Commentary

The Senate State Affairs yesterday gave approval to the Idaho Unborn Infants Dignity Act (SB1404), sending it to the Senate floor for some last technical tweaks.

Sen. Cliff Bayer opened presentation for the bill by discussing the profound ethical challenges faced by medical researchers in using fetal tissue harvested from aborted babies.

“I am proud to be the Senate sponsor of this legislation because it sends a powerful message to the culture and the scientific community,” Sen. Bayer told committee members. “We must learn from history and realize that we are living at a time in which clear ethical standards on proper medical research appear to be eroding.  Rather than inhibiting medical and biological research efforts in Idaho, I believe passage of this legislation could easily turn Idaho into a kind of mecca for researchers who want to be assured that they will never have to choose between their careers and their core values.”

SB1404 offers a comprehensive response to the terrible revelations of Planned Parenthood officials negotiating with investigative reporters for the sale of aborted baby parts in videos released by the Center for Medical Progress. The legislation was developed with help from Americans United for Life.

The legislation would make it clear that parents who lose babies to miscarriage or stillbirth have a right to direct the final disposition of their baby’s remains; it provides for a death certificate in cases of miscarriage; it bans the “donation” of organs and tissues from babies destroyed by elective abortion and it would make it a crime to conduct experiments using tissue or organs harvested from aborted babies. The bill specifically includes embryonic stem cells.

Incredibly, both the ACLU and Planned Parenthood showed up to testify against the legislation.

Planned Parenthood of Idaho has claimed that they do not harvest organs and tissue from aborted babies in the state. And yet, they have vigorously fought implementation of a ban.  They claimed that SB1404 was “bad medicine, bad science” and improperly interfered with the doctor-patient relationship.

One can only conclude that either they are deceiving people about their current practices, or have plans to sell baby parts in the future.

The legislation now goes to the Senate amending order, where it is expected that Senate Democrats will wage an effort to strike language in the bill affirming that preborn children lost to abortion deserve to be treated with the same respect as other deceased human beings.

We urge you to contact your state senators in coming days to urge passage of this historic bill.

The state Senate today gave final legislative approval to an improvement in the Informed Consent statutes on a party-line vote.  For reasons all their own, every Democrat opposed the legislation.

HB 516, brought forward by Right to Life of Idaho, would require the state to provide a pregnant woman or girl considering abortion with a list of pregnancy centers around Idaho who provide free ultrasounds. That list would be given to the mother prior to an abortion decision.

Of course, the state cannot force the woman to take advantage of those services. Nor should it.  But giving a woman in crisis information about alternatives to the reality concocted by Planned Parenthood and Company is in the public interest.  Those ultrasound images are the single greatest weapon against the Big Lie that there is not another life at stake in the abortion decision.

We expect the Governor to sign this modest advance into law, and commend RTL for bringing it forward.

Barack Obama’s campaign to pack the court has been fairly restrained and subtle up to this point. He has been arguing that he has a constitutional duty to pick a nominee to replace Justice Scalia.  And the Senate has a duty to “advise and consent”.

He brought forth a sitting appellate judge, Merrick Garland and positioned his candidate as a reasonable “moderate”. No sinister plot here.

Thankfully our friends on the radical left are a bit more honest. It saves a lot of time and helps average folks understand the dangerous game Obama is actually playing.

Yesterday the Planned Parenthood chief couldn’t restrain herself. Cecile Richards offered high praise for the president’s choice – which is all anyone really needs to know about the nominee’s “moderate” politics.  While reports have surfaced that Garland also has a terrible record on gun control – we can now be certain that he is also a committed ideologue on the matter of protecting the Roe abortion regime.

Regardless of what happens this fall, Republicans are well justified in demanding a better option for the determining justice on the Supreme Court.

Just last week, the Center for Medical Progress released a new video, this one showing a Planned Parenthood abortionist in San Diego carry on a lengthy conversation about the ways in which she can help meet the demand for in-tact baby cadavers. Dr. Jennefer Russo discusses a complex business arrangement with a company called Da Vinci Biosciences.

Like previous abortionists caught on tape, Dr. Russo also confirms that she alters abortion procedures on babies as old as 6 months-gestation in order to harvest intact cadavers. She also suggests the possibility that those babies are being killed through a partial-birth abortion procedure since she is no longer using the drug digoxin to chemically kill the baby in the womb.  Instead, the baby is delivered feet first in order to obtain the best tissue samples for its client, Da Vinci.

Da Vinci is a for-profit organ trafficking company, who markets baby parts across the country. Their price sheets indicate they are making handsome profits: $350 for half a baby liver; $500 for an aborted baby’s thymus, and $750 for a baby’s intact brain.

Those prices suggest each baby can be harvested for thousands of dollars, which raise clear questions about violation of federal law which makes such profiteering illegal.

In another important revelation about the organ harvesting/trafficking industry – the Center for Medical Progress has also documented that Da Vinci Biosciences is listed as charitable donor to the Planned Parenthood facility in Orange County. This would suggest another back-door revenue stream for Planned Parenthood clinics to get around the federal prohibition on profiting from organ “donation”.

The Select Congressional Committee, chaired by Rep. Blackburn, has opened its investigation into this sordid business.

And the Idaho Legislature has before it our proposed law to stop such barbaric practices in the state of Idaho. We ask for your prayerful support of SB1349.

The House of Representatives passed HB516 on Tuesday by a wide margin. 56 legislators supported the idea of giving women more information about their babies before an abortion.  13 of 14 Democrats in the chamber stood proudly with Planned Parenthood.

The legislation is fairly modest: It would require the state to provide a list of pregnancy centers who offer free ultrasounds to pregnant women.

And yet, access to ultrasounds is one of the most powerful tools we have to combat the denial which permeates the abortion decision. A look at a moving, living, wondrous independent life in the womb makes it almost impossible to hang on to the self-deception that there is just a collection of cancerous-like cells invading a woman’s body.

Planned Parenthood knows the power of ultrasound. They fought the measure tooth-and-nail in committee.  During that hearing before the House State Affairs Committee, Planned Parenthood tried to posture itself as already offering this service.  Under some intense questioning, however, it became clear that Planned Parenthood uses ultrasound as part of its abortion procedure – so a woman would already have to commit to killing her baby in order to access Planned Parenthood’s “service”.

Of course, Planned Parenthood proudly proclaims that it “trusts women” and happily provides them with all the “scientific” information they need to choose abortion. But the truth is – they have fought every single measure over the past 25 years to ensure that women get information about the risks and alternatives to abortion.  Every one.

One of the more bizarre turns of this legislative debate can be found in the press coverage of the House debate. Betsy Russell, of the Spokesman Review, actually reported a gender tally of those debating for and against the bill on the House floor.  Russell, who clearly has no sympathy for the pro-Life movement, was apparently trying to help advance the narrative that abortion is solely a “woman’s issue”.

In response to such a suggestion, bill sponsor Rep. Ron Nate (R-Rexburg) argued on the House floor: “I’m a man, I’m a husband, I’m a father of three beautiful daughters … I also have a mother. To say that a man can’t have a voice here in terms of respecting women … is mistaken.”

The nation was stunned by the sudden loss of Justice Antonin Scalia yesterday. Grief is mixed with alarm over the prospect that Barack Obama could somehow gain the upper hand to send the Supreme Court, and the nation with it, over the great abyss by picking a history-changing replacement on the high court.

But there will be plenty of days to worry and pray that the GOP Majority in the Senate will be up to the task of stiff-arming Obama’s radical judicial agenda until his term mercifully ends.

For now, we should gratefully celebrate the incredible contributions Justice Scalia has made to his nation. His powerful reason and rabid defense of the Constitution has earned him a place in that great Hall of Patriots.

One could – and many will – read his opinions and blistering dissents on any number of challenges to the fundamental liberties of our Republic. But we are most appreciative of his stellar defense of the right to life and his scorn for those who invented a right to kill out of pure ideological fancy.  Here is but one sample of his potent pen, written in the first case on Partial Birth Abortion:

I am optimistic enough to believe that, one day, Stenberg v. Carhart will be assigned its rightful place in the history of this Court’s jurisprudence beside Korematsu and Dred Scott. The method of killing a human child-one cannot even accurately say an entirely unborn human child-proscribed by this statute is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion. . . . The notion that the Constitution of the United States, designed, among other things, “to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” prohibits the States from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd.

We acknowledge the grief of a nation, and that of the Scalia family over his sudden departure. But it is hard not to celebrate such a life as well. We are certain that he was warmly greeted at Heaven’s Gate with those most precious words: Well done thou good and faithful servant!

The winning ad from this year’s Super Bowl has to be the Doritos ad, which shows a playful interaction between a Dad and his preborn baby. It was warm, funny and made the point that Doritos are pretty tasty.

On the way, it also built upon the common sense understanding that the preborn child is a conscious human being while yet in the womb.

That was enough to outrage the folks over at NARAL – the association of professional baby assassins. They actually blasted out a tweet denouncing the ad: “Not Buying It – that Doritos ad using the anti-choice tactic of humanizing fetuses ….”

This tells us everything we need to know about the mindset over at NARAL – an understanding of the world which hinges upon a delusional fantasy in which the “fetus” is not even human. These are the lies they must tell themselves to get up each day.

We urge our friends to go out and buy a bag of Doritos in the next couple days, if only to annoy an abortionist.

Utah Democrat state representative Rebecca Chavez-Houck introduced legislation today that would create a right to physician-assisted suicide in the state of Utah.

HB 264 is called the “End of Life Options Act”, and would allow a physician to prescribe deadly drugs for a patient diagnosed with a condition that could reasonably be expected to cause natural death within six months.

There are various clap-traps in the bill – including a requirement that the attending physician determine that the patient is acting voluntarily, and encouraging the patient to share his or her determination to die prematurely with family members. But the primary purpose of the legislation is to implement the agenda of the Death Lobby.  Under the rhetorical cloud of “compassion”, Ms. Houck and others seek to end the lives of elderly and sick citizens prematurely.  This saves money and trouble for many.

A similar effort was threatened in Idaho several years ago. Fortunately, through the leadership of this organization and people like Russ Fulcher, Cliff Bayer and Governor Otter, Idaho instead implemented an outright Ban on Assisted Suicide.

We pray that the Utah Legislature takes a similar tack: The only way to be rid of the Death Lobby is to take decisive action in positively rejecting their message and agenda.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan held true to his word, and brought a veto override motion to the House floor last night. Republicans attempted to override President Obama’s veto of the Planned Parenthood defunding measure.  Unfortunately, the effort fell short of the two-thirds’ majority required.

The motion to override on HR 3762 received 241 votes, while 186 members voted with Planned Parenthood and Obama.

Only 1 Democrat (Colin Peterson of Minnesota) voted to override the veto.

Idaho’s Mike Simpson and Raul Labrador voted again to defund Planned Parenthood.

The effort to sever our partnership with America’s largest abortion chain must now await the election of a new president.

Planned Parenthood announced that it would be spending “six-figures” on media to help protect Hillary Clinton in Iowa from the insurgency campaign of socialist Bernie Sanders over this closing weekend.

The head of Planned Parenthood’s PAC argued in a press release, “There’s too much at stake for us to take a back seat in this election. Every single leading Republican candidate would strip health care from millions across the country – blocking patients from seeking services at Planned Parenthood, banning safe, legal abortion and even ending insurance coverage for birth control”.

She went on to burn her brand into the Abortion Industry champion:

“At the end of the day, [Hillary’s] the one we trust to go head-to-head with the extreme anti-abortion politicians hell-bent on rolling back the progress we’ve made….”

We’ll see if their endorsement can save Clinton from the quixotic campaign of Sen. Sanders. If she does, it will be up to us to make sure that Americans are confronted with the specter of Planned Parenthood’s hand-picked agent occupying the world’s most powerful office.