Darshana Patel became pregnant two more times but miscarried in December and September, Outagamie County sheriff's Capt. Michael Jobe said.

A week or two before her second miscarriage, Manishkumar Patel bought her a smoothie at an ice cream shop, Sheriff's Sgt. Ryan Carpenter said. Darshana Patel noticed white powder on the rim and, feigning illness, took the drink back to her office.

Suspecting she had been slipped mifespristone, the abortion pill also known as RU-486, Darshana Patel sent a sample of the smoothie to a California lab for analysis, Carpenter said.

When it tested positive for the drug, she approached the sheriff's department Nov. 1. Manishkumar Patel was arrested Wednesday.

A brand new grandson and an interest in Soviet history brought Connie Hood into contact with one of the most desolate places in Russia.

Hood, a Catholic attorney from the Archdiocese of St. Louis, discovered the Church of the Nativity in Magadan, in the Russian Far East, and ultimately became an avid supporter of a new project that aims to counter an abortion mentality that has spread over much of the region.

A residential program called Nativity Inn, an outreach of the Catholic parish, aims to provide a sanctuary for new mothers who might otherwise have chosen to abort their children. Hood leads the Friends of Nativity Inn and coordinates a network of support. She developed the Web site www.NativityInn.org.

She explained the project in an e-mail to the Catholic Anchor, newspaper of the Anchorage Archdiocese. She sent it while waiting in Moscow for a flight to Magadan for her first visit.

About two years ago she became a new grandmother -- her oldest daughter and son-in-law had a baby, Matthew. About the same time she read an article about babies languishing in Russian orphanages, she explained. "I thought there but for the grace of God this could be Matthew in those orphanages."

Hood later discovered that a priest from her own archdiocese, Father David Means, was serving at the Church of the Nativity. Hood contacted Father Means to see if there was anything she could do to assist with an outreach to mothers.

The Friends of Nativity Inn helps Father Means and Nativity's pastor, Father Michael Shields, from the Archdiocese of Anchorage, in their work to help moms who might otherwise opt for abortion.

According to Father Shields, abortion is big business in the former Soviet Union. Regular salaries for doctors are low, which encourages many to make extra income by providing abortions.

So, even though the government is officially encouraging births to counter the region's low population growth, Father Shields said the abortion system continues to flourish, aided by the tough economic situations many young women are facing.

The Church of the Nativity has been helping pregnant women for years, providing financial support, food, clothing and counseling for any woman seeking to give birth to her child. It will extend its outreach with Nativity Inn, which should open by Christmas 2008. In the beginning the inn will accommodate up to five women.

"Being pro-life means being pro-child and that means being pro-mother," Father Shields said.

The station's "World News with Charles Gibson" program on Wednesday night focuses on the story of 26-year-old Linda Sanchez who received the news she had cancer just one day after learning she was pregnant.

Sanchez ultimate gave birth to her baby, Isabella, one month ahead of her due date. The healthy baby showed no signs of the chemotherapy Sanchez had during the pregnancy.

The choice between having an abortion or subjecting an unborn child to chemo treatment is an excruciating one.

"My doctor basically said it was me or the baby," Sanchez told ABC News.

But the program is highlighting new research at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center showing that women may no longer have to make that decision.

Scientists there say it is possible to treat the mother without hurting her unborn child.

"Yes, chemotherapy is toxic. But what we have found is that when given in the second or third trimesters it appears to be safe," said Dr. Jennifer Litton, breast oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer center, told ABC News.

"[The] placenta is protecting the baby. That baby is not getting the same side effects as the mother," Litton said.

The Code of Ethics of the Association states that "doctors must maintain respect for human life from its beginning", and "the practice of abortion constitutes a grave ethical failure".

Denouncing the "misuse of medical knowledge that various powers and pressure groups" are attempting to impose on the Association, the signatories compare the government's demands with earlier movements for "forced internments in psychiatric institutions, sterilizations, and elimination of human beings for eugenic or racist reasons".

The doctors remind the Association that the 2,500-year-old Hippocratic Oath exists to resist the moral fashions of the times, which have often been a threat to the dignity of human life. They wish to avoid "the subjection of this Code to a changing 'ethic', molded to the taste of the interests, conveniences, ideologies or convictions of those who happen to have power or influence at the time."

Shannon Nixson, a case manager and graduate student, was fired this month from the YWCA of Greater Cincinnati after she invited a pro-life speaker to address pregnant women at the club. Nixson said she was allowed to recruit speakers on both sides of several other issues, but only one view of the abortion debate was welcomed.

Nixson asked a representative of Life Issues Institute to present a pro-life perspective during a seminar on employment and literacy.

"Within the next couple of days, I was told that I was terminated, and when I was asked why I was terminated, the only issue that I brought up was this occurrence of this pro-life speaker coming."

"Parents need to know what Planned Parenthood has in store for their children and this report is an excellent starting point," said Jim Sedlak, vice president of American Life League. "The book 'It's Perfectly Normal' is obscene and offensive to Christians."

American Life League's second video report exposes the contents of the book "It's Perfectly Normal." Recently, a Washington State Prison rejected a fundraising letter that included censored images from the book for being "sexually explicit" and "obscene."

American Life League released the report as a part of its continuing effort to educate the public on Planned Parenthood's activities.

"This video report is just the beginning," said Sedlak. "We will continue to use this new media to expose the nation's largest abortion chain and we call on Christians across the nation to join us in putting a stop to tax payer funds for Planned Parenthood."

Four facilities in Barcelona were being searched, said a Civil Guard official in the city who could not be identified named under rules barring his name from being published. The official would not say what illegal activity the clinics were suspected of doing.[..]

The raids were ordered as part of an investigation that began following a complaint by an anti-abortion group called E-Cristians, the Civil Guard official said.

That complaint was filed in January after Danish television broadcast a documentary in which the gynecologist who runs the four raided clinics, Dr. Carlos Morin, was filmed offering to perform an abortion on a female journalist posing as being nearly seven months pregnant, said Pablo Molins, a lawyer for E-Cristians.

Lori Vance went against the doctors' wishes and saw her pregnancy through to birth.

Now on her daughter's sweet sixteenth birthday, the family is celebrating her triumphant life.

The Vance family told News Channel 11 that a fatal disorder isn't always a death sentence.

At 16-years-old, one of the hardest decisions for Donna Joy Vance is what to wear.

Sitting on the couch with her mother, Donna blushes over a TV crush. "We're celebrating Donna Joy's 16th birthday,� Lori Vance Said. �It's a special day because it's a day the doctors and so-called experts way back when said would never come to be."

At seven months into the pregnancy, doctors realized that Donna Joy had a brain disorder called Holoprosencephaly, or HPE.

Physicians told Lori Vance that her child would be completely blind, likely deaf, likely born with no face, no ability to move limbs or suck and swallow.

"Basically, everything that makes you a human being was going to be missing," Vance told News Channel 11. "They wanted to terminate the pregnancy because they said she was going to die anyway," Vance said.

Vance refused.

She was determined to give Donna Joy a chance. "Even if it was only for a few minutes�to give her some dignity, wrap her up in a pretty blanket. Say �I love you� and let her go," Vance said.

But mother and child never had to say goodbye.

Donna Joy is beating the odds.

While the pre-natal studies on Donna Joy's brain were accurate, her functions have surpassed expectations.

"She didn't read the book on this disorder," Vance said. "No one told her she couldn't do these things. So she does them anyway."

Among Donna Joy's accomplishments: Special Olympics track medals, modeling, singing and beauty pageants.

54% of respondents believe pregnancy termination should be allowed when the health of the mother is at risk.

In addition, more than a third of respondents agree with authorizing an abortion if the pregnancy is the result of rape or if the baby has a serious defect. Less than one-in-four respondents would consent to pregnancy termination when the woman does not want to have the child, when the couple does not want to have the child, or when either the woman or the couple are under difficult economic conditions.

There was online discussion about special Chinese herbs being sold in East London.

A BBC undercover reporter posing as an illegal immigrant visited several Chinese herbal shops, saying she was 6 weeks pregnant.

The third one she went into, the Shanghai Herbal and Acupuncture Centre on Kingsland Road in east London, offered to help her.

It was clear from the start that the staff - Dr Shen and Dr Wang - knew what they were doing was wrong.

"You come in this shop, you are lucky. Do you understand. My boss does't like me to do this treatment, my boss thinks it is a risk. So my boss doesn't know. You understand?" the reporter was told.

They first sold her a herbal remedy for £40- a mixture to drink three times a day to start a miscarriage.

When a man is enslaved, his inalienable right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness has been violated. Yet, the slave can be set free, his rights restored, and he will be once again made whole.

This does not hold true for the human child that has been aborted. Once the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has been interrupted, there can be no righting of the wrong. The child is dead and no one has the power to change anything.

You see, there never was any justification to declare that a child in gestation was devoid of personhood. The question of when a human child becomes a person should never have been a serious question, because there is never a moment in time, from conception through to the end of a human life that the entity is anything but a human being.

For the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, Planned Parenthood of West and Northern Michigan (PPWNM) lost more than $700,000, or a fifth of its $4.2-million budget. The agency's CEO Katherine Humphrey called the funding cut "shortsighted on the part of the government."

The cut "reduces our ability to provide vital reproductive health care and family planning services to women and men who otherwise have little to no access to such health-care services or the ability to pay for them," Humphrey stated.

"This is particularly distressing since Planned Parenthood health centers like ours have become the safety net for an increasingly large portion of society -- and our safety net now has some serious holes," she said.

Rhoades responded via email: "Governor Romney does not believe that abortion legislation should punish women who have abortions. Governor Romney recognizes that we must be sensitive to both lives involved in these situations, the unborn child and the mother.

"The people who should be held accountable for violations of this nature," Rhoades said, "are the people who perform an illegal abortion, the penalties of which could include anything from disciplinary action to incarceration."

And that's not all. Federal Health officials are offering to train teachers to give sex education and offering condoms to pupils. And the Health Ministry wants men to take more responsibility and is offering free vasectomies.

The problem with this is that laws prohibiting behavior but failing to punish offenders lack the indispensable leg that gives solidity to a three-legged stool. Such laws are like playthings for surrealist painters, whose license to depict unreality is not questioned. The result is a kind of moral confusion that inhibits meticulous thought.

"[I]t is a matter of great concern that the globalised secular culture is exerting an increasing influence on local communities as a result of campaigns by agencies promoting abortion," said the Pope in order to stress the importance of family life. "This direct destruction of an innocent human life can never be justified, however difficult the circumstances that may lead some to consider taking such a grave step."

"When you preach the Gospel of Life," he said, "remind your people that the right to life of every innocent human being, born or unborn, is absolute and applies equally to all people with no exception whatsoever."

Because of such a view, the "Catholic community must offer support to those women who may find it difficult to accept a child, above all when they are isolated from their family and friends," and "the community should be open to welcome back all who repent of having participated in the grave sin of abortion, and should guide them with pastoral charity to accept the grace of forgiveness, the need for penance, and the joy of entering once more into the new life of Christ."

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, saying the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

"It's the logic of the Civil War," Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. "If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong."

"For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can't simply have 50 different versions of what's right," he said in an interview on Fox News Sunday.

The couple, Dimitri and Vavara Artamkin, decided to come to Britain when doctors repeatedly refused to handle the quintuplets' delivery unless the couple agreed to abort at least two of their unborn children. They are Russian Orthodox and reject abortion as immoral.

"Our families are very religious people - Varvara's father is an archpriest - and the church teaches that abortion is murder. Varvara and Dimitri wanted all their babies and they would not agree to such a condition," Dimitri Artamkin's grandmother told Britian's Daily Mail.

Assistant Smith County District Attorney Amanda Dillon said Cook took the victim over to his house and assaulted her because he didn't want the baby she was carrying. He had three children and didn't want another, she said.

"If you won't get an abortion, then I'll beat it out of you," the victim reported Cook telling her as he beat her in the stomach, Ms. Dillon said. Cook choked her, slammed her down, pushed her into a door and held a handgun to her head, threatening to kill her if she didn't get an abortion, she told the jurors during closing arguments.

There is no constitutional right to abortion. Neither the federal nor state Constitution mentions it, much less prohibits its regulation. The reason given by judges for the permanent encasement of abortion in our midst is "privacy," a concept so amorphous that you only know what it is when a court says what it is. The extreme subjective nature of the concept disqualifies it as a candidate for the rule of law.

Privacy is not mentioned at all in the federal Constitution. The U. S. Supreme Court found it in the "emanations" and "penumbra" of the document. In other words, in outer space. To be a constitutional lawyer you apparently need a telescope, but only for privacy since the U. S. Supreme Court has not found it necessary to gaze at the sun to discover anything else since it discovered privacy there. Privacy was added to the Alaska Constitution in 1972 without defining the term. Most of us understand it to mean "don't peek." The Legislature that proposed the amendment actually thought it was dealing with informational privacy. The open-ended creativity of the judiciary was not anticipated.

Those who support abortion rights say their poll found that 52% are against having another statewide vote on an abortion ban.

They add that 75% favor reducing abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies through education and affordable birth control.

Abortion opponents say their poll found that 55% of South Dakotans oppose abortion, and 30% believe it should be legal only in cases of rape, incest or to save a woman's life.

"The right to life is our most important fundamental right, and it should be defended vigorously and absolutely," Broun told LifeNews.com.

"From a medical and scientific basis, there is no doubt that human life begins at fertilization," the lawmaker added. "My legislation would ensure that, as a matter of law, unborn children are correctly determined to be 'persons' and are provided Constitutional protections under the 14th Amendment."

Dr. Tammie Downes is under investigation for professional misconduct after she said in an interview with the Daily Mail that she had been instrumental in helping many women patients decide to continue to carry their children to term.

In the Daily Mail interview, Dr. Downes said she asked women in crisis pregnancies, "What would have to change to make you see things differently? What would help you to see this baby as good news and not bad news?"

For defying the abortion-ideology that prevails in the British medical establishment, Dr. Downes is under investigation by the General Medical Council and may lose the right to practice medicine. The Guardian newspaper reported that the investigation was begun after a complaint by "a practising doctor involved in the pro-choice movement" accused Downes of breaching the GMC's Good Medical Practice Guidelines.

Downes responded that she had let her personal feelings about abortion influence her relationship with patients. She told The Observer, "I don't try to persuade anybody. I give them the facts and allow them space to think through the decision that they are making. It has to be the mother's choice. I have no right to make that choice for them."

"But I do think it's my duty as a doctor to help a woman make that choice," she added. She said that about one third of women change their minds about abortion after seeing her.

Colorado for Equal Rights will now begin gathering the 76,000 signatures required to put this issue on the November Ballot. This Constitutional Amendment will redefine the term "Person" in three parts of the Colorado Constitution to mean from the moment of fertilization.

From the start, Cierra - the Dorins have come to call her CeCe - needed more than average care and attention. Born with a congenital heart defect, not an uncommon condition for children with this chromosome disorder, the adoption specialists prepared the couple for the rigors of raising a special needs child.

The first month they had her, CeCe needed heart surgery. The Dorins wanted her to be baptized before the surgery. At the time the birth mother was missing, so they sought and received permission from a judge.

Following the successful operation, CeCe began physical therapy. At nine months she still could not raise her head and physical therapy continued. At 13 months, three-times-a-week speech and occupational therapy sessions began.

During this time, CeCe's birth mother ended up in prison on drug-related charges. The Dorins wrote to her and sent photos of her baby - safe, sound and cherished in her foster home. They learned a little about the woman through this correspondence, including the fact that she had five other daughters. In May 2006, in part Katy believes because of the kindness they showed her in letters, CeCe's birth mother relinquished rights to her and three months later the Dorins adopted her.

Katy said of the birth mother: "She's a gift from God for us. She gave us this precious baby."

The Dorins were fully prepared for parenthood. Tom is a locomotive engineer with Canadian National and spends considerable time away from home on the rails. Katy is a certified medical assistant and left her job at her brother’s chiropractic practice when CeCe arrived to be a stay-at-home mom.

At first the couple's parents and siblings were kind but less than encouraging.

"They were worried that we didn't know what we were getting into," Katy said. "They thought we were biting off more than we could chew."

The state channeled them into support programs; the most essential was the Birth-to-Three of Douglas County. Katy and Tom took advantage of the resources and learned all they could about Down syndrome. Their family’s initial skepticism passed quickly and CeCe's new relatives are now fully committed and supportive.

In the meantime CeCe is thriving. She started crawling at 17 months and walked at 23 months.

"That's very young for a Down's baby," Katy said. "Something inside of her makes her want to do (challenging) things."

"The child I aborted would be 28 today," she said. "I thought at the time it (fetus) was only six weeks old and just 'a blob,'" Thomas said.[..]

"I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. I wanted to die," Thomas said.

In an injunction signed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton said pharmacists can refuse to sell the morning-after pill if they refer the customer to another nearby source. Pharmacists' employers also are protected by the order.[..]

Two pharmacists and a drugstore owner sued the state in July over the new rule, saying it violates their civil rights. They asked the judge to halt forced Plan B sales while the lawsuit is in play.

"On the issue of free exercise of religion alone, the evidence before the court convinces it that plaintiffs ... have demonstrated both a likelihood of success on the merits and the possibility of irreparable injury," Leighton wrote.

The injunction effectively sets up a so-called "refuse and refer" system, allowing pharmacists who personally oppose Plan B to send customers to another pharmacy.

Superior Court Judge David Lee sentenced Latoya Lequisha McGill, 21, to a year of probation, 50 hours of community service and counseling. He gave her credit for 28 months she spent in jail awaiting trial.

As part of the deal, Union County District Attorney John Snyder agreed to drop a first-degree murder charge.

In June 2005, a group of teenagers found a baby floating in a creek across the street from McGill's home off Steele Street in Monroe. The umbilical cord was still attached, according to the autopsy report.

At the time, McGill's family said they didn't know she was pregnant. It's not clear whether McGill knew.

According to a statement she gave Monroe police, McGill, then 18, was in the shower when she noticed blood. "I jumped out of the shower," she wrote. "The baby was already coming out."

She was alone in the house when she gave birth on the bathroom floor, she wrote.

"I didn't know what to do, I couldn't think."

According to her statement, she took the baby across the street, but didn't put it in the creek. She went back later, but couldn't see the baby, she wrote. "I was scared I didn't tell anyone."

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision released Tuesday, agreed with a lower court judge that Matthew Dubay's suit was frivolous.

Dubay, 25, had said ex-girlfriend Lauren Wells knew he didn't want to have a child and assured him repeatedly she couldn't get pregnant because of a medical condition.

He argued that if a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood.

U.S. District Judge David Lawson in Bay City disagreed, rejecting Dubay's argument that Michigan's paternity law violates the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause because it didn't extend reproductive rights to men.

AB-34 was introduced by Assemblyman Anthony Portantino in honor of his young neighbor who was diagnosed with leukemia several years ago. After an experimental transplant of umbilical cord blood, all traces of her leukemia disappeared.

When Portantino saw that the transplant could save lives, he made two vows: first, if his wife ever gave birth again, he would donate blood from the umbilical cord, and second, if he ever had the authority, he would push to expand cord-blood storage.

The bill will require the creation of the Umbilical Cord Blood Collection Program and will create a special fund for federal money and donations to public cord blood banks.

Portantino's goal is to create a genetically diverse supply of cord blood in California to improve the prospects for thousands of Americans who die each year while waiting for a suitable blood match.

AB-34's companion bill SB-962, which supports the research of umbilical cord blood research, will also take steps to inform mothers about options for donating cord blood.

For Stephanie Hoffmeier, it came down to believing in a power higher than a school system.

With prayer, persistence and a lawsuit against the Stafford County schools, the 16-year-old recently succeeded in starting what might be the region's only antiabortion club in a public high school. The Pro-Life Club, which attracted about 20 people to its first gathering, also promotes teen sexual abstinence as well as opposing abortion. Hoffmeier said her legal fight was a matter of equity.

"We just wanted the same rights as other clubs," Hoffmeier said in an interview last week at her Fredericksburg home. "It's not a radical thing to expect equal treatment."

Asked why she started the club, Hoffmeier said: "I feel God has put it on my heart for a pretty long time."

The Weitz Co., a nationwide construction entity hired to build Planned Parenthood's newest mega-abortion clinic in Denver, has listed United Airlines as the property owner on city permits for work on the 52,000-square-foot project, documents assembled by pro-life activists reveal.

Officials for the Weitz Co. declined to respond to WND's request for comments. But both Denver and United Airlines confirmed that the property was owned by United, then sold to a company set up by Planned Parenthood in January 2007.

United's Megan McCarthy issued a terse: "United Airlines sold the building in question to a real estate firm on January 11, 2007. We do not own this property."

And Sarah Moss, with the city, said her initial inquiries showed United sold the property to Fuller 38 LLC at that time.[..]

According to documentation from Jill Stanek as well as leaders of Colorado Right to Life, in Denver Planned Parenthood set up a front company called Fuller 38 to assemble its mega-clinic. But the permits obtained by the Weitz company from the city of Denver listed United as the property owner.

Dr. Susan Wicklund took her first step toward the front line of the abortion wars when she was in her early 20s, a high school graduate with a few community college credits, working dead-end jobs.

She became pregnant. She had an abortion. It was legal, but it was ghastly.

Her counseling, she recalls, was limited to instructions to pay in advance, in cash, and to go to the emergency room if she had a problem. During the procedure itself, her every question drew the same response: "Shut up!"

Determined that other women should have better reproductive care, she began work as an apprentice midwife and eventually finished college, earned a medical degree and started a practice in which she spends about 90 percent of her time on abortion services. Much of her work is in underserved regions on the Western plains, at clinics that she visits by plane.

In her forthcoming book "This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor" (Public Affairs), Dr. Wicklund describes her work, the circumstances that lead her patients to choose abortion, and the barriers - lack of money, lack of providers, violence in the home or protesters at clinics - that stand in their way.

But she said her main goal with the book was to encourage more open discussion of abortion and its prevalence.

"We don't talk about it," she said in a telephone interview. "People say, 'Nobody I know has ever had an abortion,' and that is just not true. Their sisters, their mothers have had abortions."

Dr. Wicklund, 53, said that at current rates almost 40 percent of American women have an abortion during their child-bearing years, a figure supported by the Guttmacher Institute, which researches reproductive health policy. Abortion is one of the most common operations in the United States, she said, more common than tonsillectomy or removal of wisdom teeth. "Because it is such a secret," she said, "we lose sight of how common it is."

But Dr. Wicklund acknowledges that abortion is an issue fraught with dilemmas. In the book, she describes witnessing, as a medical student, the abortion of a 21-week fetus. She writes that at the sight of its tiny arm she decided she would perform abortions only in the first trimester of pregnancy. She says late-term abortions should be legal, but her decision means she occasionally sees desperate women she must refuse to help.

Dr. Wicklund describes her horror when she aborted the pregnancy of a woman who had been raped, only to discover, by examining the removed tissue, that the pregnancy was further along than she or the woman had thought - and that she had destroyed an embryo the woman and her husband had conceived together. And she describes the way she watches and listens as the women she treats tell why they want to end their pregnancies. If she detects uncertainty or thinks they may be responding to the wishes of anyone other than themselves, she says, she tells them to think it over a bit longer.

On the other hand, Dr. Wicklund has little use for requirements like 24-hour waiting periods, or for assertions like those of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said in a recent Supreme Court decision on abortion that the government had an interest in protecting women from their own decisions in the matter.

"It's so incredibly insulting," Dr. Wicklund said in the interview. "The 24-hour waiting period implies that women don't think about it on their own and have to have the government forcing it on them. To me a lot of the abortion restrictions are about control of women, about power, and it’s insulting."

Dr. Wicklund said she would put more credence in opponents of abortion rights if they did more to help women prevent unwanted pregnancies. Instead, she said, many of the protesters she encounters "are against birth control, period." That is unfortunate, she said, because her clinic experience confirms studies showing that emphasizing abstinence rather than contraception may cause girls to delay their first sexual experience for a few months, but "when they do have intercourse they are much less likely to protect themselves with birth control or a condom."

According to the Guttmacher Institute, about a quarter of pregnancies in the United States end in abortion. Dr. Wicklund says that is why she believes far more people favor abortion rights than are willing to admit it in polls. For example, she said in the interview, an abortion ban that seemed to have wide support in South Dakota was put to a vote and "when people got behind those curtains and nobody was watching it was overwhelmingly defeated. Unfortunately, people are not willing to say what they really think."

One of these people might be a woman she recognized as one of the protesters who regularly appeared, shouting, outside a clinic where she worked. Only now the woman was in the waiting room, desperate to end an unwanted pregnancy. Dr. Wicklund performed the procedure.

And then there is Dr. Wicklund's maternal grandmother, a woman she was afraid would disapprove of her work. But it turned out that she had a story of her own. "When I was 16 years old, my best friend got pregnant," is how the story began. Her friend turned to her and her sister for help. They did the only thing they could think of - putting "something long and sharp 'up there,'" according to the book. The girl bled to death, and the cause of her death was kept secret.

"I know exactly what kind of work you do," the grandmother told Dr. Wicklund, "and it is a good thing." One question Dr. Wicklund hears "all the time," she said, is how she can focus on abortion rather than on something more rewarding, like delivering babies.

"In fact, the women are so grateful," Dr. Wicklund said in the interview. "Women are so grateful to know they can get through this safely, that they can still get pregnant again."

"It is one of the few areas of medicine where you are not working with a sick person, you are doing something for them that gives them back their life, their control," she added. "It's a very rewarding thing to be part of that."

"Discussions of morals and matters of conscience are admirable, but should not come into play when subjective beliefs conflict with objective medical decisions," said state Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, a bill sponsor.

To the men/boys out there who are even thinking of having sex with a woman/girl, if you do not have a condom, quite frankly you are showing little respect for your female partner. Do you really wish to get a call from them saying, "I am pregnant, now what?" Are you ready to be a father or at least hold her hand should she choose to have an abortion? Or will you run? If you run, you are beyond contempt.

In an age where people love to jump on the high horse of this human rights issue or that, surely we should defend the rights of the most fragile among us, the truly voiceless in our midst.

We talk about human rights, but where is the right in this: we kill unborn babies while we fight to save forest trees?

When doctors found that Gabriel was weaker than his brother, with an enlarged heart,and believed he was going to die in the womb, his mother Rebecca Jones had to make a heartbreaking decision.

Doctors told her his death could cause his twin brother to die too before they were born, and that it would be better to end Gabriel's suffering sooner rather than later.

Mrs Jones decided to let doctors operate to terminate Gabriel's life.

Firstly they tried to sever his umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply, but the cord was too strong.

They then cut Mrs Jones's placenta in half so that when Gabriel died, it would not affect his twin brother.

But after the operation which was meant to end his life, tiny Gabriel had other ideas.

Although he weighed less than a pound, he put up such a fight for survival that doctors called him Rocky.

Astonishingly, he managed to carry on living in his mother's womb for another five weeks- until the babies were delivered by caesarean section.

AB 427, the Coercive Abortion Prevention Act, passed the Republican-controlled Assembly 65 to 32, with all 52 Assembly Republicans and 13 Democrats voting for the legislation.

State Rep. Mark Gundrum, R-New Berlin, and state Rep. Pat Strachota, R-West Bend, authored the Assembly version of the bill.

Under current Wisconsin law, a woman must give voluntary and informed consent before an abortion is performed. The bill would require a doctor to make sure the consent is indeed voluntary and not coerced, providing women with information on domestic abuse services if needed.

State Sen. Carol Roessler, R-Oshkosh, co-sponsored the bill and said she hopes it will pass the Democrat-controlled Senate in a bipartisan fashion, the way it passed the Assembly.

"Anyone who coerces someone into an abortion absolutely needs to be held accountable," Roessler said.

Roessler said the legislation is needed to protect women from the financial or emotional abuse that could be used to force someone to undergo an abortion.

The official NHS statistics show this was a pattern mirrored across Scotland, where 394 of 678 pregnancies were terminated. The number was highest in the Lothians, just ahead of Glasgow where 64 of 122 pregnancies resulted in an abortion among under-16s.