Abortion

Governor’s Claims are Without Merit in Lawsuit Against Constitutional Amendment

July 29, 2022By

HARRISBURG, PA – The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation issued the following statement in the wake of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s lawsuit against a Constitutional Amendment which would keep abortion out of the PA Constitution:

“The Pennsylvania General Assembly has a right to seek to amend the Constitution, and to do so without the consent of the Governor,” said Maria Gallagher, legislative director of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation.

“Prior to Roe v. Wade, the common law, statutory law, and case law of Pennsylvania all prohibited abortion. Therefore, Gov. Wolf’s claims that this Amendment is ‘removing rights’ from the Constitution or ‘scaling back’ on a fundamental right of privacy that includes a right to abortion is false,” Gallagher said.

“Such a right never existed in the Pennsylvania Constitution. There is no reference to ‘abortion’ in the PA Constitution nor is there any case construing the PA Constitution to include a right to abortion,” Gallagher added.

Pro-abortion groups, however, have filed a lawsuit–currently before the PA Supreme Court–trying to get the current Court to find a non-existent right to abortion in the Constitution and to force taxpayers to fund abortion.

This Amendment simply states that the Constitution itself does not mandate these things and it leaves the decision of what the law should be regarding abortion to the elected representatives of the people–not to the Court.

In the absence of this amendment, the Court could usurp the legislative function and require that abortion be allowed on demand up until birth and also require that taxpayers fund it—all contrary to the will of the people!

************************************************************************The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation is a grassroots right-to-life organization with members statewide.  As the state affiliate of National Right to Life, PPLF is committed to promoting the dignity and value of human life from conception to natural death and to restoring legal protection for preborn children.

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Abortion

Pennsylvania Does Not Need MORE Abortion

July 12, 2022By

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE              CONTACT:  BONNIE FINNERTY, PPLF

July 12, 2022                                                                                  717-541-0034

The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation issued the following statement in response to Governor Wolf’s abortion-related Executive Order.

Pennsylvania Does Not Need MORE Abortion

“Governor Wolf wants Pennsylvania to become an abortion magnet. We already have over 32,000 abortions a year in the Commonwealth, equating to five kindergarten classes lost each and every day. Rather than pushing for even more abortion and competing with radical states like New York and New Jersey for abortion tourism, we should concentrate on providing compassionate care and tangible support for pregnant women in need and their vulnerable children.”

This quote is attributed to Bonnie Finnerty, Education Director, Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation.

************************************************************************The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation is a grassroots right-to-life organization with members statewide.  As the state affiliate of National Right to Life, PPLF is committed to promoting the dignity and value of human life from conception to natural death and to restoring legal protection for preborn children.

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Abortion

Roe v. Wade Overturn: A Victory for Women and Children

June 26, 2022By

HARRISBURG, Pa. – The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the tragic 1973 ruling known as Roe v. Wade represents a victory for women and children throughout the country.

“Roe v. Wade is a deeply flawed decision which rightly has now been tossed into the ash bin of history,” said Maria Gallagher, legislative director of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, the Keystone State affiliate of National Right to Life.

“More than 63 million preborn children have lost their lives to this abominable decision. In addition, countless mothers have been left to grieve babies lost to abortion. With today’s landmark ruling, the issue of abortion policy rightfully returns to the states, where the public, through their duly elected representatives, can pursue policies that protect preborn children and their mothers from harm,” Gallagher added.

“We commend the High Court for recognizing the truth that a so-called ‘right’ to abortion appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution,” Gallagher said. “This is a day of victory for the most vulnerable among us.”

Statistics from the PA Department of Health show that more than 32,000 abortions occurred in the Commonwealth in 2020, the latest year for which statistics are available. “Imagine how many kindergarten classes of children have been lost to abortion in PA. It’s mind-boggling,” Gallagher said.

In Pennsylvania, abortion totals would be much higher were it not for the many pregnancy resource centers which provide free counseling and material assistance for pregnant women facing challenging circumstances. Pennsylvania’s state-assisted Pregnancy and Parenting Support Program offers true alternatives and options to women in their time of need.

“No pregnant woman in Pennsylvania should feel as if she is alone. Pregnancy help centers stand ready to offer no-cost assistance and the emotional support every pregnant woman deserves,” Gallagher added.

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Abortion

Welcome to Post-Roe America

June 26, 2022By

As I joined with people from around the country in a spirited rendition of God Bless America, a feeling of intense gratitude swept over me.

This was the first time I had sung the beloved hymn in the post-Roe era. The song took on a new meaning, as I reflected on the fact that the worst decision in the history of American jurisprudence had been swept away on a tide of sound judicial reason. This is the moment I had been awaiting for decades—when our nation finally would be free of the tyranny of Roe.

I had prayed each day for years for this victory—boldly claiming that it would happen in my lifetime. The thought that any grandchildren I might have in the future would be post-Roe babies sent my spirit soaring.

I realize that much work remains to be done to protect precious preborn babies and their mothers from harm throughout the country—including the Commonwealth in which I live, Pennsylvania. But the fact that the decision on abortion policy now rests with the people, through their duly-elected representatives in the states, fills me with awe. God bless America indeed.

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Abortion

Canceling Kids: Depleting Our Greatest Natural Resource

April 1, 2022By

A few days ago my 23 year old niece did something extraordinary.  She had a baby. A precious 10 pound baby girl.

Whereas in the past, giving birth seemed like a natural, common, and somewhat ordinary progression of life (yet still inherently miraculous), today having a child, or even more so children, is nothing short of extraordinary.

With today’s couples delaying marriage and often trading in bibs for leashes, the birthrate in the United States has hit its lowest rate ever. Some attribute this to the pandemic, but the fact is that the birthrate has been dropping steadily for several years.

The case against children has been simmering under the cultural surface for decades as the abortion industry has cast children as the enemy to be eradicated. Children limit our freedom. Children require sacrifice. Children are expensive.

The messaging has been subtle and steady. Now, however, it’s screaming at us from billboards: “Stop Having Children!”

As reported by Life News, that’s the very visible billboard campaign launched in Portland, Oregon by a pro-abortion group subscribing to anti-natalism, a “philosophical and ethical stance against human reproduction…to radically reduce suffering and environmental destruction in the world.”

This is Margaret Sanger 2.0. Like the founder of Planned Parenthood, this small but vocal group of extremists believes the wayto eliminate suffering is to eliminate the sufferer.

If we stop having kids, we’ll stop bringing peopleinto a world that has problems.  And, asa happy side effect, there will be more resources for those of us granted theprivilege of birth.

Cancel culture canceling life itself.

But there are problems with this sterile, short-sighted wokism.

The drooling babies, demanding toddlers, and difficult teens of today eventually become what you and I are now- the older and wiser caretakers, the persistent problem-solvers, the productive contributors to society.

Babies become people. And people are our greatest natural resource, fueling the world with their ingenuity, hard work, and good deeds. People discover, invent, cure, produce, and achieve. We imagine, overcome, inspire, seek a greater good, and above all, we love.

Canceling children today cancels tomorrow’s generations, and that severely limits our potential as a society.

Just ask China.

After years of brutally enforcing a one-child policy, they are now scrambling to reverse their humanity deficit as reported in Forbes magazine. Couples are now “permitted” to have up to three children in China to replenish their population.

Billionaire Elon Musk has issued his own warning about global population decimation, stating, “Please look at the numbers – if people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words.”

But the problem of canceling kids is bigger than labor shortages or economic impact. We don’t just have children to supply tomorrow’s workforce.  Rather, children are the fullest expression of human love.

And when we have them, through the demands made and sacrifices offered, we learn to love in a way we hadn’t before. We become more “other-oriented” which is not only beneficial to the family unit but good for society in general. Raising children, the citizens of tomorrow, is a chance to
leave a legacy, our fingerprint on the future.

But children are not just our tomorrow, they are also our today.  They surprise and delight, help us to stay grounded, and become lifelong friends, perhaps even our own caretakers.  They give us more, much more, than they demand.  It’s not something we can quantify or even adequately articulate. If you know, you know.

What we need in our country is not anti-children billboards scaring young people away from parenthood, but a return to the very ordinary idea that having a family is a beautiful, worthwhile, and in its own way, extraordinary vocation.

As GK Chester once said, “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

Let’s make America extraordinarily ordinary again by welcoming children into a country that we can make better together.

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Abortion

Time to Correct the Error of Roe

January 10, 2022By

Even decades after slavery was abolished, there was a time in our country when it was legally acceptable to separate people by race. In fact, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in the 1896 case Plessy vs. Ferguson, protecting the doctrine of Separate but Equal. It would be upheld by the Court seven times.

It took 58 years for the Court to see the error of its ways. It’s impossible to quantify the tremendous damage that Plessy did in stalling equal rights for all Americans. Finally, the Court’s landmark decision in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case determined racial segregation of school children to be unconstitutional, and it became a cornerstone of the civil rights movement that led to de-segregation of other institutions.

Today, it’s hard for us toimagine how the Court in 1896 could have possibly thought that such a practicewas constitutionally protected.  Thedoctrine of Separate but Equal with regard to race was long overdue for the ashheap of history.

In similar fashion, another Supreme Court precedent, should join it.  Where Plessey marginalized people based on race, Roe marginalizes people based on age and location. In a day of 4-D ultrasounds, fetal surgery, and ever-changing viability, it’s hard to imagine how the Court in 1973 could have possibly thought abortion to be a constitutionally protected right.

In every pregnancy, two separate and equal humans exist. From the moment of conception, a genetically unique human is formed, one who is inside the mother, yet NOT the mother.  Perhaps a different gender, eye color, or hand dominance. A person who has never before existed and never will again. A person whose future is impossible to predict and whose impact on the world can only be imagined.

Clearly human, created of human parents. Clearly living, as demonstrated by rapid growth. It is intellectually dishonest to say this is not a living human being.

In challenging this, the abortion supporter will frequently invoke personhood, saying that we are not really people with inherent dignity and rights until we possess sentience, abilities to feel, dream, plan, etc. Yet, one must ask, does a newborn infant possess these qualities? Or those with limited cognitive capacity? Or those tortured by addiction?  Are they, or others in likewise vulnerable situations, not persons?

Personhood cannot bequalified by arbitrary social constructs. Defining personhood should be based on objective truth, and scientificallyspeaking, the indisputable truth is that human life begins at conception, justas it was indisputably true that our human dignity is not a function of race.

Justice Blackmun, in his Roe majority opinion, acknowledged thatif the personhood of the fetus is someday established, Roe is doomed to collapse, as the 14th Amendment clearlyprotects the fetus’ right to life.

That day has come. Forty-nine years later, at the tragic cost of 63 million American innocent lives, wounded mothers, forsaken fathers, and a fractured society, it’s time to correct the error of Roe.

While Separate but Equal based on race has no place in our society, equal rights based on biology certainly should be guaranteed. Situational circumstances do not change an objective truth of who we are and how we came to be. We all have inherent worth from the moment of our conception. Every person, once in existence, should have the right to live.

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Abortion

A Day of Hope at the Supreme Court

December 2, 2021By

It was a day that had been decades in the making.

The presentation of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the pivotal case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization stirred my soul. Finally, I felt, the Supreme Court was listening to reason.

Sloganeering and catchy memes had no place at the High Court. Rather, Justices were compelled to listen to the many ways the 1973 decision known as Roe v. Wade had failed to settle the abortion debate.

At stake was more than a 15-week ban on abortion in Mississippi. For this is the case that could finally overturn Roe and restore the issue of abortion to the people in the individual states, where it belongs.

The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation was among the many groups that filed friend-of-the-court briefs. In our well-reasoned brief, we argued strongly that both pregnant mother and preborn child deserve protection and care, and that modern obstetrical practice demanded Roe’s demise.

The Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have proven to be an unpredictable lot. But for the first time in a long time I am hopeful that I will see the day of Roe’s end.

And that day cannot come soon enough.

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Abortion

It’s Time for a Thorough Investigation of the University of Pittsburgh

August 9, 2021By

HARRISBURG, Pa. – The University of Pittsburgh should be thoroughly investigated amid allegations of researchers there harvesting body parts from babies whose hearts are still beating.

        “The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act makes it clear—you cannot take the life of a precious baby to harvest organs. For the sake of babies, mothers, and taxpayers throughout the Commonwealth, it’s time to investigate the University of Pittsburgh,” said Maria Gallagher, legislative director of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, an affiliate of National Right to Life.

        Under Pennsylvania law, it is a felony to experiment on a living unborn baby or to refuse to offer medical care to an infant who has been born alive.

        The Center for Medical Progress notes that Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania abortion providers supply the aborted babies, while the University of Pittsburgh provides sponsorship to Planned Parenthood’s operations in what appears to be an illegal quid pro quo for unborn baby body parts. That would be a violation of 42 U.S. Code 289g-2 and 18 Pennsylvania Statutes 3216.

        After securing hundreds of pages of public records, the non-profit group Judicial Watch has found that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has channeled at least $2.7 million into a project at the University of Pittsburgh that uses a tissue bank with body parts from aborted babies.

        Pitt’s application for one project stated that the university planned “to develop a pipeline to the acquisition, quality control and distribution of (urinary and genital organs and functions) samples obtained throughout development (6-42 weeks gestation).” A baby born at 40 weeks is considered full-term by the National Institutes of Health, while a baby born at 42 weeks is considered overdue.

        According to the Center for Medical Progress, “If the (preborn baby’s) heartbeat and blood circulation continue in a labor induction abortion for harvesting organs, it means the (baby) is being delivered while still alive and the cause of death is the removal of the organs.”

        “The allegations read like something out of a horror movie—gruesome and disgusting,” said Gallagher. “It is deeply disturbing to think that full-term babies could be treated in such an inhumane manner. We call on both federal and local authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the University of Pittsburgh’s research practices,” Gallagher added.

********************************************************************************************************************************************************************The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation is a grassroots right-to-life organization with members statewide.  As the state affiliate of National Right to Life, PPLF is committed to promoting the dignity and value of human life from conception to natural death and to restoring legal protection for preborn children.

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Abortion

Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation to U.S. Supreme Court: Overturn Roe v. Wade

July 30, 2021By

HARRISBURG, Pa. – The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation has sent a direct message to the U.S. Supreme Court: Overturn Roe v. Wade.

            The Federation has filed an amicus brief in the case of Dobbs v. JacksonWomen’s Health Organization. The case involves Mississippi’s protective law banning abortion at 15 weeks.

            In this well-reasoned brief, the Federation “seeks an overturn of Roe v. Wade, so that States may once again provide protection for vulnerable unborn human life.”

            The brief further states, “Roe was a radical decision that overrode the legislative judgments of all 50 states. It was based on a flawed understanding of the humanity of the unborn child and views of obstetrical practice that are outdated because they fail to treat unborn children as second patients in pregnancy.”

            Roe v. Wade is the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which legalized abortion throughout the country. It is estimated that more than 62million Americans have died from legal abortion since the decision went into effect. Countless numbers of women have also been forced to grieve children lost to abortion.

            You can read the Federation’s ground-breaking brief here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/docketpdf/19/19-1392/185227/20210729111948208_19-1392%20amicus%20brief%20of%20the%20pennsylvania%20pro-life%20federation.pdf.

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Abortion

PA House Bill 1500: One Small Step Towards Victory

June 21, 2021By

On June 9, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban abortions solely because of a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. This pro-life victory served as a small but significant step to promote the dignity of all human life.

The bill, known as House Bill 1500, was introduced by Rep. Kate Klunk, R-York, in December 2020.

“Most of us know of a family touched by a Down syndrome child, and know these children grow to lead joyful and fulfilling lives,” Klunk said when introducing the bill.

In current Pennsylvania law, it is legal for a woman toreceive an abortion prior to 24 weeks gestation for any reason deemed necessaryby a physician, with the exception of selecting the sex of the child. This billwill broaden that restriction through the same means in the case of a positiveDown syndrome diagnosis.

“People with Down syndrome are living longer than ever and they’re happier than most of us,” said Rep. Kathy Rapp. “So why are many of them being aborted, why? It’s a curious and heart-wrenching question, because there never has been a better time in all of history for people with Down syndrome.”

“We need to stand up for those who do not have a voice herein Pennsylvania,” added Klunk. “And that’s what this bill does. We have theresponsibility to stand up for those children who receive that Down Syndromediagnosis in the womb, and we shouldn’t allow them to be discriminated against becausethey have one extra chromosome.”

Rep. Paul Schemel acknowledged unborn babies with Down Syndrome as falling under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which protects the disabled from discrimination in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and public/private affairs. “The principle underlying the legally protected classes is that we don’t treat certain people differently because of their condition, be it race, sex, disability, etc. We don’t treat the disabled differently just because they are disabled. That would be wrong.”

The bill came through the House with a passing vote of 120-83,a major victory for the pro-life movement.  But why is it so significant?

The reason is not only because unborn babies with Down syndrome are receiving justice and protection, but the bill itself is one of the first steps to shift the focus of the abortion movement from the woman alone to the unborn child in her womb. Once we can shine a small light on the humanity and life of the unborn, we can open a door to complete, undeniable justice for them all.

May we continue to pray for our state senators, as they prepare to vote on the Down syndrome bill in the weeks to come. May we pray that Governor Wolf may also begin to see this bill in a different light. And may we continue, one small step at a time, to proclaim the humanity in all unborn life.

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