Today's Life Chain rally, plus some other items.

There were probably about 80 people at the Life Chain in El Cajon this year, on Fletcher Parkway near Our Lady of Grace and the Vons shopping center.  They were a bit more scattered than they were at the 40 Days for Life kickoff vigil a few days earlier.  Life Chains were also held in Roanoke, Va; Salem, Oregon; Peoria, Illinois; and St. Joseph's, Missouri.

Some other news updates:

*The number of abortions performed in Ohio took another drop, marking 10 straight years of decline.

*Josh Craddock wrote an interesting article in Live Action comparing Planned Parenthood's operations in minority neighborhoods with medical experiments in Guatemalans and Tuskegee.

*The Illinois Department of Public Health has shut down the Northern Illinois Women's Center in Rockford because of numerous safety violations.

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"Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer"--Ronnie James Dio (1942-2010)

Abortion as birth control

In an earlier post I spoke of Russia's huge abortion rate, and how it tends to be used as a substitute for contraception when it's legalized.  Now there comes a report out of Minnesota that sixteen women there had their tenth or more abortion just last year.  That same report also shows that the number of abortions per live birth in black Americans is almost four times that in whites. It also showed that most of the women had used contraceptives in the past, but were not using them at the time of conception, and that the method most often used was the condom, followed by the Pill. 

The report also showed that the vast majority of abortions were done because women "don't want children at this time," followed by economic reasons.  Other studies have shown that women living below the poverty level are four times more likely to have abortions than those whose income is three times the poverty level. 

See also Wikipedia article on teenage pregnancy

Be careful what you wish for

The Chicago Tribune has recently been reporting a number of incidents where abortion records were not being kept properly, including records of their complications.  Unfortunately this falls under the category of “Be careful what you wish for…”

Years ago Jack Willke and his wife wrote a book “Handbook on Abortion” that covered a number of issues relating to abortion.  In response to claims that we needed to legalize abortion to reduce illegal abortions, the Willkes argued that it would not reduce this, because of the privacy factor.  Even if abortion were legal, they argued that a wife pregnant by another man would still have it done illegally because of the possibility that the husband could find out from medical records that his wife had a legal abortion.  In the same way, a minor would go to an illegal abortionist for fear her parents might find out if she had it done legally.   By being so lax on record-keeping, they may have gotten rid of reasons for seeking illegal abortions, but the legal ones aren’t much safer, and there are more of them.

Ultrasound Equipment and Abortion-The Good News and the Bad News

Two news stories have recently revealed that the use of ultrasound can reduce the incidence of abortion.  Focus on the Family has recently claimed that its Option Ultrasound Program has saved 100,000 babies from abortion since its inception in 2004, and a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that ultrasound images reduce support for abortion.

The bad news is that keepsake ultrasound machines are apparently being used in Asian-American communities to determine the sex of the baby—and if the sex is female—it’s aborted.