The issue came to a head this summer when the ObamaCare abortion pill mandate was scheduled to go into effect. The mandate forces employers to provide health insurance coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. And many employers are compelled to provide these in spite of their sincerely held religious beliefs to the contrary.
Here are five reasons why the ObamaCare abortion pill mandate should concern you:

1. If you are an employer, you may be forced to pay for health insurance that provides abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization whether it violates your religious beliefs or not.
2. If you are an employer and provide health insurance but refuse to include abortion pills, you may be fined $100 per employee per day.
3. If you are an employee where your conscience about abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization was previously respected, you may now be forced into a health plan that violates your religious beliefs.
4. If you are an employee who refuses coverage, you will be fined the greater of either the cost of the plan or 1% of your salary for the first year, 2% of your salary the second year, and 2.5% each year after that.
5. Finally, you should be concerned that Planned Parenthood helped craft the mandate and applauded the abortion pill mandate’s provisions. This is not surprising when you consider Planned Parenthood is the largest provider in America’s abortion industry.            (read more)

Following a decision by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor denying Hobby Lobby’s request for an exemption from the Obama administration’s HHS mandate, the Christian retail company said it will defy the mandate.
As LifeNews reported, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has refused to act favorably on an emergency appeal Hobby Lobby stores filed to stop enforcement of the HHS mandate against it.
After a federal court denied a request to temporarily stop enforcement of the abortion pill mandate against the Christian-operated business Hobby Lobby, it took its HHS mandate lawsuit to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor denied its request to block the mandate and the millions of dollars in fines it will be subjected to starting January 1 for not complying.
“It is by God’s grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured,” said David Green, founder and CEO. “Therefore we seek to honor God by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.”

(read full article)

(article by Melissa Ohden)     Just like these 491 children in Canada, we were meant to simply be another number, a statistic.  But we were, and we are, someone’s child, someone’s grandchild, someone’s cousin, someone’s niece or nephew, someone’s sibling, just as the 491 survivors in Canada are.  The fact that they were aborted and left to die may have rendered them lifeless and nameless, but it doesn’t take away the truth that they were a child who survived a terrible circumstance and suffered a terrible death. 

In a strongly worded judgment a federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit from the Archdiocese of New York against the Obama administration’s HHS mandate may proceed.

The Obama administration had argued that the archdiocese’s lawsuit was premature, since the administration may still make adjustments to the mandate that would stop it from having any effect on the archdiocese.
After announcing the mandate in February, the Obama administration had announced a “safe harbor” that would prevent the mandate from applying to certain religious employers until August 2013.

However, Judge Brian Cogan slapped down the “safe harbor” argument, saying, “the First Amendment does not require citizens to accept assurances from the government that, if the government later determines it has made a misstep, it will take ameliorative action.”
“There is no, ‘Trust us, changes are coming’ clause in the Constitution,” said the judge. “To the contrary, the Bill of Rights itself, and the First Amendment in particular, reflect a degree of skepticism towards governmental self-restraint and self-correction.”

The judge observed that the archdiocese is preparing for the possibility of millions of dollars in damages should the mandate take effect. He also pointed out that the rule was announced 10 months ago and that “the Departments have had ample opportunity to enact a meaningful change to the Coverage Mandate. The fact that they have not further suggests the likelihood of injuries to plaintiffs.”
(read more)

The treaty needed a two-thirds vote for approval and the Senate voted 61-38 to approve, which fell short of that requirement. Democrats voted for the treaty while most Republicans voted against it.

Heritage Action released the following statement from CEO Michael A. Needham, “We congratulate the Senators who stood for American sovereignty by refusing to ratify this treaty.  While today’s vote is important, it does not mark the end of the fight.  Bad treaties never die in Washington and Heritage Action will remain vigilant.”

Rick Santorum, the former presidential candidate who led much of the fight against the treaty, also praised the vote that defeated it.
“If it weren’t for you, the U.S. Senate wouldn’t have defeated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ,” he told his supporters by email. “Your petition signatures (over 20,000!), phone calls, emails and tweets about CRPD’s flaws made the difference.”
“Now, that CRPD is defeated, we know that United Nations won’t have oversight of how we care for our special needs kids. This treaty would have given the U.N. oversight of the healthcare and education choices parents with special needs kids make. Had it passed, CRPD would have become the law of the land under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, and would have trumped state laws, and could have been used as precedent by state and federal judges,” he said.

The International Right to Life Federation says pro-life groups oppose this legislation because it leaves open the potential for the international community to permit sterilization or abortion for the disabled. The  terminology, found in Article 25, requires, “free or affordable health care including the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programs.”
(link to full article)

Pro-life advocates are optimistic they can defeat the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities treaty that could open the door to promoting abortion on an international scale.
“The final vote on whether or not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is scheduled for noon on Tuesday, December 4,” says J. Michael Smith of HSLDA.
“We are optimistic that we will have the votes—34 or more—to defeat the treaty. But there is too much at stake to trust to speculation,” he tells LifeNews via email. “So please remember to call your senators today, and then call them again tomorrow morning (before noon). If Senator Toomey (PA), DeMint (SC), Lee (UT), or Paul (KY) are one of your senators please give them a special thanks for leading the charge on this issue.”

ACTION: Contact the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 or go to http://www.Senate.gov to find more specific contact information.
(info. for Senators McCaskill and Bond is on the right of this screen)
(link to read full article)

Figures from Statistics Canada, a federal government agency, show 491 babies were born alive following botched abortions during the period from 2000-2009 and left to die afterwards. The numbers have pro-life advocates up in arms.

Andre Schutten, legal counsel for ARPA Canada, noticed the numbers and blogged about them recently.
(read full article)

The Centers for Disease Control released new national abortion figures this week and the mainstream media has essentially ignored the fact that the number of women dying from legal abortions has doubled.
Americans United for Life President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest called the news of a historic 5% drop in the abortion rate, released by the Centers for Disease Control on the eve of Thanksgiving, “a real cause for giving thanks.”
Nevertheless, the pro-life leader noted that reporting on the new data has not included a more somber data-point:  the number of abortion-related maternal fatalities doubled in 2008, the most recent year data is available.
“The CDC report documents the death of twelve women following their abortion,” said Yoest. “That number is double the deaths reported the previous year and it’s the highest since 1994.”

(link to full article)

The Liverpool Care Pathway has become a checklist for killing. This is what happens when a country allows bureaucrats to control healthcare. 
From the Daily Mail story:
Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies. One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone. Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’…

(read more)