Dynamics of Racism and Poverty with Abortion
 
        R. Seth Williams is the first African-American district attorney of Philadelphia; his biography on his official web page says he was born to an unwed mother and raised by an adoptive family. Is it a coincidence then that it’s under his watch that the law is finally being enforced with abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell? Williams says in this radio interview that much of the Grand Jury’s indictment of Gosnell’s horror shop was criticism of state agencies that turned a blind eye despite many complaints over the years. When asked why this happened, he discussed apathy due to the victims’ races and states of poverty. He never makes the connection as to why the long reign of indifference might end with him, and much of what he says makes clear that he himself holds the “pro-choice” position. Yet it’s another example of how tackling one kind of violence such as racism spreads to helping to prevent others.   
  

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Positive Options
 
        Much has been made in the news recently about how Planned Parenthood provides millions of women with cancer screenings and other necessary health services, things anyone of goodwill would support. This is made as an argument for continued U.S. government funding of Planned Parenthood. Similarly, military weapons producers commonly point to the jobs they provide, which of course people are desperate to have.
        Both ideas are missing a crucial point: the same money can provide health services without promoting abortion, and the same money can provide jobs doing something productive rather than inflicting us with more weapons. It’s not only that the good done doesn’t justify the associated violence, but that there are perfectly good ways of doing the good and disassociating it from violence. The more we as the human community become aware that violence is a problem, not a problem-solver, the more obvious this will become.    
 

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Martin Sheen in Irish Article
 
        CL Endorser Martin Sheen discusses why his anti-abortion views are strong in this article in Irish Central. Martin is a long-time supporter.

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Quotation of the Week
Mary Krane Derr
“Activism Throughout the Centuries” in Consistently Opposing Killing, p. 127
 
        Many of the earliest Euro-American suffragists were connected to upstate New York, among them the great “suffrage triumvirate” of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, and their beloved elder Lucretia Mott. The area’s Native Americans, the Haudenosaunee Six Nations (whom the French called Iroquois), tremendously inspired them. Haudenosaunee women enjoyed remarkable freedom in matters of sex, motherhood, property, marriage, divorce, work, religion, and government. The Haudenosaunee religion’s Code of Handsome Lake cautions against environmental devastation, domestic violence, child abuse, the stigmatization of non-marital pregnancies, and abortion, regarded as unjust fetal life-taking that hurts women, too.