Commentary

CNSNews is carrying a story today which clearly shows the impact legalized abortion is having on the fate of humanity. They are reporting that we will soon face a future in which those who are 65 years of age or older will outnumber children under the age of 5.  That is a first in all of human history.

Their report is based upon data just released by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the study, “these two age groups will continue to grow in opposite directions.  By 2050, the percentage of the (global) population 65 and older will be more than double that of children under the age of 5”.

The globe’s 25 oldest nations begin with Japan and include 22 European nations. The youngest countries are found in the Persian Gulf.

Japan, Germany, Italy and Greece are clearly gentrifying. America is teetering.

The major culprit is declining birth rates resulting from legalized abortion and cultural shifts toward smaller families.

The Census Bureau report raises alarm over the prospect of a dwindling working population supporting an ever-growing elderly population in the decades ahead. We can already see some of that demographic reality hitting the United States in the way ObamaCare was structured to force younger Americans to get expensive coverage in order to subsidize benefits for older folks.

The Food & Drug Administration announced yesterday that it was caving in to pressure from Planned Parenthood to expand the use of RU-486.

Specifically, the FDA will now allow Planned Parenthood to dispense the deadly chemical cocktail to women and girls until nearly the end of the 1^st trimester of pregnancy – much longer than its original restriction of 49 days.

The FDA has also dropped a requirement that a physician provide mifepristone to patients, meaning that nurses or other personnel at Planned Parenthood will be authorized to give out the drugs. Making matters worse, the agency has dropped a requirement that the woman return to get the second drug (misoprostol); now the woman or girl will be sent home with the second drug to complete her abortion at home without medical supervision.

Given the clear evidence of RU-486 harming women – deaths have been reported – it is most disturbing that the new regulations have dropped the requirement that a woman return for an exam following the abortion.

Clearly, these more liberal regulations are not designed to protect women and girls; this is a gift from Barack Obama to his pals at Planned Parenthood to feed their bottom line.

It is rather striking that these new regulations have come down less than a month after the Republican Senate confirmed Obama’s new Commissioner of Food & Drugs, Dr. Robert Califf.

In response, Congressman Chris Smith issued the following comments:

“Not only is mifepristone used to kill babies, it is a poison that has harmed and even killed women. Yet even with this record, President Obama has bowed to pressure from his abortion cronies and has further expanded the use of the abortion pill, putting the health and lives of even more women and children at risk.”

The Idaho State Senate overwhelmingly approved SB1404 yesterday afternoon. This historic legislation would make it illegal to harvest organs and tissue from aborted babies.  It would make it illegal to conduct experiments with tissue and organs ripped from babies killed in abortion.  That includes embryonic stem cells.

Sadly, all Democrats on the floor sided with Planned Parenthood, which has fought vigorously against this bill – despite claims that they are not selling aborted babies from their abortion clinics in Idaho.

The legislation now moves to the House State Affairs Committee.

Please join us in praying for the success of this legislation in the closing days of the 2016 legislative session.

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.”