Pregnant Women’s Rights Must Be Fully Protected by the Criminal Law

by Denise M. Burke April 15, 2014 5:15 PM

http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/375836/pregnant-womens-rights-must-be-fully-protected-criminal-law-denise-m-burke

 

Recent media misinformation, perhaps deliberate on the part of left-leaning commentators, currently casts a cloud over efforts to give women more protection when they are forced to defend themselves and their unborn children.

 

Imagine being pregnant with quadruplets and having your babies’ father viciously punch you in the stomach during an argument. You remind him that you are carrying his children and warn him not to punch you in the stomach again. Tragically, he doesn’t heed your warning and instead comes at you. Fearing for your children, you grab a knife and stab him. He later dies, and you are charged with homicide.

 

At your criminal trial, you want to argue to the jury that your actions were legally justified because you were acting in defense of your unborn children. However, the judge determines that state law does not permit you to make that argument, and you are ultimately convicted and sentenced to prison.

 

This is not just a hypothetical. It actually happened to a Michigan woman in 1999. Her conviction was later reversed when an appellate court determined that Michigan law did, in fact, permit a woman to use force in defense of her unborn child.

 

Notably, this was the first time a court had extended the “defense of others” theory to the defense of an unborn child. Courts in Texas and Illinois had previously refused to do so, despite the significant and ongoing problem of pregnancy-related violence including violence specifically directed toward unborn children.

 

Each year, thousands of cases of unlawful violence against pregnant women and their unborn children are reported. These incidents continue to underscore the urgent need to ensure that our criminal laws protect both the woman and her unborn child, and that they also affirmatively provide legal protection to a woman who must resort to force in defense of her unborn child.

 

The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, model legislation developed in 2008 by Americans United for Life, is designed to amend a state’s existing criminal code and provides that a woman may use force — even deadly force — to defend her unborn child from unlawful violence or a criminal attack.

 

Attempts by some in the media to distort the intent and impact of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act and to smear Americans United for Life as encouraging violence against abortion providers represent thinly veiled, politically motivated attacks that blatantly ignore the stated intent of the model legislation. The legislation is intended simply to ensure that a pregnant woman and her unborn child are protected from unlawful criminal violence and that a woman’s decision to carry her child to term is respected. They also reveal a fundamental — and perhaps willful — misunderstanding of the express terms of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, the scope and application of criminal law, and the purposes and intent behind this model language.

 

MYTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act will “legalize” or “incite” violence against abortion providers.

 

TRUTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act applies only to situations in which unlawful force is being applied or imminently threatened against an unborn child. Moreover, under the narrow tailoring of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, only the child’s mother — and not a third-party — may be justified in using force to defend the unborn child.

 

Under well-established criminal jurisprudence, a person is justified in using force in the “defense of another” when unlawful force is being applied or threatened against that other person. Arguably, a “person” includes an unborn child under federal criminal law and the laws of 38 states that recognize an unborn child as a potential victim of violence.

 

In this instance, examples of the use of unlawful force would include punching or beating a pregnant woman with the intent of causing a miscarriage or damage to the pregnancy or threatening the use of a knife or other weapon against the unborn child. Notably, the force applied in response to the threat must be “reasonable” or comparable to the threat. Thus, deadly force can be used, although only in cases of extreme peril.

 

The provisions of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act come into play only when unlawful force is being applied or threatened. It does not apply to lawful activity.

 

Abortion is legal in the United States and a woman must consent to an abortion before it is performed. Thus, under no reasonable reading of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act can it be construed as applying to the provision of abortion (which is a legal act and not unlawful force) or as justifying or excusing criminal violence against those who perform legal abortions.

 

This narrow application of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is confirmed by the Michigan appellate decision noted earlier where the justices specifically said:[BLOCK]The distinction between the abortion cases and the instant case is straightforward. The United States Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right to personal privacy and that this right encompasses a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy. The “defense of others” theory is available only if a person acts to prevent unlawful bodily harm against another. Because clinics that perform abortions are engaging in lawful activity, the “defense of others” theory does not apply. . . . Our holding . . . does not apply to what the United States Supreme Court has held to constitute lawful abortions.[BLOCK]

 

 MYTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is part of a “campaign” to target abortion providers.

 

TRUTH: AUL drafted the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act in 2008 in direct response to the well-documented threats of violence faced by pregnant women and their children. Moreover, in keeping with its pro-life convictions, AUL has always denounced violence against abortion providers and would never promulgate model legislation that could reasonably be construed as calling for or excusing such violence.

 

As detailed in the legislative findings section of the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, evidence has shown that violence and abuse are often higher during pregnancy than during any other period in a woman’s lifetime. Based on studies conducted between 1995 and 1999, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that at least 300,000 pregnant women are abused each year. Moreover, according to the March of Dimes, one in six pregnant women has been abused by a partner. Similarly, a 1998 household survey determined that pregnant women are 60.6 percent more likely to be beaten than women who are not pregnant.

 

In fact, a pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause. And case after case has demonstrated that husbands or boyfriends are often the perpetrators of pregnancy-related violence, and this violence is often directed at the unborn child or intended to end or jeopardize the pregnancy.

 

It is precisely these threats that AUL seeks to address with the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act.

 

MYTH: The protections provided by the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act are unnecessary and are not supported by existing law.

 

TRUTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is a logical extension of existing federal and state criminal laws that provide for the right to use force in the “defense of others” and other criminal law provisions that recognize and protect unborn children.

 

All 50 states permit the use of force in specified circumstances: for self defense, in the defense of others, and when a person reasonably believes that unlawful force is being used or will imminently be used against him/her or a third person. “Self-defense” and the “defense of others” are affirmative defenses raised by a criminal defendant that, if proven true, can provide a complete defense to criminal liability.

 

With that in mind, it is easy to see that the application of the affirmative defense of “defense of others” to cases where a mother uses force to protect the life of her unborn child is a natural extension of accepted criminal jurisprudence including existing unborn victims of violence protections (i.e., fetal homicide laws and fetal assault laws) that recognize the unborn as potential victims of criminal violence.

 

The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act (more commonly known as “Laci and Conner’s Law,” after Laci and Conner Peterson), as well as the laws of 38 states, recognizes an unborn child as a separate victim of criminal violence and treats the killing of an unborn child as a form of homicide. In addition, 22 states define non-fatal assaults on unborn children as criminal offenses.

 

Thus, it is clear that recognizing the unborn as “others” for purposes of the “defense of others” theory in no way diverges from current federal and state criminal law. If under a state’s criminal code an unborn child is recognized as a potential victim of homicide or assault, then that unborn child can be protected through the use of force when warranted.

 

Recognizing this, Oklahoma, in 2009, became the first state to enact AUL’s Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act, explicitly expanding the affirmative defense of “defense of others” to include instances where a pregnant woman uses force to protect her unborn child. Arkansas and Missouri have also enacted this protective legislation.

 

MYTH: The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act is simply another tool in the “abortion wars.”

 

TRUTH: The “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” is not an abortion bill and attempts by some in the media to subsume the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act into the debate over abortion do a grave disservice to abused women and vulnerable unborn children who are often the targets of criminal violence.

 

The Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act does not contain the word “abortion” anywhere in the text of the model legislation. (In fact, the word “abortion” is used only twice in the policy guide accompanying the model legislation, where it is used as an adjective in the term “abortion provider.” Notably, in this context, “abortion provider” is used when noting that the Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act cannot legitimately or honestly be argued to condone, promote, or incite violence against abortion providers.)

 

Finally, there is a good reason for the absence of the term “abortion” in the AUL model language: The bill is not about abortion. As detailed above, the bill is intended to ensure that a pregnant woman is able to protect her unborn child from criminal violence. In doing so, it also protects her individual decision to carry her child to term — her choice for life.

 

— Denise M. Burke is Americans United for Life’s vice president of legal affairs.

When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense

by Frederica Mathewes-Green January 22, 2016 4:00 AM

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430152/abortion-roe-v-wade-unborn-children-women-feminism-march-life

 

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.”

The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the decision. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester. The Supreme Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her doctor. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

 But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. We knew nothing of fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.

 

We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion.

Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names.

 

We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It won’t embarrass her mom and dad.

 

Abortion is like a funnel; it promises to solve all the problems at once. So there is significant pressure on a woman to choose abortion, rather than adoption or parenting.

 

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think: If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.

 

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really turn back the clock. It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so that she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.

 This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.

 

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

 

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

 

I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw
at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along.

 

Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.)

After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.”

 

He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life.

The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”

 

The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters?

For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. No matter who the father, every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear.

We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child?

 

Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. Like the claim that a fetus is not really a person because it is so small. Well, I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people? That if you catch them before they’ve reached a certain size, it’s all right to kill them?

 

What about the child who is “unwanted”? It was a basic premise of early feminism that women should not base their sense of worth on whether or not a man “wants” them. We are valuable simply because we are members of the human race, regardless of any other person’s approval. Do we really want to say that “unwanted” people might as well be dead? What about a woman who is “wanted” when she’s young and sexy but less so as she gets older? At what point is it all right to terminate her?

 

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg. That new single cell has a brand-new DNA, never before seen in the world. If you examined through a microscope three cells lined up — the newly fertilized ovum, a cell from the father, and a cell from the mother — you would say that, judging from the DNA, the cells came from three different people.

 

When people say the unborn is “not a person” or “not a life” they mean that it has not yet grown or gained abilities that arrive later in life. But there’s no agreement about which abilities should be determinative. Pro-choice people don’t even agree with each other.  Obviously, law cannot be based on such subjective criteria. If it’s a case where the question is “Can I kill this?” the answer must be based on objective medical and scientific data. And the fact is, an unborn child, from the very first moment, is a new human individual. It has the three essential characteristics that make it “a human life”: It’s alive and growing, it is composed entirely of human cells, and it has unique DNA. It’s a person, just like the rest of us.

 

Abortion indisputably ends a human life. But this loss is usually set against the woman’s need to have an abortion in order to freely direct her own life. It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive — no woman “wants” to go through it. But once it’s available, it appears to be the logical, reasonable choice. All the complexities can be shoved down that funnel. Yes, abortion solves all the problems; but it solves them inside the woman’s body. And she is expected to keep that pain inside for a lifetime, and be grateful for the gift of abortion.

 

Many years ago I wrote something in an essay about abortion, and I was surprised that the line got picked up and frequently quoted. I’ve seen it in both pro-life and pro-choice contexts, so it appears to be something both sides agree on.

 

I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

 

Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience. That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it.

 

Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2,800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not
liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression.

 

And so we come around to one more March for Life, like the one last year, like the one next year. Protesters understandably focus on the unborn child, because the danger it faces is the most galvanizing aspect of this struggle. If there are different degrees of injustice, surely violence is the worst manifestation, and killing worst of all. If there are different categories of innocent victim, surely the small and helpless have a higher claim to protection, and tiny babies the highest of all. The minimum purpose of government is to shield the weak from abuse by the strong, and there is no one weaker or more voiceless than unborn children. And so we keep saying that they should be protected, for all the same reasons that newborn babies are protected. Pro-lifers have been doing this for 43 years now, and will continue holding a candle in the darkness for as many more years as it takes.

 

I understand all the reasons why the movement’s prime attention is focused on the unborn. But we can also say that abortion is no bargain for women, either. It’s destructive and tragic. We shouldn’t listen unthinkingly to the other side of the time-worn script, the one that tells us that women want abortions, that abortion liberates them. Many a post-abortion woman could tell you a different story.

The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?

 

In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters.

 

One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of ours. And they are not obligated to be kind.

 

 — Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author of Real Choices: Listening to Women; Looking for Alternatives to Abortion.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430152/abortion-roe-v-wade-unborn-children-women-feminism-march-life

Is personhood an opinion?

Did you ever think that perhaps the root cause of many social problems is that the status of personhood is perceived as just an opinion?  If one person's opinion is that another is less of a person than oneself, then any behavior against the other is allowable and justified.  (History shows us that legality is not a factor as laws can be changed and are changed.) 

Women are considered inferior to men; so men feel justified when putting a woman into 'her place' through domestic violence.  Malala was shot for advocating women's education, defying male dominance over women.  Gays are bullied for their sexual orientation.  Ethnic and racial groups are marginalized, segregated and eliminated through genocide. 

Think of how groups of people are dehumanized through words or images.  In Rwanda before the genocide began the radio station RTLM referred to the Tutsis as "cockroaches".   Jews were described by the Nazis as "lazy", "inferior", "robbers", "vermin" and "lice".  African-Americans were labeled "apes".  Native Americans were commonly referred to as "savages".  How much easier is it to harm or kill someone else if that person is not as 'human' as you?

Abortion is justified by many as the removal of an object or a clump of cells.  Others admit that those cells are the beginning of a person, but just not yet a person; therefore an abortion is acceptable.  Euthanasia is urged in some places for those unable to function to the standards of the world. 

Is child abuse an effect of abortion?  The disposable unborn becomes the disposable baby, child, teenager?

Could even the violence of street gangs be attributed to those members viewing members of other gangs as less of a person? 

The only possible way to give dignity to all is to respect the personhood of all people from the moment of conception to their natural death. 

A stretch?  I don't think so.  But of course, it is just my opinion.

Saying Patients are PVS Allows Courts to Starve Them to Death, What if the Diagnosis is Wrong?

by Bobby Schindler | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 4/21/14 12:50 PM

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/04/21/saying-patients-are-pvs-allows-courts-to-starve-them-to-death-what-if-the-diagnosis-is-wrong/                   
I have written time and time again about the dangerous and dehumanizing persistent vegetative state (PVS) diagnosis. Actually, we saw in my family’s battle to save my sister, Terri Schiavo, from death by dehydration, that a tremendous amount of debate raged over whether or not she was in this condition.

In fact, this diagnosis is what allowed the court to order the removal of Terri’s food and water. Yet despite continuing research validating that the PVS diagnosis is growing in its inaccuracy, the medical community uses this diagnosis to end countless lives of our medically vulnerable patients who are allegedly in this condition.

This latest finding is one of a continuous stream of reports that have been issued on the inaccuracy of the PVS diagnosis. From the Report, Brain Scans Show Vegetative Patients May Actually Recover:

The Journal’s report, released on Feb. 3, revealed that some patients who were believed to be in a PVS were actually able to understand and communicate. Through the use of functional magnetic resonance scanning (fMRI), researchers in the United Kingdom estimated that a percentage of those patients suffering from profound brain injuries possessed the capacity to comprehend and communicate in limited ways.

Indeed, every time these studies are published we should move to abolish the PVS diagnosis, in particularly, using it as a reason to kill. Sadly, however, despite these imaging studies and what they reveal about the human brain, the vast majority of the medical community sees nothing improper about using such an unscientific diagnosis for, what usually turns out to be, reasons almost never in the best interest of the patients.

Furthermore, not only can the PVS diagnosis be used as an actual death sentence for a patient, but as a death sentence figuratively speaking, as well. And it seems both are supported under the pretext to save health care costs. You see, the PVS can also be used to cut off funds for a person in need of vital rehabilitation. Because once insurance providers receive the PVS diagnosis in regards to the patient’s condition, no longer are they willing to pay for any rehabilitative services.

Consequently, with no way to afford rehabilitation, families are left to either care for their loved ones at home, or place them in a nursing home. The patients, who could benefit from such services, are basically warehoused and abandoned by a system, ironically, which if it permitted the rehabilitative services to continue, could prove to save costs over the life span of the patients.

Predictably, our mainstream media supports this “quality-of-life” standard agenda and the many years and millions of dollars that have been invested in manipulating our culture to accept killing our most vulnerable persons.
It is incumbent upon all of us, but physicians in particular, to ensure that the lives of vulnerable people are not needlessly ended by flawed diagnostic practices, careless legislation, or the idea that a person with a disability must prove themselves worthy of life’s most ordinary and basic needs: food and water.

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/04/21/saying-patients-are-pvs-allows-courts-to-starve-them-to-death-what-if-the-diagnosis-is-wrong/

Six Reasons Why Men Can Speak on Abortion

by Marc Barnes | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 1/16/13 1:34 PM
Opinion

The injustice of abortion is the free choice of a woman who sees it working towards her good. This has lead to the common call for men to remove themselves from the debate surrounding the injustice. It is, after all, a woman’s issue.
While I sympathize with the thought, it doesn’t hold to the light of reason. Women bear pregnancy and birth, as they physically and emotionally bear the sad experience of abortion. As such, they are certainly the most experientially trustworthy spokeswomen for the issue. But this pride of place does not exclude the male voice. Here’s why.

1. Josiah Presley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4Jb_aA2RZVU
Men can speak about abortion because men are aborted. Is it wrong for Josiah — who survived an abortion with only a deformed left arm — to speak in favor of rendering illegal the cause of his suffering? It’s certainly a popular thought, that he should shut up over an obviously women-only issue, but he stands against all odds as a living, breathing testament to the fact that it’s not. It’s a human rights issue, and men and women hold the marvelous distinction of being human in common along, with the less-than-marvelous distinction of being threatened, maimed, or killed by abortion.

2. The majority of women are pressured into having abortions.
The study “Induced abortion and traumatic stress: A preliminary comparison of American and Russian women” published in Medical Science Monitor found that 64% of American women “felt pressured by others” to have an abortion. We can safely assume that some of the individuals doing the pressuring were men.
This is a crime, and it points to a reality glossed over by many in the pro-choice crowd. Men are not absent from the abortion debate in the private sphere, but will and do impose their desires on women. To remove the male voice from the public sphere won’t remove it from the private sphere. It will only reduce the number of men who hear, from their brothers, that abortion is wrong, and pressuring women into an abortion far worse.

3. Children — those human lives threatened by abortion — are under the care of their mother and father.
The logic of abortion would have us believe that a husband bends to his wife’s swelling belly, kisses it and sings a song to her dear cellular clump, which at some arbitrary time decided by his wife (and who knows when? That’s the magical part!) will become his child. This, of course, is stupid. Unborn children are the children of a mother and father.
There is no legal distinction on the duty of parents to their child made on the basis of sex. Every parent has the duty to provide his or her children with the basic necessities of life, including food, clothing, shelter, and necessary medical care. To do otherwise is child abuse.
Now if parental duties towards children have nothing to do with sex, how can the question of the very life of that child have everything to do with sex? Why are men exempt from duty towards their children before they are born?
The issue here is one of consistency. If we are going to say that the creation of new life is one that, for 9 months, is entirely the responsibility of the mother and entirely not the responsibility of a father, we have to come up with a really good reason for the father receiving the exact same amount of responsibility when the baby does pop from the womb.
It can’t be because he participated in making that new human life. He made it 9 months ago, and had no say in the discussion of its continued existence. We must base the responsibility of the father to his child on something besides creation.
On the fact that he is capable of direct physical contact with the baby? So are others. On the fact that he promised to take care of the baby (once it “became” his baby by virtue of leaving the uterus)? A man must support the child he didn’t “mean” to create with the woman he never liked. What then? Is sex an implicit commitment to being responsible for a new human life (after a 9 month delay)? But why, if not because — by way of sex — a man participates in making a new human life? And if that’s the reason why, we’re back at our primary problem: He participated in making a new human life 9 months ago. Why the delay?
We are left in a shamble of responsibilities, the existence of which have no origin.

4. Male abortionists.
I searched around a break down of the male/female populations of abortionists and abortion-performing doctors without luck, so I don’t know whether most abortionists are male or female. But the fact that there are male abortionists poses an interesting question. It is a woman’s free choice to undergo an abortion. It is a male abortionists free choice to perform an abortion. If a man can’t speak of a woman’s free choice that he could never truly experience, assumedly he can speak of a man’s free choice that he could experience. Thus men are free to enter the debate on abortion.

5. If this moral debate is to be sex specific, so must others.
If abortion is to be a women’s issue because it is a woman choosing to have an abortion, and men cannot know what that’s like, then an obvious problem arises. (It might seem like a ridiculous problem if you believe that the human life within a pregnant woman is not, in fact, a human life, and therefore that abortion is just, but suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine it so, that the position of the other might make a little more sense.)
Sex slavery is an injustice largely — if not entirely — perpetrated by men on women. It is a free choice made by men. This does not mean that the outrage over sex slavery should be limited to male outrage.
Now the differences are obvious, but they don’t change the fundamental truth here.
The victims of sex slavery are mostly women — of course women should protest! Well, the victims of abortion are often men. It follows that they should too.
But the victims of sex slavery are conscious of the injustice perpetrated on them, while the fetus is not! Then we arrive at the real question: Is an injustice only an injustice if the person affected by it knows he is affected by it? Can you kill a man while he’s asleep? Can he you suffocate a coma patient? Can you drink your friend unconscious then slit his wrists, for it is no injustice if the victim of injustice does not experience it?
That’s quite a discussion, but it proves something I suspected all along. Any discussion of whether men can speak on abortion will inevitably lead to and be decided by the question of whether abortion is wrong.

6. Abortion is wrong.    
The human person experiences good and evil as universal. Murder is not wrong-for-some. The fact that rape is a free choice does not negate our ability to protest it, even if we’ve never experienced rape. Abuse is not “complicated” and thereby above the judgment of those unaffected by abuse.
If you come to the conclusion that it is unjust for a human life to be intentionally killed in utero, it is impossible not to apply this realization of reality to the universe. Thus:  We will not rest until we have affected its abolition.

Grayson James Walker

Published on May 19, 2012

Grayson James Walker February 15, 2012, parents Patrick & Heather Walker

He only lived 8 hours, but what a huge impact he has had on the lives of thousands of people! Hope you all enjoy meeting and sharing moments with Grayson and his loving, faithful family.

God bless these parents and those photographers who minister through Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep.

Choosing Death, Choosing Life: did being distinctly 'normal' make a difference?- - part 2

CNN) -- A brain-dead pregnant woman lies on a hospital bed. Doctors want to keep her on life support until they can deliver her baby. An anguished husband waits.

At first glance, the case of Robyn Benson of Victoria, British Columbia, appears to bear similarities to that of Marlise Munoz in Texas -- except for two key differences.

In Munoz's case, her husband wanted her taken off a ventilator and the hospital acknowledged the fetus she carried was not viable.

But Benson's situation is different.

Here, both her husband, Dylan, and the doctors are trying to keep her on a ventilator until they can deliver the baby via a C-section. And the life inside her is growing normally.

"We go see her every day and she is doing so much to grow our son," Dylan Benson told CTV. "Her brain is not alive, but she still is."

The Benson family ordeal began shortly after Christmas.

Robyn Benson complained of a "terrible, terrible headache" and sent her husband out to get some Tylenol. When he returned, she was unresponsive, but still breathing.

At the hospital, doctors discovered she suffered a brain hemorrhage. She was later declared brain dead.

Now, Dylan Benson is in an unimaginable position.

He's counting down the days to the birth of his son -- and the death of his wife.

A much different case

The Munoz family, on the other hand, had nothing to look forward to.

Their case, which played out internationally, sparked a wrenching two-month legal debate about who is alive, who is dead and how the presence of a fetus changes the equation.

Erick Munoz found his wife unconscious at their home on November 26. A blood clot in her lungs had killed her. She hadn't been breathing for about an hour. At the time, she was 14 weeks pregnant with the couple's second child.

But, unlike the Bensons, the fetus Marlise Munoz was carrying was described by family attorneys as "distinctly abnormal," with multiple deformities including a possible heart problem.

Munoz fought a Texas law that says "you cannot withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient," eventually winning a lawsuit and the right to remove Marlise from life support in late January.

He said he knew his wife wouldn't want to be kept alive artificially.

A community rallies

Five weeks have passed since Dylan Benson found his wife unconscious. The odds are getting better for the boy he's named Iver.

"The doctors have said that he now has higher than an 80% of survival and that increases with every day that passes," Benson said.

Doctors hope Robyn Benson can carry the boy seven more weeks when she will be about 34 weeks pregnant. The baby will then be healthy enough to be delivered.

The community has rallied to support the Bensons in a online fundraising campaign that began over the weekend.

The Baby Iver Fund began with a goal of $36,000. By early Tuesday, it had already doubled that with 88 days left in the campaign.

And the number keeps climbing: It exceeded $92,000 as of noon (3 p.m. ET), about $17,000 above what it was earlier in the day.

"Please help to raise funds for my unborn son, Iver, and I," reads the front page of the online effort. "He has already lost his mother, but I want to provide the best life I possibly can for him."

The money will be used to pay for bills, baby supplies, daycare, housing, food, transportation and an education fund for Iver. Dylan also noted that he hasn't worked during this ordeal, and that compensation during his leave after Iver is born will cover just more than half his normal salary.

People shared the link to the fundraising page around social media, from former co-workers to the local Anglican diocese to strangers in Canada and beyond.

"Humanity fills me with such hope when it comes together like this," tweeted one woman. "Support Dylan and #BabyIver."

Among those chiming in on Twitter was Dylan Benson, who thanked several people -- including one who pointed to a news story from France -- who'd brought attention to his campaign.

He spoke more extensively in a blog post about his unborn baby and wife.

"She was my rock," Dylan wrote of Robyn.

"It is very difficult to know that our son will grow up never meeting his wonderful mother, and that we will have to say our goodbyes to Robyn within hours of seeing Iver for the first time."

Brain-dead Canadian woman dies after son's birth

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/02/12/dnt-brain-dead-woman-dies-after-giving-birth.cbc-news.html

From Paula Newton, CNN

updated 7:32 AM EST, Wed February 12, 2014

 

(CNN) -- A ventilator kept Robyn Benson breathing for weeks so the baby growing inside her could survive.

Doctors delivered the brain-dead Canadian woman's son on Saturday. She died the next day.

"On Sunday, we had to unfortunately say goodbye to the strongest and most wonderful woman I have ever met," her husband, Dylan Benson, wrote on his website.

Pregnant woman kept on life support

Their newborn son, Iver, is in a neonatal intensive care unit in Victoria, British Columbia, a hospital spokeswoman said. He could be hospitalized for eight more weeks, Dylan Benson told CNN on Tuesday.

"He's doing well, still learning to breathe and all those things. ... But he's the cutest little man," he said.

The Benson family's ordeal began shortly after Christmas.

Robyn Benson complained of a "terrible, terrible headache" and sent her husband out to get some Tylenol. When he returned, she was unresponsive, but still breathing.

At the hospital, doctors discovered she suffered a brain hemorrhage. She was later declared brain-dead.

The situation left Dylan Benson in an unimaginable position, counting down the days until the birth of his son -- and the death of his wife.

The case drew some comparisons to the case of Marlise Muñoz in Texas, another pregnant woman who was declared brain-dead and hooked up to machines that kept her heart and lungs working. But there were two key differences.

In Muñoz's case, her husband wanted her taken off a ventilator, and the hospital acknowledged the fetus she carried was not viable. A court ultimately ordered the hospital to disconnect the ventilator.

In Benson's situation, family members and doctors agreed to keep her on a ventilator until they could deliver the baby via a cesarean section. And the life inside her was growing normally.

On Tuesday, Dylan Benson told CNN he was grateful for the support he'd received as word spread about his family's story.

"I feel very, very, incredibly thankful. The message of positivity has been incredible, and it's made it easier to get through these past few weeks," he said.

An online fund-raising campaign to support the Bensons began this month.

The Baby Iver Fund started with a goal of $36,000. By Tuesday afternoon, it had already raised more than $150,000.

The money is slated to be used to pay for bills, baby supplies, day care, housing, food, transportation and an education fund for Iver.

"I hope that it makes it so he can have the life he deserves," Dylan Benson said. "I want to thank everyone around the world."

If Robyn Benson were still alive, he said, there's no doubt about what she'd think.

"She would be very proud of our son," he said. "I think she would be happy that there were so many people all over the world that want to see him healthy and happy. "

CNN's Ed Payne, Stephanie Gallman and Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to this report.

Choosing Death, Choosing Life: did being distinctly abnormal make a difference?- part 1

Husband of pregnant woman wants her off life support

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
updated 4:11 PM EST, Tue December 24, 2013

(CNN) -- Erick Munoz wants to see his wife's wish fulfilled this holiday season, but it's one that carries ethical and legal challenges: To be taken off of life support.

Marlise Munoz, 33, is in serious condition in the intensive care unit at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, hospital officials said. She is unconscious and on a ventilator, her husband told CNN affiliate WFAA, but she wouldn't have wanted her life sustained by a machine.

"We talked about it. We're both paramedics," he told WFAA. "We've seen things out in the field. We both knew that we both didn't want to be on life support."

Complicating an already difficult situation is that Munoz is also pregnant, about 18 weeks along, WFAA reported. Texas state law prohibits withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient, regardless of her wishes.

 

Man wants pregnant wife off life support

 

Patients can indicate their future wishes about medical treatment, in the event that they are unable to communicate them, through forms called advance directives. But in Texas, under the Health and Safety Code, such a form includes the provision "I understand that under Texas law this Directive has no effect if I have been diagnosed as pregnant."

Erick Munoz told WFAA doctors said his wife may have suffered a pulmonary embolism, which happens when blood clots travel to the lungs from elsewhere in the body. They do not know how long the baby went without nutrients and oxygen.

The hospital would not release specific details about Marlise Munoz's condition, but officials said the hospital would follow Texas law regarding care during pregnancy.

 

"We have a responsibility as a good corporate citizen here in Tarrant County to also provide the highest quality care we can for all of our patients," said J.R. Labbe, vice president of communications and community affairs for JPS Health Network, in a statement.

"But at all times, we will follow the law as it is applicable to health care in the state of Texas. And state law here says you cannot withhold or withdraw life sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient. It's that clear."

The husband and wife, both paramedics in the Tarrant County area, have a 14-month-old son named Mateo.

Erick Munoz and Marlise Munoz's mother did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNN.

Erick Munoz found his wife unconscious on November 26, around 2 a.m. He performed CPR on her and then called 911, WFAA reported.

Since that day, the pregnant woman has been on life support, her husband said. Tests have shown that the fetus has a normal heart beat, he said. At 24 weeks, doctors may know more about when the fetus can be taken out, Munoz's family told WFAA. Doctors have also discussed the possibility of taking the fetus to full term.

He told WFAA that his wife had said she would not want to be kept alive by machine, and said he has reached "the point where you wish that your wife's body would stop."

Munoz wears his wife's pink and blue bracelets on his wrist, WFAA reported. Her wedding ring is on his pinkie.

When Munoz walks in the door, he said his son Mateo is waiting for his mother to show up.

"You can see it in his eyes," Munoz said.

 

Brain-dead Texas woman taken off ventilator
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2014/01/27/newday-valencia-tx-mom-off-of-life-support.cnn.html

From Caleb Hellerman. Jason Morris and Matt Smith, CNN

updated 7:26 AM EST, Mon January 27, 2014

 

Fort Worth, Texas (CNN) -- A wrenching court fight -- about who is alive, who is dead and how the presence of a fetus changes the equation -- came to an end Sunday when a brain-dead, pregnant Texas woman was taken off a ventilator.

The devices that had kept Marlise Munoz's heart and lungs working for two months were switched off about 11:30 a.m. Sunday, her family's attorneys announced.

"May Marlise Munoz finally rest in peace, and her family find the strength to complete what has been an unbearably long and arduous journey," the lawyers, Heather King and Jessica Janicek, said in a written statement.

Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant with the couple's second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor November 26. Though doctors had pronounced her brain dead and her family had said she did not want to have machines keep her body alive, officials at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth had said state law required them to maintain life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient.

Attorneys: Fetus was 'distinctly abnormal'

Sunday's announcement came two days after a judge in Fort Worth ordered the hospital to remove any artificial means of life support from Munoz by 5 p.m. Monday. Earlier Sunday, the hospital said it intended to comply with that order.

"The past eight weeks have been difficult for the Munoz family, the caregivers and the entire Tarrant County community, which found itself involved in a sad situation," a hospital statement said. "JPS Health Network has followed what we believed were the demands of a state statute."

The hospital acknowledged Friday that Munoz, 33, had been brain dead since November 28 and that the fetus she carried was not viable. Her husband, Erick Munoz, had argued that sustaining her body artificially amounted to "the cruel and obscene mutilation of a deceased body" against her wishes and those of her family.

Marlise Munoz didn't leave any written directives regarding end-of-life care, but her husband and other family members said she had told them she didn't want machines to keep her blood pumping.

The ethics of life support

In an affidavit filed Thursday in court, Erick Munoz said little to him was recognizable about his wife. Her bones crack when her stiff limbs move. Her usual scent has been replaced by the "smell of death." And her once lively eyes have become "soulless."

The hospital's position drew support from demonstrators outside the hospital, some of whom held signs last week that read "God stands for life" and "Praying for Baby Munoz and family." But others countered with placards bearing messages like "Let Marlise rest in peace" and "Respect Marlise's wishes."