• Abortion,  Carly Fiorina,  Chuck DeVore

    CA-Sen: California Pro-Life Council Endorses Carly Fiorina


    California Pro-Life Council

    The San Francisco Chronicle had the first mention last night of the endorsement.

    Just got this scoop from California Pro Life Council czar Brian Johnston: The organization will endorse Carly Fiorina Tuesday over Orange County Assemblyman Chuck DeVore.

    This is a big deal in conservative circles, as this is California’s largest single-issue pro-life group. When Fiorina got the nod recently from the Susan B Anthony Candidate List — think of it as the anti-Emily’s List — Team DeVore dismissed it as a DC-oriented group.(They’re also going to kick Carly $200,000, they told me.) Don’t worry, predicted Team DeVore, California pro-lifers would be behind the rock-ribbed conservative DeVore.

    But this pro-life group, the California affiliate of the National Right to Life organization, isn’t. And the reason has to do with one thing: They think Fiorina has a better shot at winning. In the June primary and in the fall.

    And, then, Jon Fleischman just posted the official endorsement statement.

    This will be a significant endorsement for Carly Fiorina. Having been branded by Chuck Devore as a closet pro-choicer on abortion and a non-conservative moderate RINO, this should help dispel the misstatements.

    Plus, the $200K campaign cash donation will help fuel Fiorina mailers in the last few weeks of the campaign.


  • Abortion,  Chuck DeVore

    CA-Sen: Chuck DeVore Says Pro-Life While He Votes For Public Taxpayer Funding of Abortion

    California Assemblyman and U.S. Senate candidate Chuck DeVore Tweeting

    Oops the impeccable conservative as Chuck DeVore likes to call himself has been caught up in another hypocritical FLAP. Remember the last time it was nanny state hypocrisy.

     This time the subject is abortion.

    DeVore voted to approve the California state budget in 2005 and 2008. Both budgets contained funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. Medi-Cal uses state money to subsidize abortion (the use of federal funds for elective abortion within Medicaid is barred under the Hyde Amendment). Both times DeVore voted yes the budgets passed easily, but with non-trivial numbers of GOP no votes. Both times, efforts to separate out the abortion funding from the budgets had already been defeated when the final vote took place. Consequently, the budgets as passed contained abortion funding.

    As of 2004, Medi-Cal funded nearly 40 percent of all abortions performed in California. According to the Women’s Health Rights Coalition, that amounts to “an estimated 90,946 induced abortions out of the total 236,000 performed.” Roughly $33 million is spent funding abortions. Wynette Sills of the Coalition to Eliminate Abortion Funding told a pro-life website that 25 percent of the money goes to Planned Parenthood, despite the abortion provider’s reported $1 billion in revenues. At the national level, the health care debate illustrates the importance of having a precise understanding of how legislation could result in taxpayer funding of abortion.

    Chuck, if you are sooooo pro-life why did you vote for public funding for abortion?

    Why did you vote for these California budgets that included this abortion enabling funding for Planned Parenthood?

    Or did you conveniently forget about these votes?


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  • Abortion,  Barbara Boxer,  Carly Fiorina

    Obamacare: Senator Barbara Boxer Compares Abortion to Viagra

    California United States Seantor Barbara Boxer speaks on the Senate Floor

    Senator Boxer, I’ll make you a proposition: federal government tax dollars should NOT be paying for Viagra or abortion.

    Deal?

    Of course, Seantor Boxer is running for re-election and has used the abortion and right to choose issue as a wedge in every campaign she has run – you know controlling men vs. women.

    Explain your position again, Barbara, when you are running against Carly Fiorina next year.

    By the way, the Nelson/Hatch amendment prohibiting the use of federal tax dollars for abortion services was tabled in the Democratic Party controlled Senate this afternoon. Obamacare legislation in the Senate will continue to carry allowances for this abortion expenditure.

    Senators voted Tuesday afternoon to set aside a healthcare amendment that would have curbed federal support for abortion coverage.

    Senators voted to table a measure from Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Pa.) that would have banned the government from offering insurance plans in a national healthcare exchange that cover abortion.

    The amendment, which needed 60 votes to pass and was not expected to be adopted, was tabled in a 54-45 vote.

    The provision, which mirrored restrictions in the House’s healthcare bill authored by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Neb.), had been offered in part to win over Nelson, who’d previously warned he’d join a filibuster of the healthcare bill if it didn’t contain sufficient protections against federal support for abortion.

    Democrats lost seven of their own members on the measure — Sens. Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Evan Bayh (Ind.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Ted Kaufmann (Del.), Robert Casey (Pa.), and Mark Pryor (Ark.) — while two Maine’s two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, supported the tabling.

    The tabling represents a victory for abortion-rights supporters who had worried that the amendment’s restrictions on abortion funding would go beyond what had previously been established by the Hyde amendment.


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  • Barack Obama

    Obama at Notre Dame: Rhetoric Does NOT Match Obama Abortion Policy on Steroids

    US President Barack Obama waves as he arrives on the stage to attend the commencement ceremony in the Joyce Center of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, May 17, 2009

    So, President Obama spoke at Catholic Notre Dame University’s commencement yesterday and spoke “nice” to the pro-life crowd. But, do his abortion policies match his rhetoric?

    But Obama has disappointed some anti-abortion Catholics with decisions as president that they view to be at odds with his more tempered language on abortion, such as lifting the ban on federal funding for overseas clinics that offer abortion counseling and reversing the Bush administration’s ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

    One of the protesters at Notre Dame, Jill Stanek, an anti-abortion blogger who did not support Obama, said the president’s speech sounded eerily familiar.

    “It was just a regurgitation of things he’s said for a long time,” Stanek said. “He’s so good at expressing your point of view, so people are lulled into thinking he agrees with them, and he doesn’t. It’s just so typical Barack Obama.”

    Obama rarely strayed into the substance of the debate Sunday, steering clear, for instance, of any explanation of why he reversed George W. Bush’s policy on stem cell research.

    Hell No.

    And, what about Catholic physicians, nurses and hospitals that do NOT perform abortions? Will their careers and/or funding be cut off?

    Will doctors be forced to leave the profession or leave hospitals if they refuse to perform abortions?

    He did pledge to “honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion” as he seeks to rewrite a Bush-era “conscience clause” designed to protect health-care workers who refuse to participate in care they believe conflicts with their personal beliefs. Women’s health advocates and abortion rights supporters say it creates a major obstacle to family planning and other treatments.

    Greg Mueller, a Republican consultant who works with anti-abortion groups, said Obama’s language Sunday doesn’t match a president that he sees as strongly pro-abortion rights.

    “He might have called for toning down the rhetoric but his abortion policies are tuned up on steroids,” said Mueller. “Even considering the revocation of the conscience clause puts Catholic hospitals, Evangelical and Catholic pro-life doctors and nurses in a very tough spot career-wise – this is another example of President Obama’s rhetoric not matching his policies.”

    The President said in his speech about reaching “common ground.”

    Flap will beleive it when he sees it.


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  • Abortion,  Barack Obama,  Polling

    Poll Watch: More Americans Pro-Life Than Pro-Choice

    prolife-1

    So says the latest Gallup poll. And, fewer think abortion should be legal “under any circumstances.”

    A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

    The new results, obtained from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.

    The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.

    Well, most Americans relaize that abortion is a grizzly, unseemly procedure that may be tolderated but yet is not easily accepted, except in some extreme circumstances like rape and incest.

    Americans now know about the Planned Parenthood abortion mills set up in urban, inner city areas of most American cities which pray upon minority communities. Americans know about the partial birth abortion abuses and the abortion at any cost because of profit clinics.

    Look at this poll:

    prolife-2

    Note that the legal abortion under ANY circumstances has decreased by 6 points over the year and illegal abortion in ALL circumstances has increased by 6 points. So, what has spurred the change? What is different in a year?

    Answer: President Obama and a change in American abortion policy.

    With the first pro-choice president in eight years already making changes to the nation’s policies on funding abortion overseas, expressing his support for the Freedom of Choice Act, and moving toward rescinding federal job protections for medical workers who refuse to participate in abortion procedures, Americans — and, in particular, Republicans — seem to be taking a step back from the pro-choice position. However, the retreat is evident among political moderates as well as conservatives.

    It is possible that, through his abortion policies, Obama has pushed the public’s understanding of what it means to be “pro-choice” slightly to the left, politically. While Democrats may support that, as they generally support everything Obama is doing as president, it may be driving others in the opposite direction.

    When President Obama forces religious medical schools and hospitals to teach and perform abortions or lose federal funding their will be a larger shift and a public outcry of a loss of religious freedom.

    Likely, the shift towards the public directing/demanding a more moderate abortion policy than Obama’s is being reflected in the polls.


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  • Abortion,  Polling

    Poll Watch: Poll Shows Support for Legal Abortion Drops to Lowest Level in 15 Years



    This is what a new Pew Research poll says.

    A new poll conducted by Pew Research finds the support for legal abortions has dropped to its lowest level in 15 years.

    The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted March 31-April 21 among 1,521 adults, finds President Barack Obama’s abortion advocay could be sparking a shift to the pro-life side of the abortion debate.

    The Pew poll found 46 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in most cases (28%) or all cases (18%) and 44 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in most (28%) or all cases (16%).

    That two point margin in favor of abortion is the lowest margin since 1995 as Pew, and other polling firms, have been asking the same polling question of Americans across the country every year.

    The proportion saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases has declined to 46% from 54% last August.

    Currently, 44% say abortion should be illegal in most (28%) or all cases (16%), up slightly since last August (41%).

    Breaking down the polling results by social groups and comparing them with Pew’s results in August, men saw a 10 percent pro-life shift and women a 5 percent shift between polls.

    Older voters 50 and up experienced a greater shift (10-11 percent) to the pro-life position making abortions illegal while voters under 50 saw a five percent pro-life shift.

    Politically, there has been notable decline in the proportion of independents saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases; majorities of independents favored legal abortion in August and the two October surveys, but just 44% do so today.

    Here are the charts:

    And, who says that America is moving LEFT on social issues? That is not to say that abortion anytime soon will return to being illegal but there is clearly a disfavor in this pro-death grizzly procedure.


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