America by Allen Ginsberg

Boston Globe
(Boston, MA)
Feb 16, 2014, p. K.1

Copyright © Feb 16, 2014 The Boston Globe. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Whose Rights?
By Ruth Graham
• A new wave of fetal-protection measures creates a collision in American law: two sets of rights in one body.
In December of 2010, Bei Bei Shuai was pregnant, alone, and in despair: Her marriage had fallen apart, and her new boyfriend had broken his promise to leave his wife for her. In a desperate moment, the Indiana woman swallowed rat poison in an attempt to commit suicide. She survived; her fetus, delivered by caesarean section, did not. But instead of being sent home to receive mental health care, Shuai was charged with murder for attempting to kill the 8-month-old fetus, which enjoys its own separate protection under Indiana law. In August, she made a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to criminal recklessness after spending more than a year in jail.
Shuai is one of hundreds of women who have found themselves caught in a gray area that appears to be widening in American law. Thanks to a patchwork of state court decision and laws passed to protect pregnant women, punish abusers, promote public health, and discourage abortions, fetuses have steadily been gaining legal rights in American courts--rights that often conflict with those of the women who carry them. The shift has happened despite the failure, even in conservative states, of laws to establish "fetal personhood" outright.
Within the last five years, pregnant women have been arrested under fetal-harm statutes after falling down the stairs and driving with blood-alcohol levels of just half the legal limit. Other women have been forced against their will to undergo caesarean sections, or spend months on bed rest. The laws can affect people well beyond the woman herself, as in the recent Texas case of Marlise Munoz, kept on life support for two months for the purpose of saving her fetus, despite her family 's wishes that she be allowed to die. In Wisconsin last summer, a pregnant woman named Alicia Beltran was taken to court in handcuffs after refusing to take an anti-addiction drug for a painkiller habit she had already kicked on her own. The court initially ignored her requests for a lawyer, but appointed a legal guardian for her 14-week-old fetus.
Lawyer and activist Lynn Paltrow, who is helping represent Beltran in a suit against several officials, coauthored a recent paper cataloging such cases and says she has found more than 700 instances since 1973 of women arrested, detained, or subjected to forced medical interventions because of issues related to their pregnancies. She is part of a group of legal scholars who are starting to raise the alarm about the breadth and meaning of what they see as a largely unappreciated shift in American law.
"What it means is that all fertile women are responsible for knowing at every single moment whether they 're pregnant," says Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. "Because at that moment an entirely different legal system comes into play."
Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who wrote a forthcoming article on the topic for the California Law Review, calls the issue a "new constitutional battlefront," turning pregnant women into unequal citizens in the guise of protecting them.
Though many "feticide" laws were pushed by conservative activists who see them as part of the fight against legal abortion, other fetal-rights cases have emerged in court rulings on laws intended to protect children from drugs, or protect pregnant victims of domestic violence. Whatever the motives, the laws have an effect with no real parallel elsewhere in the law: Essentially, two entities have begun to compete for rights in one body.
Underlying the phenomenon, the scholars are realizing, is an unsolved moral and philosophical question: how to establish protections for pregnant women without creating a second set of rights that can trump their own.
For most of American history, the question of whether a fetus had any standing in court was a simple one: It didn 't. States went along with the common law "born alive" rule, which mandates that fetuses can only be declared legal victims of crimes if they have taken breaths independent of the mother. (Even where abortion was illegal for doctors to perform, it wasn 't considered a crime against the fetus itself.)
This approach followed a view that had existed since at least the 4th century BC, when Aristotle proposed a three-part framework of fetal development: The fetus moves from a "vegetable" stage to an "animal" stage and finally to the "rational" stage, soon after birth. The idea that a fetus is on a continuum, becoming gradually more "person-like" as it progresses from a cluster of cells to a viable entity to a newborn, has made a certain intuitive sense to most human beings throughout history. As political scientist Jean Reith Schroedel points out in her 2000 book, "Is the Fetus a Person?," this is roughly analogous to the Supreme Court 's logic in the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which ruled that the fetus has no independent status in the first trimester. (For the purposes of this article, the term "fetus" is used to describe to describe all stages of gestation.)
But the past 40 years have seen big shifts in both politics and technology that have made the fetus contested ground in American law. The most significant shift was Roe v. Wade, which created a motivated opposition looking for ways to push back against the legality of abortion, in part by creating a political movement around the threatened fetus. Their case has been helped by technology. Medicine has steadily pushed back the date at which a fetus is viable outside the womb; and the ultrasound, which came into wide use in the 1970s, offered the first visual encounter between the born and the unborn. The ultrasound "forces us to come to the terms with similarities between fetuses and born children," said Luke Milligan, a law professor at the University of Louisville who has written about fetal homicide laws and personhood debates.
Since then, fetuses have increasingly been mentioned in laws and court decisions. The term "fetal rights" itself tends to be used by concerned progressives and legal scholars, but the idea 's chief support comes from the antiabortion movement, which sees stronger protection for fetuses as a counterweight to the abortion liberties created under Roe v. Wade. Fetal rights have arisen through two broad mechanisms: new laws that specifically address the fetus and afford it a special legal status; and decisions by judges and prosecutors to interpret existing laws to include fetuses.
The best-known law may be the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, passed in 2004, which recognizes fetuses at any state of development as legal victims if they are harmed or killed during the commission of certain federal crimes. (The law uses the antiabortion movement 's preferred term, "unborn child," rather than "fetus.") States, too, have laws that establish explicit protections for fetuses killed by violence against pregnant women: Today, some form of fetal homicide laws are enforced in 38 states, including Massachusetts.
These laws are often passed after well-publicized tragedies, and usually framed as ways to protect pregnant women from domestic violence. (Murder is the number one cause of death for pregnant women in the United States.) Passage of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, for example, was triggered by the case of the pregnant California woman Laci Peterson, whose murder at the hands of her husband dominated cable news in 2003. But, as critics point out, they aren 't necessarily focused on the victimized women--indeed, not all states exempt pregnant women for harm done to their own fetuses. The ACLU and others have observed that the laws have changed over time: The newer wave of laws, unlike most fetal homicide bills written in the 1980s, are less likely to specify they apply to viable fetuses. In theory, they can apply even to women who don 't know they are pregnant.
Not all the laws involve prosecution. Some allow women to be detained, or let authorities intervene in their medical decisions, for the sake of fetal health. Seventeen states consider substance abuse during pregnancy to be child abuse, and three explicitly give authorities the power to confine pregnant women suspected of substance abuse because they are endangering their future child. In the recent case of Marlise Munoz in Texas, the hospital refused to take her off life support out of fear of breaking a 1999 state law banning the withdrawal of "life-sustaining treatment" from pregnant women.
Even where states have not passed laws that explicitly mention the fetus, courts and prosecutors are often willing to interpret existing laws written to prevent child abuse and drug use to apply to protect the fetus--even if the perpetrator is the woman carrying the baby. In Alabama last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that a law that had been written to protect children from exposure to meth labs could apply to "children" still in the womb. Since then, Paltrow has counted more than 100 cases in which women have been arrested for endangering their fetuses.
Paltrow 's recent paper, published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, shows that the peak of arrests and forced detentions of pregnant women actually came in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That was thanks to a confluence of factors, including the nascent War on Drugs and the panic over "crack babies." Prosecutors began using existing child-abuse statutes to go after pregnant women for "abusing" their unborn children.
That scare has since subsided. But a continuing wave of laws passed in the last decade explicitly address fetal health and fetuses as separate legal victims of crimes. Although these trends originate in different places, and some are more politically motivated than others, they are converging to have significant implications for pregnant women--particularly, Goodwin points out, the low-income women who are more likely to find themselves in the crosshairs of law enforcement. She believes that race and social class are an important part of the story, and the fact that the burden tends to fall on "ignored" women may be one reason the issue has been largely out of the public eye. "We could have had perhaps at least a better, earlier conversation about these issues back in the 1980s," she said, if legal experts had paid more attention to the women involved.
For all the political disagreement about fetal protections, the impulse comes from a widely shared human intuition: that it is morally worse to hurt or kill a pregnant woman, because more than one life--or potential life--is at stake.
The problem comes when this notion intersects with American law: How, exactly, is the legal system supposed to express this extra value? Schroedel 's book points out that pregnant women were granted "deference and protection" in early American law, even though there 's no indication that fetuses were thought of as rights-holding "persons" in the way the contemporary antiabortion movement describes them. The newer idea that the fetus has rights of its own creates the conflict Paltrow and others are worried about: It is a way of acknowledging a special moral status for pregnant women, but one that can sometimes work against them.
In some sense, the legal issue is driven by a deeper question that America has simply not resolved: what a fetus is, and when it acquires a special moral status. Describing it as simply a new part of a mother 's body until birth seems overly simplistic when babies born as small as one pound can now sometimes survive in intensive care. At the other extreme, the notion that a fetus is deserving of full human protections from the point of conception is a theological position that has virtually no legal support. The most extreme expression of this framework--the recent push for state "fetal personhood" laws--has split even antiabortion activists, some of whom point out that legal protections for early embryos would criminalize even some infertility treatments.
Public opinion polls and election results suggest that many Americans take a rather subtle approach to the question of fetal protection. A clear majority favor at least limited rights to legal abortion, but polling at the time of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act also found the vast majority approve of laws making fetal homicide a crime. Expressed as absolutes, those positions would directly contradict each other. To many, it seems, some kind of continuum--perhaps Aristotle 's notion of a fetus gradually acquiring personhood as it grows--still makes sense.
The issue tends to get caught in the calcified rhetoric of the abortion debate, and some see a missed opportunity there--a chance to grapple with an unresolved national question of deep moral significance. "It 's something there hasn 't been sufficient reflection on," says Milligan, who has written scholarly work on the apparent philosophical inconsistencies in our current legal regime.
"It has become this conundrum, this intersection of human rights," said Milligan. If progressives have been slow to move on an issue that has already animated the right, he also points out there 's a reason: It is progressives who have historically pushed to expand civil rights, yet who now find themselves concerned about the expansion of rights to fetuses. "It 's incumbent on modern progressives to focus on the intersections of those rights, and figure out how best to mediate those conflicting rights."
Goodwin, whose book "Policing The Womb: The Politics of Reproduction" will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year, would like to see new legal arguments developed, acknowledging the value of pregnancy by focusing on the dignity and rights of pregnant women rather than by creating a new status for the fetus. So far, however, such arguments have yet to emerge into the legal mainstream.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground is changing yearly, and in some ways the states seem to be moving in different directions. New Jersey 's Supreme Court recently ruled that child-protection services don 't have jurisdiction over pregnant women, implying the fetus is not a "child"; North Dakota voters will weigh in on a restrictive new "fetal personhood" amendment in November. As for the pregnant women themselves, what they can expect on their own behalf seems ever more elusive.
Ruth Graham, a writer in New Hampshire, is a regular contributor to Ideas.
Citation:
Graham, Ruth. "Whose Rights?" Boston Globe: K.1. Feb 16 2014. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .

Newsweek
Vol. 160, No. 2
Jul 2, 2012, n.p.

Copyright © 2012 Newsweek Inc. Usage: May not be sold, electronically stored, or reproduced in any form without prior written permission of Newsweek Inc. All commercial uses are prohibited. All rights reserved.
War of the Wombs

By Abigail Pesta
It 's an awkward moment at the Cheesecake Factory for Keith Mason. Over dinner in Denver recently, his wife, Jennifer, mentions she 'll be giving birth to their fourth child in August. Mason, a clean-cut guy with the unflappable air of a college quarterback, suddenly flaps. "Wow," he says. "August? I guess I 've been busy."

The couple laughs. In the four years since Mason launched the pro-life group Personhood USA, he has been crisscrossing the country to convince voters that the best way to overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling that legalized abortion, is to define human embryos as people from the moment of fertilization. The group has helped spark 22 "personhood" bills and ballot initiatives; while none has passed, in each ballot vote on personhood, the margin of defeat has declined. His group is now collecting signatures for ballot efforts in Colorado, Ohio, and Montana for the November elections and in Florida for 2014. "Wait and watch us grow," he says confidently. "We 're like a weed."

Personhood efforts have existed for decades, but they have never taken hold in the public imagination the way Mason 's work has. Nor have they been so present in the pro-life discourse. "They 're saying out loud what many anti-choice activists believe but don 't say upfront--they want to ban abortion in all circumstances," says Donna Crane, a policy director at the advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice America. "In some ways, it 's the more honest conversation to have." And it has gathered supporters in this election season who include Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry. (Mitt Romney has demurred, but Mason says he is "hammering away" at the nominee.)

Mason, the man at the heart of the maelstrom, is part preacher, part hipster. A charismatic, green-eyed 31-year-old, he tools around town on a vintage motorbike, loves the metal band Deftones, and peppers his speech with gee-whiz phrases like "cool stuff, man" and the occasional biblical teaching. He, his 29-year-old wife, and his 34-year-old legal counsel, Gualberto Garcia Jones (who wears a backward pageboy cap and is also a sculptor), hope their youth will help recruit others like them to the team.

Pensive and pretty with long brown hair and dark eyes, Mason 's wife, Jennifer, is the group 's communications director. Her pro-life affinity started when she was a girl in California and learned that her mother had had an abortion; she became a full-fledged activist as a teenager, after seeing a graphic image.

Mason 's awareness of abortion also began early on. Growing up in an evangelical family in Aurora, Colo., he found a postcard wedged in the pages of his mother 's Bible showing "a little boy with his head missing," he says. "I was 8 years old," he recalls today, at the Personhood USA headquarters in a Denver office park. Mason found the abortion photo "deeply disturbing," but didn 't dwell on it. He was young, he jokes, and had extreme skateboarding to think about. Although as a teenager he did protest outside an abortion clinic, he went to college to study business and heating and air conditioning, and planned a career in real estate.

The turning point came after graduation, in 1999, when he and three friends took off on a summer motorcycle trip to California. His friends started "getting stoned and drinking a lot while on their bikes," and he ditched them. Finding himself at loose ends, he went to an abortion protest, which at least seemed like familiar territory. The rally, packed with young people, made an impression. "I felt like I had a chance to start a career making money, or dedicate myself to serving God."

It took time for Mason to get to personhood. He met his wife while praying outside an abortion clinic; the two married within five months--"Purity was very important to us," he says--and they moved to Kansas to continue their pro-life work. The dominant efforts at the time were incremental: then, as now, activists aimed to contain access to abortion by passing legislation that would curtail abortion clinics or put up roadblocks, like waiting periods and parental consent, for those who have decided to abort. Mason and his wife joined in those efforts.

It was a 2006 campaign in South Dakota to ban abortion outright that got Mason wondering if the efforts to chip away at access were enough. "They were going after the heart of the matter," he says. "I thought, wow, this is amazing." Then in 2007 a young Colorado woman started a personhood ballot initiative, and Mason felt drawn home. He collected 103,000 signatures and got personhood on the state ballot--a first. On voting day, the measure got 27 percent of the vote. The next day, he launched Personhood USA.

Earlier efforts at personhood--in the 1970s and again in 2005--suffered from a lack of support and organization. They also faced a battle within the pro-life community itself. While some groups support defining embryos as legal people, the movement overall has feared that pushing a personhood law toward the Supreme Court is a recipe for judicial disaster. Paul Linton, former general counsel for Americans United for Life, says personhood is "fundamentally flawed," as "no justice on the Supreme Court ... has ever expressed the view that the unborn child is or should be regarded as a federal constitutional 'person. '"

But Mason is a dynamic and energetic organizer who galvanized enough pro-life Coloradans to get personhood on the state ballot again in 2010; it received 30 percent of the vote. More important, it grabbed national headlines and attracted some pro-lifers who came to believe it was a viable political strategy.

Today, his nonprofit group works by connecting with local pro-life activists to spur state ballot initiatives. He says his team has gained more than 80,000 volunteers and more than a million signatures. In 2011 personhood got 42 percent in a ballot vote in Mississippi. This year in Oklahoma, the state Supreme Court blocked a ballot effort, a decision Mason is appealing with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mason 's efforts have kicked up a storm of opposition among women 's-rights activists, who claim such laws would ban birth control as well as in vitro fertilization and stem-cell research, both of which can result in the destruction of embryos.

Mason disputes these claims, saying he does "not oppose contraceptives," but rather methods that "kill a living human being." The copper IUD and the morning-after pill would fit that category, as the FDA says they can prohibit an egg from implanting in the womb after fertilization, though the science behind this has been hotly contested. As for IVF, Mason says it wouldn 't be banned, but "reformed," without specifying how.

Miscarriage could be another flash point, says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. She thinks personhood could put mothers who miscarry under undue scrutiny. Already in 38 states, fetal-homicide laws can put mothers on trial for murder if a fetus dies--starting from the first moment of pregnancy in some states. "There 's no way to give embryos constitutional personhood without subtracting women from the community of constitutional persons," she says.

Mason calls these claims "ridiculous." But, he adds, "I know of cases where a woman that is addicted to crack will have her baby and the state will take the crack baby away because of child abuse and mandate the woman receive treatment--I 'm good with that."

As Mason 's team gathers signatures for the fall ballots in his most ambitious season so far, opponents are bracing for a fight. Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other groups have filed lawsuits and launched extensive publicity campaigns. Personhood is a "formidable presence in every state," says NARAL 's Crane. "If any one of these initiatives passes, it could work its way through the courts. And the courts can 't necessarily be counted on these days to make decisions that will protect women 's health."

Mason is undaunted: "As long as I have arms, I 'm gonna be swinging them."
Citation:
Pesta, Abigail. "War of the Wombs." Newsweek Jul 02 2012: n.p. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
(Pittsburgh, PA)
Oct 30, 2011, p. A.3

Copyright © Oct 30, 2011 Post Gazette Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. 'Personhood ' Amendments a New Tack in Abortion FightBy

Erick Eckholm A constitutional amendment facing voters in Mississippi on Nov. 8, and similar initiatives brewing in half a dozen other states including Florida and Ohio, would declare a fertilized human egg to be a legal person, effectively branding abortion and some forms of birth control as murder.

With this far-reaching anti-abortion strategy, the proponents of what they call personhood amendments hope to reshape the national debate.

"I view it as transformative," said Brad Prewitt, a lawyer and executive director of the Yes on 26 campaign, which is named for the Mississippi proposition. "Personhood is bigger than just shutting abortion clinics; it 's an opportunity for people to say that we 're made in the image of God."

Many doctors and women 's health advocates say the proposals would cause a dangerous intrusion of criminal law into medical care, jeopardizing women 's rights and even their lives.

The amendment in Mississippi would ban virtually all abortions, including those resulting from rape or incest. It would bar birth control methods, including IUDs and "morning-after pills" that prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. It would also outlaw the destruction of embryos created in laboratories.

The amendment has been endorsed by candidates for governor from both major parties, and it appears likely to pass, said W. Martin Wiseman, director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University. Legal challenges would surely follow, but even if the amendment is ultimately declared unconstitutional, it could disrupt vital care, critics say, and force years of costly court battles.

"This is the most extreme in a field of extreme anti-abortion measures that have been before the states this year," said Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal advocacy group.

Opponents, who were handing out brochures last weekend to tailgate partiers before the University of Southern Mississippi football game in Hattiesburg, said they hoped to dispel the impression that the amendment simply bars abortions -- a popular idea in Mississippi -- by warning that it would also limit contraceptives, make doctors afraid to save women with life-threatening pregnancies and possibly hamper in-vitro fertility treatments.

The drive for personhood amendments has split the anti-abortion forces nationally. Some groups call it an inspired moral leap, while traditional leaders of the fight, including the National Right to Life and the Roman Catholic bishops, have refused to promote it, charging that the tactic is reckless and could backfire, leading to a Supreme Court defeat that would undermine progress in carving away at Roe v. Wade.

The approach, granting legal rights to embryos, is fundamentally different from the abortion restrictions that have been adopted in dozens of states. These try to narrow or hamper access to abortions by, for example, sharply restricting the procedures at as early as 20 weeks, requiring women to view ultrasounds of the fetus, curbing insurance coverage and imposing expensive regulations on clinics.

The Mississippi amendment aims to sidestep existing legal battles, simply stating that "the term 'person ' or 'persons ' shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."

No one can yet be sure of how the amendment would affect criminal proceedings, said Jonathan Will, director of the Bioethics and Health Law Center at the Mississippi College School of Law. Could a woman taking a morning-after pill, for instance, be charged with murder?

But many leaders of the anti-abortion movement fear that the strategy will be counterproductive. Federal courts would almost surely declare the amendment unconstitutional, said James Bopp Jr., a prominent conservative lawyer from Terre Haute, Ind., and general counsel of National Right to Life, since it contradicts a woman 's current right to an abortion in the early weeks of pregnancy.

"From the standpoint of protecting unborn lives, it 's utterly futile," he said, "and it has the grave risk that if it did get to the Supreme Court, the court would write an even more extreme abortion policy."

Bishop Joseph Latino of Jackson, Miss., said in a statement last week that the Roman Catholic Church does not support Proposition 26 because "the push for a state amendment could ultimately harm our efforts to overturn Roe vs. Wade."

Conservative Christian groups including the American Family Association and the Family Research Council are firmly behind the proposal.

Randall S. Hines, a fertility specialist in Jackson working against Proposition 26 with the group Mississippians for Healthy Families, said the amendment reflects "biological ignorance." Most fertilized eggs, he said, do not implant in the uterus or develop further.

"Once you recognize that the majority of fertilized eggs don 't become people, then you recognize how absurd this amendment is," Dr. Hines said. He fears severe unintended consequences for doctors and women dealing with ectopic or other dangerous pregnancies and for in-vitro fertility treatments. "We 'll be asking the Legislature, the governor, judges to decide what is best for the patient," he said.

Eric Webb, an obstetrician in Tupelo, Miss., who has spoken out on behalf of Proposition 26, said the concerns about wider impacts were overblown, and that the critics were "avoiding the central moral question."

"With the union of the egg and sperm, that is life, and genetically human," Dr. Webb said.

Keith Mason, president of Personhood USA, said he did not agree that the Supreme Court would necessarily reject a personhood amendment. The ultimate goal, he said, is a federal amendment, with a victory in Mississippi as the first step.
Citation:
Eckholm, Erick. " 'Personhood ' Amendments a New Tack in Abortion Fight." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: A.3. Oct 30 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .

Wall Street Journal
Jan 23, 2012, n.p.

Copyright © 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. All rights reserved.
My Fight for Life
By Rick Santorum
• The other Republican candidates simply check the pro-life box. America needs leadership.
Monday marks the first full day of the 40th year of Roe v. Wade, but together we can make it the decade when Roe is overturned. With a president committed to defending life and appointing originalist judges, we will turn the tide for life and human dignity.

I believe that all life is precious. I know life begins at conception. I know that every person, every child conceived in the womb, has a right to life. I know that life is a right endowed by our Creator, that it is inalienable, laid down in the Declaration of Independence, and should be guaranteed under the Constitution. The right to life is the first right. Without its protection, no other rights matter.

This anniversary is both a day of sadness for the more than 40 million babies who have been killed since Roe v. Wade and a day of hope as more and more Americans embrace a culture of life and as more and more young people march in Washington and around the country in support of life.

The 14th Amendment states explicitly: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The Constitution is clear. The meaning is inconvenient.

I have learned lessons about the value of all life from my children. I grieve for the children lost and for the mothers who have been deceived by a society selling selfishness. I am thankful for the faithful workers around the country who serve at pro-life pregnancy centers providing women honest information and additional choices.

I fought in the U.S. Senate against the tragedy of partial-birth abortion. This debate energized momentum for the culture of life in America. I sat in the Supreme Court during the first oral arguments on the constitutionality of the law designed to stop the heinous practice. It wasn 't until President George W. Bush nominated conservative justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, whose confirmations I helped lead, that the Supreme Court changed its position and upheld the law.

We don 't judge hearts but we do judge records. President Obama 's record of support for abortion is radical and extreme. He stood alone not to defend life but to oppose the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in the Illinois State Senate. He opposed ending the horrific procedure of partial-birth abortion. He supported federal funds for abortion through ObamaCare and told Catholic Charities that there was no room in the inn if they wanted to help women abused by sex traffickers and be pro-life at the same time.

My opponents whisper that they are pro-life, but I fight the battle in the trenches and will continue to do so until every innocent human life in this country is protected. I 've dedicated my life as a husband, father and leader to this cause.

Ron Paul embraces the 10th Amendment but ignores the 14th Amendment when he refuses to support federal protections for the unborn. The Constitution protects not only property rights but people, too. What is liberty without the right to life? The federal courts and the federal government are the last resort for protecting this foundational right.

Mitt Romney 's passion for life was apparently overwhelmed by Democrats when he put Planned Parenthood on the advisory board for RomneyCare and did not fight government-funded abortions while governor of Massachusetts. He was, it seems, too intimidated to support judges who understood the plain meaning of the Constitution on the right to life.

Newt Gingrich has pushed social issues to the back bench. In a pledge to America that the Congress tried to put together in 2010, my phone was ringing off the hook from people who said he went in and told them to keep social issues out of the pledge for the 2010 elections. Do we want a president who talks on both sides or one who is unafraid to put social issues in the forefront where they belong?

Whenever I am confronted with an immoral law that is unjust or harmful to society, I believe I have an obligation to work toward changing it to comport with what is moral. I agree with the Founders that there is a natural law that can be known through the exercise of reason against which the positive or civil law must be measured and, if needed, amended. For decades certain human beings were wrongly treated as property and denied liberty in America because they were not considered persons under the Constitution.

I am disappointed that President Obama, who rightfully fights for civil rights, refuses to recognize the civil rights of the unborn in his country. I am disappointed that the other three Republican candidates in this race for president simply check the box. The unborn need leaders who will stand for life; so does the soul of America.
Mr. Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, is a Republican candidate for president.
Citation:
Santorum, Rick. "My Fight for Life." Wall Street Journal: n.p. Jan 23 2012. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .

RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
(Richmond, Va.)
Oct. 8, 1989, pp. G1+

"Reprinted with Permission, Richmond Times-Dispatch. October 8,
1989."

BILL OF RIGHTS by Wilford Kale
Times-Dispatch state staff

On Sept. 25, 1789, the First Federal Congress meeting in New York, adopted 12 amendments to the new Constitution and offered them to the states for ratification.

Ten would be adopted.

The action of the congressmen was dramatic, coming as it did in the first few months of a government created by a Constitution, which the Congress then quickly sought to amend.

But the heritage of the Bill of Rights goes back to the shadow of the American Revolution. The founding fathers, developing the framework for a new government amid the political strife after the Revolution, had been adamant that personal rights, often ignored by the British king and Parliament, should be specified.

In June 1776 in Williamsburg, as a resolution for independence was being drafted for presentation to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and as a state constitution was being written, Virginians also adopted what would be called the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It was drafted by George Mason.

Following the war, many of the states adopted their own bills of rights. But when the federal convention was meeting to draft a constitution, there was little mention of a bill of rights until the last days of deliberation.

On Sept. 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, just five days before the convention was to close, Mason told the delegates that he wished the Constitution had been prefaced with a bill of rights.

"It would give great quiet to the people," he said, "and with the aid of the state declarations, a bill might be prepared in a few hours."

Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a Mason supporter, made the necessary motion. But Roger Sherman of Connecticut argued that the state declarations of rights were adequate.

Mason responded, "The laws of the United States are to be paramount to state bills of rights."

Still, without much more debate, Gerry 's motion was unanimously rejected.

"Many Federalists considered the eloquent demands of Anti-federal leaders for a bill of rights during the ratification campaign as merely a ruse to cover their opposition to a Constitution which restricted state sovereignty and thereby threatened their political bases," Dr. Kenneth R. Bowling, a historian, wrote recently. "Such a motive cannot be attributed to George Mason...."

The Federalist response to the quest for a bill of rights was the assertion that because all powers not delegated to the federal government remained with the states, there was no need for a federal bill of rights because Congress had no power to interfere with personal liberties.

From Paris, where he was on government assignment, Thomas Jefferson wrote about the proposed Constitution. He found many praiseworthy features, he said, but questioned where the guarantees of personal freedom, such as a free press and freedom of religion, were assured in the state constitutions.

"A bill of rights," Jefferson said, "is what the people are entitled to against every government on Earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest upon inferences."

When the proposed federal Constitution was sent to the states, Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut ratified it without amendments. Massachusetts ratified, but proposed amendments. Pennsylvania and Maryland included no amendments, but minority leaders published them anyway. South Carolina included four amendments. New Hampshire adopted the nine Massachusetts amendments and three of its own on personal liberty.

Thus the required number of states had adopted the Constitution to form the United States of America, but four--Virginia, North Carolina New York and Rhode Island--remained out of the new Union.

Each of these had large Anti-federalist supporters, and their conventions proposed fundamental alterations and amendments.

Virginia 's convention proposed 20 amendments and a separate bill of rights, modeled after Mason 's 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights. New York also proposed a bill of rights. North Carolina did not adopt the Constitution until 1789 after the first presidential election and the adoption of the federal Bill of Rights. Likewise, Rhode Island did not join the United States until 1790.

On the eve of the meeting of the First Federal Congress in 1789, groups of delegates from eight of the 12 state conventions had met and offered 210 amendments to the Constitution. There were many duplications and about 100 separate proposals emerged.

"First and foremost, they sought to alter the balance of power in the new [federal] system in order to make the states more equal with the federal government," Dr. Bowling said. "Secondly, the alterations [amendments] aimed at a pure separation of powers between the judicial, executive and legislative branches, with the latter being dominant."

Left unaddressed was the question of specific protections for personal liberties.

Virginian James Madison, now known as "the father of the Constitution" also might be termed the "political father" of the Bill of Rights, while Mason would be the "intellectual father," Dr. Bowling said.

Credit for the introduction and passage of the proposed amendments that formed the Bill of Rights goes to Madison, who pushed them through a reluctant House of Representatives.

A Federalist, Madison had opposed many amendments, but was converted to the Bill of Rights concept by Jefferson 's pleadings from Paris and by the Anti-federalist sentiments of his congressional district.

Madison had won his House seat by defeating James Monroe, a moderate Anti-federalist. In the campaign, Madison had given his word to support amendments to safeguard all the "essential rights."

Madison first proposed that amendments be considered in May. Then on June 8, he offered several amendments which he felt ought to be woven into the Constitution 's text. Most were related to personal rights and relied heavily on the bill of rights drawn at Virginia 's constitutional convention.

Federalists, however, were not willing to consider amendments. Anti-federalists also did not want to consider rights-related amendments, fearing they would eliminate any opportunity to rein in the powers of the new federal government.

Mason, then a strong opponent of Madison, was still not convinced that the new representative had truly become "the ostensible Patron of Amendments.

"Perhaps some Milk & Water Propositions may be made by Congress to the State Legislatures by Way of th[r]owing out a Tub to the Whale; but of important & substantial Amendments, I have not the least Hope," he wrote on July 31, 1789, while the amendments debate raged in Congress.

Mason 's literary allusion was to Jonathan Swift 's "Tale of a Tub" in 1704 in which Swift describes how sailors encountering a whale that threatened their ship, tossed an empty wooden tub overboard to divert the whale 's attention.

Many saw the rights amendments as the tub to the Anti-federalist whale. Madison bristled at the allusion but begged the House to take up his proposals. Instead, a select committee was appointed to examine them.

"Many law clerks and scholars have searched in vain through the congressional debate over the first 10 amendments for comment on their constitutional or philosophical implications," Dr. Bowling wrote.

"Instead of inspiring rhetoric and thoughtful analysis about the rights of man, they find only political fights: The most important between James Madison of Virginia and his fellow Federalists in the House of Representatives; the most bitter between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists in the House; and, finally, the least divisive between the House and the Senate."

The select committee, composed of one representative from each state, was unsympathetic to the amendments.

The committee tightened some of Madison 's wording, rearranged proposals and narrowed the absolute guarantees of religious freedom and the equal rights of conscience.

According to Dr. Bowling, "[the committee report] gutted Madison 's majestic natural law preamble by omitting the right of the people `to reform or change their government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution, ' and omitted the statement `that all power is originally vested in and consequently derived from the people ' and the list of benefits that people derive from government: enjoyment of life and liberty, acquiring and using property, pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

The removal of that language--the principles of 1776 as put in Mason 's Declaration of Rights and Jefferson 's Declaration of Independence--was a reflection of the ascendancy of the Federalists.

At Madison 's insistence, on Aug. 13 the House went into a committee of the whole to discuss the amendments. The process took six days.

None of the amendments received the necessary two-thirds support in the committee of the whole to gain approval by the full House. Madison was in trouble.

He turned for more votes to his Virginia colleague, President George Washington. In his inaugural address, Washington also had called for the adoption of amendments promoting the rights of free men. The president gave Madison a letter.

Washington said he thought some of the proposals were unimportant, but "not foreseeing any evil consequences that can result from their adoption, they have my wishes for a favorable reception in both houses."

The endorsement was lukewarm, Dr. Bowling noted, but was probably enough to unite House Federalists behind Madison.

In achieving the compromises needed for favorable votes, Madison lost what was left of his preamble and agreed to Sherman 's motion that amendments be placed at the end of the Constitution instead of being woven into it.

"The change set a precedent for isolating amendments, broadened their role in constitutional law, and made it possible to point to a body of amendments known as the federal Bill of Rights," Dr. Bowling said.

On Aug. 20, 21 and 22, the House made only minor changes as it considered the amendments and began adopting some. By the 21st, the Anti-federalists were pushing their alterations in the power of the federal government, but those were defeated.

On Aug. 24 the House sent to the Senate 17 amendments that were little changed from the select committee 's report.

The Senate met in secret. Federalist Sen. William Maclay of Pennsylvania kept an unofficial record of part of the debate. He noted that Sens. Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, Ralph Izard of South Carolina and John Langdon of New Hampshire treated the amendments with contempt.

Anti-federalist Sen. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia reported there was a debate over whether the freedom of speech and freedom of the press sections should be deleted on the grounds that they only tended to encourage licentiousness.

The other Anti-federalist senator from Virginia, William Grayson, was disappointed that Madison 's proposals "affect personal liberty alone," leaving standing what he saw as the other great problems with the federal government arrangement, such as the power of the judiciary and direct taxation.

On Sept. 14, when the Senate completed its amendment work, the 17 articles has been compressed and rearranged as 12.

Madison was upset with the Senate wording on a number of issues, but the House, happy to get the issue behind it, supported the Senate document.

On Sept. 28, 1789, the Congress sent the 12 amendments to the states.

Over the next six months, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania ratified most of the amendments.

Rhode Island, which finally adopted the Constitution in May 1790, adopted the amendments two weeks later. North Carolina followed in November.

Vermont, which had been admitted to the Union on March 4, 1791, during the amendment ratification process, ratified them on Nov. 3, 1791. It became the 10th state to do so, but its admission then meant 11 states were needed to adopt.

So it was left to Madison 's home state of Virginia to provide the vote necessary to add the amendments to the Constitution. Virginia ultimately adopted them on Dec. 15, 1791.

The states, however, did not ratify all 12 amendments.

Rejected were the first two regarding the regulation of the number of members in the House of Representatives and preventing pay raises for members of Congress during their terms of office.

(Two new works were among the source materials for this article: "Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789-1971," by Charlene B. Bickford and Kenneth R. Bowling, and "`A Tub to the Whale: ' The Founding Fathers and Adoption of the Federal Bill of Rights," by Dr. Bowling in the "Journal of the Early Republic.")
Citation:
Kale, Wilford. "Bill of Rights." Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA). Oct. 8 1989: G1+. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May. 2014.

USA TODAY
Nov 7, 2011, p. A.8

Copyright © Nov 7, 2011 USA Today Information Network. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Life Begins at Fertilization
By Gualberto Garcia Jones
Increasingly, the American people are being treated paternalistically by a government, media and public sector elite that stands in direct opposition to our traditional American values.

Using the courts as its instrument, this American elite has emasculated a once independent America.

The Constitution, a document written to prevent tyranny, has, as Thomas Jefferson predicted, become "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please."

No greater example exists of this abuse of raw judicial power than Roe v. Wade, a decision by seven unelected men to impose abortion on all 50 states.

Tuesday, Mississippi will vote on a pro-life constitutional amendment, Initiative 26, that declares that all human beings are persons entitled to the protection of their rights.

Mississippi is a pro-life state, and Mississippi 's leading elected officials are all supporting Initiative 26. This includes the current governor, Haley Barbour (R), and both candidates for governor: Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant (R) and Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny Dupree (D); as well as Attorney General Jim Hood (D), Sen. Roger Wicker (R) and Reps. Alan Nunnelee (R), Greg Harper (R) and Steven Palazzo (R).

This simple amendment has become ground zero in the fight over abortion because it challenges not only the legal foundation of Roe v. Wade -- that the child in the womb is a non-person -- but also the source of the power that has allowed the liberal elite to reshape America in its own image.

As a result, the people of Mississippi have become the target of an unrelenting campaign of scare tactics and doomsday predictions from abortion proponents.

These scare tactics are exposed by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, which concluded in its legal analysis that Initiative 26 will not ban birth control or in vitro fertilization, nor criminalize lifesaving medical treatment or accidental deaths.

To date, 55 million innocent human beings have been killed by abortion. Tuesday, in the sovereign state of Mississippi, men and women will vote to put an end to it in their state by voting yes on 26.
Gualberto Garcia Jones is a director of, and legal analyst for, Personhood USA, a group that opposes abortion and seeks to establish that the legal definition of "person" begins at fertilization.
Citation:
Jones, Gualberto G. "Life Begins at Fertilization." USA TODAY: A.8. Nov 07 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .
Christian Science Monitor
Aug 13, 2011, n.p.
Copyright © 2011, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Abortion Opponents Have a New Voice
By Jennifer Skalka
With an easy laugh and ample charm, Charmaine Yoest doesn 't at all appear to be Public Enemy No. 1 for the pro-abortion rights community. But the foundation of her rising influence – the accessibility of her approach – becomes clear when she settles in for an unexpectedly frank conversation about the stunning 2011 antiabortion legislative juggernaut that she has helped orchestrate.
This mother of five – who is not a physician, attorney, or lawmaker – has set the stage for sweeping antiabortion victories at the state level on the strength of her seeming candor, warmth, and camera-ready smile.
And so, she engages on the question of what animates her interest in advocacy like any smart girlfriend might. She says it was a miscarriage – which came early in her first pregnancy – that rocked her world. The intensity of her sadness caught her by surprise. It rained as she and her husband drove home from her physician 's office, and Ms. Yoest says she felt that heaven wept with her. The experience made her wonder anew how anyone would opt to terminate a pregnancy voluntarily. And it stoked her already fervent belief that a society that presents abortion as an option is putting women in harm 's way.
"We were so excited because it was my first pregnancy," she says. "I told everybody instantly. And within a few days I miscarried. And it was so awful, the whole physical process of going through that."
Yoest, the president and chief executive officer of Americans United for Life, a group that offers 39 pieces of model legislation for state lawmakers and advocates, is one of the key actors pushing a wave of highly restrictive – the other side would say dangerous and illegal – initiatives limiting access to abortion. AUL 's goal is to eat away at the underpinnings of the protections provided by Roe v. Wade – the landmark United States Supreme Court decision that extended the right to privacy to a woman 's decision to have an abortion – not necessarily to challenge it outright. At least not yet.
So far this year, AUL and other like-minded groups have caught their adversaries flat-footed; some 22 states have enacted a record 86 new measures in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual and reproductive health and supports abortion rights.
Just two years after the election of a pro-abortion rights Democratic president, it appears the antiabortion movement has been reborn.
"We were expecting a bad year – we weren 't expecting this bad of a year," says Elizabeth Nash, a Guttmacher public policy associate.
Yoest boasts that 22 of the 86 measures began in some form with AUL guidance. Taken in full, the reforms are sweeping and go much further than bills debated in recent years – like parental notification or consent – around which there might have been some, albeit limited, cross-party agreement, say abortion-rights advocates.
For example, some of the AUL-influenced results this year include:
• A Texas mandate that women seeking abortion undergo a sonogram, hear a description of the fetus from the provider, and wait 24 hours after this exchange before having the procedure.
• Kansas clinic regulations that essentially shutter abortion providers with stringent rules ranging from the temperatures of procedure rooms to the drugs and equipment that must be on hand. A federal judge temporarily blocked this law last month.
• Legislation in several states – including Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Virginia – permitting the exclusion from state health insurance exchanges of companies that allow coverage of abortions.
This flurry of activity comes in large part as a result of GOP victories in 2010 that provided Republicans with control of 21 statehouses and governorships, compared with 11 for Democrats, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Playing against type
But beside the undeniable political advantage, there 's something else afoot, something Yoest embodies. She represents the changing face of the antiabortion movement. No longer are ideologically driven men necessarily the dominant spokesmen.
Despite her career in Republican politics, notable most recently for a stint as communications director on Mike Huckabee 's 2008 presidential campaign, it 's harder to peg Yoest in the traditionally one-dimensional caricature of an antiabortion advocate. She is not shrill, rigid, or somehow provincial in values or experience. She is not a fire-and-brimstone finger wagger, though faith is a centerpiece of her life.
In fact, Yoest has many of the attributes of a feminist – her career is a point of obvious pride and focus, and it has at times also dictated family moves and priorities – though she would strongly insist she has none of the sentiments. She holds a doctorate of philosophy in government from the University of Virginia, a degree she achieved after 10 years of study while raising her children. She is the daughter of two PhDs – a Fulbright-awarded economist father and a mother who specializes in communication theory. She is a breast cancer survivor, a marathoner, and the mother of an athlete on the Junior National World Development Rowing team.
While common ground is elusive in the fight over reproductive freedoms, Yoest 's measured manner is a marked break with those of some of her peers and many fighting in the trenches.
Yoest 's deliberative nature is home grown, a product of a peripatetic childhood experience that required adapting to new locations and schools and attracting new friends. So perhaps it is not surprising that she is the kinder, gentler face of a movement winning not just the legal war but the spin game at the moment.
"It 's not too difficult to imagine that somewhere in some major pro-abortion organization, there 's a bull 's-eye with Charmaine 's face in the middle," says Gary Bauer, Yoest 's former boss at the Family Research Council.
A popular thinker
Yoest was first challenged to dig deep foundations for her antiabortion sensibility at Oxford University in England, where she went to study under conservative ethicist David Cook after serving under Mr. Bauer in the Reagan White House as an intern and staffer.
"I want to be a part of the intellectual discussion defending family issues and life," Yoest says she told Dr. Cook. "He was wholly unimpressed. He said, 'Go write me a paper on why abortion should be legal. ' Apparently, I didn 't do a great job at it. He really helped me focus on where I didn 't understand my whole argument. It changed the whole way I think about the issue. He really challenged me – defend it, defend it, defend it."
Yoest says she learned that her adversaries ' arguments shift ground and divert attention from what she believes is the essential fact: Abortion takes a human life.
If there was any sign of Yoest 's future calling, it was that she was always "a little adult" – eager for dinner-table discussion of the topics she read about in Newsweek, recalls her mother, Janice Shaw Crouse.
Though Yoest was born in Lexington, Ky., the family, which included a younger brother, moved frequently for the Crouses ' doctoral work and teaching assignments. They bounced from Indiana to upstate New York, and then overseas when Mr. Crouse won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at National Taiwan University in Taipei.
The two years abroad were formative for Yoest and her brother, who were elementary-age students old enough to appreciate the journey, which included swim meets in Okinawa, Japan, and a summer traveling with their parents around Europe.
Yoest was both brainy and social: a National Merit Scholar finalist and a high school cheerleader.
"She was never one to follow the crowd, but she still was very popular," Ms. Crouse recalls. "She 's a very genuine person. What you see is what you get."
The family went to church every Sunday and regularly read the Bible together. They never ate a meal without praying first and never made major life decisions without reflecting on them, says Ms. Crouse, whose parents were Methodist ministers.
"Charmaine comes from a family that is willing to work," Ms. Crouse says. "We understand the value of work. God expects everybody, including women, to live up to their potential."
A traditional working mom
It was through the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Md., that Ms. Yoest met and, following her time at Oxford, married fellow parishioner Jack Yoest, a dozen years her senior. For a time, the Yoests lived in Richmond, Va., where he served briefly as a senior assistant to the secretary of Health and Human Resources in the administration of Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Republican.
Ms. Yoest was raising her children and commuting to Charlottesville, Va. to work on her doctorate, which examined parental leave policies in academia. They later moved closer to campus so she could complete her degree.
"She was a very good student. She was an 'A ' student," says Steven Rhoads, Yoest 's dissertation adviser at the University of Virginia. "I 'm not surprised she took a more activist route. I think that was important to her.... She is one of a number of women who are going to make a mark for themselves beyond the family, yet are not going to want to turn their kids over to day care."
The couple, married for more than two decades, now lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington with what Mr. Yoest, a management consultant, calls their "Penta posse": Hannah, 18; John, 16; Helena, 14; Sarah, 10; and James, 7.
The children are a close-knit pack of brunettes. With busy working parents, each helps to keep the family ship on course. Helena, an early riser, makes everyone 's lunches – peanut butter-and-jelly or ham-and-cheese sandwiches – in the morning. Sarah unloads the dishwasher. John mows the lawn. And Hannah, who this fall starts at UVA on a rowing scholarship, drives her siblings to school. Many days, family members stay in touch via Facebook.
Routinely, Ms. Yoest admits with just mild hesitation, the family misses Sunday church services because one of the kids has a sporting event.
The Yoests bonded over politics during the 2008 campaign when Ms. Yoest worked for Mr. Huckabee. After painting the family Chevy Suburban and dubbing it the "Hucka truck," they spent six weeks on the road, traveling through New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Iowa, where the kids say they discovered phone banking – and that it 's a rare voter who hangs up on a child calling for campaign support.
After Huckabee flamed out, Yoest negotiated a job with AUL allowing her to take one child with her on each business trip – an effort to expose them to different parts of the country and provide her with additional quality mom time.
When Yoest told her parents of the opportunity at AUL, they asked her to consider seriously if she wanted to be a one-issue advocate, to give up all the other matters of political and public interest to her.
Ms. Crouse says the family was never issue-focused when Ms. Yoest was a child, and that abortion was not a topic of conversation in the house. Faith was viewed first and foremost as the critical foundation for living "authentic lives" and treating friends and strangers alike with kindness. Ms. Yoest says she has never had an abortion and that she would never consider it. But when it comes to prevention of unwanted pregnancy it 's worth noting that she is less forthcoming. Contraception is not part of the AUL platform. And abortion foes often disengage on this question – because the use of birth control suggests sexual activity that is not purely procreative. For her part, Yoest bristles when asked about her personal use of it. She says she believes there should exist some "zones of personal privacy."
Yoest does note that the stresses she and her husband endured during her fourth pregnancy added nuance to her thinking about the politics – and humanity – of the abortion issue; he was out of a job, finances were tight, and they had to sell their home.
"You could search and search and search and never find me minimizing the choice that some women make, because I do completely understand the panic, the fear of how are you ever going to be able to handle the situation," she says.
But what about rape? Or when a mother 's life is at risk as a result of the pregnancy?
In the case of the former, Ms. Yoest says that she is sorry for the pain of the mother. But heaping tragedy on tragedy is no solution. Abortion, she says, "only adds more irrevocable sorrow."
And in the latter circumstance: "If a woman is facing a pregnancy that threatens her life, I would make sure she knew a real pro-life doctor who would treat her and her baby as two patients," she says. "If a baby dies in the process of trying to save a mother 's life, as long as the intention is to save both lives, then there is no moral system in the world that sees that as equal to elective abortion."
Yoest says she believes, and she points to data her adversaries would readily dismiss, that the majority of women who have abortions regret their decisions and that there exists a heightened risk of drug and alcohol dependence, suicide and psychiatric admissions for women who have had an abortion, and increased risk of premature birth for later pregnancies.
"Every single human being has crisis points in their lives, you have to come to grips with that," she says. "You have to figure out how to put your life back together and move forward. The thing that 's exciting to me about pregnancy is that even in the most awful circumstances, there 's a redemptive opportunity and a hope that comes from new life."
Hope in crisis is not a situation with which Yoest is unfamiliar. After a breast cancer diagnosis in early 2009, she underwent a mastectomy and months of chemotherapy.
Her husband and sons shaved their heads in solidarity. "That day I remember," she says. "I will always remember."
Massive menu of model legislation
Yo est calls AUL the legal wing of the modern antiabortion movement. The group is fed by individual and foundation donations and has an annual budget in the modest ballpark of $4 million. Its bread-and-butter resource, in addition to its staff of seven attorneys and two paralegals, is its annual report – Defending Life: Proven Strategies for a Pro-Life America – which gives local law-makers resources for building their own bills. The telephone book-sized guide outlines which states are the friendliest, and not, for antiabortion legislation and ranks them on their laws governing legal recognition of the unborn and newly born, end of life matters, and bioethics, among other issues.
"I think AUL has become the premier pro-life organization in the country," says Huckabee. "I think their approach has been far more objective, a great deal more thoughtful. They 're working not toward just raising an issue, but also toward changing minds and hearts, engaging people in honest, thoughtful discussion as to why every life matters."
And that 's what pro-abortion rights advocates worry about. It 's easier to address an extremist adversary, not so one who talks with some sensibility about her underlying belief system. And perhaps it 's why, time and again, when asked for direct reflection on AUL or Yoest, her foes prefer to deflect to a discussion of the ways her group 's legislation fits into a larger effort to restrict the reproductive health freedoms of the nation 's women.
Yoest 's backers, of course, do not refrain from praise. Ellen Kolb, the legislative affairs director for New Hampshire 's Cornerstone Action, a conservative public policy group involved in passage of that state 's parental notification law, says the Republican sponsors of the state 's bill went to AUL for guidance about what has worked across the nation. Ultimately, Granite State lawmakers in June overrode the veto of Democratic Gov. John Lynch.
"I know of no other organization that is a better clearinghouse for current legal information on life issues," Ms. Kolb says.
When a pro-abortion rights president is in the White House, the push at the state level is always more intense, observes Jordan Goldberg, state advocacy counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. But she says she is "deeply troubled and of course angered by the agenda" AUL and others are pursuing.
"I don 't know that I would be too proud of it if I were them," she says of AUL 's collection of model bills. Ms. Goldberg says legislation passed so far this year – including AUL-backed clinic regulations so restrictive that in Kansas, for example, all three abortion providers would have had to close their doors – make it impossible for women to access the range of health-care services they need.
In Texas, the AUL-backed sonogram measure is under review of a federal judge. A Center of Reproductive Rights lawsuit asserted that the law hijacks the doctor-patient relationship and "imposes stress and emotional strain on women as they prepare to undergo a medical procedure."
"Basically these laws say to women, 'We don 't trust you or think you know how to make a decision, ' " Goldberg says. "These kinds of regulations, in addition to being clearly and overtly sexist, they are also somewhat insidious because they regulate the practice of medicine that is not based on standards of care."
There is a divide in the antiabortion movement, meanwhile, about this approach. Some believe officials should strive to overturn Roe v. Wade – and that anything less is missing the point. Others, including Yoest, suggest that in the short term they can do much to reduce the number of abortions performed by pushing these types of initiatives and cuts to funding of Planned Parenthood, among other proposals. Avoiding a Supreme Court fight – where a decision about abortion would probably fall to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who signaled in a 2007 ruling that he has hesitation about later-term procedures but whose commitment is not yet clear – has strategic benefits.
AUL has avoided involvement in some of the bills that, if challenged, could get batted down by the nation 's highest court. Among them, a South Dakota measure requiring women to wait 72 hours for an abortion. The initiative also requires a visit to a crisis pregnancy center where a woman would be advised of her alternatives. A judge has imposed a temporary injunction.
Yoest says this of her group 's incrementalist strategy: "You don 't have to overturn Roe to actually make progress at the state level." One option is to let Roe "crumble under its own weight and become irrelevant," she says.
Dictating the national conversation
The nation is decidedly split when it comes to abortion. According to a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey conducted in February, 54 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while 42 percent said it should be illegal. Gallup polling has fluctuated in recent years, though the divide between Americans who self-identify as "pro-choice" versus "pro-life" has narrowed considerably since the mid-1990s when there was more than a 20 percentage-point edge among those favoring reproductive freedoms. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 51 percent of respondents said they were "pro-life" while 42 percent were "pro-choice." But Gallup 's 2011 numbers indicate that 49 percent call themselves "pro-choice" compared with 45 percent who are "pro-life."
The antiabortion movement is having success in dictating the national conversation about abortion, says Kathryn Kolbert, the civil rights attorney who successfully argued the landmark 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the Supreme Court. Ms. Kolbert views the initiatives being pushed by AUL and others as "totally draconian," including, she says, a relentless push to defund Planned Parenthood, an effort AUL renewed in July with gusto. With half a dozen GOP members of Congress by her side, Yoest issued a report – titled The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood – suggesting that lawmakers worried about the debt ceiling and America 's fiscal crisis shouldn 't be providing public tax dollars to an abortion provider.
While Yoest took a calm tack during the press conference, asserting that the report allows the American people to look at the issue "openly and honestly" and decide for themselves, others were more direct.
"This provides a blueprint to investigate a group that has literally gotten away with murder," says Rep. Chris Smith (R) of New Jersey.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says antiabortion congressional Republicans are overstepping. They gained power at the state and federal level last year on a message of job creation and fostering a healthy economy, not on a radical social agenda. Ms. Lake says tea party candidates, in particular, won the hearts of voters because of their small-government libertarian bent, but, she adds, they were selling a bill of goods. And with the economy still lagging, the focus on antiabortion legislative activity could come back to haunt conservatives in the 2012 contests – especially with young single women being a key swing voting bloc.
"There 's a lot of buyer 's remorse going on out there," Lake says. "Voters didn 't vote for this. When it comes to the abortion issue in particular, we 've had 30 years of fighting about this issue, and enough is enough. Voters are really tired of it."
It 's harder to forecast if the issue will become a matter of major debate in the 2012 presidential contest. The economy and jobs are still voters ' overwhelming first concern, polls indicate. Yoest says AUL isn 't interested in advocating for a candidate. Any of the GOP hopefuls are better on the abortion issue than President Obama, she says during an interview in her office, where photos of her family at the March for Life in Washington adorn her bookshelves.
Moral bearings
In AUL 's front waiting room, meanwhile, visitors won 't find drawings of babies in different stages of development or graphic leaflets. They can browse The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal. Or watch the television, which is turned to Fox News. Or perhaps take in the irrefutable wisdom – scripted, at Yoest 's direction, in large lettering on one wall – of one of the nation 's great Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson:
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
Yoest frames her argument similarly. "You either believe it 's a life or you don 't," she says. "The intellectual underpinnings really do matter. And they matter for our culture. If you can 't draw the lines, you lose your bearings. You lose true north if you can 't defend innocent human life."
Citation:
Skalka, Jennifer. "Abortion Opponents have a New Voice." Christian Science Monitor: n.p. Aug 13 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .

USA TODAY
Mar 22, 2011, p. A.6

Copyright © Mar 22, 2011 USA Today Information Network. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Protect the Unborn

By Mary Spaulding Balch
Should public policy seek to increase or decrease the number of abortions? No matter what you think about abortion and when it should be legal, the answer is obvious.

Every abortion stops a heart that begins beating 22 days after fertilization. Brain waves are detectable in the sixth week, and in the seventh week an unborn child has been observed kicking and swimming. Every organ is in place by the eighth week, when the child begins to respond to touch. By 20 weeks, an unborn child reacts to being pierced by a needle with vigorous body and breathing movements, moving away and showing an increase in stress hormones.

USA Today 's editorial on laws limiting abortions curiously fails to focus on Nebraska 's ground-breaking 2010 statute, versions of which are being considered in several states this year. Asserting "a compelling state interest in protecting the lives of unborn children from the stage at which substantial medical evidence indicates that they are capable of feeling pain," the law prevents abortions from 20 weeks. In a 2000 Supreme Court dissent, Justice Anthony Kennedy described the "D&E" abortion procedure used at this stage: "The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb."

We believe that when women are informed about unborn development and abortion alternatives, rather than just whatever they may be told by abortion providers, they 're more likely to choose life. Currently, 23 states with informed consent/women 's right-to-know laws protect a mother 's right to receive this kind of information prior to undergoing an abortion.

The abortion-rights advocacy group NARAL has acknowledged that "Medicaid-eligible women in states that exclude abortion coverage have abortion rates of about half of those women in states that fund abortion care." Limiting insurance coverage of abortions to separate policies can similarly help save lives. That we may not equally protect the unborn children of those who can afford to evade these laws does not diminish the value of saving those who can be saved. Abortion is a tragedy that public policy should discourage, not promote.
Mary Spaulding Balch is director of state legislation at the National Right to Life Committee.
Citation:
Balch, Mary S. "Protect the Unborn." USA TODAY: A.6. Mar 22 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .

Los Angeles Times
(Los Angeles, CA)
Apr 1, 2011, p. A.12

Copyright © 2011 Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
The Right to Choose
Imagine you decided to have a medical procedure but state law said that, even though your doctor supported your decision, you had to be screened to see if you were mentally fit for it, and then had to go to a clinic that directly opposes doing the procedure and listen to its spiel before you could go ahead. Most of us would call that unconscionable interference in our ability to make decisions about our own health.

Now imagine you 're a pregnant woman in South Dakota.

Under a law signed by Gov. Dennis Daugaard last week, women who seek an abortion will have to wait 72 hours, undergo two visits to physicians to be checked for unspecified physical and mental risk factors, and be proselytized by an antiabortion counseling center before they can have the procedure. This in a state with just one center that offers abortions, which are performed by an out-of-state doctor who flies in a couple of times a month. In other words, a few days of waiting could add up to a lot more.

The South Dakota law is among 371 pieces of legislation that have been making headway in state capitals during the last few months -- none of them in California -- seeking to restrict and in some cases all but remove women 's access to abortions, according to the National Abortion Rights Action League. Not only is that more than twice as many antiabortion bills as last year, but, like the South Dakota law, many of the appalling bills are making swifter and surer progress toward passage.

Measures to make abortion illegal after 20 weeks of pregnancy are advancing in Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama and at least 10 other states, and Ohio is considering banning abortions after the first fetal heartbeat is detected at about six weeks. That bill flies directly in the face of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not restrict a woman 's right to abortion during the first trimester; it also sharply limited states ' ability to restrict such rights until the fetus might be able to live outside the womb -- about 24 weeks.

Legislation in Texas would have required women to undergo a sonogram before an abortion; it has been amended to require that they be offered the chance to do so, though they can refuse. More than 20 states are considering restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion. In Arizona, a bill would prohibit any business from winning state contracts if its employee health insurance includes abortion coverage.

At the federal level, the House is likely to pass two bills to restrict abortion rights. Women would be prevented from using even their tax saver healthcare accounts, which allow employees to set aside pretax earnings to pay medical expenses, for abortion services, and hospitals that do not believe in abortion, such as Roman Catholic ones, would be allowed to withhold the procedure from women even in a life-or-death emergency.

This unprecedented attack on women 's reproductive rights was set off by Republican Party gains in November 's election, especially those by "tea party" members, the very politicians who clamor the loudest against any government intrusion in personal healthcare decisions.

It 's easy to understand the objections that abortion opponents have to the procedure and their fervor to end it. If people consider terminating pregnancy to be tantamount to murder, they will have little tolerance for the differing beliefs of others. But this matter was settled by the 1973 Roe decision, which held that attempts to limit a woman 's right to an abortion during early pregnancy were unconstitutional infringements on her right to privacy, just as they would be for any other medical procedure.

Lawsuits will fly over many of the bills that ultimately become law, and that 's part of the strategy. Reproductive-rights groups will be so busy going after the most egregious laws that some of the less clearly unconstitutional ones will go unchallenged.

Polls show that most Americans continue to support the Roe decision; South Dakota voters have twice in recent years rejected proposals to ban most abortions in the state. Studies and data show that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is with high-quality sex education and access to birth control. That 's not included in any of these state proposals.
Citation:
"The Right to Choose." Los Angeles Times: A.12. Apr 01 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .

Works Cited
Balch, Mary S. "Protect the Unborn." USA TODAY: A.6. Mar 22 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .
Eckholm, Erick. " 'Personhood ' Amendments a New Tack in Abortion Fight." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: A.3. Oct 30 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .
Santorum, Rick. "My Fight for Life." Wall Street Journal: n.p. Jan 23 2012. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .
"The Right to Choose." Los Angeles Times: A.12. Apr 01 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .

Cited: Balch, Mary S. "Protect the Unborn." USA TODAY: A.6. Mar 22 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 . Eckholm, Erick. " 'Personhood ' Amendments a New Tack in Abortion Fight." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: A.3. Oct 30 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 . Santorum, Rick. "My Fight for Life." Wall Street Journal: n.p. Jan 23 2012. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 . "The Right to Choose." Los Angeles Times: A.12. Apr 01 2011. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 13 May 2014 .