COLE COUNTY, Missouri, October 6, 2015 (LifeSiteNews)
– The "Satanic Temple" is suing both Missouri and the United States,
claiming that laws restricting abortion violate its members' "free
exercise" of religion. Now, this week, they responded to the governor's
and attorney general's motion to dismiss their suit.
The Satanic suit identifies abortion as an "essential religious duty"
for Satanists and opposes Missouri's "Informed Consent" and 72-hour
waiting period laws. Satanic Temple founder Doug Mesner (a pseudonym),
who goes by the Satanist name "Lucien Greaves," sued Missouri's governor, attorney general, and the state,
saying that Missouri's informed consent law violates the federal
Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). "The question of when life
begins is absolutely a religious opinion," he claims.
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster, both
Democrats, responded by filing a motion to dismiss the suit, noting that
Satanist plaintiff "Mary Doe" was not religiously motivated to abort,
nor was she religiously motivated to abort her baby in less than 72
hours. Rather, she disagrees with the informed consent booklet's
scientific facts, medical information, and basic biology. Nixon and
Koster pointed out
that Missouri law does not require her to agree, or even read the
booklet; it only requires that a new mother be given a 72-hour chance to
read the facts, if she chooses to be informed.
Last week, attorneys for Mesner's "Satanic Temple" countered: "The
physical act does not necessarily have to be imbued with inherent
religious meaning[.] ... If the physical act – or abstention therefrom –
is motivated by a religious belief, then it is the 'exercise of
religion.'"
Mesner reacted to the governor and attorney general with ridicule.
"The laughable nature of their argument can't help but signify a certain
degree of desperation," Greaves told Raw Story.
"I'm pleased to see that our case is strong enough that this Motion to
Dismiss was the best Missouri could do. I think this bodes very well for
our prospects of a momentous victory in defense of reproductive
rights."
"Informed consent" laws are intended to educate a woman about the
facts of abortion and what's going on inside her body, and waiting
periods between initial contact and the major surgery of abortion are
intended to give mothers time to think the information over before
having irreversible major surgery.
Besides their state lawsuit, Mesner's group sued in federal court so
as to create a national precedent to stop not only Missouri's law, but
also abortion laws in other states. He says the Constitution's freedom
of religion includes the "Freedom to Believe When Human Life Begins."
The informed consent booklet's facts are "moot," Mesner argues, because
it is contrary to Mesner's "Satanic Temple" beliefs.
Mesner also argues that abortion restrictions violate the
Constitution's Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from
establishing a religion.
Mesner's "religion" is an anti-religious movement, founded only three
years ago, which makes up its own "beliefs" and then seeks to use those
"beliefs" as the free exercise of established religion.
As the leftist publication Broadly admits, "[t]he Satanic Temple levy their beliefs to balance the scale in U.S. politics away from dominant Christian ideology."
Started in 2012 as a Facebook page, the "Satanic Temple" was founded
by Bostonians Mesner and "Malcolm Jarry" (a pseudonym), from an idea
hatched years earlier by Jarry, who reacted against President George W.
Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Jarry thought it would be
cool to start a faith-based organization that could receive federal
funds but would be repugnant to what the Faith-Based Initiative stood for.
Neither Mesner nor Jarry, who was raised by non-practicing Jews,
actually believe that the Devil exists. In fact, their self-starter
"religion" is "totally opposed to supernaturalism," according to the
head of its St. Louis chapter, "Damien Ba'al." Their group's worship
focuses on dance music, porn rooms, phallic imagery, S&M behaviors, and nudity. The only requirements to be a member are to agree to its tenets and simply name oneself a member.
But Mesner and Jarry's new group has drawn more attention to Lucifer
than anyone since Anton LaVey, the San Francisco carnival worker who
wrote The Satanic Bible in 1969.
And as the New York Times put it, they have done so "with only a website, some legal savvy and a clever way with satire."
The Satanic Temple is fundraising for its state and federal lawsuits and has so far raised more than $33,000.
The Senate and House passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
(RFRA) in 1993 with the support of the Clinton White House. When
Congress first debated the RFRA, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
and the National Right to Life Committee both expressed concerns that
it could be misused to create a "religious" right to abortion.
In July, the satanic group's Detroit chapter publicly unveiled a
9-foot-tall, one-ton statue of Satan. Audience members were required to
sell their souls to Satan in order to attend.
Tell Nancy Pelosi: No, supporting abortion and gay 'marriage' is not Catholic. Sign the petition. Click here.
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews)
-- Top Democrat Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, won't say whether an unborn child
with a “human heart” and a “human liver” is a human being.
Pelosi, who is the Minority Leader in the House, was asked a question
about the issue by CNS News at a press conference last week. The
conservative news outlet asked, "In reference to funding for Planned
Parenthood: Is an unborn baby with a human heart and a human liver a
human being?”
Pelosi stumbled over her answer, saying, “Why don't you take your ideological questions--I don't, I don't have—”
CNS then asked her, "If it's not a human being, what species is it?”
It
was then that Pelosi got back on stride, swatting aside the question
with her accustomed reference to her “devout” Catholic faith.
“No,
listen, I want to say something to you,” she said. “I don't know who
you are and you're welcome to be here, freedom of this press. I am a
devout practicing Catholic, a mother of five children. When my baby was
born, my fifth child, my oldest child was six years old. I think I know
more about this subject than you, with all due respect.”
“So
it's not a human being, then?” pressed CNS, to which Pelosi said, “And I
do not intend to respond to your questions, which have no basis in what
public policy is that we do here.”
Pelosi has long used her self-proclaimed status as a “devout” practicing Catholic to promote abortion.
In response to a reporter’s question a proposed ban on late-term abortion in 2013, Pelosi said that the issue of late-term abortion is "sacred ground" for her.
"As
a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when
we talk about this," Pelosi said. "This shouldn't have anything to do
with politics."
In 2008, she was asked by then-Meet the Press host David Gregory
about when life begins. Pelosi said that "as an ardent, practicing
Catholic, this is an issue I have studied for a long time. And what I
know is that over the centuries, the doctors of the Church have not been
able to make that definition....We don't know."
The
Church has always taught that unborn human life is to be protected, and
that such life is created at the moment of conception.
New video: Planned Parenthood abortionist jokes about harvesting baby’s brains, getting ‘intact’ head
Sign the petition to defund Planned Parenthood here.
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 5, 2015 (LifeSiteNews)
- In the newest video footage released by the Center for Medical
Progress, a Planned Parenthood abortionist laughs as she discusses her
hope of removing the intact "calvarium," or skull, of an unborn baby
while preserving both lobes of the brain.
She also describes how she first dismembers babies up to twenty weeks
gestation, including two twenty-week babies she said she aborted the
week before.
Dr. Amna Dermish, an abortionist with Planned Parenthood of Greater
Texas, told undercover investigators she had never been able to remove
the calivarium (skull) of an aborted child "intact," but she hopes to.
"Maybe next time," the investigator said.
"I know, right?" Dr. Dermish replied. "Well, this'll give me something to strive for."
Dermish, who performs abortions up to the 20-week legal limit in
Austin, then described the method she used to collect fetal brain and
skull specimens.
"If it’s a breech presentation [in which the baby is born feet first]
I will remove the extremities first - the lower extremities - and then
go for the spine," she began.
She then slides the baby down the birth canal until she can snip the spinal cord.
The buyer noted that intact organs fetch higher prices from potential buyers, who seek them for experimentation.
"I always try to keep the trunk intact," she said.
"I don't routinely convert to breech, but I will if I have to," she added.
Converting a child to the breech position is the first step of the
partial birth abortion procedure. The procedure has been illegal since
President Bush signed legislation in 2003 making it a federal felony
punishable by two years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
According to CMP lead investigator David Daleiden, who debuted the
video footage during an interview with Lila Rose on The Blaze TV, Dr.
Dermish was trained by Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical
services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola.
Dr. Nucatola was caught on the first CMP undercover video, discussing the side industry while eating a salad and drinking red wine during a business luncheon.
Between sips, she described an abortion process that legal experts believe is a partial birth abortion, violating federal law.
“The federal abortion ban is a law, and laws are up to
interpretation,” Dr. Nucatola said on the undercover footage. “So, if I
say on day one that I don't intend to do this, what ultimately happens
doesn't matter.”
Daleiden told Rose he hoped that Congressional investigators would
continue to pressure the organization about whether the abortion
technique it uses violates federal law, as well as the $60-per-specimen
fee the national organization has admitted some of its affiliates
receive.
Trafficking in human body parts for "valuable consideration" is also a
federal felony carrying a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a
$500,000 fine.
"That would be enough to construct a criminal case against Planned Parenthood," Daleiden said.
October 5, 2015 (LiveActionNews)
-- In 1976, Dr. Anthony Levatino, an OB/GYN, graduated from medical
school and was, without a doubt, pro-abortion. He strongly supported
abortion “rights” and believed abortion was a decision to be made
between a woman and her doctor.
“A lot of people identify themselves as pro-life or pro-choice, but
for so many people, it doesn’t really touch them personally; it doesn’t
impact their lives in the way that I wish it would. If nothing more than
in the voting booth, if nowhere else,” said Levatino in a speech for
the Pro-Life Action League. “But when you’re an obstetrician /
gynecologist and you say I’m pro-choice – well, that becomes rather a
more personal thing because you’re the one who does the abortions and
you have to make the decision of whether you’ll do that or not.”
Levatino learned how to
do first and second trimester abortions. Thirty to forty years
ago, second trimester abortions were done by saline injection, which was
dangerous.
"For the first time in my
life, after all those years, all those abortions, I really looked, I
mean I really looked at that pile of goo on the side of the table that
used to be somebody’s son or daughter and that’s all I could see."
At that same time, Levatino and his wife were struggling with
fertility problems and were considering adoption. They knew however, how
difficult it was to adopt a newborn.
“It was the first time that I had any doubts about what I was doing
because I knew very well that part of the reason why it’s difficult to
find children to adopt were that doctors like me were killing them in
abortions,” said Levatino.
Finally, in 1978, the couple adopted their daughter, Heather. Right
after the adoption, they discovered they were expecting a baby, and
their son was born just 10 months later.
Levatino describes a “perfectly happy” life at this time and says
that despite those first qualms about abortion, he went right back to
work performing them. In
1981, after graduating from his residency, Levatino joined an OB/GYN
practice which also offered abortions as a service. Saline infusion was
the most common method for second trimester abortions at the time, but
it ran the risk of babies born alive. The procedures were also
expensive, difficult, and required the mother to go through
labor. Levatino and his partners trained themselves to perform
the D&E abortion procedure, which is used today.
In his speech, he describes what it’s like to perform the now routine procedure:
You take an instrument like this called a sopher clamp and you
basically – the surgery is that you literally tear a child to pieces.
The suction is only for the fluid. The rest of it is literally
dismembering a child piece by piece with an abortion instrument […]
absolutely gut-wrenching procedure.
Over the next four years, Levatino would perform 1,200 abortions, over 100 of them D&E, second trimester abortions.
But then everything changed. On a beautiful day in June of 1984, the
family was at home enjoying time with friends when Levatino heard tires
squeal. The children were in the street and Heather had been hit by a
car.
“She was a mess,” he explained. “And we did everything we possibly
could. But she ultimately died, literally in our arms, on the way to the
hospital that evening.”
After a while, Levatino had to return to work. And one day, his first
D&E since the accident was on his schedule. He wasn’t really
thinking about it or concerned. To him, it was going to be a routine
procedure he had done many times before. Only it wasn’t.
“I started that abortion and I took that sopher clamp and I literally
ripped out an arm or a leg and I just stared at it in the clamp. And I
got sick,” he explained. “But you know something, when you start an
abortion you can’t stop. If you don’t get all the pieces – and you
literally stack them up on the side of the table […] your patient is
going to come back infected, bleeding or dead. So I soldiered on and I
finished that abortion.”
But by the time the abortion was complete, Levatino was beginning to feel a change of heart:
For the first time in my life, after all those years, all those
abortions, I really looked, I mean I really looked at that pile of goo
on the side of the table that used to be somebody’s son or daughter and
that’s all I could see. I couldn’t see what a great doctor I was being. I
didn’t see how I helped this woman in her crisis. I didn’t see the 600
dollars cash I had just made in 15 minutes. All I could see was
somebody’s son or daughter. And after losing my daughter this was
looking very, very different to me.
Levatino stopped performing second trimester abortions but continued
to provide first trimester abortions for the next few months.
“Everybody puts doctors on a pedestal and we’re all supposed to be so smart but we’re no different than anybody else,” he said.
He realized that killing a baby at 20 weeks gestation was exactly the
same as killing one at nine weeks gestation or even two weeks
gestation. He understood that it doesn’t matter how big or small the
baby is, it’s a human life. He has not done an abortion since February
1985 and says there is no chance he will ever perform one again.
Adamant that he would never join the pro-life movement because of the
media’s portrayal of pro-lifers as crazy, he was eventually invited to a
pro-life potluck dinner where he met people who he realized were
intelligent volunteers who spent their time defending preborn humans.
After that, Levatino began speaking out against abortion specifically
with young people, graphically describing for them what an abortion
really is.
Levatino has also testified before Congress, asking our government to end legal abortion. Reprinted with permission from Live Action News.
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