They were deceived — much like you have probably been deceived. An abortion, especially for an early pregnancy, is a relatively easy procedure to perform. And while I know, women of South Dakota, that you never asked for this, now is the time to learn how it is done. There is no reason you should be beholden to doctors — especially in a state where doctors have been refusing to perform them, forcing the state’s only abortion clinic to fly doctors in from elsewhere.

Boy, does this have lawsuit written all over it. What an interesting tact to take. We can’t get abortions legally in this state, so instead, I’ll tell you how to perform one, since it requires little, if any, medical training, and is safer than actual pregnancy (according to some vague, non-cited statistic from the 1960′s). Let’s dissect this a bit, shall we?
As I understand it, abortion advocates claim that if abortion is outlawed, women will turn to “back-alley” procedures which endanger their lives due to unsafe and unsanitary conditions, increasing the chances of toxic shock, vaginal infections, excessive bleeding, etc. Now, just so you know, the inflated numbers used by abortion advocates to prove this was the case pre-Roe have been debunked, which makes publication (even on the Internet) of the manual and the author’s reasons for doing so somewhat spurious.
But imagine, if you will, the author’s good intention of writing a self-help abortion manual because she cares deeply about the rights of women to know about and have easy access to procedures that directly affect their rights as women.

DISCLAIMER: I am posting this as information only. Whether anyone chooses to act upon this information is their own concern. I believe in the free exchange of information and ideas. I believe this information has been kept from women for too long, and there is no reason they should not know about a procedure being performed on their own body, and no reason women should be kept in the dark about how to perform it — especially if someone they know is having their health jeopardized by this law.

This is apparently intended to be a panacea for any wrongful death lawsuits that result from a teenage girl reading this and taking matters into her own hands. But I wonder, if a woman having surgery for a cancerous tumor would demand to know specific details about the procedure being performed on her. What makes abortion, as a medical procedure, different from any other that it doesn’t require a medical license to perform? Does having someone scrape placenta from your uterine walls somehow make them a skilled medical technician or surgeon? I simply have trouble imagining how women can think an abortion self-help guide is any better than visiting a back alley doctor with rusty instruments and an old Hoover vacuum.

The first step is to break the membrane holding the fetus inside. You can feel around with the forceps for it. To get an idea of what each part looks like — and to see the texture so that you understand better how it will feel — I recommend looking at books with photographs of first trimester fetuses (personal recommendation for its astonishing photographs: A Child is Born).

I think the author misses the irony of using a book about children being born to aid in performing an abortion. Or perhaps not.

Save the material until the end of the procedure on a piece of plastic, so that you can be sure the entire fetus has been removed. If doing this sounds too ethically challenging, remember that fetuses do not have the capacity to feel actual pain until the third trimester. You are not “hurting” it, and it has no awareness, nor the capacity for awareness, that you are extracting it.

This is, in fact, a total fabrication. Fetal tests indicate that at eight weeks, fetuses are capable of responses to external stimuli, including pain, sunlight, touch, even sound. Whatever manner professional abortionists perform their procedures, it would be a safe bet to assume that anything done in an illegal clinic or house would be equally, if not more painful to the fetus. The unprofessional status of the operation, and the manual’s blatant disregard for the facts, indicates that the abortionist is in no way qualified to perform such a procedure. If the abortionist is aware of the facts regarding fetal pain, it in no way ameliorates his or her responsibility toward both the woman and her unborn child. After all, according to the manual, HONESTY is vitally important to the health of the patient.

Why isn’t the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy approaching the scale, say, of Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than that of the general community? No one wants to recreate the backyard abortion clinic (or to stigmatise the millions of Australians who have had abortions or encouraged others to do so). But is it really so hard to create a culture where people understand that actions have consequences and take their responsibilities seriously?

The same questions can be asked here in America. Only the scale here is more than 10 times that of Australia.
Actions and consequences. Two words that are very nearly foreign to most of us. Especially the latter. Forgetting the moral aspect of it for a second, just take the physical ‘consequences’. Pregnancy. Disease. Health risks in general. Then there are the social ‘consequences’. Single motherhood. Disease. Poverty. Crime. A society of children raising children.
Children don’t often understand consequences. When first confronted with a hot stove, a child doesn’t realize that touching it will cause great pain. Children have parents, therefore, to guide them, to teach them about cause and effect, action and consequence.
The liberalizing of the world has created more need than ever. By disposing of connections between the moral and the physical choice, Liberals also destroyed the ethos of personal and social responsibility. They fooled us into thinking consequence was a figment of our imagination; a stove with no fire inside it. Now the policy is catch-up, or maintenance, not prevention.
And 1.2 million babies are destroyed; we have millions of girls and women whose lives are burnt each year. They held their hand on the stove, and now they look to society for healing. Of course we tell them the easy way out.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could teach them not to touch the stove at all?

A counselor at Morning Star — a crisis pregnancy center promoting alternatives to abortion — offered her the chance to see her fetus via an ultrasound.
What Michelle saw on the tiny black-and-white screen pushed all thoughts of abortion out of her mind.
“After the ultrasound there was no way. At that point I realized there was someone living and breathing and with a heartbeat,” she said.
Michelle’s decision to keep her baby thrilled volunteers at Morning Star, who hope the ultrasound machine can persuade more women who might otherwise consider abortion to continue their pregnancies.

But uh oh! According to abortion rights advocates, the ultrasound is doing the women a disservice. Hmm, I can’t see where they explain how it is a disservice, but no matter, because AGENDA PUSHING RIGHT HERE!

Advocates for abortion rights say the ultrasounds, offered without discussion about abortion, do women a disservice.
“It’s something that should be offered as a tool to provide medical care,” Leslie Anastasio, executive director of the NARAL of Pennsylvania, formerly The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, said of the ultrasounds. “Instead it’s used as a tool to push their agenda.”

I bet they’ll say that ultrasounds are judgmental, something that would sway a woman not to get an abortion. Let’s take a look further down…
We have a winner!

“If ultrasounds are given in a nonjudgmental environment with all options discussed, that’s one thing,” said Patrick Hopkins, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania Advocates.
“But it’s very much directive and judgmental information women are given.”

I won’t even go into how assinine this statement is. Forgetting that abortion information could be considered just as “judgmental” and “directive”, abortion defenders are so rabid anti-life they’re willing to dismiss all choice in favour of offing an unborn life. A choice is not a choice if it’s the only thing being offered.

I reassured [the patient] that I do not perform the “partial-birth” procedure and that there is no likelihood that the ban’s passage would close my office and keep me from seeing her. The fetus cannot be delivered “alive” in my procedure?as the ban stipulates in defining prohibited procedures?because I begin by giving the fetus an injection that stops its heart immediately. I treat the woman’s cervix to cause it to open during the next two days. On the third day, under anesthesia, the membranes are ruptured, allowing the amniotic fluid to escape. Medicine is given to make the uterus contract, and the dead fetus is delivered or removed with forceps. Many variations of this sequence are possible, depending on the woman’s medical condition and surgical indications.

And then later, he writes the following:

Earlier this year, I began an abortion on a young woman who was 17 weeks pregnant. Because of the two days of prior treatment, the amniotic membranes were visible and bulging. I ruptured the membranes and released the fluid to reduce the risk of amniotic fluid embolism. Then I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact. With the next pass of the forceps, I grasped the placenta, and it came out in one piece. Within a few seconds, I had completed my routine exploration of the uterus and sharp curettage. The blood loss would just fill a tablespoon. The patient, who was awake, hardly felt the operation. She was relieved, grateful, and safe. She wants to have children in the future.

Could it be that he is completely without feeling with regards to these lives he’s snuffing out? Can he really be that cold and uncaring? How does this description, much less the actual, physical procedure, not sicken him with its total lack of humanity and morality?
What he fails to understand is that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban is aimed at stopping exactly this type of procedure, because no matter how clinical you make it sound, the truth is, life is being snuffed out as gruesomely as can be imagined, with such utter detachment it makes Idi Amin look like a humanitarian.

“To my little angel,” reads one, “You will always be my baby. I will see you in heaven, sweetheart. I love you!” This message, like the others, is addressed to a freshly aborted baby.

Yes, the November Gang is putting a new face on abortion. It’s not murder, it’s not even cell evacuation, it’s love. A counselling group who help women overcome the guilt of abortion by convincing them they’re actually doing the child a favour. The amazing thing is the total inhumanity of a project like this masked in a guise of compassion. How disgusting is it when abortions are considered “loving acts” that even if it were wrong, God would forgive.

And when a churchgoing young woman asked whether God will forgive her for “killing my baby,” the counselor asked, “Do you think there are any things that God considers completely unforgivable?” A moment later, the woman shook her head.
Aside from the heart-shaped Valentines ritual, religious women are encouraged to mock Christian beliefs as they give “baptisms” to their aborted child by sprinkling holy water over its mangled corpse (euphemistically called “fetal tissue” in the Glamour article).
The Gang glows over their strategy’s success. “It’s wonderful to see someone, perhaps for the first time, making a choice based on love for herself and belief in herself and not simply letting life happen to her,” said one member.

I’m confused. Now they’re finally acknowledging it’s a child, but because it hasn’t been born it’s loving to kill it? I think I read somewhere that’s illegal. Yeah! It’s called MURDER. But really, what’s murder next to your own happiness?
Makes me ill.

DEAN: What do you mean?
RUSSERT: To say to people at NARAL…
DEAN: I don’t think it’s… (CROSSTALK)
DEAN: A pretty big omission, you mean?
RUSSERT: Omission, yes. That’s a…
DEAN: I don’t think it is at all.
RUSSERT: To suggest her father may have been…
DEAN: I thought it was. At the time, I thought it was.
RUSSERT: But when you told that story, you knew otherwise.
DEAN: That’s right.
RUSSERT: Why didn’t you say that?
DEAN: Because it didn’t make any difference.? Meet The Press with Tim Russert, Jan 22, 2003.

Indeed. Mr. Dean doesn’t care about the truth. Why doesn’t anyone find that interesting?

The ACLU seems to think that the old parental consent law is the reason for the breakdown in family:

Parental Involvement Laws Do Not Strengthen Family Relationships
Parental involvement laws do not encourage young women to tell their parents about a pregnancy. In the minority of cases in which minors do not voluntarily consult a parent, many come from family where such an announcement would only exacerbate an already volatile of dysfunctional family situation. One study showed that 14% of minors having abortions believed that, if forced to tell their parents about their pregnancies, they would face physical abuse, and 11% feared violence between their parents. Others feared exacerbating a parent’s drug or alcohol problem.

That’s all well and good, except that three paragraphs up, the ACLU asserts:

Most Minors Involve Parents in the Decision Whether to Have an Abortion
A majority of minors who have abortions do so with at least one of their parent’s knowledge. Based on a national survey of more than 1,500 unmarried minors having abortions in states without parental involvement laws, 61% of women discussed the decision to have an abortion with at least one of their parents. The younger the minor, the more likely she was to have voluntarily discussed the abortion with her parent. Such communication was not mandated by law.

My question is, if most minors involve their parents or legal guardians anyway, why make a fuss? And if telling parents is bad for the family, why do the majority of minors do it?
John Locke on inherent parental authority:

“Though I have said . . . ‘That all men by nature are equal,’ I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality. Age . . . may give men a just precedency…[for] natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man.”
“Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it. Their parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over them when they come into the world, and for some time after, but it is a temporary one. The bonds of this subjection are like the swaddling clothes they are wrapped in and supported by in the weakness of their infancy. Age and reason as they grow up loosen them, till at length they quite drop off, and leave a man at his own disposal…”

Age and reason. One is not precluded by the other, nor are they independent of each other. By the state’s own definition, minors are subject to their parents’ control and voice. Natural law affords parents charge over their children. When the state intervenes or diminishes natural law, the state violates the very measures and principles upon which people exist, and secondarily upon which this nation was founded.
There was a time when the words of men like Locke meant something to America. Read the Second Treatise and discover the breakdown in our nation’s laws versus the laws of nature. The end of the family is in sight. With the family gone, the nation cannot long stand.