On January 22, 1973, U.S. Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Bryon White rightly identified in their dissents that Roe v. Wade was a bad (to put it mildly) decision:

“The decision here … partakes more of judicial legislation than it does of a determination of the intent of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

“There apparently was no question concerning the validity of this provision or of any of the other state statutes when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted [more than a century]. The only conclusion possible from this history is that the drafters did not intend to have the Fourteenth Amendment withdraw from the States the power to legislate with respect to this matter [prohibiting abortion].”

Among the numerous and grievous consequences of the unlawful decision in Roe, and in combination with improved medical technology, is the fact that the medical profession has overwhelmingly persuaded parents that the death of their unborn children known to have Down syndrome is preferable to the life they would otherwise lead, despite God’s command and overwhelming evidence to the contrary [1].

On April 2, 2019, to prevent this selective abortion from eradicating its population with Down syndrome [2], Arkansas enacted the Down Syndrome Discrimination by Abortion Prohibition Act.

On April 9, 2021, in perhaps the most persuasive case against Roe to date, the Arkansas Attorney General officially asked the U.S. Supreme Court (after defeat in the lower courts) to affirm this law. The case, known as Rutledge v. Little Rock Family Planning Services, is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

On May 13, 2021, the Illinois Family Institute joined a friend of the court brief in support of the prohibition [3], along with numerous other patriotic Americans, including the American Center for Law & Justice, the Jerome Lejeune Foundation (a Down syndrome advocacy group), Americans United for Life, 82 United States Senators and Representatives, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the State of Missouri and 21 other states.

IFI’s joining the brief is very important for three key reasons.

First, the name “Illinois Family Institute” prominently displayed in official proceedings, on the morally right side of the issue in this potentially landmark case, makes a very strong statement that the People of Illinois are not the extremist, Marxist, “blue state” ideologues most are led to believe by virtue of the lopsided Chicago control of our electoral votes and our state government.

Second, focusing precisely on the particular result of genocide of a particular group gives a tangible, rational, and emotionally-charged illustration of the truth of the tyranny resulting from Roe.

Roe v. Wade is a 54-page opinion which uses euphemisms and grand language to hide the fact that it writes entirely new law, which deprives a small and defenseless minority of unborn persons of their most important Constitutional right: life itself (known non-euphemistically as murder).

“Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death.” – Leviticus 24:17

American values protect minorities of human beings from tyranny of the majority and, even more, genocide, as is rapidly becoming the case with Down syndrome children.

These uncomfortable truths have been glossed over by the Court and the culture in addressing the euphemisms of “abortion” and “terminating her pregnancy,” rather than the truth of the matter of murdering [4] innocent persons in America according to the desire of others.

Rutledge begins to destroy these dishonest euphemisms by focusing on the almost complete genocide of a precise group of persons, those with Down syndrome, who are valuable and would otherwise lead happy and productive lives.

Selective abortion of babies with Down syndrome is the very sort of tyranny of the majority that led our founders to despise Democracy (rule by a majority) as a form of government, and rather create a Republic (rule by law) based only upon securing those inalienable rights given to us by our Creator. Rutledge presents this in a way that both the Court and common Americans can see and feel clearly.

Finally, this particular Court has the sound jurisprudence necessary to finally recognize and overturn the great injustice of Roe, redeeming the moral authority of the court from the judicial tyranny of its last five decades [5].

For approximately 34 of the years following Roe, either Rehnquist himself, or his former clerk and current Chief Justice John Roberts, have led the High Court.

Six of the current justices have expressed judicial understanding consistent with Justice Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett chose not to kill her unborn son (now 8) pre-diagnosed with Down syndrome.

Pray for all members of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For those who are believers and to whom God has given judicial wisdom, that they will be strong and courageous, leading the Court and the Nation from error into the path of righteousness and able to withstand Principalities and Powers, as well as the flesh and blood of the leftist culture that will attack them mercilessly.

For those who espouse foolish and unlawful judicial philosophies, that God would turn their hearts (the King’s heart is in the hand of the LORD) to righteousness and destroy their efforts to usurp His authority by promoting unrighteousness and tyranny.

Pray for God’s favor upon this case, that the Court would choose to hear it (grant “certiorari”), and seeing this illustration of judicial tyranny against a few (depriving these small, disabled, and helpless persons, within the jurisdiction of the United States of America, of their rights to life and liberty without ANY process of law or ANY protection of the laws), rule authoritatively that Roe was wrongly decided and must be overturned.

Pray that God would bring shame upon any Americans who would continue to promote this evil.

[1]   Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Leslie Rutledge, in her official capacity as Attorney General of the State of Arkansas, et al., v. Little Rock Family Planning Services, pp. 2-9.

[2]    Box v. Planned Parenthood of Ind. & Ky., Inc., 9139 S. Ct. 1780, 1791 (2019) (Thomas, J., concurring) (“In Iceland, the abortion rate for children diagnosed with Down syndrome in utero approaches 100%.”).

[3]    Brief Amici Curiae, Rutledge v. Little Rock Family Planning Services.

[4]   Historically, “anyone who takes the life of a human being is to be put to death.”  According to the Indiana Code, 35-42-1-1, a person who knowingly or intentionally kills another human being commits murder, a felony.  States since Roe have added vague words to accommodate their legalization of murder, for example, Illinois Code 720 ILCS 5/9-1 specifies that a person who kills an individual without lawful justification commits first degree murder.

[5]    The three theories of constitutional interpretation taught in contemporary law schools: Natural Law (e.g., Clarence Thomas): there is an objective higher law (of the Creator in our case, though they don’t typically mention that source) which man can never supersede, and upon which the Constitution is based; Strict Construction (e.g., Scalia, Rehnquist): the Constitution can only be understood as what the document itself was understood to mean when passed; and Living Constitution (e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor): the Constitution means what Justices believe it means based upon their own current understanding (a subterfuge to enable Judges to ignore the text of the Constitution and substitute their own opinions).  Holmes is the author of Buck v. Bell, saying that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” while upholding forced sterilization of the intellectually disabled.)

Written by Terence P. Jeffrey

Back in 1994, a worried Delaware taxpayer sent a message to his senator. “Please don’t force me to pay for abortions against my conscience,” he said.

Joe Biden sent an unambiguous response.

“I will continue to abide by the same principle that has guided me throughout my 21 years in the Senate: those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them,” he wrote.

“As you may know,” Biden continued, “I have consistently — on no fewer than 50 occasions — voted against federal funding of abortions.”

“(T)he government,” Biden said, “should not tell those with strong convictions against abortion, such as you and I, that we must pay for them.”

Today, Biden is the most powerful man in the United States government — and he is demanding that Americans “with strong convictions against abortion” must pay for them with their tax dollars.

This is the moral price Biden was willing to pay to become vice president and then president as the nominee of a party that will not tolerate leaders who insist on defending the innocent unborn.

When Biden ran for president in 2020, he made clear on his campaign website that he favored not only nationwide abortion on demand but also federal funding of it.

“Vice President Biden favors repealing the Hyde Amendment,” his website said. This is the amendment Congress has habitually added to annual appropriations bills over more than four decades to prohibit funding of abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is endangered.

“Biden will work to codify Roe v. Wade,” said his website, “and his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade.”

Roe, of course, is the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a “right.”

Biden — in 2020 — also said he would: “Restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood.” In 2019, according to its annual report, Planned Parenthood performed 354,871 abortions.

When Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 bill — the so-called American Rescue Plan — was being considered in the U.S. House, Reps. Jackie Walorski (R-IN), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), and Virginia Foxx (R-NC), offered a Hyde-type amendment to prevent it from funding abortions. This amendment was co-sponsored by 203 of their colleagues.

“Without Hyde protections in the reconciliation package, over $414 billion in taxpayer dollars could potentially be used to pay for elective abortions or plans that cover elective abortions,” said a statement from Walorski’s office.

But Democrats on the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee rejected the amendment and the House Rules Committee refused to allow it to be considered on the U.S. House floor.

U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), co-chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, then noted in the U.S. House debate on the bill how Biden had flip-flopped on federal funding of abortion. Smith demonstrated this point by quoting from and linking to the letter Biden had written to his constituent in 1994 and a similar letter Biden had authored in 1977.

“Mr. Biden once wrote to constituents explaining his support for laws against funding for abortion by saying it would ‘protect both the woman and her unborn child,'” Smith said.

“I agree,” said Smith.

But Biden no longer agrees with himself.

At the White House press briefing on Feb. 16, Owen Jensen of EWTN asked Biden press secretary Jen Psaki: “We know where President Biden stands on the Hyde Amendment, but that being said, can this administration right now guarantee, if the American Rescue Plan is passed, that no taxpayer dollars will go to the abortion industry?”

“Well, the president’s view of the Hyde Amendment is well known, as you have stated in your question,” Psaki responded in part of her answer.

“He’s shared his view on the Hyde Amendment,” she went on to say. “I don’t think I have anything new for you.”

Jensen pressed her for a direct answer. “Can the administration guarantee those tax dollars won’t be used for abortions?” he asked.

“Well, I think, Owen, as I’ve just noted,” she responded, “three-quarters of the public supports the components of the package, wants to see the pandemic get under control, wants to see people put back to work, vaccines in arms. So, I think that answers your question.”

Psaki would not directly state the plain truth: Yes, Biden’s COVID-19 bill will use tax dollars to pay for abortions.

But she could not deny it — because it does.

When the bill came up in the U.S. Senate on Friday, U.S. Senator James Lankford (R-OK), (for whom this writer’s daughter works) offered a Hyde-type amendment to prevent it from funding abortion. As a procedural matter, the amendment needed 60 votes. It won only 52.

Thus, the U.S. Senate version of the bill funds abortion, too.

As the U.S. Senate was considering it, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, joined eight other leading bishops in issuing a statement.

“For 45 years, the United States Congress — whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans — has maintained that taxpayers should not be forced against their conscience to pay for abortions,” these bishops said.

“We ask all Members of Congress to include the same protections against abortion funding that have been present in every COVID relief bill to date, and every annual spending bill for almost half a century,” they said.

Biden, this nation’s second Catholic president, is now poised to sign a bill that defies this request and forces all American taxpayers to pay for abortions.

Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSnews.com.
To find out more about him, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

Written by Julie Tisdale

This January marked the 48^th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion across America. And recently, President Joe Biden rescinded the Mexico City Policy, which bans U.S. foreign aid to organizations that provide or promote abortion. Both serve as grim reminders of the millions of unborn children whose lives have been aborted – currently an estimated 44 million worldwide each year, with an annual average of more than 1.3 million in the U.S. since 1973.

The Mexico City Policy was first introduced by Ronald Reagan and prohibits federal funding to NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that provide abortions or abortion counseling, refer women for abortions, or advocate for expansion of abortion rights. Unfortunately, like many policies related to abortion, the Mexico City Policy has become highly partisan. Since its introduction in 1985, every Republican administration has upheld it, while every Democratic administration has rescinded it. It’s become one of the more predictable presidential actions anytime control of the White House shifts from one party to the other. President Biden’s action, then, is highly disappointing, but not surprising.

The Mexico City Policy matters because America, with our Judeo-Christian tradition, should be one of the world’s staunchest defenders of the vulnerable, and few people are more vulnerable than unmarried women and unborn children in many developing nations. By withholding federal dollars from NGOs that perform or promote abortion, we ensure that U.S. taxpayers aren’t paying for practices that take advantage of and abuse women, and that many of us find abhorrent. But we also send a message about our values, that we believe all life is important, no matter how marginalized. We affirm that all children are valuable because they are made in the image of God.

As people of faith who care about these issues, we should be vocal in our objection to the lifting of the Mexico City Policy and the use of our tax dollars to fund abortions around the globe. We should continue to advocate to our elected officials for the protection of vulnerable women and children. We should keep a close eye on the actions of the Biden administration and the 117^th Congress, who are expected to make other moves to lift restrictions on abortion domestically.

We should also back up our advocacy with other types of support. Vulnerable women consider abortion for a variety of reasons. They often lack the resources – money, jobs, housing, family and community support – that they need to parent well. Many face social stigmas associated with pregnancy outside of marriage. Sometimes there are serious health concerns that women feel unable to face. Too many women have been victims of sexual violence. All of those situations call for compassion, not condemnation.

Internationally, there are ministries working in many parts of the world to address these issues. If we’re going to tell women that they should choose life for their babies, then we also need to help them in the right way to make that choice. We can do that by supporting organizations like Food for the Hungry that provides education and job training, community development, and basic health care. We can do that through sponsorship programs like Compassion International that provides schooling for kids and food assistance to families. We can do that through working with groups like Potter’s House Association that addresses poverty’s root causes and helps to empower poor families in the developing world. There are many groups doing good work, and supporting them is a way we can show love in very practical ways to our neighbors around the world.

Domestically, we should also support pregnancy centers and homes for unwed mothers that help moms facing unplanned pregnancies… We should offer practical help with things like diapers and childcare to struggling moms in our community, either through our churches or through organizations like Safe Families for Children. We should consider adoption ourselves or support families in our churches who are adopting, providing homes for children whose parents chose life but are unable to parent. ­­­­And, addressing the heart of this situation for many, we need to support abstinence education that teaches that the wisest and healthiest choice is to abstain from sexual activity outside of marriage.

And of course we should pray—for elected officials here and abroad, for organizations working with vulnerable and marginalized communities, for families in poverty, and for women facing unplanned pregnancies. We know that God cares about all women, and men, and children. As Christians, then, we should advocate for policy change, but we must also work to provide the support that women need to help them make a choice for life.

This article was originally published by NC Family Policy Council.

For many Christian conservatives, the number one voting issue is abortion. Under no circumstances will we vote for a “pro-choice” candidate, no matter how good that candidate’s other policies may be. Conversely, we will vote for a strong pro-life candidate even if that candidate does not line up with some of our other ideals. After all, we reason, what is more important than the shedding of innocent blood, especially the blood of babies in their mothers’ wombs?

And while it is true that having an abortion is not exactly the same as burning a baby on the altar of the god Molech, as the ancient Israelites used to do, it is certainly high on the list of things that God hates. For good reason are we grieved and outraged over it.

That is one reason why so many of us voted for President Trump. And that is one reason why so many of us voted against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (and Kamala Harris). Abortion. That one word says it all.

But that leads to an important question. Other than voting for pro-life candidates every two (or four) years, what else are we doing to save babies’ lives? Other than expressing our moral outrage in tweets or comments, what practical difference are we making? If this is such a grave evil in God’s sight and if we are so burdened by it, what are we doing the rest of the year?

I remember speaking at a pro-life rally in Charlotte, North Carolina in conjunction with the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. There was a fairly small crowd present, which only highlighted the degree of apathy in the Church on the subject. In fact, one might say that our degree of passion when it comes to voting against abortion is in inverse proportion to our degree of action when it comes to actually working for the pro-life cause outside of the voting booth.

But as I spoke at the small rally, rather than having a holier-than-thou feeling, I was struck with the opposite emotion, saying to those gathered, “For many of us, attending this rally once a year is the only thing we will actually do to save the lives of the unborn.” Most of us could hardly pat ourselves on the back.

To be sure, there have been countless thousands of pro-life workers who have given themselves to the cause for decades. They have endured ridicule and scorn. They have been arrested and attacked. And yet week in, week out, standing in front of abortion clinics, they have lovingly offered women (and men) a better way. “Choose life,” they have pleaded, with passion, regardless of the opposition they have received.

Others have served faithfully in pro-life clinics, offering alternatives to abortion and affirming the humanity of the child in the womb. Others have worked on the legal front, while others have lobbied politically. Still others have given themselves to prayer and fasting, spending many a sleepless night praying for the unborn and for the emergence of a culture of life.

Here in Charlotte, a powerful pro-life movement, called Love Life, was birthed by some Christian businessmen deeply burdened by the shedding of innocent blood. It quickly moved to other cities in North Carolina and has now been duplicated in other states and countries. As a result, many hundreds of babies are being saved and many families being formed.

But the truth be told, as dogmatic as we are when it comes to voting pro-life (and I’m with you in terms of taking that stand) most of us are often just as apathetic when it comes to actually doing something to save the lives of the unborn.

Does that not smack of hypocrisy? Does that not speak of superficiality? If we really are so burdened, why so little action? If this sin really is so ugly in God’s sight, why do we do so little to stop it outside of our periodic votes? If these unborn children are so precious and innocent, why do we hardly lift a finger to save their lives?

A recurring theme of the Bible is that talk is cheap and that actions speak louder than words. Or, to paraphrase the words of Jacob (James), “If you have so much conviction, show it to me by your deeds” (see James 2:18).

Our voting is certainly important, and there are many legislative victories being won even as we continue to fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. (See here for a grudging acknowledgment of this in Time Magazine.)

But if we really care as much as we claim to care about the unborn, and if abortion is as serious an issue as we claim that it is when we go to vote, then surely, for most of us, there is far more we can do to be pro-life.

Let us turn our passion into action and let us put feet to our conviction. Lives are hanging in the balance, and you and I can be the difference between life and death. Literally.

This article was originally posted at AskDrBrown.org

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Illinois’ feckless U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth opposes the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the U. S. Supreme Court because Barrett signed a 2006 newspaper ad sponsored by an Indiana pro-life organization that said,

We, the following citizens of Michiana, oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death. Please continue to pray to end abortion.

In an October 2^nd letter to her Senate colleagues, Duckworth said the pro-life organization whose ad Barrett signed 14 years ago opposes,

a critical step of the in-vitro fertilization (IVF) process that gave me my children.

Duckworth conveniently omitted what that critical step is.

Duckworth went on to say in her “Dear Colleague” letter that Barrett is a

Supreme Court nominee who appears to believe that my daughters shouldn’t even exist.

Really? Does Barrett really believe Duckworth’s living breathing daughters shouldn’t exist? If there were technology that allowed doctors to create life in a lab and grow babies in artificial “wombs,” would opposing that technology necessarily entail the belief that children created and gestated like that shouldn’t exist?

Someone might want to clarify to Duckworth that what pro-life supporters oppose is the discarding of any siblings of IVF-created children that their parents—like Duckworth—didn’t want.

Duckworth began her missive the way “progressives” like to address all debates over substantive moral issues: with a heartstrings-tugging “narrative”—a narrative irrelevant to the underlying moral issue she hopes no one will think about as they read her appeal through misty eyes.

She spent 2 ½ paragraphs describing bringing her second baby onto  the floor of the U.S. Senate “swaddled in blankets” with colleagues “cheering … as little Maile Pearl continued to sleep blissfully in my lap.” She quickly switched to describing the “deep knot of dread and anguish in the pit of my stomach” she experienced when hearing that Amy Coney Barrett had been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Duckworth experiences dread at the prospect of a woman sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court who believes all lives are of infinite value—including imperfect humans and humans Duckworth views as disposable. Duckworth feels no dread about U.S. Supreme Court Justices who have no qualms about the dismemberment of humans or about chucking humans in an incinerator, but she does experience dread about a woman sitting on the Court who is raising a disabled child and who has adopted two Haitian orphans.

Duckworth appealed particularly to “Republican colleagues who cooed and cuddled” her ten-day-old infant, while never mentioning that she supports the legal right to have ordered the killing of her daughter 11 days prior to the day of cooing and cuddling. In Duckworth’s foolish view, eleven days prior to the day of cooing and cuddling, her daughter was a non-person and deserving of no legal protections.

Worse still, Duckworth believes all Americans should have to pay for the choice of women to order the killing of their offspring up to the day of birth for any or no reason.

Demagogue Duckworth claims that “Judge Barrett’s willingness to associate her name” with an organization that believes that humans are not disposable “is disqualifying and, frankly, insulting to every parent, hopeful parent or would-be parent who has struggled to start a family.”

Duckworth’s claim insults every American who believes the science that the product of conception between two humans is a human and who believes that all humans are of infinite worth. The feelings of other more developed or less “defective” humans about tiny humans in the womb does not abrogate the right of tiny humans to exist. Despite what Duckworth may believe, subjective feelings do not determine either reality or morality.

Duckworth claims to,

fear that, if confirmed to the nation’s highest court, Judge Barrett would be unable to resist the temptation of overturning decades of judicial precedent in an effort to force every American family to adhere to her individual moral code.

Duckworth must focus on “judicial precedent” because nowhere in the text of the U.S. Constitution can a right to abortion be found.

John Hart Ely, former dean of Stanford Law School, former Yale and Harvard law school professor, and former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, wrote,

What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the U.S. Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. … It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.

No matter to Duckworth. She wants what she wants and will use any means to get it.

Although Duckworth isn’t an attorney, surely, she knows that all laws “force” Americans to “adhere to” someone’s moral code. Make no mistake, Duckworth and her pro-feticide collaborators have no problem forcing every American to adhere to their moral code. If they did, they wouldn’t try to force Americans to perform abortions or pay for abortions (not to mention bake cakes for faux-weddings, share locker rooms with opposite-sex persons, or use incorrect pronouns when referring to opposite-sex impersonators).

Desperate to retain laws that reflect the non-existent moral right of women to off their offspring, Duckworth concludes her letter with these patently silly words:

I hope you’ll join me in speaking out for every American family who has struggled with infertility by opposing this confirmation.

Leftists know that Barrett is eminently qualified and morally beyond reproach. They also know that since religious tests for holding office are constitutionally prohibited, they can’t again attack her religious faith as Diane Feinstein once did, so now they will start manufacturing fanciful new justifications for opposing her. Duckworth’s fanciful justification is that Barrett will try use her position on the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart the use of IVF by infertile families. Where’s an eyeroll emoji when you need one?

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to let them know that you support the nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court. We must confirm nominees who will uphold the U.S. Constitution’s protections of life and religious liberty.

Amy Coney Barrett is a proven originalist who sees her roles as limited to interpreting the U.S. Constitution. She is the type of judge conservatives have been praying for. Her faithful approach to the U.S. Constitution and her experience on the 7th Circuit federal appeals court make her an outstanding nominee.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Duckworths-Foolish-Attack-on-Amy-Coney-Barrett.mp3

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In June Medical Services v. Russo, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts again disappoints conservatives. Roberts voted with the politically “progressive”/morally regressive majority to strike down a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have hospital privileges within 30 miles of the slaughterhouses in which they kill tiny humans and occasionally end up killing or maiming their mothers. This law would have required abortuaries in which surgical procedures are performed to adhere to the same safety regulations as all other ambulatory surgical centers.

Ironically, in a similar case out of Texas similarly decided, Roberts dissented, siding with conservatives. In June Medical Services v. Russo, Roberts concluded that following precedent (i.e., stare decisis) rather than sound reasoning is the absolute highest priority of any Justice. Good thing Roberts wasn’t sitting on the Supreme Court when Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson or when Loving v. Virginia overturned Pace v. Alabama.

In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas made clear that the abortionists pursuing this lawsuit lacked “standing”:

Their sole claim before this Court is that Louisiana’s law violates the purported substantive due process right of a woman to abort her unborn child. But they concede that this right does not belong to them, and they seek to vindicate no private rights of their own. Under a proper understanding of Article III, these plaintiffs lack standing to invoke our jurisdiction.

Despite the fact that we granted Louisiana’s petition specifically to address whether “abortion providers [can] be presumed to have third-party standing to challenge health and safety regulations on behalf of their patients,” a majority of the Court all but ignores the question. The plurality and THE CHIEF JUSTICE ultimately cast aside this jurisdictional barrier to conclude that Louisiana’s law is unconstitutional under our precedents.

Attorneys represent litigants in lawsuits, and litigants must be able to claim that they are in some way harmed by a law. The purported harmful effect is what gives them “standing” to pursue a lawsuit. Since feticidal profiteers have trouble getting women to argue against abortionists having hospital privileges, this lawsuit was pursued by “third parties” who would be “harmed” monetarily by a law requiring abortionists to have hospital privileges.

The ability of abortionists to serve as third-party litigants was secured in the 1976 case Singleton v. Wulff in which two feticide providers sued for the right to have Medicaid reimburse them for killing humans in “not ‘medically indicated’” abortions. It was determined by the liberal court that the feticide providers had “standing” because, according to Justice Blackmun, “they will benefit by receiving payment for the abortions.”

“The point is, Ladies and Gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works,” says Gordon Gekko.

‘Twas ever thus.

Justice Thomas goes on to remind America of the fundamental truth that Supreme Court precedents defending abortion lack even “a shred of support from the Constitution’s text”:

Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled.

He’s far from alone in his assessment of the precedents as “grievously wrong.” Here are some assessments of Roe v. Wade from liberals:

• “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School professor).

• “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose” (Edward Lazarus, former clerk to SCOTUS Justice Harry Blackmun).

• “[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum—will tell you it is basically indefensible” (Edward Lazarus).

• “Blackmun’s [U.S. Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference” (William Saletan, Slate magazine writer).

• Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be…. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the U.S. Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure.” (John Hart Ely, clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren).

• “[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision—the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution—strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy. … “[Roe] is a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument. … Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument—but a bit of our soul as well” (Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist).

• “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy) …. [C]lear governing constitutional principles… are not present” (Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard Law School professor).

• “In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. … Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it” (Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School professor, former clerk to Judge Abner Mikva).

• “Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision…. Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching” (Michael Kinsley, attorney, political journalist).

• “[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor. … who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. … As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether.” (Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor).

• “The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution” (Archibald Cox, JFK’s Solicitor General, former Harvard Law School professor).

The super creepy pro-feticide organization Personal PAC, whose sole reason for its creepy existence is to protect the legal right of women to have their own offspring offed, is expressing only tepid kudos for this decision. Their enthusiasm is tempered by their correct assumption that pro-life activism will not cease:

While the Supreme Court’s decision in June Medical Services was a temporary reprieve from the assault on reproductive rights. … [d]on’t be fooled. … The anti-choice extremists are emboldened by today’s decision and it is to our great peril if we think it portends anything other than a reprieve by the Court Trump promised would end Roe.

“Choice” is an obvious and deceitful euphemism that is not up to the task for which it was created: it can’t conceal the truth about the unseemly nature of the choice leftists want women to have.

There exists no absolute or constitutional right “to choose.” Leftists exploit the word “choose” or “choice” because of its positive connotations. They exploit it because of the fondness everyone has for making choices in life. But not even leftists believe that a free-floating right “to choose” exists. There are a host of choices they want to proscribe:

• Leftists don’t believe parents should have school choice.

• Leftists don’t believe parents should have the right to choose whether their minor gender dysphoric children are chemically sterilized or surgically mutilated.

• Leftists don’t believe parents should have the right to choose the type of sex education their children should receive.

• Leftists don’t believe minors who experience unchosen, unwanted homoerotic feelings should have counseling choice.

• Leftists don’t believe employers should have the right to choose whether to hire or fire cross-dressing men.

• Leftists don’t believe anyone should have the right to refer to cross-dressing men by male pronouns.

• Leftists don’t believe women have the right to choose to exclude all biological men from their private spaces or sports.

• Leftists—well, most leftists–don’t believe minors should have the right to choose to have sex with adults.

So many choices of which tyrannical leftists want to deprive Americans. Well, many Americans don’t believe women have a moral or constitutional right to order the killing of imperfect or inconvenient humans.

Feminist and family abolitionist Sophie Lewis cheerfully admits,

Abortion is … a form of killing. It’s a form of killing that we need to be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.

Because science confirms that the product of conception between two humans is a human, abortion inarguably kills humans. At no point in the gestational process is the product of conception anything other than human. Since abortion kills humans, legalized human slaughter will never cease to divide America.

Anything that gnaws around the edges of the child-killing cultural tumor that we refer to as Roe v. Wade is a good thing. Chief Justice Roberts didn’t help babies, women, or America.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mp3-Chief-Justice-Roberts-Votes-with-Liberals-Against-Tiny-Humans-and-Women-_audio_01.mp3

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A controversial documentary airs Friday May 22 on FX titled “AKA Jane Roe” in which Norma McCorvey—the “Jane Roe” from the infamous Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade—makes a shocking deathbed confession. According to The Daily Beast, in the documentary the troubled McCorvey who died in 2017, “admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was ‘all an act.’” The leftist Daily Beast reports other documentary highlights that are sending thrills up the legs of human slaughter advocates everywhere, including the claim that McCorvey was paid by pro-life leaders to be a quisling to her true anti-life beliefs and was coached by them. But can McCorvey be believed? And what does her past involvement with anti-life leftists reveal about both her and them? Most important, how is her confession relevant to the pro-life movement?

A 2013 profile of the deeply wounded McCorvey in Vanity Fair outlines a few of the huge lies McCorvey told over the course of her troubled life. McCorvey was—to borrow a literary term—an unstable narrator. Put more bluntly, she was an inveterate liar.

According to Vanity Fair, many of McCorvey’s claims have been either disputed or been proven false. Her claims include the following:

• She claimed her mother Mary took custody of Norma’s first child because she was a lesbian. Her mother said it was because of Norma’s drinking and drug use (“pot, acid, mescaline”).

• She claimed her third pregnancy was the result of rape. McCorvey later admitted that was a lie.

• She claimed she didn’t identify herself as “Jane Roe” or speak about the case for 11 years, when she actually identified herself 4 days after the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

• She claimed she and her lesbian lover Connie Gonzalez were shot at in their home. Gonzalez and a friend dispute that claim.

What is indisputable is that her father abandoned the family leaving Norma and her mentally ill brother to be raised by her violent, alcoholic, promiscuous mother Mary. Norma spent several years in state correctional institutions; was allegedly raped repeatedly by her mother’s cousin; married an abusive man when she was a teenager; engaged in promiscuous hetero and homo sex; was a long-time abuser of alcohol and drugs; and had three children, none of whom did she raise.

According to multiple reports, when she became pregnant the third time, she was encouraged by friends to say she was raped in order to secure a legal abortion. That plan failed, and she later confessed that her rape claim was a lie. After her rape scheme failed, she was referred to two women attorneys, Sarah Weddington and lesbian Linda Coffee, who were seeking pregnant clients to represent in their pursuit of the legalization of abortion. In other words, they exploited Norma McCorvey, and the toxic result was Roe v. Wade, which legalized human slaughter throughout the United States.

The two attorneys weren’t the only leftists to exploit McCorvey, and they weren’t the only people the emotionally damaged McCorvey would exploit.

Politico reported that,

[by 1980] Abortion was fast becoming the surest test of political affiliation. And so as to galvanize those who supported it, the pro-choice turned to McCorvey. At the time, McCorvey was game; she and her partner, Connie Gonzalez, were tired of cleaning homes.

By 1989, McCorvey’s pro-choice activism was really taking off:

McCorvey flew to Washington to march in support of abortion rights. There she met the feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. … Accompanied by Allred, McCorvey flew to Los Angeles for a brunch at the restaurant Baci with a roomful of pro-choice activists …  who paid $100 a plate to attend. In L.A., Allred also arranged for McCorvey to get lessons in public speaking. Among McCorvey’s documents is a card from the Los Angeles firm Ready for Media with a typed list of pointers. … Reportedly, the brunch at Baci was a benefit for the Jane Roe Foundation. But the foundation received no money. Rather, Allred told a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner later that year, the funds had gone directly to McCorvey.

Take note of four facts: McCorvey was used by leftists. McCorvey was coached by leftists. McCorvey was paid by leftists. McCorvey exploited leftists.

A brief digression to talk about “coaching” and financial support: Experts often coach ordinary people prior to public-speaking, especially when ordinary people are thrust into the spotlight that shines on controversial issues. Such coaching is not necessarily nefarious. It isn’t an ethical breach for either those on the right or those on the left to tutor those inexperienced in dealing with the press or other public speaking contexts. Nor is it an ethical breach to offer financial support, remuneration, or honoraria to speakers. It would be an ethical breach to pay someone to speak lies.

Daily Beast cites a quote from the McCorvey documentary that reflects a recurring theme in her life:

I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. I’m a good actress. …

Perhaps realizing that such an admission of her inveterate lying might lead people to doubt this, her deathbed confession, she hastily added, “Of course, I’m not acting now.”

Vanity Fair included a telling quote about McCorvey from advertising executive Gus Clemens with whom McCorvey had concocted a money-making scheme in 1988 that exploited her role in Roe v. Wade and never came to fruition—a quote that reaffirms the recurring theme of manipulation that shaped her sad life :

I think it’s accurate to say that [we] were manipulating Norma … and that Norma was manipulating us.

The Economist reported that pro-abortion elitists had little tolerance for McCorvey, who was more like the deplorables “progressives” disdain:

She was too simple for the pro-choice people, who seemed to shun her at their rallies and sent a strong hint that she was totally stupid, though she had brains and ideas. She wasn’t their special chosen Jane Roe, and they didn’t want Norma McCorvey.

According to Vanity Fair, in the spring of 1995, McCorvey was working in a Dallas abortuary when the pro-life activist group Operation Rescue headed at that time by Flip Benham moved into the building next door:

[R]ight away—“instantly,” Benham recalls—McCorvey “would come over and ask us to pray for her … She began to see me as someone who could help her work things out.” The two began talking about their pasts and then about the Bible. Before long, says Benham, they were calling one another “Flipper” and “Miss Norma.” In July, McCorvey accepted Jesus as her savior.

In 2017 just after McCorvey died, The Washington Post shared this account from McCorvey on her initial meeting with Benham:

She recalled the weekend after Benham moved in. Saturdays were always big protest days, she wrote, and McCorvey was dreading the first one with Operation Rescue next door. As McCorvey stood outside smoking, she wrote, Benham sat down beside her. He apologized for calling her names: “I saw my words drop into your heart, and I know they hurt you deeply.” McCorvey was taken aback. She excused herself, went inside and cried, she wrote.

Whether McCorvey first approached Benham or Benham first approached her seems irrelevant. What both recollections have in common is that these early encounters were welcome and shaped by faith and good will. Neither party viewed Benham’s actions as exploitative. While many leftists view evangelism as inherently exploitative, Christians view evangelism as both an act of obedience to God and an offer of the greatest gift they possess: salvation.

Another major character in the story AKA Jane Roe that director Nick Sweeney tells is Reverend Rob Schenck, formerly a pro-life activist who worked with McCorvey and has now renounced his prior beliefs, claiming that overturning Roe v. Wade “would be destructive of life.” Schenck actually wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that protecting humans in the womb from being destroyed is “destructive of life.”

Schenck argues that allowing humans to be snuffed out prior to birth “if that child will enter a world of rejection, deprivation and insecurity, to say nothing of the fear, anxiety and danger that comes with poverty, crime and a lack of educational and employment opportunities” is dictated by Christian faith. Schenck argues that until the problems of rejection, deprivation, insecurity, fear, anxiety, danger, poverty, crime, poor schools, and unemployment are solved, all those who oppose abortion are “perpetrators of fake religion” and “fools.”

Schenk shares on his blog that what now animates him is his antipathy for President Trump and the “Faustian pact” pro-life supporters have allegedly made with him. Schenck calls them “giddy sell-outs” to Trump who is advancing his “cruel agenda that includes separating families at the southern border, deporting people who have only known the USA as their home, cutting back social programs for the poor, and, now, interrogating pregnant women seeking tourist visas.”

The omniscient Schenck, who knows the motives of Trump, continues:

Mr. Trump is [sic] used the March for Life for his own ends. The pro-life leaders who ceded the stage to him did a supreme disservice to the people for whom that stage was built. If life really is sacred, then everything around it should be kept sacrosanct.

Remember, all of you who work tirelessly to defend the defenseless from slaughter: NEVER WORK WITH IMPERFECT PEOPLE!

For those unfamiliar with the director Sweeney, his body of work includes a documentary about sex robots and another about weird adult men who don full women’s body suits complete with breasts and women’s nether regions, women’s clothes, and masks of women’s faces. Sweeeney has also made fawning documentaries about “trans” cultism, including one about children who wish they were the sex they aren’t. Apparently working with the creepy Sweeney to undermine efforts to protect the unborn doesn’t pose a moral problem for the sanctimonious Schenck.

An article in GQ magazine about Sweeney’s documentary featuring the unreliable Norma McCorvey is titled “The Anti-Abortion Movement Was Always Built on Lies.” The anti-abortion movement was not built on Norma McCorvey. And the lies that propelled the anti-abortion movement were the lies told by human slaughter advocates, including that the humans growing in women’s wombs are just “blobs of tissue”; that when a woman has an abortion, there is only one body involved; and that incomplete development, bodily defects, crimes of fathers, desires of mothers, and poverty grant to adults the right to order the killing of their offspring.

The troubled McCorvey’s “confession” is an interesting factoid that may or may not be true. What is certain about her confession is that it is wholly irrelevant to the question of the moral status of slaughtering humans in the womb. This documentary is irrelevant noise that the left hopes will divert attention via a guilt by association fallacy away from the central arguments regarding the nature and rights of preborn, living humans.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Controversial-Documentary-Profiles-Unstable-Norma-McCorvey.mp3

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Written by Charles Snow 

WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore praised Illinois last month for what she saw as a strength. Illinois has become a go-to state for abortion:

Women travel from all over the country to have abortions in Illinois. As neighboring states restrict abortion access, Illinois is seen as a haven that protects access.

The number of “tourist” abortions carried out in Illinois nearly doubled from 2014 to 2018. She credits two groups of people for this development. First, while neighboring states have enacted laws related to such things as parental notification, counseling, waiting periods, or restrictions on public funding, Illinois politicians have been busy making law too. Even if Roe v Wade gets overturned, they have seen to it that Illinois’s abortion centers will remain open for business – with taxpayer funding for customers on Medicaid. Because of moves like these, says Chicago activist Megan Jeyifo, pregnant women pursuing abortion are choosing Illinois “because it’s quicker and less expensive.”

“Looking at Abortion More Expansively”

Moore also credits Illinois activists for having worked to change the narrative about abortion. I read her article carefully. Here is what is meant by “changing the narrative,” based on what she wrote in Abortion Access And Activism Remain Strong In Illinois:

• Abortion should be commonplace. In an earlier era, “keep abortion safe, legal and rare” was the operative slogan. No more. “Rare” must be dropped. Why? Because …

• Words are tools. “Political education means astute communication.” Messaging must serve the cause, and saying abortion should be “rare” doesn’t project the right message. How is the “right” message to be projected?

• Storytelling is a political tactic. Political education also means “storytelling” and “humanizing people.” Here’s what is meant by that. Since nearly 1 in 4 women will at some point have an abortion, everyone knows and loves someone who’s had one. Also, abortion experiences can be difficult. Therefore, stories designed to stir up feelings of love and compassion, especially those involving hardship, should be told.

The campaign to change the narrative, then, reduces to a political strategy by which stories are told to manipulate people into going along with an agenda they would not otherwise go along with. Emotions surrounding the universal values of love, compassion, and goodwill are stirred up and tied to a message that says, if you are loving and compassionate, you will join the “fight” for this cause. This is the very essence of propaganda.

Tack on the all-purpose rhetorical caboose “justice,” and voilà, you have organized a “reproductive justice” train. Moore lauds the fact that the idea of abortion as “reproductive justice” was conceived in Chicago. “The beauty of the reproductive justice framework,” said Toni Bond, one of the framers of the strategy, “is the way that it looks at things much more expansively.”

Looking at Abortion Activists More Expansively

I abhor abortion. I think it’s one of the most egregious human rights violations of our day. But abortion activists aren’t moved by my outrage. Or by yours. In the face of hardened abortioneers (social activists specifically pushing abortion), I think there’s a time and place for drawing them out.

Here are two ways to do that. Both involve looking at abortion – and the abortioneer – more expansively. (Never give an ounce of air to the emotional manipulation. Just call it out, and then proceed.) One approach is to make the case for human life based on facts and logical reasoning. If a conversation is to be had, center it on the nature of abortion. For more on how to make the case for life this way, I highly recommend the work of Scott Klusendorf, president of Life Training Institute (LTI) and author of The Case for Life. Click here or here for more on that.

“Why We Fight”

The other way to proceed is to do what the activists do – tell stories. Except that we tell stories that are true. Here’s a true story:

In 2001, HBO released the ten-part miniseries Band of Brothers. Based on the Stephen Ambrose book of the same name, it followed a group of WWII paratroopers, E Company (“Easy Company”), through basic training, D-Day, occupied France, and finally into Germany.

In Episode 9, “Why We Fight,” the soldiers encounter an altogether different kind of evil. It’s April 1945, the war in Europe is all but over, and they’re stationed in the German town of Landsberg awaiting orders. One day, a few of them venture out to explore the area. They come to the edge of a forest, and before them stands a high barbed wire fence with a locked gate. They venture closer and find behind it hundreds, perhaps thousands of dazed, emaciated and starving prisoners. They have seen fierce battle, but this is a horror on a whole new level, and they are speechless.

After they set about meeting the prisoners’ basic needs – food, water, medical attention – they marched the Landsberg townspeople out to the camp. They made them look, straight on, at the human atrocity that had been taking place in their own backyard, with their complicity. I think it’s safe to say that nobody would want to have been one of the Landsberg townspeople that day.

We can’t drag Illinois abortion defenders out to the POC rooms of Planned Parenthood’s sparkling new complexes in Fairview Heights (near St. Louis) or Flossmoor (near Indiana), or to the spa-like Carafem (near Wisconsin). But one day, all the things that have taken place behind those fences and walls will be exposed.

What we can do now is challenge the activists to look more expansively – straight on, as much as is possible – at exactly what it is that they are championing. Invite them to watch an actual abortion procedure with you. There are plenty online. Maybe even let them have the honor of choosing one to watch. Click here, here, or here for options. Afterward, invite them to explain what they just saw. Perhaps they might further explain how it merits the term “justice.” For the truly hardened, if you can manage to do all this in public, that’s all the better.

You may not change the moral orientation of a given abortioneer, but you can proceed with confidence, knowing that the real justice train only runs one way. In drawing the abortioneer out into the light, you will have invited someone championing evil to look at it from a very uncomfortable place. That’s what tends to happen when the light of truth is shone into the “haven” of darkness.

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As you may know, January is Sanctity of Life month–a time when pro-life advocates host special events, rallies, marches, and projects to protest the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the destruction of pre-born human beings. While IFI believes we should continually do what we can to deliver those who are drawn toward death (Prov. 24:11) every month of the year, January–the month during which Roe v. Wade was decided–is a particularly important symbolic time to bring to your attention an eye-opening documentary about the devil’s work to destroy innocent babies made in the image of God.

On the bank of the Omo river in southern Ethiopia, the Kara people live in relative peace with each other and with the land, believing that there is a “God who created us and nature . . . when the rain comes, that is God.” But in their belief, this fruitfulness came at a great cost.

When a child was born into the tribe without the blessing of an elder or outside of marriage, or if his top teeth grew in before his bottom teeth, that child was called “Mingi,” or cursed. According to the Kara people, if this child were allowed to live, he or she would bring a curse upon the entire tribe and their land. Thus, per the tradition of the tribe and their ancestors, every Mingi child was killed soon after birth, often being thrown in the bush or drowned in the river.

The people saw this as necessary and were too afraid to oppose or question the elders, but a young Kara man named Lale sought to change that. One of the first in the tribe to leave for an education, Lale returned as a married man intent on rescuing Mingi babies. “I will be the river,” he told fearful mothers. “I will be the bush.” In memory of his sisters, both of whom were Mingi, Lale and his wife helped rescue and raise many of the “cursed children,” ultimately even helping the tribe to reverse the practice altogether. “It was like a resurrection,” one of the men said after seeing the grown Mingi children return to the tribe.

The full story of the Kara people, their customs, and one man’s influence to end the destructive superstitious practice is presented in moving detail in the documentary Omo Child, named for the organization Lale and his wife founded to care for the children, and available for streaming through Amazon Video.  It is a story of movement from stubborn darkness to hope that tells the tale of a people who learned to recognize and fight for the sanctity of all life.

Watch the trailer:

(Viewer discretion advised.)

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-and, please-

Forty-six years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in America through a 7-2 decision in Roe v. Wade. Then in 1992, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the right to terminate preborn babies in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Over the past 45 years, over 60 million innocent human lives have been sacrificed on the altar of convenience and the non-existent constitutional “right to privacy.”

There is a large Planned Parenthood surgical abortion center located in Flossmoor that is open 5 days a week, ending innocent lives right in your back yard. Christians and non-Christians are their targets. How the Christian community responds is what will determine who will win this urgent battle for Life.

We invite you to join with others who refuse to wave the white flag of surrender and who are committed to disseminating truth about abortion and its victims.

Invitation

We urge you be part of this nationwide, peaceful, prayerful 40 Days for Life effort to save lives and share truth. (See flyer HERE.)

The Southland 40 Days for Life team is hosting a special church leaders’ luncheon on September 19^th at the Tinley Park Convention Center. We want you to hear the vision, understand the importance, and learn the details of the upcoming “40 Days” campaign, which runs September 25th to November 3rd this year, which you can then share with your members.

We must not be silent any longer. In a society that has advanced every form of hedonism, the foundational battle is life versus death.

What does the Bible have to say about life?
For You created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Your works are wonderful,
I know that full well. ~Psalm 139:13-14

I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live. ~Deuteronomy 30:19

Yes, there is a battle and Ephesians makes clear who we are fighting:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. ~Ephesians 6:12

At the heart of this matter is a spiritual battle, and prayer is our most effective weapon against it.

Enter 40 Days for Life!

We have the tremendous opportunity to pray for expectant mothers to choose life and to pray for those deceived by the lies of the wicked one.

The stated vision and mission of 40 Days for Life:

Vision

40 Days for Life is a focused pro-life campaign with a vision to access God’s power through prayer, fasting, and peaceful vigil to end abortion.

Mission

The mission of the campaign is to bring together the body of Christ in a spirit of unity during a focused 40-day campaign of prayer, fasting, and peaceful activism, with the purpose of repentance, to seek God’s favor to turn hearts and minds from a culture of death to a culture of life, thus bringing an end to abortion.

In other words, by partnering with 40 Days for Life we can live out Ephesians 6:13-18: “your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace…. Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit.”

There is power in prayer! And there is even greater power when we gather with fellow Christians in prayer!

We cannot and should not be silent. Instead, we can be a silent witness and a prayer warrior for those little ones who cannot speak for themselves.

Please join us to learn more. If you are unable to join us, please send another church leader who you think would be interested in this prayer campaign.

RSVP to v.kathy@illinoisfamily.org or call (708) 781-9329.

We hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

Dr. Rich Mantoan
Leader: 40 Days for Life
(708) 557-0011 or southlandsmiles@gmail.com

>Download Flyer HERE<

The first weekend in July, the National Education Association (NEA) held its annual Representative Assembly in Houston, an assembly consisting of “nearly 7,000 delegates.” The National Education Association is a “progressive” political activist organization that masquerades—er, I mean, identifies as an educational organization. The NEA’s Code of Ethics says, among other things, this:

The educator… recognizes the supreme importance of the pursuit of truth, devotion to excellence, and the nurture of the democratic principles. Essential to these goals is the protection of freedom to learn…. The educator therefore works to stimulate the spirit of inquiry, the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, and the thoughtful formulation of worthy goals. In fulfillment of the obligation to the student, the educator… Shall not unreasonably deny the student’s access to varying points of view.

Read these “New Business Items” just passed by the NEA, and see if you believe the NEA honors its Code of Ethics:

• “The NEA vigorously opposes all attacks on the right to choose and stands on the fundamental right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.”

• “The NEA will immediately call on the Trump administration, U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and the courts, for the immediate end to the detention and criminalization of immigrant children and their families; including an end to ICE raids.”

• “The NEA will call on the U.S. government to accept responsibility for the destabilization of Central American countries (including, but not limited to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua), and that this destabilization is a root cause of the recent increase of asylum seekers in the United States.”

• “NEA will collaborate and partner with organizations and individuals who are doing the work to push reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States.”

• “The National Education Association will organize and mobilize in support of the Equality Act to be a top legislative priority.”

• “NEA will incorporate the concept of ‘White Fragility’ into NEA trainings/staff development, literature, and other existing communications on social, gender, LGBTQIA, and racial justice.” (“White fragility” is a racist leftist term invented to mock, criticize, and silence colorless people who disagree with the assumptions of Critical Race Theory. The term embodies the false idea that disagreement with the racist views of social justice warriors is motivated by fear.)

• NEA “… will recommend specific annual numeric goals for the recruitment of, and retention of, educators of color.” (In other words, the NEA will judge educators by the color of their skin.)

• “NEA will promote the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in schools during Black History Month in 2020…. NEA will specifically call for clear efforts to demonstrate support for the four demands of the BLM Week of Action in schools” which include “Mandating that Ethnic Studies be taught in preK-12 schools.”

• The National Education Association will create space in all individuals’ name tags, badges, and IDs for the individuals’ pronouns. The individuals’ pronouns will only be left off at the individual’s request.”

• “The NEA will contact all school districts… to recommend incorporating into their science curriculum, causes, effects, and solutions to climate change and pollution.”

• “NEA will work with current partners (such as GLSEN), to expand on the number of professional development opportunities for Gender Sexuality Alliances (GSA) advisors.  This training should include, at a minimum: Starting a new GSA; How to handle possible backlash from different stakeholders.”

• “NEA will create model legislative language that state affiliates can use to lobby for a K-12 cross content curriculum that is LGBTQ+ inclusive.” (It’s bad enough that K-12 classes teach about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation in health, sex-ed, and purported “anti-bullying” activities, but now they want indoctrination in the “LGBTQ+” ideology to permeate all content areas.)

• “[T]he National Education Association will explore the opportunity to create a Stonewall LGBTQ Scholarship for tuition assistance to an openly LGBTQ student attending graduate school who demonstrates a commitment to research and practice surrounding LGBTQ issues and awareness in our schools.  This would be a tribute to the Stonewall riots.”

• “NEA will… call on educators to refrain from discouraging… students to not speak a language other than English at school.”

• “The NEA will publicize… a 100 percent student loan forgiveness program for educators… across the country.”

One interesting membership change was passed as well. Two-thirds of the delegates “voted to amend the national teachers’ union’s constitution” to allow “non-educators” to become members, which in turn allows them to “donate to the NEA’s political action committee.” Such “public education allies” won’t “be able to vote, nominate candidates for elected office, or hold governance positions within the union.” They’ll only be able to donate money, thereby strengthening the power of “progressives” within the NEA. If by becoming members, non-educators could vote and nominate candidates, conservatives would have reason to join, because membership might enable them to weaken the power of “progressives” within the NEA. But if membership entitles non-educators only to donate money, the effect will be to strengthen the existing power structure.

The NEA is not an educational organization. It is not an organization committed to the full, free, and critical examination of diverse ideas. It’s a Leftist, political advocacy organization led by presumptuous culturally regressive dogmatists who have arrogated to themselves the right to use government schools to impose their arguable assumptions/worldview on other people’s children. The NEA and its ideological allies have transformed education into indoctrination.

The systemic anti-conservative bias deeply rooted in the sinews of government schools make them places that conservatives—especially Christians—should exit immediately if not sooner. And this will require the assistance of churches. Many families can neither homeschool nor afford existing private schools. Churches must be creative and find ways to enable their members to exit government schools. Churches should make funds available to enable members to send their children to existing private schools and/or create affordable private schools.

There are many ways the church can facilitate the training up of children in the way they should go, including tapping one of our greatest resources: retirees who, mature in their faith and equipped with a lifetime of diverse experiences and acquired knowledge, can and should help in this crucial endeavor. Retirees who are in good health should actively pursue ways to help in this effort. I will close with this legendary admonition from theologian and retired pastor, John Piper:

I tell you what a tragedy is. I’ll read to you from Reader’s Digest what a tragedy is. “Bob and Penny . . . took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their thirty foot trawler, playing softball and collecting shells.”

That’s a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. And I get forty minutes to plead with you: don’t buy it. With all my heart I plead with you: don’t buy that dream. The American Dream: a nice house, a nice car, a nice job, a nice family, a nice retirement, collecting shells as the last chapter before you stand before the Creator of the universe to give an account of what you did: “Here it is Lord — my shell collection! And I’ve got a nice swing, and look at my boat!”

Don’t waste your life; don’t waste it.

Let’s all start working for children in earnest, with courage, and with a willingness to suffer for Christ and his Kingdom.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/New-Recording-3.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

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With a cringe-worthy, faux-earnest expression, State Representative Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago) explained at Thursday’s press conference to promote her radical abortion bill the meaning of the necklace she prominently wore—a necklace adorned with a coat hanger:

My necklace is a little gold wire hanger…. It’s a reminder of what can happen in a post-Roe world.

Her little gold coat hanger symbolizes the illegal abortions she fears will kill women if they are prohibited from legally offing their offspring. So, let’s examine the issue of pre-Roe, voluntarily sought illegal abortions that occasionally resulted in maternal deaths—as distinct from abortions that almost always result in the deaths of human “fetuses,” none of whom had a say in their mother’s choice to have them killed.

As cited in an article on the website Abort73, the CDC reported that,

In 1972 (the year before abortion was federally legalized), a total of 24 women died from causes known to be associated with legal abortions, and 39 died as a result of known illegal abortions.

Here’s more interesting information from the pro-human slaughter, gangrenous Guttmacher Institute:

In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women…. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200.

Compare those numbers of tragic accidental deaths to the intentional slaughter of 61,000,000 humans in the womb in the United States since 1973 or the 368,000 humans killed in the womb so far in 2019—including 5,520 killings after 21 weeks gestation. I wonder if Cassidy and her accomplices in promoting feticide will shout that stat.

If killing humans in the womb isn’t obscene enough, Springfield regressives decided to add insult to death and dismemberment by having a black woman, State Representative Carol Ammons (D-Champaign) introduce their press conference.

It was obscene—not to mention tone deaf—to have Ammons lead the feticidal charge because as most know, Planned Parenthood (PP)—like its racist, eugenicist founder Margaret Sanger—has set its sights on black babies. A study conducted by the Life Issues Institute “found that 79 percent of abortion-offering Planned Parenthood facilities are within walking distance of black or Hispanic neighborhoods. Sixty-two percent are near black neighborhoods.” While blacks constituted about 13.3  percent of the population in 2014, 36 percent of all abortions were performed on black women.

The difference between Sanger’s goal to rid the world of blacks and Planned Parenthood’s decision to target the babies of women of color is that PP is motivated by greed rather than racism.

Yeah, that’s sooo much better.

At the press conference, Cassidy, the morally vacuous lesbian, “wife” of Candace Gingrich, and sponsor of every culturally destructive legislation to come down and go up the crumbling pike from Springfield said this:

As opponents of reproductive freedom have stepped up their attacks on our access to reproductive health care, it has become very, very clear that Illinois must respond in kind with equal energy behind defending reproductive freedom…. We had a pledge from the speaker that we will be able to move the bill forward, so I am uh looking forward to advancing this bill and getting it over to the Senate. 

Slapping the words “freedom” (or “choice”) on to an issue with nary a mention of the nature of the acts being freely chosen is dishonest and opaque. All decent people know that freedom is not absolute, that not all choices are moral, and that not all choices should be legal.

In the service of sorting truth from the evil Cassidy’s murky euphemistic language is designed to cloak, I will translate her dishonest, opaque words into plain English:

Opponents of the legal right of mothers to hire people to kill their offspring in the womb are having some success and, therefore, Illinois regressives must attack them and their efforts. Regressives must intensify their efforts to defend a legal right to feticide and de facto infanticide. Regressives got a pledge from the thoroughly corrupt Mike Madigan, who rules Madiganistan with a blood-stained fist, to speedily advance this bill by any unethical means possible, preventing due deliberation and preventing those who defend life a chance to marshal their forces against it.

It should be very, very clear that Cassidy and her morally contemptible cronies are mustering their energy to, among other things,

• Legalize the womb-killing of viable, full-term babies for any or no reason

• Compel the public to subsidize human slaughter

• Compel health care providers to facilitate this moral outrage even when doing so violates their consciences and their religious beliefs

• Rob parents of the right to be involved in the life-changing and health-risking decisions of their daughters to have their offspring killed

I wonder what morally regressive Springfield swampsters would say to Nik Hoot whose limbs were ripped off during a botched abortion—you know, when he was a “fetus,” as opposed to a human person. (It’s so weird that the once-bodily-whole human person Nik has a damaged body so like the damaged body of the fetus Nik. I wonder how that happened?)

Maybe pro-life advocates everywhere should wear necklaces from which dangle tiny severed limbs and crushed skulls forged in gold to represent their intrinsic and infinite value—value that regressives in Springfield are too blind to see.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to your state senator, state representative and to Gov. Pritzker. Urge them to stop targeting innocent pre-born children and vulnerable women in Illinois. Ask them to vote against the grotesquely misnamed “Reproductive Health Act.”

Then call their offices. Click HERE to find their contact information. Your state senator and state rep. are the last two on the page. Please call today!

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/hANGER-3-1.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia said this about the Alabama ban on human slaughter: “[T]hese laws are unconstitutional and they [pro-life advocates] don’t care.”

It’s remarkable that the Founding Fathers managed to make clear to “progressives” that women have a constitutional right to have their offspring offed without ever uttering a single word about it in the U.S. Constitution.

Here are some quotes from liberal scholars and writers on Roe v. Wade collected by Timothy P. Carney, commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—quotes that shrieking feminists may find wholly unpalatable:

• “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School professor).

• “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose” (Edward Lazarus, former clerk to SCOTUS Justice Harry Blackmun).

• What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent—at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed” (Edward Lazarus).

• “[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum—will tell you it is basically indefensible” (Edward Lazarus).

• “Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference” (William Saletan, Slate magazine writer).

• Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be…. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the U.S. Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it.… At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking” (John Hart Ely, clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren).

• Roe “is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” (Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution).

• “[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision—the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution—strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy…. As a layman, it’s hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is. If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe, with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers…. “[Roe] is a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument…. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument—but a bit of our soul as well” (Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist).

• “Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy) …. [C]lear governing constitutional principles… are not present” (Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard Law School professor).

• “In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people…. Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it” (Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School professor, former clerk to Judge Abner Mikva).

• “Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision…. Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching” (Michael Kinsley, attorney, political journalist).

• “[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entited [sic] to the protection of the 14th Amendment…. By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values” (Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor).

• “The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution” (Archibald Cox, JFK’s Solicitor General, former Harvard Law School professor).

Roe v. Wade is the SCOTUS decision that “progressives” argue absolute fidelity to precedent demands Justices uphold. If they think “lousy,” “indefensible,” “barely coherent,” unintelligible, a-constitutional non-reasoning must be honored in slavish service to the political end of allowing feticide, I hate to imagine what they would have thought about revisiting Dred Scott.

Save these quotes to show your pro-human slaughter friends next time they claim Roe v. Wade is the unchallengeable law of the land and reflects immutable constitutional truths.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Roe_SCOTUS.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

Written by Abigal Ruth

The love of a parent for a child is the most natural love there is. Most people find it easier to love their children than any other people on the planet and would sacrifice their very lives for their children if necessary. I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that our love for our children is probably the purest and least self-serving love of which we are capable as fallen human beings in a broken world.

So how is it that killing our children has become not only epidemic in practice but morally acceptable in the minds of so many Americans? I am of course talking about abortion. The most obvious answer is that we are sinners and everything about us is corrupt in one way or another—even our love for our children. God makes that fact crystal clear in the Bible which whitewashes nothing. References to children being sacrificed to pagan gods pepper the pages of the Old Testament. The well documented practice of ancient Romans abandoning their unwanted infants at garbage dumps to die of exposure, neglect and/or animal attack, surely indicates that a lack of respect for human life is normal for human beings who don’t have the enlightenment of God’s law. But still, how have so many mothers become the mortal enemies of their own unborn children?

I would suggest to you that there is another principle at work here. It can be found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians (3:24) which says, “the Law has become our tutor…(AMP)” Paul was, of course talking about God’s laws which He gave to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. The central point of this verse is not the point I am about to make, but nevertheless true: For better or worse, all laws teach people about right and wrong—especially non-religious people who do not have an independent moral code. They figure if it’s legal it must not be that bad…

In their excellent book, Legislating Morality, Dr. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek say it this way,

“Even though laws don’t change hearts overnight, they often help change attitudes over the long term…Today, apart from the tiny fraction of racist extremists in this country, everybody believes that slavery is morally wrong. Did hearts and attitudes change overnight because we outlawed slavery? No. Behavior changed because slave owners didn’t want to go to jail, but the law did help change pro-slavery attitudes over the long term…Before the Civil War, slave owners could rationalize the obvious immorality of slavery under the cover of “it’s legal.” Afterward, the law didn’t proved that convenient excuse and attitudes slowly changed.”

The same has been true of abortion. Abortion on demand was illegal for the first 200 years of our existence as a nation. All fifty states had laws against it. Even in New York it was limited to cases of rape, incest and saving the mother’s life. Before Roe v. Wade the vast majority of Americans believed that abortion was immoral. The laws in all fifty states protecting the unborn confirms this. The legalization of abortion did not come about as a result of the American people clamoring for it. The change in attitude toward abortion came after seven unelected U.S. Supreme Court justices arbitrarily reversed the will of the majority as expressed through their legislators to protect the unborn. Legalizing abortion helped to remove the stigma of immorality and taught millions of Americans the lie that abortion is morally acceptable. We have seen the same change in attitude happen in a stunningly short period time with regard to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage.

We need not criminalize every behavior that God calls sin. That would be both unworkable and foolish. However, our civil laws should never contradict God’s laws because God’s laws accurately reflect what is truly right and wrong.

I can foresee a day in which infanticide, prostitution and even pedophilia will not only be legalized but will become morally acceptable in the minds of many Americans. Unless more people learn to fear God and turn to His law as the primary source of moral wisdom, the escalation of evil is inevitable. The consequences will be catastrophic–especially for children. Pastors, it’s time to quit pulling your punches. Teach God’s law as well as His grace. If your congregations don’t learn right and wrong from God they WILL learn it elsewhere…

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?
And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?
And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
~Romans 10:14~