Pro-Lifers Win Court Victory Over Planned Parenthood
by Fred Jackson and Jim Brown
(AgapePress) – A federal appeals court has handed pro-life activists a major victory. Last week, a three-judge panel threw out a multi-million-dollar judgment awarded to Planned Parenthood.
The case involved charges from Planned Parenthood that the American Coalition of Life Activists and several allies were advocating the killing of abortion doctors. At issue were lists of the names of abortion doctors that the ACLA published on Old West-style wanted posters and on the Internet. The lists, with titles such as the “Deadly Dozen” and the “Nuremberg Files,” urged activists to block the doctors from performing more abortions.
Planned Parenthood took the ACLA to court, charging them with violating federal racketeering laws and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. In 1999, a jury in Portland, Oregon, ruled in favor of Planned Parenthood, and ordered the ACLA and its allies to pay some $109 million in damages.
But on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that judgment was wrong, primarily because all the pro-life activists were doing was exercising their constitutional free speech rights. The court noted that while the ACLA named the doctors, it said nothing about harming them or even calling on others to do so. The justices went on to say that the lists constituted nothing more than part of public debate about matters of public policy.
“We've been saying all along this is a threat case without a single threat,” said Christopher Ferrara, the ACLA’s lawyer.
Counselor Ferrara said six defendants have been “driven into bankruptcy” because of the original verdict. As reported earlier, pro-life activist David Crane filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in an effort to eliminate a $10 million judgment as his share of the verdict. Crane and 11 others had been ordered to pay the $109 million to four doctors whose names and addresses were published on the wanted-style posters.
by Bill Fancher
WASHINGTON, DC (AgapePress) – Revelations about “live-birth abortions” in many hospitals across the nation is an outrage, according to Pennsylvania Republican Joe Pitts.
The procedure Pitts finds so offensive involves inducing labor and delivering the child several months in advance of anticipated birth. Most of the babies die in the delivery process, but between 25% and 50% are born alive. At that point, hospital staffers simply place the babies aside until they die — usually within an hour.
Congressman Pitts says this horror prompts a question: “Is abortion in our land the right to a dead baby if it is not killed in the process?”
Pitts laments the fact that this procedure has been ruled legal in Illinois and other states.
“In the past, infants were always considered born-alive human beings, protected under the law,” he says, “but this principle is not completely accepted in today's culture.”
Pro-abortion groups are now trying to redefine the term “viability” to mean more than being able to breathe apart from the mother after birth. Some are even advocating that parents be granted the right to “abort” their child even after birth, if they desire to do so.
A bill that grants human rights to any baby surviving an abortion died in the Senate last year. But Arkansas Republican and pro-life advocate Congressman Asa Hutchinson says Congress will take action to promote that same legislation — the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.
“Those infants [who] for whatever reason survive an attempted abortion … under a just law of our land and a Constitution … are entitled to constitutional protection as any living human being [would be],” Hutchinson says.
Hutchinson maintains God's justice demands such a bill be passed and signed into law.
He also feels this will be a very good year for the pro-life cause, and says its advocates can expect lots of action in Congress over the next few months. He expects the Judiciary Committee to move this year on the partial-birth abortion ban, which he says “has really changed the abortion debate in America [and] moved public opinion more toward the pro-life side.” He also expects action on legislation for parental rights, as well.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
