Vol. 12, No. 3 -- April 5, 2013

The Many Flaws of Judicial Bypass

The System is Biased in Favor of Abortion, Putting Teens at Risk

Lauren Enriquez writes at LiveAction News about how the abortion industry uses "judicial bypass" to get around laws requiring them to notify parents before performing abortions on teenage girls. She notes:

The judicial bypass process is essential to ensuring that cash flow into the abortion industry does not suffer due to one demographic (minors) not having access to abortion. In fact, to ensure that abortion is accessible to minor girls, Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses have sympathetic attorneys on call at all times to personally usher young women through the confusing court system.

Often, these attorneys bring minor girls directly to like-minded judges who are the most unlikely to turn down a petition for judicial bypass. To say "unlikely to turn down" is the most accurate term to describe the judge’s role, because -- unbelievably -- in states like Texas, the bypass request is automatically granted if a judge does not release a decision one way or the other within forty-eight hours of the petition being filed.

The "judge-shopping" Enriquez describes is only a part of the problem. Another is the fact that these hearings are non-adversarial. In other words, there is no attorney representing the position that abortion is harmful and not in the girl's best interests. The system ensures that judges hear only one side of the evidence -- the pro-abortion side.

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The Abortion-Breast Cancer Link: Those Stubborn Facts Again

Part 1 of 4

Joel Brind, Ph.D.

Note: This first of four articles on the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link, originally published at NRL News Today, was written by Dr. Joel Brind, a professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York. The next installment in this series will run in our next newsletter.

Dr. Brind chronicles the history of epidemiological data going back over 50 years that shows a consistent statistical connection between a history of induced abortion and a higher incidence of breast cancer among women all over the world. He will also briefly talk about the curious logic used by deniers of the ABC link.

By way of background, abortion raises a woman's risk for breast cancer in two ways; the debate is over the second, not the first. Scientists have long understood that the risk of breast cancer is reduced when a woman completes a full-term pregnancy. This "protective effect of childbearing" is lost with an abortion. The second way abortion increases the likelihood of breast cancer is that an abortion leaves a woman with more cancer-vulnerable breast tissue than she had before she became pregnant.

In 1957, a nationwide study in Japan published in the Japanese Journal of Cancer Research found that women who had breast cancer reported having had three times as many pregnancies end with an induced abortion. Of course, there were few studies in those days, as induced abortion was neither legal nor common in most of the world -- and breast cancer was not that common either!

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