Congressman Stupak Headline Correction

Here is an entry on Drudge Report covering how Congressman Stupak sold his vote on Health Care reform.

For me, the headline is all wrong in that a big part of the trade involved Stupak trading away the lives of unborn babies.

WASHINGTON, March 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Phyllis Schlafly, president and founder of the conservative grassroots public policy organization Eagle Forum, made the following remarks after the public announcement that formerly pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak (D-MI) will cast a "yes" vote for the Senate health care bill today in the House:

"It is naive for any elected official, especially one who describes himself as 'pro-life,' to expect that a promise to issue an Executive Order that reasserts the intentions of the Hyde Amendment will be fulfilled by the most pro-abortion president to ever sit in the White House. Perhaps Mr. Stupak and his fellow pro-life Democrats forget that President Obama's first Executive Order was the repeal of the Mexico City Policy to allow for international funding of abortion."

"Not only would an Executive Order be rendered meaningless in the face of Congress passing legislation which actively provides for the massive expansion and funding of abortion services, but anyone who doubts the abortion tsunami which awaits this bill becoming law lives in a fantasy world."

"Barack Obama has lined every existing federal agency with the most dedicated pro-abortion ideologues, and we know that he will continue this pattern of pro-abortion appointments when it comes time for him to fill the over-100 bureaucracies created to administer his socialized health care program."

"Any formerly pro-life Democrat who casts a 'Yes' vote for this Senate health care bill tonight will be forever remembered as being among the deciding votes which facilitated the largest expansion of abortion services since Roe v. Wade."

"Mr. Stupak and his Democrat followers have now clarified that you cannot be pro-life and be a Democrat. If abortion was truly their biggest issue, they wouldn't willfully align themselves with the Party of Death."

"This vote will expose the myth of the 'pro-life Democrat.' With this single vote, the Democratic Party will divide our nation into the Party of Death and the Party of Life, and future elections will never be the same."

CONTACT: Suzanne Bibby, (610) 608-6303

SOURCE Phyllis Schlafly - Yahoo News

As far as I am concerned, the President was able to sign this Health Care bill into law because Congressman Stupak enabled it's passage by selling out the lives of unborn babies. It is that plain and simple. Sure other votes were bought to get this bill passed, but he got paid off to drop his concern for the protection of unborn children. Concern like that should have no price.

This makes me wonder if he ever cared about this issue or simply knew that it was the best way to get a payoff. Turned out is was. I just wonder why he sold so cheap...

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Stupid Double-Standard for Minor Children - Abortion and Death Penalty

How is it possible that children are no longer eligible for the death penalty in cases of murder simply because they are under the age of 18 and therefore not completely responsible for their actions, and yet they are somehow responsible enough to purchase 'abortion pills', not only without permission of the parents, but even without having to see a doctor?

The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it would accept, not appeal, a federal judge's order that lifts Bush administration restrictions limiting over-the-counter sales of "Plan B" to women 18 and older. U.S. District Judge Edward Korman ruled last month in a lawsuit filed in New York that President George W. Bush's appointees let politics, not science, drive their decision to restrict over-the-counter access.

Women's groups said the FDA's action was long overdue, since the agency's own medical reviewers had initially recommended that the contraceptive be made available without any age restrictions.

Korman ordered the FDA to let 17-year-olds get the birth control pills. He also directed the agency to evaluate clinical data to determine whether all age restrictions should be lifted. - Breitbart

This is the height of Government, and dare I say Liberal, stupidity and irresponsibility.

This is part of a larger battle where liberals are fighting for the right of minors to get an abortion without parental permission. See my comments on this issue here: Minors, the Death Penalty and Abortion

If 17 year-old 'children' are so responsible, then let's change the law so that you are treated as an adult at age 17 and not 18. Then they can go get abortions without having to tell their parents and can also face the justice system as an adult when they end up on the wrong side of the law. These half-ass measures just makes being a parent more difficult and exposes children to much more dangerous and risky behavior. (Not for anything, but if this pill was available back in the 60's, we might not have the President that we have now, given that his mother got pregnant when she was 17...)

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Embryonic Stem Cell Research - So Last Administration

I am starting to wonder if President-elect Obama or his incoming Administration is suffering from BDS. Take this plan to open the tap for Government funding of embryonic Stem Cell research:

But as both incoming Democrats and outgoing Republicans struck a tone of civility, Obama's transition chief signaled that the president-elect could wipe away some hallmarks of the Bush years, including a ban on embyronic stem cell research and moves to open new lands to oil drilling.

The move could signal a swift change of course after eight years under the Bush administration, even as top aides stressed Obama's bipartisan aims and predicted the new cabinet could contain familiar faces, particularly at the Pentagon.

"On stem cell research, on a number of areas, you see the Bush administration, even today, moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country," transition chief John Podesta told Fox. - AFP

OK, at the time stem cell research was in a very basic form. While there are many different types of stem cells, it was the embryonic stem cells that looked the most promising, as they were the most basic building block. Unfortunately, to get them you first needed to kill a fertilized human egg.

To be clear, President Bush did not ban embryonic stem cell research. He just banned using Federal money to pay for whatever research was done. So the research could and does continue to be done, we as taxpayers are just not paying for it. Most of the rest of the world could also continue to study embryonic stem cells.

Today, there have been many discoveries on the stem cell front, including a couple that basically eliminate the need to destroy any fertilized eggs:

January 2007 - Scientists at Wake Forest University led by Dr. Anthony Atala and Harvard University report discovery of a new type of stem cell in amniotic fluid. This may potentially provide an alternative to embryonic stem cells for use in research and therapy.

June 2007 - Research reported by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice. In the same month, scientist Shoukhrat Mitalipov reports the first successful creation of a primate stem cell line through somatic cell nuclear transfer.

November 2007 - Human Induced pluripotent stem cells: Two similar papers released by their respective journals prior to formal publication: in Cell by Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka, "Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors", and in Science by Junying Yu, et al., from the research group of James Thomson, "Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells": pluripotent stem cells generated from mature human fibroblasts. It is possible now to produce a stem cell from almost any other human cell instead of using embryos as needed previously, albeit the risk of tumorigenesis due to c-myc and retroviral gene transfer remains to be determined.

January 2008 - Robert Lanza and colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology and UCSF create the first human embryonic stem cells without destruction of the embryo. - Wikipedia

So now that there appears to a path to obtaining embryonic stem cells without the ethical complications, why is there all of this talk of going back to a part of science that at the time funding was restricted looked like the only path now looks like one of many paths to possible new discoveries? It almost looks like the Obama team just going to reverse this policy simply because it was a Bush policy, totally ignoring the significant discoveries in this field.

Who knows. Maybe they are looking for some anti-aging cream and think that the only possible place to discover it is in the juice from ground up babies. Really, where do you draw the line? What if embryonic stem cells are not good enough? What if the eggs need to mature to 10 week? Twenty weeks? What if they are best coming from a fetus that can survive outside the mother? At its best, this is bad science. I would not call it murder simply because these eggs were not going to turn into kids. BUT if there is some breakthrough, what happens when they need to start harvesting eggs from donors? What do you do when you run out of willing donors? It is best not to go down that path. We are better than this. Too bad that our new President does not appear to think so.

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More Abortions than Births in Russia

One campaign issue that did not materialize during this latest American Election was abortion. That is a shame as the older I get the more I think that more attention should be put on the issue, not to ban it, but to do something to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. But as bad as the American situations looks when it comes to abortion, Russia is much worse:

...Russia is, in other words, the world capital of abortions by a wide margin. It is, in fact, an abortion factory, butchering over 2 million fetuses each year, more than 5,400 per day, more than it has live births — a situation virtually unprecedented in human history. Every ten years, Russians kill more of their own people simply by means of abortion than did Hitler’s invading Nazi hoardes in the whole of World War II. - La Russophobe

The US abortion rate is less than half Russia's. Also the US birth rate is much higher than Russia's. I think in the comments of the story above a couple people noted that during Soviet times women would get pregnant to then have an abortion because they got a couple days 'vacation' from workplace in order to have the procedure. That probably says more about the Soviet Union and how they failed to instill any sort of respect for life. Hell, that respect for life is still pretty much lacking given how the Russian State has failed to improve the quality of life for many, and actually managed to lower the average life expectancy for Russian.

The only point here is that people should be taught to take action and be a little more responsible for their actions. Not just in Russia but also around the world. When playing around in bed you can't count on being lucky. You need to use protection every time. Being drunk is not an excuse. It certainly isn't one if you have a gun 'accident' that hurts someone. Having sex is no different.

Link:
EDITORIAL: Russia and its Abortion Apocalypse - La Russophobe

Russia’s Demographics - SteelJaw Scribe
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