The Honduran Congress has joined several other Latin American countries in banning the morning-after pill. According to Catholic News Agency, the law passed earlier this year has now taken effect. Carlos Polo, Latin American director of the Population Research Institute, told CNA,

In Latin America, where abortion is illegal, the only option left for the promoters of this pill was to misinform the people by denying the so-called ‘third effect.’  Now we see that pressure and misinformation can last a while but in the end, deceit fails on its own. We will certainly see the morning-after pill eradicated from Latin America, thus freeing ourselves from an inoperative and costly method that has grave adverse effects for women.

Abortion is illegal in Honduras, and advocates for the bill noted that the pill can cause abortions by preventing the embryo’s implantation.

For the past eight years, Abby Johnson has worked for Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, the last two years as its director. But then she saw an ultrasound of an abortion procedure. “I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it,” Johnson told KBTX-TV (link includes a video interview with Johnson).

She also began to disagree with the organization’s new business model of pushing for more abortions: “The money wasn’t in family planning, the money wasn’t in prevention, the money was in abortion and so I had a problem with that.”

Johnson, who resigned on Oct. 6, has joined forces with Coalition for Life and has been praying with the group on the sidewalk in front of her former employer’s place of business. Planned Parenthood has reacted to Johnson’s leaving by slapping a temporary restraining order on her and Coalition for Life. A hearing on the order is set for Nov. 10.

HT: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

WORLD Washington Bureau reporter Edward Lee Pitts has been closely following healthcare reform this week on Capitol Hill. He reports:

Healthcare reform advocates took two major steps forward this week, but conservatives fear those steps could represent two giant leaps backward for those with pro-life, limited government, and anti-tax interests.

Concerning the inclusion of abortion funding in healthcare legislation, Lee writes:

. . . the biggest burden the House bill places on the nation may be its treatment of abortion.

“Language in the bill still does not do enough to prevent federal funding from going to abortion services,” worries Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich.

Stupak and as many as 40 other House Democrats fear that the creation of new federal insurance subsidies for low-income earners would go toward purchasing healthcare plans that include abortion coverage.

Current law prohibits federal funding for abortion through Medicaid, the federal employee health plan, and military plans. But the new health bill creates new federal funding avenues that are not covered under current law—and theses new streams have the potential to reach a greater number of Americans than the already restricted plans.

To stop this, Stupak is pushing for an amendment that adds the abortion prohibition to the new federal subsidies. He says that pro-life Democrats combined with Republicans could derail the House bill. Stupak is continuing to negotiate, but Pelosi may try to get the House bill through under a procedure that does not allow amendments.

“Anyone voting to forbid amendments to this bill is in effect voting to set up a federal government program that will directly fund abortion on demand,” warns Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee. “Prominent Democrats who have claimed that the federal government could pay for abortion with ‘private’ funds have been engaged in a big snow job.”

The fight over the pro-life amendment could come as early as next week.

Read Lee’s report in its entirety here.

President Barack Obama won the majority of Catholic votes last November, but Democratic healthcare reform may not win the backing of some of the most influential Catholics in the country. Earlier this month, representatives for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a letter to Congress, expressing disappointment over congressional healthcare proposals, and warning that if a final healthcare package allows taxpayer funding for abortion “we will have no choice but to oppose the bill.”

Cardinal Francis George—the Catholic archbishop of President Obama’s hometown of Chicago—told The Wall Street Journal yesterday that every healthcare bill coming out of congressional committees so far has allowed taxpayer funding for abortion. Such provisions violate what the cardinal called his top priority for healthcare reform: “Nobody should be deliberately killed.”

The Guttmacher Institute has a new report saying that abortions declined from 1995 to 2003.

The number of abortions performed worldwide fell from 45.5 million in 1995 to 41.6 million in 2003, the report said. The global abortion rate declined from 35 abortions for every 1,000 women (aged 15-44) in 1995, to 29 per 1,000 women in 2003.

Other highlights:

• The use of contraception is up. The percentage of married women using contraception increased from 54% in 1995 to 63% in 2003.
• The global rate of unintended pregnancies fell from 69 per 1,000 women in 1995 to 55 in 2003.

Advocating for abortion legalization is part of the report’s agenda. It also reports that the rate of “unsafe abortions”—the term they use for “illegal abortions”–has barely decreased. It says about 70,000 women die each year from the effects of “unsafe abortion” and that eight million women annually experience experience complications that need medical treatment.

Pro-lifers reject this figure of 70,000 women, saying the report is based on conjecture. LifeNews.com quotes Anthony Ozimic, with British pro-life group SPUC, calling the report “propaganda from the pro-abortion lobby” and saying the figures “are based on highly spurious guesstimates, which even the report itself is forced to admit.”

The seemingly never-ending congressional healthcare debate looks closer to completion now with the Congressional Budget Office’s lower than expected estimate for a key Senate Finance Committee version. What to expect next? A likely passage of that bill by the committee next Tuesday, then Democratic congressional leaders will look to seize that momentum by quickly bringing it to the full Senate floor for debate. Expect a lot of fiery speeches on the Senate floor- you may want to TIVO (or DVR) CSPAN2 the next couple of weeks. A lot of senators who are not on any of the committees that oversee healthcare have been eagerly awaiting their chance to attack/stump for the bill in an official forum. Republicans will surely mount an aggressive verbal assault on the plan. It will be interesting to see who becomes the loudest and most eloquent critic of the measure (the two may not necessarily be found in the same senator).  Likewise, which senator will become the healthcare shining knight? New stars will arise in both parties given the bright media spotlight expected to shine on the debate.

In the end something will likely pass the Senate, but it will be interesting to watch how much- if any- Republicans can tone down the bill.  While a huge step, Senate passage does not mean victory for Democrats. A version has to pass the full House. That chamber has been waiting to see what the Senate does before acting on a their bill, which has long passed the three key House committee. Why the wait there? Some House Democrats felt burned this spring when they voted on a very liberal cap-and-trade climate change bill that is going nowhere in the Senate. That means they voted for a measure that is likely dead- and Republican opponents will be able to use that for cannon fodder during next year’s elections. So now the House wants to see if healthcare has legs in the Senate before attaching their names to another controversial bill.

As media outlets prepare for the upcoming debate, the media is starting to examine the bill’s particulars. Interestingly, the Associated Press seemed to suggest in its abortion piece that the healthcare bill would hurt the pro-life movement,as it will become easier to fund abortions:

WHAT IT MEANS: Women with private insurance plans that cover abortion might be able to switch to a less-expensive public plan without losing that coverage. Anti-abortion activists would feel they’ve lost an important battle, as taxpayer funds mingle with some insurance plans that, one way or another, pay for abortions.

This is something World has reported on numerous times already: pro-abortion lawmakers have repeatedly defeated amendments in the House and Senate, supported by members of both parties, that would have explicitly excluded abortion from the proposed federal insurance plans. Efforts to get this in the final bill will surely continue as healthcare moves outside the committee rooms and into the historic congressional chambers.

Stay tuned. (To CSPAN).

Dr. Al Mohler posted an article today in which he writes about the racial underpinning of the abortion discussion in the 1970’s. Nixon’s words are chilling:

Tapes recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library reveal that President Richard M. Nixon, who had been considered generally opposed to abortion, told aides on January 23, 1973 (the day after the decision was handed down) that abortion was justified in certain cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

“There are times when abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” said Nixon. President Nixon’s words, chilling as they are, are also a general reflection of the moral logic shared by millions of Americans in that day.

As a matter of fact, one of the dirty secrets of the abortion rights movement is that its earliest momentum was driven by a concern that was deeply racial. Leaders such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued quite openly that abortion and other means of birth control were necessary in order to limit the number of undesirable children. As she made clear, the least desirable children were those born to certain ethnically and racially defined families. Sanger, along with so many other “progressive” figures of the day, promoted the agenda of the eugenics movement — more children from the “fit” and less from the “unfit.”

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13 ESV)

At last year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, Kristen Day of Democrats for Life seemed energized about the prospect of the party including more pro-life voices in its approach to abortion policy. Her group hosted an afternoon session in a packed hotel meeting room that featured several pro-life lawmakers, including Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Rep. Lincoln Davis (R-Tenn.). It was one of several sessions aimed at touting the Democratic Party’s “common ground” approach to abortion that promised to bring pro-life and pro-abortion forces together.

A little more than a year later, Day sounds disillusioned about the way Democrats have handled federal funding for abortion in its crafting of healthcare legislation. She’s quoted in a Wall Street Journal piece that offers a glimpse of how Democrats are shutting down one of their own: Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), a nine-term congressman offering an amendment to ban federal funding for abortion in healthcare legislation. Democrats won’t let Stupak’s amendment come to the floor for a vote.

“You can’t just say common ground,” Day tells the Journal. “You have to do it.”

The New York Times can be relied upon to tell us where liberals want to take the country—to tell us what they really want. In an editorial last Thursday, the Times said:

“[I]n a rational system of medical care, there would be virtually no restrictions on financing abortions. But abortion is not a rational issue.”

Not rational? Medical science has known since 1857 that human life begins at conception. It was the medical profession—not the churches—that vigorously lobbied for protective laws against abortion in the 1850s and 1860s. Those laws upheld the highest form of rationality and morality. Those protective laws said simply: Innocent human life may not be directly attacked.

Another influential journal—maybe not as influential as The New York Times, but influential all the same—is California Medicine. Its editors told us in their pro-abortion editorial of 1970 why the Times is wrong to say opposition to abortion is not rational:

The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life regardless of its stage or condition. This ethic has had the blessing of the Judeo-Christian heritage and has been the basis for most of our laws and much of our social policy. The reverence for each and every human life has also been a keystone of Western medicine. . . . Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.

The slaughter of innocents is unjust. It will not matter that it has the backing of the Supreme Court, the president, the Congress, or The New York Times.

Our opposition to liberal abortion is based on this fundamental truth, this self evident truth. This nation—of all nations—proclaimed the right to life as the first among rights, the first human right endowed by our Creator. Jefferson said it well: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”

Even if you do not believe in God—as apparently The New York Times does not—medical science has incontrovertibly told us when human life begins. “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,” says the Declaration of Independence, including primarily the right to life.

Does The New York Times believe that the Declaration, too, is irrational? Do they think the United States should be adjourned?

Our opposition to abortion is as rational and as deeply ingrained as our opposition to slavery or to segregation. For centuries, slavery was “legal” in all too many parts of our country. Our Supreme Court, in an earlier act of “raw judicial power,” affirmed slavery as a right of property and explicitly declared it constitutionally protected. That gross injustice brought the nation to the brink of dissolution. Lincoln used the words of Jesus to warn that “a house divided could not stand.” Was Lincoln’s opposition to the spread of this evil also irrational?

We hear that The New York Times has had to mortgage its headquarters, that this once-great newspaper is in financial peril. I do not want to see this American institution go under. But if it does die, the obituary for the powerful paper they call “the Gray Lady” will read: Suicide.

WORLD’s Emily Belz reports on a study of the work of pregnancy resource centers that was commissioned over two years but released at a good time—smack dab in the middle of the healthcare reform debate:

It examines the role that 2,300 “pregnancy resource centers” (PRCs) across the country have had since the first center opened in California in 1968. The report describes community-based, faith-based organizations that provide not just medical services but also counseling for 1.9 million women in unintended pregnancies annually.

“PRCs are answering the call to fill the unmet need for abortion alternatives,” the report reads, citing the statistic that, at the current rate, one in three women will have an abortion before the age of 45. …

According to the report, 29 out of 30 people working at pregnancy centers are volunteers, meaning the centers provide a service to the community without demanding federal funds on the scale of, for example, Planned Parenthood, which receives around $350 million annually in federal funds.

Read Emily’s report in its entirety here.