Democracy for Life of Illinois will be holding a kickoff event in Effingham next week:

Democracy For Life of Illinois (DFLI), an affiliate of Democrats for Life of America (DFLA), has scheduled a press conference and initial meeting for October 22, 2007 at the Thelma Keller Conference & Convention Center, 1202 N. Keller Drive, Effingham, IL. The event will begin at 6:00 pm. Featured speaker will be Carol Crossed of Rochester, NY, one of the founders of DFLA. The purpose of the meeting is to publicly announce the formation of DFLI and explain its goals and purpose. Presentation of “The Case for Pro-Life Democrats” will be made as well as a brief explanation of DFL’s “95-10 Initiative.” Democrats for Life of America, Inc. is a national organization for pro-life members of the Democratic party founded in the year 2000. Democrats for Life of America exists to foster respect for life, from the beginning of life to natural death. This includes, but is not limited to, opposition to abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia. The goal of DFL is to mobilize Democrats at local, state, and national levels to:

a. elect pro-life Democrats to office
b. support pro-life Democrats while in an elected position
c. promote a pro-life plank in the Democratic Party platform
d. achieve pro-life legislation with the help of national and state pro-life Democrats
e. participate actively in Democratic party functions and offices

All members of DFLI, pro-life Democrat officeholders and candidates and interested members of the public are invited. For questions or more information, contact DFLI president, David Seiler: 217-342-6882.

[ETA: updated with more information. Also, apparently I got the name wrong at first and it’s Democracy for Life of Illinois. I kind of like that.]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on bringing attention to global climate change.

I’ve seen speculation around the blogosphere this week that if Gore won the Nobel, it would be the perfect springboard for a new bid for the presidency. I think that’s more than a little naïve. There’s a strong streak in the American psyche, particularly but not exclusively among the right, of resistance to anything that could be construed as letting outsiders tell us what to do. If Gore announces his candidacy, you can bet that by lunchtime Bill O’Reilly and the rest will spin it as “Don’t let some Godless socialist tree-huggers in Norway decide who’s going to be your president.”

I personally think a little humility and willingness to admit that other people in the world might have something to teach us would go a long way toward making this country a healthier place. You’d think, for instance, that the pro-life movement in the U.S. would look at countries with dramatically lower abortion rates than ours and ask ourselves, “What are they doing right? What can we learn from them?” But you’ll never find an article on “Lessons from the Netherlands” in the National Right to Life News, nor an interview with Belgian public health officials in Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine. Granted, that’s mostly because solutions involving contraception and sex ed don’t fit in with the agenda of most pro-life groups — more’s the pity. (At first, I mistyped that as “more’s the piety”. That too.) But I think there may be an element of false patriotism at work as well. It’s hard for many Americans, and particularly for conservatives, to admit that there’s anything the U.S. isn’t the best at. I would think having an abortion rate 2 to 3 times that of many Western European countries would be a hint, though. We can learn from other countries, and it’s not anti-American to say so. It’s as pro-American as you can get, to want to make America a better place.

The Visible Embryo site now has a blog. Sadly, the very first post advocates the destruction for research of the embryos whose wondrous development the site chronicles.

Someone is going around comment-spamming blogs with a link to a crisis pregnancy center’s web site.

*sigh*

The New Jersey Supreme Court recently dismissed a woman’s claim that she was denied proper informed consent when she had an abortion:

Plaintiff said that she asked defendant “if it was the baby in there” and that defendant replied, “don’t be stupid, it’s only blood.” Defendant could not recall how he responded but believes he likely would have told her that a “seven-week pregnancy is not a living human being,” but rather it “is just tissue at this time.”

Note that he doesn’t dispute that he gave her false information in response to her direct question, he just doesn’t remember whether his response was quite as false — and heartless — as she says it was.

Oh, but it’s not lying to a patient (in the state of New Jersey) to say that the seven-week embryo is “only blood” or “just tissue”, because scientific concepts such as “organism” and “species” don’t have meaning if you can find someone who will testify that they don’t:

Plaintiff is prepared to present expert testimony to establish, as a biological fact, that her embryo was “an existing human being” –- “a member of the species Homo sapiens” — at the time of the abortion. Defendant, however, can present expert witnesses who will dispute the point and who will assert that plaintiff’s characterization of the embryo as a living human being is a moral, theological, or ideological judgment, not a scientific or biological one. Clearly, there is no consensus in the medical community or society supporting plaintiff’s position that a six- to eight-week-old embryo is, as a matter of biological fact — as opposed to a moral, theological, or philosophical judgment — “a complete, separate, unique and irreplaceable human being” or that terminating an early pregnancy involves “actually killing an existing human being.”

I guess if you can get expert witnesses to say that the earth is 6,000 years old, you can get expert witnesses to say that a six- to eight-week-old embryo carried by a human mother is not a living organism belonging to the species Homo sapiens. And the best part is, they’ll never even have to convince a jury that they’re credible!

Do you think this works for other kinds of litigation?

Plaintiff: When I asked my doctor whether I should quit smoking because of my asthma, he said, “Don’t be stupid, my mother smoked every day of her life and she lived to be 119.”

Defendant: I can present expert witnesses who will dispute the point that smoking causes lung disease and who will assert that, in fact, it makes you cool.

New Jersey Supreme Court: Good enough for us! Case dismissed!

To say that the American Life League and I see eye-to-eye on very little would be to state the case in the mildest possible way. That said, I have to hand it to them. I think this is perhaps the most strongly worded statement against clinic violence I’ve yet seen from a pro-life organization.

My favorite part:

In furtherance of this purpose, we call on:

[…]

• All perpetrators of violence to recognize that, far from being pro-life crusaders, they are nothing more than common criminals

Yes, exactly.

“Pro-lifers are sorry to see Rove go as well.”

Speak for yourself. This pro-lifer would buy his gas if it would get Rove back to Texas faster. If he’d take Bush with him, I’d throw in money for beef jerky and Red Bull for the road trip.

I’ve recently returned to work after maternity leave, and am trying to figure out how to juggle working, spending time with my family, and finishing my Master’s degree. Blogging’s been just a teeny bit slow, and that might continue for a while, but I’ll do my best.

I wonder how many of the people who argue that “I decide whether the fetus living in my body is a person or not” go by “Ms.” instead of “Miss” or “Mrs.”. It seems a bit of a contradiction to me — if you want to be considered as a person in your own right and not defined by your relationship to another, you should extend that courtesy to others.

(I’ve gone by “Ms.” my entire adult life, despite once having been informed by some pro-choice group or another that signing letters to Congresscritters with “Ms.” was code that you were part of their pro-choice constituency.)

I also wonder how many tout themselves as members of the “reality-based community”. You know, as opposed to those who “create our own reality.”

Just curious…

The Chattanoogan published a scathing anti-war opinion piece for Memorial Day:

The only way to truly honor our war dead and those that have fought in our wars would be to tell the truth about why they died and why they fought and why there must come a day – in honor of them – when we must put a stop to needless war and the killing and maiming, the ruining of lives and the heartbreak and suffering that comes from it.

The last time an American soldier died or fought for our freedom was World War II. That is the plain fact and the plain truth. To say that any soldier since World War II fought or gave up his life in order that we might enjoy our freedom is a horrible mistake in reasoning.

It is a horrible mistake because it is not just a mistake but a mistake that perpetuates and promotes our insatiable appetite for needless war and needless death and suffering under the guise that it was all for the cause of freedom.

(I admit, I was much more impressed before I noticed that this is Chattanooga’s “alternative” newspaper. You expect to see this kind of thing safely penned in the alternative ghetto — I was hoping it had escaped into the mainstream press.)

I honor the humanity of all of those, not just soldiers, who have lost their lives in war. I honor the fact that the soldiers this day is meant to commemorate sacrificed their lives to do their duty as they saw it. And I hold in contempt those who corrupt the notions of honor, and sacrifice, and duty, so that they may continue to wring political power or monetary gain or a sense of vicarious importance from the deaths of their fellow human beings.

A California woman recently gave birth to a son conceived using both an egg and sperm that had been frozen. She was part of a study aimed at improving techniques for egg-freezing, which has proven much more difficult than successfully freezing sperm — according to the article, only about 200 children have been born from frozen eggs.

Egg-freezing is being promoted as a way for women to preserve their eggs so that they can become pregnant later in life. But I can think of another possible benefit. One reason “excess” embryos get created and frozen is that egg harvesting is both hard on the mother and expensive, so couples want to maximize their chances of conception for each harvest. If freezing of eggs can be made to work reliably, then women could be spared multiple egg harvests while still creating only as many embryos as they intend to implant in any given cycle.

…Death-Penalty States Return to Electric Chair and Hanging.”

As a death penalty opponent, I wouldn’t find much to celebrate in that headline. Similarly, as an abortion opponent, I’m not particularly excited that the partial-birth abortion ban was upheld. I understand the propaganda value of publicizing the gruesomeness of this form of abortion, but all the law means is that people wishing to do abortions past 20 weeks will have to use a different gruesome method. For this, years of effort have been spent?

OK, maybe I should have gotten the flu shot like the midwives wanted me to. Flu + pregnancy = no fun. I’m feeling much better now, though.

Speaking of pregnancy: I expect to be spending a little time away from the internet in, oh, about two weeks (give or take two weeks). If anybody would be interested in doing a little guest-posting, please leave a comment or email me.

Denise is looking for people to get a local group started in the Philadelphia area.

I’ve been trying to spiff the joint up a bit. I know IE still doesn’t render it properly; I’ll keep working on it.