As excerpted on FOX Nation:

While we were watching Kagan’s confirmation last week, an amendent sponsored by Senator Ronald ”Blago-pal” Burris (D-Ill.) and spawned by the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 15-12 vote in late May, will allow abortion procedures in clinics or hospitals on military installations worldwide.  The amendment to the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act passed the Senate along a partyline vote, with the exception of Ben “Cornhusker Kickback” Nelson. 

The Washington Times accurately calls it a “ruse” to “accomplish radical social change – to mainstream abortion, to press the government into providing it on a widespread scale so that it becomes respectable and ordinary”:

In late May, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved an 11th-hour amendment by Democratic Sen. Roland Burris of Illinois to overturn the long-standing restrictions on abortion in military hospitals during the committee‘s work on the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act and after protracted debate on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The Burris amendment passed on a party-line vote with one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voting no. While Elena Kagan‘s confirmation hearings directed attention away from the Defense authorization bill, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan has called for this issue to be dealt with as soon as possible after the Senate returns from August recess.

Under current law, Department of Defense resources may be used for emergency abortions to save the mother’s life and in cases of rape or incest, restrictions first added to the U.S. Code in 1984 and 1996.

Elective abortions, on the other hand, have been disallowed in military hospitals for decades, with the exception of a brief period when President Clinton reversed the policy in January 1993, only to have Congress vote to restore it in 1995. Under current law, military women are free to leave the base and make their own private arrangements for an elective abortion.

Mr. Burris‘ amendment would overturn current law so that elective abortions are performed in U.S. military clinics and hospitals by military personnel, putting the armed forces in competition with Planned Parenthood as the nation’s largest abortion provider.

Critics of the current law say their biggest concern is sexual assault in the military, but this is highly disingenuous, as current law provides a specific exception allowing the use of military facilities to abort a child conceived in rape.

They also cite Iraq and Afghanistan and complain that abortion laws in those countries limit off-base abortion options. But this, too, is meant to deceive. If this were the real concern of Mr. Burris and his allies, he could have crafted his measure to address it. Instead, he took a bludgeon to current law across the board so that the greatest impact would be felt right here on U.S. soil, where abortion is virtually unlimited throughout pregnancy and 1.2 million children are aborted every year.

Read the rest.

This just doubly reveals the duplicitous nature of President Obama’s “no fed funding for abortions” Executive Order to get healthcare passed.

Planned Parenthood, of course, supports the amendment, saying:

The vote repealing this discriminatory and dangerous ban is the first step..

This is discrimination against unplanned persons.

I’d like to know how many servicewomen have been in danger because abortion procedures were not readily accessible to them, especially when President Obama already made it a federal requirement for all military bases to carry Plan B, the morning-after pill  back in February of this year, even though bases have always had the option to carry the abortive drug.

Our taxpayer dollars at work.

Never trust anything coming out of Chicago.

Crossposted and on the ZipWire.

[Edit]: A summary that exposes deeper ramifications:

New Scientist, a popular site with over 3 million unique visitors a month, initially responded to the nation’s first abortion ban based on fetal pain in April 2010 with a simple “briefing” that wasn’t widely repeated throughout the web. The article focused on discrediting Nebraska’s 20-week abortion “Fetal Pain” restriction as “debatable.”

Late last week, New Scientist followed up (HT Tabitha Hale’s Amplify) with a direct refutation of the “pain claim” by citing a UK study that had been picked up by UPI and the AP for mass distribution.

This study has subsequently appeared in Time, CBS, The Money Times, MSNBC, and The Washington Post.

The headliner for these articles on the UK study generally state, ” Fetus Can’t Feel Pain  Before 24 Weeks.”

What these articles aren’t telling the public is that this study advocates absolutely no regard for the pain (and therefore treatment of pain) of the unborn before or after 24 weeks – throughout the duration of the pregnancy, in fact – even for corrective procedures performed on fetuses in utero, something that is typically done here in the United States.

In the United States, we have our own studies concluding the opposite of the UK study. Methods of administering fetal anesthesia are widely discussed. This is the neonatal care standard we’ve practiced here in the United States as our technology advances. Neonatal care is a profession.

The widespread dissemination by the leftist mainstream media of this worthless UK study that can readily by discredited by medical studies and medical methodology accepted and practiced here in the US flies in the face of reason — so much so, one can easily assume why abortionists would be interested in dismissing the pain of the littlest ones.

Back in April, Nebraska passed the first-ever “Fetal “Pain” abortion bill — the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” (LB 1103 ) — to prevent the abortions of fetuses older than 20 weeks…

…by an overwhelming pro-life majority of 44 in favor and 5 against. The governor wasted no time in signing the measure into law.The law portends a fresh challenge and new look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton cases, which led to the virtual legalization of abortion on demand. The Nebraska law applies a different standard – that of the unborn child’s ability to feel pain – for restricting abortion, while the high court used the standard of what they then considered to be point of fetal viability.

The Supreme Court considered fetuses “viable” beginning at 24 weeks when deciding Roe v. Wade, a mistake subsequent Justices would argue :

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued in a 1983 decision that Roe was on a “collision course with itself.” She said that improvements in technology would continually push the point of fetal viability closer to the beginning of the pregnancy, allowing states greater opportunity to regulate the right to an abortion.

Nebraska’s LB 1103 would be is the first state to regulate abortion according to the interests of the baby, not according to the interests of the mother:

“The Nebraska Legislature took a bold step today which should ratchet up the abortion debate across America,” said Julie Schmit-Albin, Executive Director of Nebraska Right to Life in a statement.

“LB 1103 creates a case of first impression for the courts to acknowledge the capability to feel pain as a compelling state interest to protect those unborn babies from an excruciatingly painful death.”

The legislation bans abortions after 20 weeks of post-fertilization age except in two cases: first, when the pregnancy puts the mother in danger of death or “substantial and irreversible” physical harm to a major bodily function. The second exception allows an abortionist to perform an abortion in order to increase the probability of a live birth, or to preserve an unborn child’s life and health after a live birth.

This is important, because this law shifts the argument from the focus of time restrictions for would-be aborting mothers to the focus of the effects of the abortion itself on the fetus — from the interests of the mother to the interests of the child. It forces society and the courts to admit the human-ness of the fetus and consider their suffering in a very real death.

To pass LB 1103, Nebraska cited the 2004 testimony of Kanwaljeet Anand from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center who testified on the federal partial birth abortion ban (subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007):

Kanwaljeet “Sunny” Anand, a pioneer in the study of fetal pain and now a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, testified in 2004 on the federal partial birth abortion ban that after 20 weeks gestation, an unborn child would experience “severe and excruciating pain” from an abortion.

The pain may even be more acute than it would be for older humans, as some research indicates their immature nervous systems have not developed coping mechanisms that help the body better endure pain.

The law notes that unborn children have been observed to “seek to evade certain stimuli” in a manner that “would be interpreted as a response to pain.” Additionally, the bill says unborn children exhibit “hormonal stress responses to painful stimuli” that were reduced with the application of pain medication.

Abortion supporters want to call that evasion of “certain stimuli” a reflex action, similar to a knee-jerk responding to a tap on the knee or a finger removing itself from a heat source before being sensed by the brain.

When Nebraska passed LB 1103 in April of this year, New Scientist.com came out with a 2-page rebuttal to the law’s fetal-pain argument. The site claimed that changing the terms of abortion is inappropriate because pain experienced by fetuses as young as 20 weeks is “far from certain.” The site’s most vile assertion is the lie that “before most abortions the fetal heart is stopped by a drug – usually digoxin or potassium chloride . The fetus cannot feel pain after that.”

Using digoxin or potassium chloride on fetuses did not begin to be seriously considered by abortionists until after the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial birth abortion ban in 2007, and only then for the abortion of fetuses older than 20 weeks. Even so, an “interest” by those who slaughter the unborn does not constitute a widespread, enforceable mandate.

Potassium chloride is also the same chemical used for the lethal injection of prisoners, a practice New Scientist claims is inhumane .

So while New Scientist will consider the inhumane manner of death of a condemned person, this same publication will blatantly dismiss the pain of the unborn as merely “reflexive,” “irrelevant,” and even “completely irrational.”

Last week, New Scientist reiterated their support for abortion by using a study by the UKs Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) to refute the opinion of American researchers. Keep in mind that the UK has full-blown socialized medicine , where abortion on demand has been rising for years and where medical procedures are pre-determined by committee according to “harms and benefits” — or cost-effectiveness.

New Scientist cited a “working party report ” that argues that since the pre-born fetuses exist in a state of unconsciousness, that consciousness is needed to experience pain. Therefore, pre-born fetuses, regardless of gestational age, “even after 24 weeks” would not benefit from pain medication.

“After 24 weeks there is continuing development and elaboration of intracortical networks” .. “Such connections to the cortex are necessary for pain experience but not sufficient , as experience of external stimuli requires consciousness . ..[T]he fetus never experiences a state of true wakefulness in utero … [ i]s in a continuous sleep-like unconsciousness … [that] suppress[es] higher cortical activation in the presence of intrusive external stimuli. ..

[I]n the light of current evidence, the Working Party concluded that the use of analgesia provided no clear benefit to the fetus. … [F]etal analgesia should not be employed where the only consideration is concern about fetal awareness or pain . Similarly, there appeared to be no clear benefit in considering the need for fetal analgesia prior to termination of pregnancy, even after 24 weeks , in cases of fetal abnormality.

New Scientist ends their article with

“It is only after birth, with the separation of the baby from the uterus and the umbilical cord, that wakefulness truly begins.”

According to the RCOG, only once that umbilical cord is cut can a child experience pain, never before.

By citing this wretched study, the argument of New Scientist and all pro-abortion advocates is clear:  pain experienced by fetuses in utero is hardly significant, and whatever ground the pro-life camp makes, the tide must be turned around, 360 degrees. Therefore, define fetuses as sub-human, never requiring pain medication, regardless of gestational age.

If the Supreme Court were to agree with the RCOG study, the issue of viability in Roe v. Wade would be moot. The experience of pain would be the true threshold, and that would only occur once the umbilical is cut when everyone can hear the newborn cry.

Abortionists like these subscribe to ideas similar to this one:

When a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound.

Since these abortionists aren’t there in the womb with the baby to see it writhe in pain, the baby’s pain must not exist.

It would follow that neither does “a baby.”

Crossposted .

Originally posted in RedState on January 11, 2010

The Definitive Answer on Obama: Why Americans Don’t Understand Their President

Although R2P is a term that is vibrantly articulated and discussed among academia, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and foreign policy think tanks, it remains a closely guarded secret from the American public.

Wesley Clark, Converence on the Future of the Responsibility to Protect,

What we, the American public, are faced with is a doctrine that the UN is trying to implement throughout it’s 192 member states around the globe and it is not even part of our American lexicon or debate.

The purpose of this site is to raise awareness of Obama’s implementation of the UN’s R2P doctrine through his foreign and domestic agenda.

R2P Exists. Know What it Means (<-link)

R2P is the mechanism through which the United Nations attempts to establish global governance over sovereign states. It seeks authoritative “power in perpetuity” under the guise of securing human rights for humanity. This doctrine defines sovereignty as the responsibility to protect.  The guiding principle of this imperative is to ensure a sustainable security and a just peace for all.

In other words, the United Nations, working as a group of sovereign nations, but also under its own authority, declares that all nations have a multilateral responsibility to protect humanity when and where sovereign nations fail to meet their responsibility.

As to how R2P affects our sovereign nation — if fully implemented, R2P can be exploited to subjugate the sovereignty of America and supercede the Constitution of the United States and the security of our nation.

It theory, it already does, in practice it would.

The President of the United States

President Barack Obama is not the architect of R2P. As President of the United States, he is its most enabled champion for the success of this “hope for change” we know he has spoken of since the beginning of his presidential campaign. It’s the same message he spreads now, the same message spread by his surrogates and policy advisers, the same message the UN spreads throughout the world.

The course is well underway and many hands have been employed to bridge “the gulf between mandate and means,” transforming the concept of R2P “from slogan to operational reality.”

His activist skills are being employed for what the UN lacks in order to achieve relevance and success on a global scale: President Barack Obama is the UN’s global organizer.

When juxtaposing his speeches, senate and community activist background, and presidential actions during 2009,  against the language used to perpetuate the R2P doctrine in UN documents, think tank briefs,  NGOs and the like, it becomes clear that President Obama’s aspirations were always far beyond the realm of America and hampers his faithfulness in executing his duties as President of the United States.

President Obama is thinking and acting on a global scale. And we, as Americans, should not expect him to slow his pace, because he is working to further the UN and EU ambitions of global governance by advancing the core principles within the R2P doctrine through his foreign and domestic agenda.

If conservatives are going to be successful in countering his global agenda, we have to first think globally, just as he does.

President Obama is not amateurish, nor is he naive. He is well-steeped, well-versed and knows how to tailor the shared ideology of global governance into action.

Conservatives will need an intimate knowledge and understanding of R2P doctrine and the documentation that saturates NGOs, CSOs, academia, and liberal policy think tanks. We have to understand the history of the R2P doctrine and the subsequent documents the UN has used to promulgate R2P’s “right to protect” mandate — core principles and practices that have already been woven into the very fabric of American politics, society and culture, including the War on Terror (WOT), UN and INTERPOL’s new peacekeeping role, the prosecution of terrorists in civilian courts, and our engagement in Afghanistan.

If the concept of R2P sounds unfamiliar, it is because we will not find R2P broadcast throughout the mainstream media or in conservative policy-analyst commentary or the consevative blogosphere.

Up until now, much of American commentary on his speeches and what he has accomplished throughout the first year of his presidency has revolved around his cadence, his teleprompter and whether he affirms the values of America.

America’s new approach needs to be all-encompassing, employed to understand what he says and what he means. This will provide a pattern and clarity to the vital question of “Why?”

America has not been listening to President Obama, as he speaks beyond us to the world through the prism of R2P.

It is time to think globally first,  when it comes to Obama.

Crossposted. Still under contruction, tho. More to come, from hubby and me.