the dollars directly pay for abortions.  In contrast, all this section of the executive order accomplishes is strict compliance with the anti-life “abortion surcharge” provision in the bill, which segregates the portion of premiums that pays for abortions in plans that cover abortion from federal funds.

Section 3 addresses new funding for CHCs.  As a recap, the Senate bill does not prohibit these new funds from being used to pay for abortions.  While the executive order states that the Hyde Amendment and longstanding regulations currently prohibit the use of CHC funds for abortions, the Hyde Amendment is not applied to CHC funding by statutory law, but only by regulations from an administrative agency.

This section of the executive order states that the Hyde Amendment will apply to the new authorization and appropriation of CHC funds.  While this section may effectively prohibit the use of CHC funds for abortions, a court could interpret the statutory language as requiring the use of the funds for abortions because there is no statutory prohibition, which courts have done in the past with other health care statutory language.

Also, the executive order is not permanent law, just as regulations are not permanent law.  Either or both of these can be repealed by President Obama and his administration fairly easily.

Should this executive order remain in place, it does not even attempt to address the broad mandate authorities in the bill that could be used to require private insurance plans to cover abortions.  For instance, the Mikulski amendment to the Senate bill allows an administrative agency to determine what is “preventive care.”  If abortion is categorized as “preventive care,” private insurance plans will be required to cover abortions.