On one snowy Wednesday this month, a student at the University of Mary Washington was manning a table giving out chocolate bars and a message unlike most seen that day at contemporary university campuses.

On St. Valentine's Day at the small Fredericksburg, Virginia liberal arts college, a new student group, Project Plus handed out bars of Hershey's chocolate wrapped in an educational flyer that read, "True Love is worth more than Contraception."

The other side of the wrapper/flyer read, "It makes sense that condoms are handed out today with nothing more than a tiny chocolate kiss. This reflects how little love you can express while using one. Using contraception tells your lover, 'I don't want to share every part of myself with you.'"

The student-led and originated campaign was a response to the annual nation-wide "condom and a kiss" campaign in which college campuses give away a Hershey's Kiss chocolate and a condom and, in some cases, a "healthy hook-up" kit instructing students to practice "safe sex". The group's message and the full-sized chocolate bar emphasized that non-contraceptive sex offers "so much more."

Although the school had shut down classes due to heavy snowfall, all 360 chocolate bars were handed out.

In a speech to a group of experts on pro-life issues within the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against genetic engineering and designer babies. He used the speech to the Pontifical Academy for Life to condemn in vitro fertilization and the use of diagnostic tests to have abortions of babies with disabilities.

"In developed countries, there is a growing interest for the most sophisticated biotechnological research to introduce subtle and extensive eugenics methods in the obsessive search for the 'perfect child'," the Pope said.

He opposed "the spread of artificial insemination and of various forms of diagnosis that tend to ensure its selection."

Joyce Farley grew terrified when she realized her 13-year-old daughter, Crystal, had gone missing on the last day of August in 1995.

When the teen returned home later that day, Farley was shocked to learn the reason for her absence: Crystal had been out having an abortion. Farley didn't even know her daughter was pregnant.

Crystal was a rape victim. The mother of the 19-year-old perpetrator took Crystal to another state for the abortion to avoid parental consent laws in their home state of Pennsylvania. When Crystal developed complications from the procedure, the abortionist's office refused to release medical records to the girl's physician. For Farley, it became a mother's worst nightmare.

Their web page says, "The University of Detroit Mercy (UDM), a Catholic university in the Jesuit and Mercy traditions ... seeks to integrate the intellectual, spiritual, ethical and social development of our students."

Nevertheless, the same "Catholic" University is encouraging its student's to work with abortion agencies such as Planned Parenthood. Their career suggestions have not gone unnoticed and a local Planned Parenthood branch is boasting of having hired a UDM student.

The "Career Education Center" UDM website lists Planned Parenthood as a career opportunity for students. Pointing to the website for Planned Parenthood, the UDM career website suggests that Planned Parenthood "Lists dozens of clinical and non-clinical positions at Planned Parenthood clinics and similar organizations."

.. in addition to links to Planned Parenthood, the Catholic university's website links to the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

The UDM Women's Studies web page lists under "Professional Associations" Planned Parenthood, which UDM describes as the "Best known pro-choice organization in the U.S.". The web page also links to the pro-abortion group National Organization for Women (NOW) which recently failed in its decade long attempt to have pro-life activism outlawed under racketeering laws.

According to "La Stampa" young Valentina suffered a mental breakdown after Judge Giuseppe Cocilovo of the Court of Minors ruled that she must undergo the procedure to kill her child.

Since the abortion, Valentina has been confined to the psychiatric unit of Regina Margherita children's hospital in Turin for wanting to commit suicide.

"You have made me kill, and now I kill myself," Valentina reportedly cried. "I am not crazy; I am only evil like a dog" for what her parents and the court have obliged her to do, she said.

Planned Parenthood Wireless is a new affinity program that allows its supporters to sign up for a mobile phone service and see 10% of their monthly bill go back to the abortion business.

The pro-abortion group will also use customers' monthly bills to include action alerts and information and will provide 30 free minutes of calls every month to encourage its members to talk to friends about abortion issues.

Knitting needles, coat hangers, scissors. It's not pretty. Clinical abortions are the safest and most humane way to go. If it is going to happen anyway, why should it happen with these unsafe, unethical, painful practices that will, no doubt, haunt memories forever?

Sources tell Operation Rescue that Hecht is aware of the case and may be considering prosecuting Tiller in Shawnee County, since the allegedly illegal reports were filed in his jurisdiction. The possibility also exists that there could be felony charges against Tiller as well.

However, Hecht would not be able to prosecute Tiller for committing 15 illegal late-term abortions, the more serious of the charges, because the abortions took place in Sedgwick County.

Dr. Miriam Grossman, who is a psychiatrist at the university's student health service, says that men involved in abortion decisions have become "invisible" to researchers and members of her profession.

Grossman says a sociologist named Dr. Arthur Shostak is about the only researcher to examine how abortion affects men.

Shostak looked into the situation because he and his girlfriend reached the decision to have an abortion when she became pregnant unexpectedly. He was curious to know how similar decisions affected other men.

Shostak surveyed 1,000 men who accompanied their wives or girlfriends to an abortion facility at various spots around the country. He then tracked the men over subsequent years to see how abortion changed their lives.

He found that 80% of the men he surveyed said the trip to the abortion center was the worst day of their lives.

Grossman, speaking with Agape Press, said the number of men who regretted their decision went up over time.

"The number of men who reported that day feeling some guilt and some ambivalence about what they were doing; the number of men who were asked 'Do you think that in the future you might have some troubling thoughts about this ?' - the percentages went up," she explained.

"So a few years afterwards, they were reporting that it was worse than they had anticipated," she added in the AP interview.

Grossman told the news service that her colleagues too readily ignore men's involvement in abortion and how it affects them.

"There is a significant number of people who do have those scars and that painfulness and if we are going to be open to victims of every sort, then we in mental health need to be acknowledging them even if they don't advance a particular ideology," she said.

The girl, from Torino, did not want to have an abortion but the ruling will compel her to do so.

The Italian newspaper La Stampa reports the decision has caused the teenager so much stress she has contemplated suicide and needed to receive psychological help as a result.

The unnamed girl became pregnant after have sexual relations with her 15 year-old boyfriend but she decided the best course of action was keeping the baby.

The pregnancy-center clinic, with its new ultrasound machine, has been open only since December, but already the staff can count the women who came in considering an abortion and changed their minds: five women converted, six lives saved, they declare, since one was carrying twins. "They connected," nurse Joyce Wilson says, recalling the reaction of the women who saw the filmy image of their fetus onscreen. "They bonded. You could just see it. One girl got off the table and said, 'That's my baby.'"

"Another got up," Deborah Wood says, "and said, 'This changes everything.'"

Wood is the CEO of Asheville Pregnancy Support Services in Asheville, North Carolina, one of the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S. that are working to end abortion. Hers is the new face of an old movement: kind, calm, nonjudgmental, a special-forces soldier in the abortion wars who is fighting her battles one conscience at a time. Her center helps women navigate the social-service bureaucracy, sign up for Medicaid and begin prenatal care. She helps pregnant girls find emergency housing if their parents threaten to throw them out. Free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds are just the latest service.

"They've been fed these lies, that it's just a bunch of cells that's not worth anything," Wilson says. "But those limbs are moving. That heart is beating. You don't have to say anything ..." She brings out a black velvet box that looks as if it holds a strand of pearls. Inside are four tiny rubber fetuses, the smallest like a kidney bean with limbs, the biggest about the size of a thumb. This is what your baby looks like, she tells clients; this is about how much it weighs right now. "When we do the ultrasound, we ask the girl how she's feeling," Wilson explains. "I ask what she would like to put on the picture for her baby book. One girl put ANGEL. Some put the name they've picked out for the baby." She points to the translucent image on the screen. "One put LITTLE MIRACLE!!!!"

This bright new examining room is as good a place as any to study the anatomy and evolution of attitudes about abortion. About half of American women will face an unplanned pregnancy, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, and at current rates more than one-third will have an abortion by the time they are 45. Since Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973, no other issue has so contorted U.S. politics or confounded values. When does life begin? Who should decide? And is there anything that can be agreed on to make the hard choices less painful? Much of the antiabortion movement remains focused on changing laws, tightening restrictions one by one, state by state. But Wood and her team talk of changing hearts. They are part of a whole other strategy that is more personal and more pastoral, although to some people it's every bit as controversial.

It's easy to support the goal: helping women facing an unplanned pregnancy. What critics challenge are the means, the information these centers give, the methods they use and the costs they ignore. Even among pro-life activists, there's an argument about emphasis: Do you focus on fear and guilt, to make choosing an abortion harder, or on hope and support, to make "choosing life" easier? Either way, the pregnancy-center movement takes the fight over abortion deep inside some of the most intimate conversations a woman ever has.

According to court documents, EMS workers were called to her home in College Hill Courts last September. Krista Bonds, who was 7 months pregnant, was having difficulty breathing, but EMS workers discovered another problem. A police report shows Bonds told an EMS worker she tried to kill her unborn child by drinking bleach. They rushed her to the hospital.

According to this police report, Bonds told the EMS worker that the father didn't want the baby anymore. That's why she drank the bleach and tried to kill it, but the baby was just fine. So was Bonds. Records show she only took 4 sips of the poison, which police said was not enough to harm them.

Now Bonds faces two felony charges: criminal abortion, which according to Assistant District Attorney Rodney Strong, carries a 3 to 15 year sentence, and attempting to cause a miscarriage, a crime that could land her in prison for 1 to 6 years.

On the Fox news program Hannity & Colmes on Monday night he used some pretty strong language against abortion, though he admitted he still is pro-abortion when it comes to whether it should be legal.

"Where I stand on abortion is, I oppose it. I don't like it. I hate it. I think abortion is something that, as a personal matter, I would advise somebody against," he said.

"However, I believe in a woman's right to choose," Giuliani admitted. "I think ultimately you have to leave that to a disagreement of conscience and you have to respect the choice that somebody makes."

Parental involvement laws reduced the minor abortion rate by an average of 1.67 abortions per 1,000 females between the ages of 13 and 17.

Medicaid funding restrictions reduced the minor abortion rate by an average of 2.34 abortions per 1,000 females between the ages of 13 and 17.

The results of two natural experiments indicate that pro-life legislation, not changing values, is responsible for the declines in abortion.

Gov. Pawlenty said the state legislature should join him in promoting the use of adult stem cells, the only ones to help patients.

"We should be for certain types of stem cell research," the governor said. "I do not support wide-open embryonic stem cell research."

Pawlenty said he supports adult stem cell research or studies into methods of embryonic stem cell research that don't involve the destruction of human life. He also said he would be open to funding work using embryonic stem cells but only if they currently exist.

What he won't support is new embryonic stem cell research funding where human embryos will be destroyed using tax dollars.

Julie Makimaa was raised in a devout Christian family and never knew her mother had withheld a wrenching secret from her past.

"I grew up knowing I was adopted, thinking about my birth mother, praying for her," Makimaa said.

When she turned 21 and had her first child, Makimaa tracked down and contacted her birth mother, Lee Ezell, with a surprise phone call.

Ezell recalled the the startling call. "On the end of the phone was this person who said, 'My name is Julie. I live in Michigan, and I thought you'd like to know you're a grandma,'" Ezell said.

When they met for the first time, Ezell told her daughter she was conceived when Ezell was raped by a colleague. "I was a virgin teenager, and I had just become a Christian, and I was so confused. ... Why is God letting this happen to me?" Ezell said.

She wrestled with the idea of having an abortion and said her faith pushed her "over the line" and she decided not to terminate her pregnancy. "I thought, 'I can't do it. If God's real, he's gotta help me out with this one. I'm going to give birth to this baby,'" Ezell said.

Then Makimaa's faith was tested, learning that she was conceived as the result of a rape. "I believe that there is a divine purpose and plan for everyone, and now it was time for me to say, 'Well, do you think that's a nice saying or do you really believe it?'" she said.

Makimaa and Ezell now travel the country and speak out against abortion at churches, conferences and state legislatures - even in cases of rape and incest.

Even within the anti-abortion rights movement, there are some who believe victims of such crimes should not be forced to carry their rapists' babies and should have access to abortions.

Makimaa opposes that exception for women who are raped or who are the victims of incest. "Because I am the exception and I think my life has value," she said. "It wasn't my fault and [I] shouldn't be punished."

A 21-year-old housemaid died of severe bleeding caused by an induced abortion in the house of her employer Monday in Caloocan City.

Senior Superintendent William Macavinta, city police chief, identified the victim as Erlinda Adeva, who lived with the Ruallo family.

Adeva prematurely delivered a five-month-old baby, who was rushed to an undisclosed hospital and was said to be still fighting for his life.

PO3 Generoso Rosales, Substation 4 investigator, said the dying Adeva was found at around 5:30 a.m. on the blood-splattered floor of the bathroom by Rogelio Britos, a tenant in the Ruallo household.

Britos quickly sought the help from doctor Ofelia Morales, a neighbor in the village, but in vain. Morales declared Adeva dead on arrival and cited the cause of death as due to severe loss of blood caused by induced abortion.

Rep. Tom McGillvray, a Billings Republican, is behind the measure the House backed on a 58-42 vote. A final vote on the bill is scheduled for today.

McGillvray said his bill would satisfy the court by clarifying the times when a teenager can get a judicial bypass in cases of parental abuse.

"It's absurd that we put laws in effect that govern many, many decisions for our minors," McGillvray said, referring to parental notification requirements for body piercings and school field trips.

"But then when it comes to an invasive procedure like abortion with physical and mental effects that can be scarring for life, that somehow we think that's different," McGillvray said, according to an AP report.

"Montana should not be a mecca for minor girls coming here for abortions," McGillvray told the legislative committee that approved the measure.

He made a pledge to a gathering of a couple hundred people in South Carolina, an early primary state, that he will do everything he can to stop abortions.

"I will commit to helping end abortion in America," Brownback said at the rally.

"We've got to rebuild the family in America," he added, saying that he favors overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to again have the opportunity to prohibit abortions.

A Bexar County jury took a little more than an hour to convict Adrian Estrada, 24, of capital murder in the December 2005 choking and stabbing death of Stephanie Sanchez.

Estrada, a former youth pastor at El Sendero Assembly of God church, could receive the death penalty. The punishment phase of his trial was set to begin Tuesday.

Sanchez was found dead on the kitchen floor of her family's home. She was three months pregnant at the time of her death, and DNA evidence showed Estrada was the father.

Estrada admitted to police that he choked and stabbed the teen.

Focus on the Family's CitizenLink reported yesterday on the newly-elected governor's surprise Wednesday recommendation that $20 million in grant funding be allocated to research using adult stem cells or those harvested from birth products and amniotic fluid.

"Every day, the miracles of science give hope to Floridians and their loved ones, and this funding will move stem-cell research forward," Gov. Crist said.

The governor’'s announcement comes as the Florida legislature considers two opposing proposals on stem cell research--along with the bill supported by Gov. Crist, another proposal would grant the funding to embryonic research efforts.

The House Health Committee backed HB 1296 on a 9-3 vote on Friday.
The measure doesn't require women to view the ultrasound but requires allowing them to see it if they desire. It also allows her the opportunity to sign a written form saying she was given the chance.

Rep. Roger Hunt, a Republican who was one of the lead sponsors of the abortion ban in the state legislature last year, is the prime sponsor of the ultrasound measure.

He said he proposed it to help give women more information that may encourage them to choose abortion alternatives and carry the baby to term.

"When the pregnant woman sees the sonogram ... she becomes more fully informed about the process, the fact that that unborn child is not a glob of tissue," he told the Associated Press.

"Anybody that's performing abortions has to at least offer it," he added.

The final day at Aradia Women's Health Clinic in Seattle Wednesday had turned out to be a rough one. Privacy was requested; the staffers wanted to mourn. So, too, should everyone who considers women's health and the right to choose as necessary as oxygen.

The shuttering of the First Hill clinic this week means there is one less place in Seattle for women to get abortions. That should make abortion opponents happy.

But it also means that there is one less place for women to receive the kind of health care that could prevent those unwanted pregnancies - and the abortions that no one wishes on anyone.

When it opened in 1972, Aradia was the first in the area to offer women's reproductive services, and one of the first in the country to follow a feminist model: health care by women, for women. (Hence the name: Aradia was the Greek goddess of the healing arts.)

Some 60,000 women passed through the doors over the years to receive treatment, counseling and compassion.

Over time, the clinic became a strong voice in the battle to de-stigmatize the right to choose.

"Inside the clinic, there were services, and outside, we advocated and educated the community on women's rights," said Marcy Bloom, who led Aradia for 18 years before stepping down last May.

The proposal, by Senate Majority Leader Thayer Verschoor, R-Gilbert, would not provide state officials with the names of the women involved.

But in addition to a woman's age, race and marital status - which the state health department already collects - it would mandate that doctors collect and report information such as the reason for the abortion, who referred the woman to the clinic, the weight of the aborted fetus and other intimate personal information about the woman.

A potentially bigger effect of SB 1550 is that it would require doctors to report the same information not just for surgical abortions but when a pregnancy is terminated with drugs such as RU-486 - something state health officials say they don't track now.

Verschoor acknowledged that it might even require reports to be filed when a woman uses the "morning-after" pill. That's because the legislation would define a fetus as any organism beginning at fertilization, and there is some medical evidence that the pill prevents a fertilized egg from implanting.

Theresa Hanntz was honored by the Diocese of Metuchen with a Pro-Vita Award for fighting for her beliefs when the Girl Scouts initially rejected a chastity program she organized at her high school as a project to earn her the Scouts' Gold Award. A compromise was eventually reached and she received the Scouting honor.

Last year, as a senior Girl Scout at Immaculata High School in Somerville and president of the Pro-Life Club, Hanntz wanted to earn her Gold Award by organizing a five-week True Love Waits program at her school.

The program, aimed at freshmen and sophomores, educates students on issues such as chastity, abortion and understanding God's plan for sexuality. The Girl Scouts organization, however, did not feel that such a program was appropriate and denied Hanntz the Gold Award.

But Hanntz, now a freshman at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, remained committed to the project.

"I just became so involved in that issue and it became such a passionate topic for me," Hanntz told The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Metuchen Diocese. "I really wanted to spread the word."

She appealed the Girl Scouts' decision, arguing that the program was voluntary and required parental consent, but the Girl Scouts still felt the topic itself was too controversial.

Eventually, a compromise was reached when Hanntz agreed to rename the project "Implementing a Long-Term Program." She restructured her proposal to focus on organizing a program rather than promoting pro-life issues and finally received the Gold Award.

The True Love Waits program was a success at Immaculata, with 30 students participating. Hanntz said that she received strong feedback from her classmates who took part. Everyone who participated then signed a purity pledge saying they would wait for marriage before engaging in intercourse.

Hanntz first became involved in pro-life work as a freshman at Immaculata. She accepted an invitation to join the school's Pro-Life Club from teacher Kathleen Reid, a 2006 Pro-Vita recipient.

"I'd always been pro-life, but I'd never really known much about it," said Hanntz. "Once I started, everything kind of snowballed."