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Many reasons for joy as we approach the end of 2015

Dec 18, 2015

Editor’s note. This editorial appeared in the December digital edition of National Right to Life News. This editorial, and all the remaining content, can be read at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsDec2015.pdf. Please share these stories using your social media contacts.

christmas-nativity-storyThis is the final digital edition of the monthly National Right to Life News, “the pro-life newspaper of record,” for 2015. For me, as editor in his 34th year at the helm, it has been a particularly rewarding 12 months.

I am not a Pollyanna; we’ll look at what did not go well–in some cases horribly so–momentarily. But I would like to use the contents of the December issue, with references to other stories you can find at National Right to Life News Today, to illustrate the upward arc of our Movement.

Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon offers the absolutely most in-depth analysis of the latest abortion numbers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). After reading NRLC’s director of education’s story on page 7, you’ll be delighted to be reminded that the steady drop in the annual number of abortions is continuing. This has taken place for so long, we might easily miss that the 4.2% decline from 2011 to 2012 is not some dry statistic but represents the survival of real, live, flesh-and-blood babies.

Moreover, taking the abortion rate (the number of abortions for every 1,000 women aged 15-44 years) and the abortion ratio (number of abortions per 1,000 live births) together, it shows that the lower numbers reflect not merely, say, population shifts but actual changes in attitudes and actions towards abortion in the wider culture. Abortion is becoming a less common occurrence in our society and a less common choice among pregnant women.

Also less common is the unchallenged myth of Planned Parenthood as just a stellar provider of “women’s health services.” More people than ever know that PPFA is the largest “provider” of abortions in the U.S. and have a sense that members of its leadership treat the babies they abort in a jocular, morally debased fashion.

If the major media gave more prominence to what was revealed in the undercover videos shown by the Center for Medical Progress, the public would know, not merely intuit, that PPFA is a bastion of desensitized people who are the ultimate source for intact body parts “researchers” use for research fodder. And that they are not some mom-and-pop corner store, but a $1.3 billion “non-profit” whose president makes over a half million dollars a year.

NRL News Today has discussed at length the fall in PPFA’s public approval ratings, particularly as it relates to federal funding. I’ve asked more than once what would happen if an accurate question was asked of people, not one designed to secure the “right” conclusion?

Lo and behold, Robert Morris University (RMU) did just that. Typically the question is framed, “Do you think all federal funding for Planned Parenthood should be cut off?” which is misleading on multiple fronts.

RMU asked instead: “Congressional Republicans favor shifting Planned Parenthood federal funds to community clinics that perform the same services, but do not perform abortions. Would you say you support or oppose this plan?”

Instead of a majority who would not “cut off” “all federal funding to Planned Parenthood,” 53.3 % were in favor of shifting Planned Parenthood funds to community clinics which do not perform abortions , while 31.5% opposed it.

Difference? The latter question tells the individual being polled the money is not going away, it is being rerouted. Much more honest and fair.

And the story on page one helps us understand how and why both the United States House and Senate have passed a bill that will block approximately 89% of all federal funding to Planned Parenthood – about $400 million in the next year. As for President Obama–well we know his response. But these votes have set down a marker and that is a huge first step.

In addition, we have a powerful array of stories that document parents who were unwilling to abort their children when advised that the baby’s chance of survival was very low. To name just two, pages 17 and 19.

In the very first issue of National Right to Life News, NRLC made it clear we were just as committed to stemming the drive for euthanasia and, more recently, physician-assisted suicide, as we are to saving unborn babies. The stories on pages 14, 20, 28, and 32 outline the many permutations of physician-assisted suicide and the (alas) enduring legacy of Jack Kevorkian, “Dr. Death.”

And I promise you will be delighted by “Ten Reasons not to have an abortion” (page 5) and the latest example of an abortion clinic being converted into a crisis pregnancy center (page 6).

I know you are swamped, but please take a couple of hours out of the next day or two and read the December digital edition of National Right to Life News. And in the process, please be sure to share it using all your social media contacts.

Merry Christmas to you and your family from the Andruskos.

Categories: NRLC