Life Advocacy Briefing

For the Week of April 22, 2013

Pro-Life Concerns about Obama Labor Nominee / Barbara Willke, R.I.P. / Cracks Develop in Media Blackout of Gosnell Trial / Wrapping It Up / Opening Pandora’s Box / Roll Call Series Concludes / Senate Voting Records: Shaheen & Cruz III

Pro-Life Concerns about Obama Labor Nominee

THE MAN PRES. OBAMA HAS NOMINATED AS LABOR SECRETARY – Thomas Perez – has a troubling record in the Dept. of Justice concerning the Constitutional rights of pro-life citizens.

We urge our readers to contact home-state US Senators to seek opposition to the Perez promotion to the Cabinet. Calls may be placed via the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) has reportedly vowed devoted efforts to block the nomination.

that Mr. Perez hotly pursued pro-life citizens who were peaceably protesting abortion in public places, as is their right. Indeed, Mr. Perez’s seeming fanaticism as a federal prosecutor drew him rebukes in such cases from at least two federal judges.

“At the [Dept. of Justice],” reports Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in his April 16 Washington Update, “[Mr.] Perez has made it his mission to antagonize pro-lifers, routinely bringing the full weight of the Justice Dept. against harmless pro-life protestors and sidewalk counselors. In 2012, a Florida court rebuked [Mr.] Perez for letting his extreme ideology cloud his judgment: ‘The Court is at a loss as to why the government chose to prosecute this particular case in the first place.’

“In 2011, a Kansas judge had a similar reaction,” notes Mr. Perkins, “insisting that [Mr.] Perez’s vendetta against pro-life demonstrators ‘continued to have an unlawful chilling effect on the defendant’s and others’ right to free speech and free exercise of religion.’”

Perhaps Senators interviewing Mr. Perez in his confirmation hearings will raise questions as to how he could exercise such extremism yet hold the post of chief of the Civil Rights Division at Justice. How he could then be proposed for significant promotion is clear, based on the character of the one making the appointment, but that does not excuse any Senator from voting to confirm.

Barbara Willke, R.I.P.

ALWAYS CHEERFUL, ALWAYS DEVOTED, Barbara Willke will be missed dearly by many in the pro-life community.

The registered nurse supported her dear husband John C. Willke MD in founding the International Right to Life Federation and certainly during his 10 years as chairman of the National Right to Life Committee in the US, herself devoting countless hours to pro-life activism and counseling, particularly in the Cincinnati area.

Her passing last Sunday evening at the age of 90, some two months in advance of the couple’s 65th wedding anniversary, reportedly resulted from complications from a severe fall.

“‘Barbara was always a joy to be with,’” said Priests for Life national director Fr. Frank Pavone in a report on her passing by Ben Johnson for LifeSiteNews.com. “‘The work she did in the movement helped lay the foundation for decades of life-saving activity.’”

The Willkes also founded Life Issues Institute, a key pro-life ministry based in Cincinnati but operating nationally, whose executive director Brad Mattes was also quoted in the LifeSiteNews story: “‘Barbara was like a mother to me,’” Mr. Mattes said. “‘She and Jack have been my inspiration and mentors for the 38 years I’ve been in the pro-life movement. The impact she and Jack have had on the pro-life movement is immeasurable.’”

Our own president, former Illinois State Rep. Penny Pullen, is also well acquainted with the Willkes and offers her heartfelt condolences to Dr. Willke and all the family. Mrs. Willke is indeed irreplaceable. Her passing is a shock to the entire pro-life community.

Cracks Develop in Media Blackout of Gosnell Trial

ALTHOUGH MEDIA ATTENTION SHIFTED to the terrorist bomb attack in Boston last Monday, legitimate questions remain about the near-blackout by national media of the Kermit Gosnell capital murder trial in Philadelphia. Mr. Gosnell is a notorious abortionist.

The media silence began to crack with publication by USA Today April 11 of an opinion column by Kirsten Powers, who is identified by FoxNews as a “Democratic strategist,” followed the next day by a 12-hour “tweetfest” encouraged by pro-life organizations to use the social medium to urge the mainstream media to cover what Megan McArdle of The Daily Beast called, at the close of the tweetfest, “‘the trial of the century,’” quoted by LifeSiteNews.

The result was a stirring in the “mainstream media,” which prompted NBC-TV’s Today Show to seek a comment on the trial from Abortion-Advocate-in-Chief Barack Obama, who first said, disingenuously, that he couldn’t comment on “an active trial,” as if that has stopped him in the past, but went on to comment anyway, seeking political shelter under the trite and insincere but oft-quoted mantra of ex-Pres. Bill Clinton, saying, “What I can say is this, I think Pres Clinton said it pretty well when he said, “‘Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare….’” Say no more, please! Or perhaps, given his own record on the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, Mr. Obama should be expected to say more. (Among the charges against Mr. Gosnell are the brutal slayings of seven late-term babies born alive on his abortion table.)

One major media commentator, FoxNews host Greg Gutfeld cited Mr. Obama’s shameful Born-Alive protection record during an airing Wednesday of The Five, a FoxNews Channel daily program, saying: “President Obama did comment extensively on something like this when he was Senator, and he felt that it was wrong to get in between the patient and the abortionist if the baby was born alive, and he said that the abortionist would never let that happen. That’s why he’s on very thin ice when he can’t talk about this sort of stuff.”

Certainly contributing to the pressure on major media, more than 70 Members signed a letter “chastising the major networks for ignoring this important story,” reports Tony Perkins in his April 17 Washington Update, and pro-life Members of Congress staged a “special order” in the US House to call the media to task over the Gosnell blackout.

Prominent among 10 pro-life Congressional Members who took their frustration to the House floor April 11 was New Jersey Republican Chris Smith, who used the Congressional focus du jour on gun control legislation to call the media’s attention to the unheralded proceedings in Philadelphia, proposing, “If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing,” beginning his remarks, according to a transcript reprinted by LifeSiteNews, with “Will the decades-long major national news media cover-up of the brutality—and violence—of abortion methods ever end? Will Americans ever be told the horrifying details as to how—and how often—abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies?”

Explaining away the silence of the so-called reporters and editors with whom he apparently consorts, Columbia University professor and FoxNews-dubbed “media commentator” Marc Lamont Hill took a stab at the reason for the media’s neglect of this major story, according to Ben Johnson, writing for LifeSiteNews, saying, “‘For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the Left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights.’” He continued, “‘Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the Left….I think it’s a bad idea,’” he said of the blackout. “‘I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.’”

Though some of the media had responded to their critics with a half-hearted effort at least to look interested (until the Boston attack gave them understandable cover), some media types actually turned to the Gosnell “house of horrors” as a macabre justification for their own sick view of what they call “abortion rights.”

Responding to the anticipated “tweetfest” that brought such wide condemnation upon the media blackout, the left-wing “Media Matters” operation, reports Ben Johnson for LifeSiteNews, “wrote that [Mr.] Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society stands as ‘an indictment of the outcome if the anti-choice movement achieves its goals. Far from the practices of well-established medical facilities, the Women’s Medical Society was the modern-day back alley, like those in the pre-Roe era where desperate women were butchered,’ wrote the group, which is a recipient of George Soros’s funding,” Mr. Johnson notes.

The pitch was picked up by some shameless media types, reports Mr. Johnson, who quotes Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, writing on a blog for Philadelphia Magazine: “‘As individual states increasingly restrict abortion rights, more and more illegal clinics like Gosnell’s may crop up.’”

How utterly ridiculous. It was Pennsylvania’s refusal to execute its own laws that permitted the Gosnell horror to prey on women and their babies for decades.

Abortion apologists—both in and outside the media—every day advocate setting up back-alley abortion shops on Main Street across America. Thanks to the 1973 Supreme Court, they have achieved exactly that, and Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors is their own trophy.

Wrapping It Up

PROSECUTORS IN THE GOSNELL CAPITAL MURDER TRIAL were expected to close their case on Friday after more than a month of gruesome testimony, according to FoxNews host Kimberly Guilfoyle, who promised to, once again, fill one of those empty seats depicted in a courtroom photographer’s photo that was widely circulated on the Internet as having been “reserved for media.” Ms. Guilfoyle, a former prosecutor, has noted her personal revulsion at the testimony she observed last week and vowed to return to cover the trial for The Five on FoxNews Channel.

We at Life Advocacy Briefing choose not to fill our pages with the gut-wrenching details of the testimony against the man the mayor of Philadelphia has called “a monster living in our midst,” but we invite readers, if they so choose, to examine the grand jury report which brought about this overdue prosecution. The report is available here.

Opening Pandora’s Box

AN EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAM IN NEW JERSEY has produced “the world’s first genetically-modified humans,” reports Michael Hanlon for London’s Daily Mail.

“The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the US,” writes Mr. Hanlon, “provoked another furious debate about ethics. So far,” he reports, “two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three ‘parents.’”

The report attributes the birth of 15 of the babies to “one experimental program at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine & Science of St. Barnabas in New Jersey,” reports the Daily Mail. “The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor,” notes Mr. Hanlon, “were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilized, in an attempt to enable them to conceive. Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year-old children confirm,” he continues, “that they have inherited DNA from three adults – two women and one man.”

The London reporter notes that the test result means these two children, at least, “will, in turn, be able to pass [the extra genes] on to their own offspring.”

The lead researcher in the experiment is believed to be Prof. Jacques Cohen, whom Mr. Hanlon describes as “regarded as a brilliant but controversial scientist who has pushed the boundaries of assisted reproduction technologies.” Indeed, Mr. Hanlon notes that Prof. Cohen last year “said that his expertise would allow him to clone children – a prospect treated with horror by the mainstream scientific community.”

No reactions to the triple-gene-line children were quoted from US sources, but Mr. Hanlon quotes a critical statement from John Smeaton, national director for the United Kingdom’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, and from Lord Winston of the Hammersmith Hospital in West London, called an “expert” by the reporter. Lord Winston, he writes, “told the BBC …: ‘Regarding the treatment of the infertile, there is no evidence that this technique is worth doing. … I am very surprised that it was even carried out at this stage.’” He then declared, writes Mr. Hanlon: “‘It would certainly not be allowed in Britain.’”

Opening Pandora’s Box

WE BEGAN LAST WEEK publishing the voting records from the Senate Life-related amendment marathon in March. This week we are presenting the roll calls from a key pro-life policy amendment offered by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and from an ObamaCare right-of-conscience amendment by Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE). Both are freshman lawmakers; Sen. Rubio was elected in 2010 and Sen. Fischer in 2012. We thank them both for their efforts.

Opening Pandora’s Box

Senate Voting Records: Rubio & Fischer

Rubio Amendment 292 to Senate Budget bill to express the sense of the Senate enacting the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (federal government policy favoring parental notice of abortion and aiding its enforcement where law) – March 22, 2013 – Rejected 48-51 (Democrats in italics; “Independents” marked “I”)

Voting “yes” / pro-Life: Sessions & Shelby/AL, Murkowski/AK, Flake & McCain/AZ, Boozman & Pryor/AR, Rubio/FL, Chambliss & Isakson/GA, Crapo & Risch/ID, Coats & Donnelly/IN, Grassley/IA, Moran & Roberts/KS, McConnell & Paul/KY, Vitter/LA, Cochran & Wicker/MS, Blunt/MO, Fischer & Johanns/NE, Heller & Reid/NV, Ayotte/NH, Burr/NC, Hoeven/ND, Portman/OH, Coburn & Inhofe/OK, Casey & Toomey/PA, Graham & Scott/SC, Thune/SD, Alexander & Corker/TN, Cornyn & Cruz/TX, Hatch & Lee/UT, Manchin/WV, Johnson/WI, Barrasso & Enzi/WY

Voting “no” / anti-Life: Begich/ AK, Boxer & Feinstein/CA, Bennet & Udall/CO, Blumenthal & Murphy/CT, Carper & Coons/DE, Nelson/FL, Hirono & Schatz/HI, Durbin & Kirk/IL, Harkin/IA, Landrieu/LA, Collins & King (I)/ME, Cardin & Mikulski/MD, Cowan & Warren/MA, Levin & Stabenow/MI, Franken & Klobuchar/MN, McCaskill/MO, Baucus & Tester/MT, Shaheen/NH, Menendez/NJ, Heinrich & Udall/NM, Gillibrand & Schumer/NY, Hagan/NC, Heitkamp/ND, Brown/OH, Merkley & Wyden/OR, Reed & Whitehouse/RI, Johnson/SD, Leahy & Sanders (I)/VT, Kaine & Warner/VA, Cantwell & Murray/WA, Rockefeller/WV, Baldwin/WI

Not Voting: Lautenberg/NJ

Fischer Amendment 630 to Senate Budget bill to establish a reserve fund to protect women’s “healthcare access” in a manner providing conscience rights for medical providers under ObamaCare – March 22, 2013 – Rejected 44-55 (Democrats in italics; “Independents” marked “I”)

Voting “yes” / pro-Life: Sessions & Shelby/AL, Flake & McCain/AZ, Boozman & Pryor/AR, Rubio/FL, Chambliss & Isakson/GA, Crapo & Risch/ID, Coats/IN, Grassley/IA, Moran & Roberts/KS, McConnell & Paul/KY, Vitter/LA, Cochran & Wicker/MS, Blunt/MO, Fischer & Johanns/NE, Heller/NV, Ayotte/NH, Burr/NC, Hoeven/ND, Portman/OH, Coburn & Inhofe/OK, Toomey/PA, Graham & Scott/SC, Thune/SD, Alexander & Corker/TN, Cornyn & Cruz/TX, Hatch & Lee/UT, Manchin/WV, Johnson/WI, Barrasso & Enzi/WY

Voting “no” / anti-Life: Begich & Murkowski/AK, Boxer & Feinstein/CA, Bennet & Udall/CO, Blumenthal & Murphy/CT, Carper & Coons/DE, Nelson/FL, Hirono & Schatz/HI, Durbin & Kirk/IL, Donnelly/IN, Harkin/IA, Landrieu/LA, Collins & King (I)/ME, Cardin & Mikulski/MD, Cowan & Warren/MA, Levin & Stabenow/MI, Franken & Klobuchar/MN, McCaskill/MO, Baucus & Tester/MT, Reid/NV, Shaheen/NH, Menendez/NJ, Heinrich & Udall/NM, Gillibrand & Schumer/NY, Hagan/NC, Heitkamp/ND, Brown/OH, Merkley & Wyden/OR, Casey/PA, Reed & Whitehouse/RI, Johnson/SD, Leahy & Sanders (I)/VT, Kaine & Warner/VA, Cantwell & Murray/WA, Rockefeller/WV, Baldwin/WI

Not Voting: Lautenberg/NJ