Charlotte Life

Another Look

Another Look

BEIJING — Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal defender who made a dramatic escape from house arrest and whose decision to seek refuge in the American Embassy here jolted American-Sino relations, left China aboard a commercial flight bound for Newark on Saturday.

“Conservative complaints about media bias are sometimes overdrawn. But on the abortion issue, the press’ prejudices are often absolute, its biases blatant and its blinders impenetrable. In many newsrooms and television studios across the country, Planned Parenthood is regarded as the equivalent of, well, the Komen foundation: an apolitical, high-minded and humanitarian institution whose work no rational person – and certainly no self-respecting woman – could possibly question or oppose.”

On Monday the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer pointed to a new study which found a nearly 3-fold increase in the risk of breast cancer among Armenian women who had an abortion as yet another reason women should steer clear of the procedure.

The results of the blood test revealed only a risk, but when she saw them, she still threw up. Now she had to find out for sure.

So she lay on her back at a doctor’s office, praying, comforted by her Christian faith and her mother at her side, while a needle was slipped into her belly.

Erin Witkowski of Port Jervis, N.Y., was going to find out if the baby she was carrying had Down syndrome.

Charlotte Voices

Charlotte Voices

Thanks to the 75 federal, state, county and judicial candidates who responded to our questionnaires! Early voting opens up at multiple locations throughout the county on April 30th for the May 8th primary. Please consider LIFE when you vote!

(03/15/12) If the bill is enacted, South Carolina would become the 16th state to “opt-out” of abortion coverage. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, each state is required to set-up a health insurance “exchange” by January 1, 2014. Unless a state specifically opts not to include plans that cover abortion, an exchange-plan may offer (but interestingly, not advertise) that this is a covered procedure. The 2010 law provides federal subsidies to those with income of up to 400% of poverty level. Even if a state opts-out of abortion coverage within their plans, those receiving the taxpayer-funded subsidies in other states may well select plans that happen to cover abortion — paying a premium of $1 or more per month for this coverage whether they actually wanted it or not. Pro-life groups reacting to the March 12th HHS regulations, that dealt with the administration of the plan exchanges, remain very concerned with the components of the law which expand abortion.

Prosecutors are charging Mark Anthony Cox with two counts of murder for the slaying of a pregnant woman Jan. 13 at the Stonecrest shopping center in South Charlotte.

Meanwhile, police search warrants released Monday, Jan. 23, indicate that a miscommunication between a 911 dispatcher and Danielle Watson’s fiancé came at least an hour after the woman’s alleged killer had already fled the scene.

(10/25/11) A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction today putting a hold on the ultrasound provision of North Carolina’s Woman’s Right to Know which goes into effect tomorrow. Ultrasounds are performed before an abortion but in many cases women are never given the opportunity to see the image. We believe it is unconscionable for abortion providers to withhold this information. NC Woman’s Right to Know sets the standard that a clear image be displayed, an explanation be provided, and that the mother be given the chance to hear the fetal heart tone.

Our Issue

LIFE Today

“Due to the ACA’s (Affordable Care Act’s) restrictions on IPAB’s cost-cutting methods, the board is expected to focus on minimizing payments provided to doctors who serve Medicare patients. However it is no longer financially viable for many physicians to serve Medicare patients as it is, and such cuts would exacerbate a Medicare-doctors shortage that is already affecting patients’ access to care throughout the country.”

The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday unanimously struck down a key provision of a state law that criminalized some assisted suicides, finding it violates free speech rights.

The court’s ruling means that four members of the Final Exit Network do not have to stand trial on felony charges in Forsyth County in connection with the 2008 suicide of 58-year-old John Celmer, who killed himself two years after he had been diagnosed with cancer.

The state Legislature passed the law in 1994 to punish people like the late Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist known as “Dr. Death.” He catapulted to fame in the early 1990s by overseeing the suicides of more than 100 people, prompting a number of states to criminalize assisted suicide.

The state Supreme Court said Georgia’s law is unconstitutional because it does not prohibit all assisted suicides and, instead, criminalizes only those in which someone advertises or offers to assist in a suicide and then takes steps to help carry it out.

“The State has failed to provide any explanation or evidence as to why a public advertisement or offer to assist in an otherwise legal activity is sufficiently problematic to justify an intrusion on protected speech rights,” Justice Hugh Thompson wrote for the court.

“Had the state truly been interested in the preservation of human life … it could have imposed a ban on all assisted suicides with no restriction on protected speech whatsoever,” Thompson wrote. “Alternatively, the state could have sought to prohibit all offers to assist in suicide when accompanied by an overt act to accomplish that goal. The state here did neither.”