Women looking to get an abortion in Virginia will be required to have an ultrasound and given the chance to see an image of the fetus under legislation passed by the state’s legislature on Wednesday….

Once the bill becomes law, women will have to sign a form for their permanent medical record if they choose not to see an image of their fetus. The U.S. Census documented 28,520 abortions in the state in 2008.

This is a win for everyone.  It makes far more clear exactly what is happening in an abortion.  If seeing the reality of the fetus about to be killed leads a woman to keep her baby, how can that be deemed manipulative?  She is simply making a more informed decision at that point.  Those who promote abortion minimize the reality of the fetus developing within a woman’s womb.  They attempt to shield her from that reality.  Ultrasounds make that reality clear – and such clarity should be supported by both sides of the abortion debate.

To take a single example, is incredibly illuminating to see just how Planned Parenthood reacts to a pregnant woman entering their offices.  Here’s an excellent chart from an older Washington Examiner piece (click here for that whole article):

The numbers are distressing.  The simple fact is, Planned Parenthood exists to prevent or destroy babies.  What other conclusion can be reached?  They broadly proclaim their contraceptive efforts, and the above numbers show just what they do for women who are already pregnant.  Read the rest of the Examiner article to understand the numbers games.

• An aversion to rapid change; a belief that tradition and prevailing social norms often contain within them handed down wisdom; and mistrust of attempts to remake society so that it conforms to an abstract account of what would be just or efficient.
• A desire to preserve the political philosophy and rules of government articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
• An embrace of free-market capitalism, and a belief in the legitimacy of market outcomes.
• A belief that America is an exceptional nation, a shining city on a hill, whose rightful role is leader of the free world.
• A belief that America should export its brand of democracy through force of arms.
• An embrace of localism, community and family ties, human scale, and a responsibility to the future.
• A belief that America shouldn’t intervene in the affairs of other nations except to defend ourselves from aggression and enforce contracts and treaties.
• A desire to be left alone by government, often coupled with a belief that being left alone is a natural right.

There are many more – click here to read the whole list.  Friedersdorf goes on to lay out which views each of the Republican Presidential candidates appears to hold.

The list is thought provoking and enlightening.  A conservative can certainly hold to many differing beliefs while still being a conservative, but Friedersdorf brings up a more interesting question: What defines actual conservatism?  Look over the list – which things do you think are specific to conservatism against, say, a progressive perspective?  A belief in tradition and an emphasis on local community seem obvious, but what of the others?  Which things may simply be common Republican beliefs but not be inherently conservative?  And which entries do you hold to?

The startling success of this method seems to refute the idea that “pluripotency” — the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body — is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another.

It raises the possibility that embryonic stem cell research, as well as a related technique called “induced pluripotency,” could be supplanted by a more direct way of generating cells for therapy or research.

Advances in inducing pluripotency in adult cells were exciting, but the above approach would simplify things and eliminate many of the concerns over cancer and viruses.  Hopefully things continue to go well and this method can be tried with humans soon.  Keep an eye on this technology as it develops – it has huge implications for the future of health and longevity.

In the latest development, Catholics fight back (click here to read the whole article from The Blaze):

Over the weekend, the Catholic Church’s letter went beyond simply issuing oppositional rhetoric to media. Instead, priests read an open note to congregations across the country, dubbing the administration‘s take on women’s health and religious violations as an attack on their faith. In the letter, Bishops highlighted what they called “an alarming and serious matter,“ as their words contended that the federal government has ”dealt a heavy blow” to the Catholic population.

In it, Catholic leaders went on to say that the Church “cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law,” as it violates the Catholic conscience. Additionally, the church says that it is faced with a difficult decision — either comply and violate its faith or drop coverage for employees and suffer the consequences. The letter urges congregants to take action and to call Congress in an attempt to overturn the regulation.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.  Perhaps the one-year delay by the Obama administration is an effort to kick the can down the road until the next term, avoiding the contentious issue during an election year.

Catholics are once again standing strong for their beliefs.  Now it’s up to the Obama administration: What’s more important?  Contraception coverage as a no-exceptions standard or basic, necessary medical coverage for the thousands of people who will be impacted if Catholic institutions drop medical insurance for their employees.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that.

Roughly six million are currently in our prisons.  Among the many problems with our system:

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.

Adam Gopnik, author of the article, spends time investigating efforts in the 90′s onward that led to a startling decline in crime in New York City:

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already.

Gopnik commends small steps that change behaviors – opening doors for good opportunities and blocking easy access to crime.  One example he used was closing down the drug market in Washington Square.  Such actions either eliminate or reduce criminal activity.  Crime stops or it goes into less convenient places.

So what are Gopnik’s conclusions?  Basically, he believes that we need to change our tactics in our approach to crime while also making wiser decisions about precisely which kinds of activities we deem prison-worthy.  Near the conclusion of his piece:

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient.

I find it difficult to weigh the justice in such a situation.  Do community service and public disgrace balance against the wrong of some of these crimes?  At the same time, surely community service is closer to the ideal of paying recompense for your crime than merely spending time in a cell.  A prisoner does not pay back his community – far from it – he requires thousands of tax dollars to support in prison.

There is much we could do to reduce our prison population, and we should get serious about finding solutions.  Surely many men and women would rather work to atone for their crimes than sit in a jail cell for months or years.

Such adjustments still would not change the reality of prison for violent crime, but they would massively reduce our taxpayer burden.  This is made all the more desirable if prison itself cannot be shown to be a great deterrent to crime.

I’m not sure that I agree with Gopnik’s exact proposals, but we should really reconsider how we deal with petty crime and whether time in a cell is really justice at all in some of these cases.

Click here to read the whole piece.  It’s excellent, fascinating reporting and opinion.

While more than 500,000 Americans physically went to Washington, D.C. to take part in the March for Life — giving of their time, money and effort to do so, the nation’s biggest pro-abortion groups are having a difficult time getting 20 percent of that number to barely lift a finger by signing up for a march on the Internet.

Sponsoring by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, MoveOn, Ms. Magazine, NOW, and a host of smaller pro-abortion groups, the Trust Women Week march has only signed up 87,784 people to participate.

And that’s for a virtual march!  The pro-life movement has shown such organized activism over the years that this result is not really surprising, but it is amazing that pro-lifers have not seen even more success.  Thankfully, some great steps have been made in the defense of life in state legislative halls across the nation this past year.  Let’s hope the trend continues in 2012.

The plan, which [Pennsylvania Republican Representative Joe] Pitts says will be fleshed out in coming months, sounds pretty similar to other Republican proposals on health care, such as that of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. The Republican presidential candidate would allow insurers to sell across state lines, let insurance plans pool across state boarders and extend the tax deductible treatment of employer-sponsored health insurance to plans bought on the individual market. The goal is to increase competition between insurance companies, driving down prices in the process.

As the Post article comments, these plans are nothing new.  The upside is that they are restrained and simple.  Really, the important part is the reversal of Obamacare.  If and when Obamacare becomes entrenched in our medical system, turning back will become nearly impossible.  It may already be too late, but if action can be taken quickly, it’s possible that we can once again return responsibility for healthcare reform to a state and local level.

If true, lasting, significant reforms ever happen, they will have to come from local doctor’s offices, local hospitals, and the demands of individual citizens.  Our current behemoth system has been made by massive insurance companies, large medical groups, major pharmaceutical companies, and big government.  Another top-down “solution” will not work.

Well the gay parents of one of the other students at the high school complained to the school administration, and the administration went crazy.  From FoxNews (click here to read their whole article):

The school immediately issued an apology – stating Wegner’s opinion was a “form of bullying and disrespect.”

“Offensive articles cultivating a negative environment of disrespect are not appropriate or condoned by the Shawano School District,” the statement read. “We sincerely apologize to anyone we may have offended and are taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.”

But [Matthew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel] said what the school system did next was absolutely outrageous. He said the 15-year-old was ordered to the superintendent’s office where he was subjected to hours of meetings and was accused of violating the school’s bullying policy.

“The superintendent called him ignorant and said he had the power to suspend him,” Staver said. “He’s using his position to bully this student. This is absolutely the epitome of intolerance.”

Staver said the boy’s parents were never notified.

At one point, Staver said the superintendent gave him a chance to say he regretted writing the column.

“When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing it, and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he ‘had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic,’” Staver said.

At that point, Staver said the superintendent told the boy that “we have the power to suspend you if we want to.”

Wow.  What is going on in the halls of our high schools today?  This 15 year old was articulating a pretty common traditional Christian perspective on homosexuality.  His argument was not the clearest or cleanest, but given his age that’s pretty understandable.  Regardless of whether you agree with him, he certainly didn’t write anything that should have sparked such controversy.

Clearly the superintendent is looking to make some kind of statement.  And he certainly did: His school is not a place where a variety of opinions can coexist and real discussion can be had.  His school demands politically correct orthodoxy of every student, and you’d better watch out if you step outside of his ideological box.

On Friday, the Obama Administration added insult to injury, announcing that it would give some religious nonprofits an additional year to “adapt” to its coercive mandate that nearly all insurance plans provide coverage for the abortion-inducing drug ella. Essentially, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that these employers have one more year to get their priorities straight and align their consciences with the anti-life agenda of the Obama Administration.

Secretary Sebelius stated the “extension” for nonprofit groups with a religious-based objection to providing coverage for “contraception,” was “the appropriate balance” for “respecting religious freedom.”

This is a simple, unbelievable power play by the Obama administration. In their hard, absolute push for abortion, they are attempting to destroy the very idea of conscientious objection. Are you the owner of a small business or nonprofit? Do you not want your money going towards contraception that can lead to the abortion of an embryo? The Obama administration’s position is simple: Too bad.  Oh, but in order to respect your religious freedom, they’ll delay a year, just so you have time to wise up.

This overreach is a clear violation of a proper governmental respect for the freedom of religion. Hopefully Congress or a new administration will step in to put a stop to such strong arm tactics.