Bob and Mary Schindler, and the pro-life community, were unprepared for the fight to save Terri. They did not then understand what they were up against. Today, the Schindlers, through their newly reorganized Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation are working to educate people on these issues. They are working with right-to-life organizations to promote and lobby for legislation that would offer greater protection to those whom some in our society would deem unworthy of continued life. They, and many others, are working to create a network of doctors, lawyers, and clergy who are knowledgeable about the legal, medical, and moral issues involved in end-of-life cases and who can be trusted to approach them from a "reverence for life" point of view.

It is clear now that the battle to protect the lives of people like Terri is best won at the very outset - by amassing the best scientific and medical evidence to support the position that even lives that seem profoundly limited are nonetheless worthwhile and human. Ultimately, this is a battle for people's hearts and minds: Once people understand that there is hope in life, even when that life is limited or entails suffering, they will be unwilling to embrace death as a solution to problems.

Unsurprisingly, the Dutch, ever prickly about international criticism of their peculiar institution, were outraged. Giovanardi's critique cut so deeply that even Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende felt the need to respond, sniffing, "This [Giovanardi's assertion] is scandalous and unacceptable. This is not the way to get along in Europe."

As is often the case in the New Europe, what is said matters more than what is done. Thus, the prime minister of the Netherlands thinks that killing babies because they are born with terminal or seriously disabling conditions is not a scandal, but daring to point out accurately that German doctors did the same during World War II, is.

That being noted, one wishes Giovanardi had thought twice before raising the Nazi specter. Partly, this is because nothing we are talking about today matches the scope or magnitude of Nazi crimes. As a result, accusing people of Nazi-like behavior allows those amply deserving of moral condemnation to deflect reproaches. Thus, Giovanardi says that killing disabled babies is what the Nazis did, and the Dutch merely retort (correctly) that they are not Nazis.

Still, the "Nazi" analogy is worth exploring, precisely because it is unequivocally true that German doctors did kill thousands of disabled babies, for which a few such physicians were hanged at Nuremberg. Dutch apologists know this, of course. But they claim that the Netherlands' infant euthanasia program is substantially different: Dutch doctors are motivated by compassion whereas the Germans' were motivated by the bigotry of racial hygiene. Of course it is the act of killing disabled and dying babies that is wrong, not the motivation. But even leaving that aside, the Dutch defense is not as persuasive as Prime Minister Balkenende would like to believe.

"Sadly, the tragic and preventable deaths of these two women remind us that not only is RU-486 used to kill babies, it is a poison that continues to harm women," said Smith at today's Capitol Hill press conference. "Even proponents of RU-486, such as Planned Parenthood, have recognized the danger that it has caused to women. How many deaths, investigations and warnings will it take before RU-486 is properly labeled as lethal and removed from the market?"

Major research firms and universities in America, Canada, and England have arrived at the same conclusion as the new study reported in the Australian Sydney Morning Herald, that "daycare damages babies' brain chemistry and affects their social and emotional development."

It was reported, "significant among the reams of research are the so-called cortisol studies, which measured the presence of stress hormones in young babies -- consistently finding levels to be higher in children in long hours of day care." Children in daycares and preschools are not developing properly, and equally as troubling, in later public schooling.

A 31 year old British mother put off treatment for leukemia when her diagnosis and eagerly-awaited third pregnancy were confirmed on the same day in 2004. The BBC reports that Sarah Peck of Plymouth, was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) .

Mrs. Peck said it was their haematologist's agreement to manage the pregnancy that turned their decision away from abortion, or "termination" as it is called in England. "It's because he agreed to manage the pregnancy that we decided to go ahead," she said.

The Pecks were informed, however, that delay could cause difficulties in treating Sarah’s illness. Dr. Simon Rule, a consultant haematologist at Plymouth's Derriford Hospital, said, "If you delay (treatments) then the risk you run is that it can become acute at any time."

After the birth of baby Charlotte 19 March 2005, Sarah was treated with bone marrow stem cells from her sister, Vicky. This week, while the Peck's celebrated Charlotte's first birthday, Sarah was informed that she was in the final five picks for the Daily Mail's Mother of the Year award.

Sarah was informed a month ago that her illness is in remission. She told the BBC, "What I am really looking forward to now is spending quality time with my children. My family has always come first but now even more so. Every day is a gift now."

... there is absolutely nothing beautiful about abortion. Aside from the tragedy of a poor child who will someday read terrible headlines about a father who went to great lengths to make clear he wanted nothing to do with her..

McCreary has been a doctor long enough to remember the time when abortion wasn't legal for women. She says, "I saw some of them in my private practice, women who had illegal abortions that had infertility as a result."

What she saw, she says, wasn't pretty. She says, "They would have an illegal abortion and get an infection and then be unable to have children because of the infection and the scarring of the tubes. So if they didn't die, they at least had infertility."

Those women are why today, with abortion now legal, McCreary is willing to travel hundreds of miles, three times a month, to provide services for the women of South Dakota. She says, "An unwanted pregnancy can be a disaster for a woman. There are so many reasons why women want to have a pregnancy terminated."

For half of the women she sees at Planned Parenthood, the pregnancy is the unintended result of failed birth control. For others, financial or lifestyle issues bring them to the clinic. She adds, "We always tell women that adoption is an option for them. We ask them if they would like to consider that option. We don't see very many who do."

From the first line of the latest NARAL e-mailer:

South Dakota has already passed an abortion ban. Now, Tennessee is considering a similar ban of its own.

There is nothing further in the email explaining the particulars of this Tennessee abortion "ban." That's because, strangely enough, no such proposed ban exists.

The situation here in Tennessee is as follows: the Supreme Court of Tennessee has ruled that the Tennessee Constitution also includes the right to an abortion (in point of fact, they went out of their way to declare that the Tennessee Constitution protects a "greater" right to an abortion than does the United States Constitution. I can't fathom how that would be possible, unless they are referring to the Peter Singer view, which allows abortion into the seventh trimester, but that's what they said.) The proposed measure on the table in Tennessee is actually an amendment to the state Constitution which simply says that the State Constitution does not, in fact, contain such a right. There is nothing in the language of the proposed amendment which would ban a single abortion.

Another reason NARAL may not have been keen to talk about the details of this proposed abortion "ban" is that the procedure for amending the state Constitution is amazingly convoluted, and requires quite a stretch of time. If I understand the process correctly (and I am open to being corrected on the details), if the measure passes the House Committe, and then 2/3 of both chambers, it will be placed on a referendum for the voters of Tennessee to consider in 2010. Truly, the Dark Night of Fascism™ is imminent in Tennessee.

Patient trials of a drug that is used in higher doses to cause abortions have shown it to be an effective contraceptive with few side-effects, and animal and cell models have even suggested that it can protect against breast tumours.

Women taking the new Pill, which contains no female hormones, would have no periods and would thus be unlikely to suffer from pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS). The contraceptive is also thought to carry a lower risk of blood clots than existing varieties.

Mike packed away years of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, documents and letters about Terri in two huge plastic bins. They sit in the garage, alongside an old dining room table and outdated toys.

He said he will pull the boxes out one day when his children are old enough to hear about Terri. He hopes they will be proud.

If men want reproductive rights, the right they should be given is the option to raise their child even if the mother wants to prevent her child from ever being born. Abortion rights activists often say it is their goal to make abortions a "safe, rare, and legal" option, but oppose any measure to make the procedure rare. If fathers are willing to raise their child, they should have full rights under the law to do so and prevent the mother from going ahead with an abortion. Fathers should be notified and have to give consent to an abortion.

If the National Center for Men wants to stand up and be men, then this is the reproductive right that they should be standing up for. Men should have the right to be able to stop the unwanted abortion of their child by the mother who is seeking to avoid the "inconvenience" of parenthood.

The myth that Roe v. Wade made abortion safer for women is unraveling. Before abortion became a choice it was a criminal enterprise and abusers were jailed. It's still a criminal enterprise, but the butchers are protected, medical incompetence is rampant and abuses are hard to track down. The consequences of the Roe decision are 47 million dead babies and countless women dead, injured and emotionally scarred. That's a choice nobody should support.

Liberal columnist Nat Henthoff says that media polls about Terri Schiavo are meaningless because the media has not presented the whole truth about Terri's situation.

"[H]ow many Americans knew from the polls that her husband who provided hearsay "evidence" of her wishes, corroborated only by his brother and sister-in-law," he said.

"The polls, which so confused so many millions about Terri Schiavo's actual quality of life and her further potential, are by no means the only polls that have misinformed Americans on a wide range of vital public issues," Henthoff added.

Two Alabama legislators have introduced bills that would ban almost all abortions in the state, except those performed to save women's lives.

The bills are similar to legislation banning abortion that passed in South Dakota.

"I thought if South Dakota can do it, Alabama ought to do it, because we are a family-friendly state," said state Sen. Hank Erwin, R-Montevallo, who has introduced a bill in the Senate that would even ban abortions in cases where a woman became pregnant because of rape or incest.

A similar bill has been introduced in the House by Rep. Nick Williams, R-McIntosh. The bills would make it a felony crime to perform abortions in Alabama.

Dear Michael,

A year ago this week, I stood by the bedside of the woman you married and promised to love in good times and bad, in sickness and health. She was enduring a very bad time, because she hadn't been given food or drink in nearly two weeks. And you were the one insisting that she continue to be deprived of food and water, right up to her death. I watched her face for hours on end, right up to moments before her last breath. Her death was not peaceful, nor was it beautiful. If you saw her too, and noticed what her eyes were doing, you know that to describe her last agony as peaceful is a lie.

This week, tens of millions of Americans will remember those agonizing days last year, and will scratch their heads trying to figure out why you didn't simply let Terri's mom, dad, and siblings take care of her, as they were willing to do. They offered you, again and again, the option to simply let them care for Terri, without asking anything of you. But you refused and continued to insist that Terri's feeding be stopped. She had no terminal illness. She was simply a disabled woman who needed extra care that you weren't willing to give.

I speak to you today on behalf of the tens of millions of Americans who still wonder why. I speak to you today to express their anger, their dismay, their outraged astonishment at your behavior in the midst of this tragedy. Most people will wonder about these questions in silence, but as one of only a few people who were eyewitnesses to Terri's dehydration, I have to speak.

I have spoken to you before, not in person, but through mass media. Before Terri's feeding tube was removed for the last time, I appealed to you with respect, asking you not to continue on the road you were pursuing, urging you to reconsider your decisions, in the light of the damage you were doing. I invited you to talk. But you did not respond.

Then, after Terri died, I called her death a killing, and I called you a murderer because you knew - as we all did - that ceasing to feed Terri would kill her. We watched, but you had the power to save her. Her life was in your hands, but you threw it away, with the willing cooperation of attorneys and judges who were as heartless as you were. Some have demanded that I apologize to you for calling you a murderer. Not only will I not apologize, I will repeat it again. Your decision to have Terri dehydrated to death was a decision to kill her. It doesn't matter if Judge Greer said it was legal. No judge, no court, no power on earth can legitimize what you did. It makes no difference if what you did was legal in the eyes of men; it was murder in the eyes of God and of millions of your fellow Americans and countless more around the world. You are the one who owes all of us an apology.

Your actions offend us. Not only have you killed Terri and deeply wounded her family, but you have disgraced our nation, betrayed the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and undermined the principles that hold us together as a civilized society. You have offended those who struggle on a daily basis to care for loved ones who are dying, and who sometimes have to make the very legitimate decision to discontinue futile treatment. You have offended them by trying to confuse Terri's circumstances with theirs. Terri's case was not one of judging treatment to be worthless - which is sometimes the case; rather, it was about judging a life to be worthless, which is never the case.

You have made your mark on history, but sadly, it is an ugly stain. In the name of millions around the world, I call on you today to embrace a life of repentance, and to ask forgiveness from the Lord, who holds the lives of each of us in His hands.

-- Fr. Frank Pavone

Download a Tell-A-Friend card and fill out the back of the card with your name, address and phone number (or pick up Tell-A-Friend cards at any Planned Parenthood health center in Metro Denver;

Give Tell-A-Friend cards to any friends who don't go to Planned Parenthood;

When they come in for an appointment - and turn in your card - we will mail you two FREE movie passes*, and your friend will receive $10.00 off their visit

Tell-A-Friend about Planned Parenthood and enjoy the movies on us!

Every school in England will have a nurse who can arrange secret abortions and hand out contraception, it emerged yesterday.

New guidelines will allow them to help pupils get the morning-after pill, pregnancy tests and terminations without their parents' knowledge. [..]

The new guidance to primary and secondary school heads says that nurses will be able to "provide contraceptive advice to pupils and emergency contraception and pregnancy testing to young women".

It claims that nurses are the best people to provide this service because they are "able to assess need and prescribe appropriate medication/ provide specialist contraception advice for the future".

Another booklet, described as a resource pack for school nurses, suggests they "support young women to access services to make timely choices about emergency contraception, pregnancy or abortion".

The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families coalition filed with the state to begin collecting the 16,700 signatures needed to put the issue before the voters in November, Deputy Secretary of State Chad Heinrich said.

If the petition drive obtains the needed signatures by June 19, the law would be put on hold until the voters decide on its fate in the November election. If not enough signatures are gathered the law would go into effect July 1, leaving opponents with the option of challenging it in court.

"When you take things to the courts you don't have the opportunity to engage the public in the process. You don't have the ability to build a movement," said Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Kate Looby.

In the episode titled, "Secrets and Files," Christina, a young, single mother of an infant, is murdered. Investigation reveals that she was still a virgin, but that she had in fact given birth to the baby. How did Christina get pregnant?

Grissom and CSI Willows find out that Christina had been implanted with an "extra" fertilized embryo through a pro-life agency called Project Sunflower. Not surprisingly, the program negatively portrays the agency's director. When Investigator Willows argues with her over the beginning of life, Dr. Grissom presents his argument. He quotes Leviticus 17:11: "Life is in the blood." When blood enters the embryo on the 18th day after conception and the heart begins to beat, it becomes alive, he explains.

According to his argument, there is an 18-day "grace period" when abortion should not be condemned.

However, Scripture has to be taken in context. The full passage in Leviticus 17 reads, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul". This reading makes it obvious that the Biblical reference is about sacrifice and atonement, not about when life begins.

REAL MEN - good men - take responsibility for the children they father. If they get a woman pregnant, they do the right thing: They stand by her. They support their child. They don't try to weasel out of a situation they co-authored. They shoulder the obligations of fatherhood, even if they hadn't planned on becoming a father.

In 1985, RU-486 was a very bad idea that was being imported to America from France. Today it is simply another tool in the arsenal of weapons being used to kill innocent preborn children - children who are perceived to be annoyances, inconveniences or simply problems in need of easy solutions.. The mantra of "safe and legal" has shrouded the ugly facts about abortion for years now. These most recent deaths have been accepted as part of the price a culture must pay when it persists in refining methods for aborting the results of people's unwillingness to accept responsibility for their actions. Not only do we hear very little about the mothers who die because of abortion, we also hear very little about any of the side effects of RU-486 - side effects that are unhealthy for some, deadly for others.

"There are no people with physical defects in North Korea," Ri told members of the New Right Union, a group that partners human rights activists with North Korean refugees.

According to a Reuters report, Ri said disabled babies were killed in hospitals or homes and quickly buried. He indicated the North Korean government encourages the practice to "purify" its population and get rid of people who are "different."

Come in for an appointment at any of our 8 health centers before April 30th and enter to win an iPod.

I was taken home, dropped off, took up-stairs (could not climb up or down stairs), and left to lay alone for 6 hours.

Finally, my husband comes home -- drunk, dirty and greasy -- and knelt down beside my bed and said, "Honey you do know I could never hate you for keeping something we created while making love, don't you?"

A female nurse held my left hand as the doctor prepared my body for violation. It felt like my insides were being torn in two. I cried silently when the vacuum came on and I felt its pull. I passed in and out of consciousness from then on. The pain was still there, but sounds and smells became indistinct. I remember saying "is it over yet?" The nurse said "soon" and I drifted away again. When I woke up, I was on a gurney, draped with a sheet in the recovery room. My stomach was cramping and I was lightheaded. My womb felt vacant. There was a girl on my left and another on my right. One was still sleeping and the other was wailing for her dead baby.

Due to health concerns about infection rates and adverse events, we are updating our medical protocol for medication abortion.

Our health centers will no longer recommend the option of administering misoprostol vaginally (misoprostol is the second drug in the two-drug medication abortion regimen). Patients will now receive misoprostol orally or buccally (where the pill is placed between the cheek and gum and dissolves). This change in protocol is effective immediately.

In 2003, Oxford University researchers found a link between the pill and cervical cancer. Researchers from Cancer Research UK's epidemiology unit in Oxford reviewed 28 studies and found that the longer a woman took the pill, the greater her risk of developing cervical cancer. They found a 10% increased risk for women taking the pill for 5 years or less, 60% for 5 to 9 years' use, and 100% greater risk (i.e. double the risk of a non-pill-using woman) if they had taken it for at least 10 years.[..]

In July 2005 The World Health Organization said that the birth control pill is carcinogenic and is associated with increases in cervical, liver and breast cancer.

"At this time we are investigating all circumstances associated with these cases and are not able to confirm the causes of death," the Food and Drug Administration said in an advisory to the public.

Four previously reported deaths were linked to complications from a bacterial infection that developed after the women took the abortion pill, which is sold by privately held Danco Laboratories.

In the two new cases, it is unknown if the women had bacterial infections, and if so, whether they were infected with the same rare bacterium identified in the earlier deaths. The bacterium is called Clostridium sordelli.

Across the country, anti-choice politicians are creating a gauntlet of legislation that attempts to put roadblocks between women and reproductive healthcare. Currently, nationwide, there are approximately 850 pieces of state legislation related to choice - only a small minority of which support women's access to reproductive health services.

Isn't it ironic that those who want to ban abortion do not support the very programs and services that reduce the need for abortion? California has demonstrated what happens when you expand access to contraception and sex education - unintended pregnancy goes down, teen births go down, the number of abortions decline, families are healthier, taxpayers save money.

Americans increasingly believe that it's not enough to be legally free to do and live as you please - your choices must also be exempt from judgment and evaluation. In other words, you have a moral "right" not to feel bad about your "lifestyle" choices. This includes not having to think about the social consequences of these choices.

... but when all choices are deemed equally worthy of respect and stigma is regarded as a kind of hate speech, the likelihood of folly increases almost exponentially. By the time the consequences of certain choices become apparent, it's usually too late to do anything about it: the damage is irreversible or the choices are regarded as inviolable.

This film will focus on the horrors of the 21st Century... It will be political, and it will be provocative. It will begin with you playing a hopeful, young, religious woman seeking happiness and fulfillment. It will conclude with you shaving your head and having an abortion.

Please note that all actresses must be willing to have an actual abortion, and be willing to have the procedure filmed . I believe that this sacrifice will make a powerful message about the inhuman, fascist world we are beginning to see.

Thelma Underberg, director of the regional pro-choice movement, has been fighting to uphold abortion rights for more than 40 years. For Underberg, professional and economic equal opportunity and a woman's right to choose are inextricably linked. When the Supreme Court passed Roe vs. Wade in 1973, enabling women to obtain abortions legally anywhere in America, Underberg celebrated. "We thought we had won," she says.

But now, sitting in her windowless office, she says she doesn't understand the world anymore. The 74-year-old has three children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and she is active in her church. Yet while she outwardly resembles her opponents in the pro-life camp, she refuses to speak with them. "You might as well be talking to a wall," she says.

"Statistics are cold numbers but each one of these precious babies before birth are human beings who were systematically dismembered by doctors and this was paid for by the taxpayers," said Mary Ellen Douglas, National Organizer of Campaign Life Coalition. "The death of each of these babies has been recorded in the Book of Life long before they were counted by StatsCan. The fact that the numbers are lower among teenage girls is encouraging, perhaps, but the final figures are staggering," she stated.

Among teen-aged women, the abortion rate in 2003 was 14.5 per 1,000 women under the age of 20, down from 15.7 the year before. The abortion rate for teen-aged women has declined gradually since 1997 when it was 18.4 per 1,000 women under the age of 20.

The crude birth rate for teen-aged women has also continued to fall. In 1997, there were 16.8 live births per 1,000 women under 20. By 2003, this had declined to 12.1.

The number of induced abortions per 100 live births decreased to 31.0 in 2003, from 32.1 in 2002.

Induced abortions continue to be most common among women in their twenties, who accounted for 53% of all women who obtained an abortion in 2003. On average, 26 women out of every 1,000 in their twenties obtained an abortion.

Induced abortion rates remained the same or increased for residents of most provinces and territories except for New Brunswick, Ontario and British Columbia, where the rates decreased.

I would say the really bad cramping had been going on for something like an hour, no bleeding whatsoever, when I went to sit on the toilet again. I had been rocking back and forth for a few minutes when I felt this bizarre kind of schlorrp inside, and then a few seconds later, something quite large fell out of me and into the toilet. The cramping immediately let up to what I'd classify as normal-to-annoying period cramps. I sat there for a few minutes to make sure nothing else ginourmous was going to come out, cleaned myself up and got up.

When I turned around, there wasn't a lot of blood in the toilet--just one roughly lemon-sized clot, and next to it, something that was most definitely not clot-colored. I leaned over and squinted at it, and holy shit, there was a freaking embryo in my toilet! They had told me that I probably wouldn't be able to see anything--that anything recognizable probably wouldn't show up unless I was more than eight weeks along, and I was only seven. But this thing, even seeing it in the toilet, was undeniably the embryo. I would say it was just a little bit longer than the diameter of a quarter.

So I found a brush, scooted the embryo up and out of the water, and put it on a square of toilet paper so I could look at it (and threw the brush away). I didn't know what to think about it at first, but the more and closer I looked at it, the more I thought it had to be the single neatest thing I had ever seen. I didn't want to touch it because it looked so gelatinous, like I might accidentally pop it. But I was looking at it and seeing the teeny face (it was at the point where it has the huge flat nose and looks kind of like a puppy) and the little webbed flipper feet and the huge black eyes, going "HOLY CRAP THIS THING IS FREAKING AWESOME." I called Austin up to see it, and he wasn't quite as giddy about it but he still wanted to see it. Apparently he didn't realize it would have fingers and toes and all of that so soon.

(Cecile) Richards says pro-life advocates have tried to politicize Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions.

"I'd say folks from the other side have really tried to politicize what are basic health care services. That's the business we're in," she claimed.

Slowly, as though coming to terms with buried sexuality, the abortion-rights leadership is groping for a way to think and talk more frankly about the morality of ending unborn life.

In part, this process is being driven by political defeat. In part, it's being driven by the truth of women's experiences. In part, it's a matter of younger women taking over the movement, uninhibited by old fights and fears. And in part, it's a matter of reflection by some who fought those fights but see how times have changed. Abortion no longer symbolizes freedom and women's rights as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, one old-timer observed; the movement must ask how abortion fits into its mission, not the other way around. Another veteran warned her colleagues that fetal life has become "the elephant on the kitchen table": If you can't acknowledge it, people will tune you out.

"We are no longer the largest minority in this country. That is due, in fact, to abortion," said Day Gardner, national director of Black Americans for Life.

"We have allowed abortion to become a kind of birth control for many of us... Many pastors are afraid they will offend women if they talk about it."

The American Medical Association and seven other medical groups say that today's legal abortions do not cause either physical or psychological harm. An abortion is safer than having tonsils removed.

The study-authored by Stacey A. Missmer of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a team of researchers here and in Texas-correlates the over-consumption of corn tortillas with neural-tube defects (NTDs) in unborn children. Often debilitating and sometimes fatal, NTDs such as anencephaly and spina bifida have been linked directly to the tortillas and other corn products in the diets of expectant mothers living along the Rio Grande.

Missmer and her associates isolated fumonsin, a fungal toxin often found in American corn crops, as the likely cause of these infants' cranial and spinal malformations.
The study, conducted on mothers of babies born from the early 1990s to 2000, determined that overexposure to fumonsin inhibits fetal ability to absorb folic acid, a compound known to prevent NTDs.

Co-author of the study, Lucina Suarez, who works with the Texas Department of State Health Services, said the implications of NTDs can be fatal.

Forget the political jockeying by pro-lifers to gain a foothold with moderates. Never mind laws on parental notification and consent in the name of family involvement. Or attempts to ban one abortion procedure at a time. Or laws to mandate misinformation and waiting periods.

Until now, the anti-abortion right has not only tried to frame itself as moderate, it has dressed up in woman-friendly camouflage. It has touted research that makes one false claim after another linking abortion with depression and breast cancer. It has cast women as the hapless victims of abortion and portrayed its own side as protectors.

Only the abortion rights movement has a genuinely positive agenda, the protection of a woman's right to make her own decision about an admittedly thorny moral issue whose implications are intimate. The emotional force driving pro-lifers is profoundly negative; alas, it is our negative emotions that usually pack the most punch. The anti-abortion movement is fired up with loathing - for permissive, Godless lefties who don't even get nervous when threatened with eternal damnation since they don't believe in it (which must be terribly frustrating). Thrilled with the sudden realignment on the supreme court, the right is power-mad, and relishes the prospect of telling the heathens what they can and cannot do. This is a very personal showdown, but it is a showdown between folks who are generally at least five feet tall. The babies are useful tools, but emotionally irrelevant.

Researchers at Baruch College at City University of New York studied the records of teen abortions and births for the two years before the Texas law took effect on Jan. 1, 2000, and for three years afterward.

Abortion rates dropped for girls ages 15 through 18, even though the 18-year-olds were not subject to the law. But the drop was more pronounced among the younger girls. Their rates fell 11% to 20% more than the rate among the 18-year-olds did.

"The law has definite behavioral effects," said lead researcher Ted Joyce, a Baruch professor of economics.

The study was reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

In the study, birth rates declined for all ages in the 15- to 18-year-old group. At the same time, the abortion rate among 18-year-olds fell from 27.7 abortions per 1,000 girls before the law to 25.8 afterward. The rate dropped from 18.7 to 14.5 among 17-year-olds; 12.1 to 9.0 among 16-year-olds; and 6.5 to 5.4 among 15-year-olds.

Texas state Sen. Florence Shapiro, who sponsored the notification law, said the findings show that more parents are becoming involved in their daughters' "life-altering decisions."

The president of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, acknowledged that disputes over unintended pregnancies can be complex and bitter.

"None of these are easy questions," said Gandy, a former prosecutor. "But most courts say it's not about what he did or didn't do or what she did or didn't do. It's about the rights of the child."

Pro-lifers have gained ground over the last decade and a half by pursuing a savvy incremental strategy. That strategy puts the end of Roe within sight. If Roe falls, pro-lifers should then try to persuade the public in each state to prohibit most abortions. After that, they should try to persuade them to prohibit abortion in the case of rape and incest. To try to collapse this multi-stage process into an instant is to ignore social and political circumstances, and to throw away patiently and painfully won political victories for the sake of an emotional gesture.

The most effective response to Roe is not to pretend that it does not exist. Some of our pro-life allies who favor enacting these laws now - as opposed to waiting until Roe is gone - wave aside the practical objections by saying that it is never the wrong time to do the right thing. That is true. But making it easier for pro-choicers to win the abortion wars is not the right thing to do.

They put me in a room no bigger than a powder room with a chair and a little cart of gowns. Told me how to get dressed and they would be back for me. It felt like I was sitting in there for 4 hours... I never ever cried so hard in my life. I almost ran out of there and couldn't go through with it. My boyfriend was sitting on the otherside of the wall. I wanted him to come get me and say, no let's not do it!!!!!! I know that he was scared too. I was crying so hard I thought I was going to be sick... I was brought into the procedure room and my legs were strapped down. The anesthesiologist came in to hook me up. I started crying and crying and crying, the dr. came in and introduced herself and asked me my name and what I was there for. I was crying so hard I couldn't speak my name. I just wanted someone in that room to ask me, do you really want to go through with this? I wanted SOO bad for someone to say, "you don't have to do this" No one did and I felt soo trapped and scared and was crying soo hard, I tried so hard to say "No, STOP! I don't want to do this!!!"... Next thing I knew I was in the recovery room. It was over. I felt like a piece of sh*t.

Dr. Sam Epstein, author of Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War and Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago, told the CBC's Marketplace that exposure to the hormones estrogen and progestin, as found in the pill, increase breast cancer risk.

Marketplace author Wendy Mesley, herself a breast cancer survivor, explained that the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer last year re-classified hormonal contraceptives as carcinogenic to humans.

Dr. Chris Kahlenborn, M.D. demonstrated that a woman who takes birth control pills before her first child is born has at least a 40% increased risk of developing breast cancer and a woman who has taken the pill for four or more years prior to the birth of her first child has a 72% risk factor in developing breast cancer. Dr. Kahlenborn's book, "Breast cancer: Its link to abortion and the birth control pill," published by One More Soul, is based on six years of study and a meticulous analysis of hundreds of scientific papers and other sources.

"This extreme ban will threaten the health and lives of women in South Dakota," said Talcott Camp, Deputy Director, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. "History has shown that when women are denied access to abortion care they may resort to desperate measures. Politicians in South Dakota have turned their backs on the women of their state."

A nurse told the mother of Haleigh Poutre during a hospital visit on Tuesday that the severely beaten Westfield girl, whom officials once wanted to let die, has been able to eat scrambled eggs and cream of wheat, and has tapped out drum rhythms during physical therapy, according to the mother's lawyer.

I told her that the most important thing for her to know was that I would stand by any decision she wanted to make. I would support her and the baby to the best of my ability if she wanted to continue the pregnancy and try to make a go of things. I would support her if she chose to carry the baby to term and then place it for adoption. I would support her if she chose to end the pregnancy with an abortion. I would not judge her decision or try to make her change her mind. Whatever she chose would be the way it would be.

Neither of us wanted to be parents. We had neither the experience nor the financial ability to offer a child a decent life. Hell, we still hadn't finished high school. We talked about how choosing to keep the baby would not only put severe restrictions on the future life of a child, it would effectively end our own growth and progress towards adulthood before it had even begun. Instead of creating a new life, we would be destroying three.

Politically, legally, and technologically, the 33-year-old court decision is increasingly obsolete as a framework for managing decisions about reproduction. But pro-lifers can't launch the post-Roe era, because they're determined to abolish its guarantee of individual autonomy, and the public won't stand for that. Only pro-choicers can give the public what it wants: abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy.