Tonya Reaves

***Update*** The local CBS television station received new documents regarding the death of Tonya Reaves. Her D&E abortion was performed at Planned Parenthood at 11 am, but after the procedure she began bleeding heavily. The bleeding continued for five and a half hours at Planned Parenthood until she was taken to the emergency room at 4:30 pm. There the doctors had to start from scratch to figure out what was wrong with her. They performed an ultrasound then another D&E. When the heavy bleeding continued they performed a second ultrasound and discovered a perforation. Tonya was taken to emergency surgery at 10:12 pm, but the bleeding was uncontrollable. Her death was completely avoidable, but after bleeding heavily for over five hours at Planned Parenthood before receiving medical treatment was too much. Once she was moved from Planned Parenthood to a hospital, even more valuable time was lost while the doctors started from scratch to discover the severity of her injuries.

LifeNews quotes an emergency room doctor with 30 years of experience named Dr. James C. Anderson, M.D. He pointed out the habit of abortion clinics sending injured patients to the emergency room without giving the doctors appropriate information concerning their condition. "I have always had to evaluate the situation, come to my own conclusions, and initiate what I thought was appropriate treatment. This definitely created some time delays that were not in the patient's best interest," stated Dr. Anderson. "These delays can have life-threatening implications when dealing with hemorrhage or infection." (More)

**Update** Tonya's family have found an attorney who is looking into a civil lawsuit against Planned Parenthood. (More)

*Update* Congressman Cliff Stearns has been looking into an investigation of Planned Parenthood regarding hiding sexual abuse and Medicaid fraud, and he is now pressing for an investigation regarding Tonya's death. (More)

Last Friday, a health young woman named Tonya Reaves went to a Planned Parenthood in Chicago for a second trimester D&E abortion. She was 24, engaged to be married, and had a son who had just turned one. She was transported to a hospital for hemorrhage. She was pronounced dead at the hospital at 11:20 PM. The autopsy Saturday determined that she died from hemorrhage caused by the abortion. Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue, explained, "Abortion deaths like this are completely avoidable. When a woman bleeds to death after an abortion, it is usually an indication of error on the part of the abortionist coupled with a delay in calling for emergency assistance. Planned Parenthood should be held accountable." Abortion clinics are not equipped for such emergency complications, and when an emergency does happen, calling an ambulance is avoided because it brings such bad publicity.

Yesterday, in an incredibly insensitive move, Obama called for more government funding for Planned Parenthood. "Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood. I think that's a bad idea," the president explained. "I've got two daughters. I want them to control their own health care choices."

Really, Obama? You want your daughters to be cared for by Planned Parenthood? I don't often get angry, but I'm angry about this one. How many more women like Tonya have to die before things change? What will it take for the government to stop funding organizations with blood on their hands?

Tonya Reaves 

To Feminists: Concerning Forced Abortion in China

What if you woke up one morning in the hospital in severe pain and no one would tell you what happened. That alone would be terrifying for me.

What if you were nine months pregnant, ready to deliver your second any day now, then suddenly eleven strangers come into your house to carry you away. They take you to a hospital, insert a syringe into your stomach, and after you pull it out insert another.

Then you wake up, no longer pregnant, but in server pain. No one would tell you what happened. Later you find your uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries were removed to prevent you from having more children.

This is a very real situation for thousands of women. Many, including Zhang Wen Fang, were left in a wheelchair because of complications from the surgery. She lost not only her legs and her uterus, but also her child, her health, her livelihood, and eventually the stress caused her to lose her marriage. She never found out what happened to her child.



Zhang Wen Fang shared her story with an organization called All Girls Allowed, which works in China fighting the one-child policy and the resulting problems of gendercide and sex trafficking. She tried to appeal her case to the government, but she was threatened and beaten by the police. Mr. Guo, the Deputy Minister of the Family Planning Committee (which enforced the one-child policy through forced abortions), responded by saying, "I removed the uteruses of one thousand women, and no one dared to say a word to me."

How is this alright? How can we sit back while women are kidnapped, force to kill their own children, and drugged as their uteruses are stolen? I challenge anyone who considers themselves pro-women to do something about this. How is this choice, when it is forced upon women? How is this health, when it confines women to wheelchairs? How is this making women equal to men?

Let's not forget the visual of what forced abortion really does:

Feng Jianmei, 6/3/2012

Read the Lifenews article or similar posts.

Freedom of Choice, Forced Abortions

Warning: extremely graphic photo below. 

In America, abortion is seen as a lovely thing that allows people to choose when they have children. They can plan out their families, their lives wont be interrupted by untimely babies, and women are no longer constrained by the inconveniences of pregnancy.

In China, abortion is entirely something different. It's worlds apart.

Because of fears of overpopulation, China has developed a one-child policy. In 1979 China adopted the policy that allowed couples to only have one child, and penalized those who had a second. This has brought on all sorts of problems, problems that we can only wait to see how they will play out in the future. One of the biggest examples is gendercide; because of the culture's emphasis on having boys and the liability it is to have a daughter, many couples abort or abandon their daughters until they can have a boy. This has created a distorted sex ratio that will leave 50 million Chinese men without wives.

The horrors of the one-child policy seem to be catching America's attention more and more. Recently, a photo from June 3, 2012 was released of a woman named Feng Jianmei. She was beaten and dragged into a car by Family Planning Officials. They demanded RMB 40,000 (about 6,300 American dollars), but when her family could not supply the money they forced her to abort her seven month old baby.

After the forced abortion, they laid the body next to her in bed.

This is hard to stomach. How sick that something people fight tooth and nail to defend in our country is the cause of so much suffering and injustice in another? 

LifeSiteNews article, Bryan Kemper's article, original picture, Petition to Stop Forced Abortion in China, All Girls Allowed. 

Prenatal Discrimination Act

PRENDA, the Prenatal Discrimination Act, has failed. It would have made sex-selective abortions illegal, but the two-thirds majority needed failed with 246 yes and 168 no. (Read more here).

What's more, today Live Action released another video in their War On Baby Girls series. This time, in New York City, yet another Planned Parenthood employee counsels a woman seeking to abort if her baby is a girl. She says having another girl would be horrible because she wants a boy. What will Planned Parenthood do now? They keep saying they are against gendercide, they seemed to luck out last time by having already fired the employee of the previous video, what will be their next move?

Abby Johnson of Live Action, author of Unplanned, and former Planned Parenthood clinic director, said, "The counselor in this video is a licensed social worker. In this video you will hear her encourage the pregnant women to get a Chorionic Villi Sampling test to determine the gender of her baby. Here's what the counselor doesn't say...CVS testing is very risky...miscarriage rate is 1 in a 100 procedures. Oh well, it's not like they really care about the unborn or risks...or informed consent."

And yes, this has been my second post of the day and it's only 4:30. That's what happens when interesting things are happening in abortion news and I'm trying to draft that darn chapter four about abortion history. 

Planned Parenthood: "Every Child a Wanted Child" Except If It's Bad Publicity

Two days ago Live Action released a video exposing Planned Parenthood's willingness to help women have sex-selective abortions. A Live Action actor came into a Planned Parenthood, explained to the employee that she wanted a boy but would abort a girl, and caught the employees reaction on film. The results, honestly, don't shock me much after watching Planned Parenthood handle themselves in the past. They agreed to go through testing to discover "the sex of the pregnancy" (the word "baby" is always avoided within Planned Parenthood's walls), and abort if the child is a girl. 


However, Planned Parenthood released a statement saying that they fired the employee in the video soon after the incident, before Live Action ever released the video. They said the employee did not handle the situation well, and as they strive for the best quality care for their patients, they let her go. But it still raises a question: if Planned Parenthood's goal is to make every child a wanted child (by aborting the unwanted ones), then what if a girl is unwanted while a boy would be? As they refuse to admit that they are involved in gendercide, they contradict one of their main ideas. They can't have it both ways. 


Planned Parenthood said in one of their statements regarding the situation, "Planned Parenthood cares about staff, and conducts retraining or other personnel action responsibly." As Jill Stanek pointed out, they're caring about their staff by throwing them under the bus and not taking responsibility for their mistake? 

Gendercide: "War On Baby Girls, part 1" from Live Action

Live Action is a pro-life organization that performs under-cover investigations of Planned Parenthood, America's largest abortion provider. So far they have exposed Planned Parenthood involved in human trafficking, covering up sexual abuse, accepting racist donations, and giving women inaccurate medical information. Yesterday they released another project called War On Baby Girls. The first video in the series, in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas, shockingly shows the clinic employee helping a woman plan how to abort her unborn child if its a girl, but continue with the pregnancy if it's a boy. Then she helped her abuse Medicaid in order to fund this sex-selective abortion.

Stay tuned for more videos in the War On Baby Girls series. In the meantime, you can sign this petition to ban sex-selective abortions nationwide. 100 million girls are missing today. There are 100 million more boys in the world today due to this gendercide. What happened to equality, women's rights, and feminism? Girls are being killed just for being girls. That has to stop now.

Life and Death and...the AVENGERS!!

I'm not usually one for action movies. While they can be fun, completely lacking a plot is one of the most annoying things a movie can do. Even if there is a plot, not having good characters or character development or anything at all realistic is really annoying. Well, I don't know if the Avengers somehow managed all of that perfectly or if I was just in a super good movie-watching mood when I watched it, but I loved it.

Maybe I just liked all different superheroes with all different back stories, habits, styles, and struggles all trying to put aside their differences and work together. Iron Man's arrogance, the Hulk's anger issues, Captain America feeling outdated, Thor being a mythical god...ect, it made for an interesting plot.

Or maybe I just like the idea of superheroes.

Or maybe I realized just how much superhero movies appeal to the part of us that wants the good guys to win, that wants evil to lose, that wants human life to be spared.

I'm beginning to realize the parts of our culture that does value life. The Avengers have to work together in order to protect millions of people from dying at the hands of evil. Near the end of the movie, New York City is under a huge attack and many authorities wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on the city in order to keep the attack from spreading. The Avengers want to spare as much human life as they can, so they have to find a way to save the world as well as the city.

I like superhero movies, cause with each daring and incredibly act they are protecting the lives of the human beings. Too many action movies show thousands of people dying during a really cool shot of a building blowing up. Superheroes value and protect human life.

Abortion and Cannibalism

Warning: this post is about a very gruesome topic. I believe understanding the abortion industry and culture is important, but it's definitely not for everyone. I strongly caution you before reading on. 

I get daily email updates from many different pro-life news sources. I at least skim all of them, and if the title of an article catches my interest then I'll read the entire thing. Because of this I've found countless resources, beautiful testimonies, and encouraging updates about new abortion laws in place in North American and Europe. However, there is a downside.

I have also read countless horrifying articles. News reports from policemen going into abortion clinics that have never been inspected. Rusty instruments, patients' medical documents strewn around, no medical waste bins, blood-splattered freezers filled with jars of aborted babies. The worst, though, is the cannibalism.

Krishna Rajanna 

An abortionist named Krishna Rajanna was caught dumping medical records in a recycling bin. Being a "doctor," he should now that in his state, a patient's sensitive medical records must be kept by the doctor for ten years, then disposed of with a shredder or by burning them. When he was inspected, authorities found his abortion clinic was a horrendous mess. The chaos of his clinic lead to him (either accidentally or on purpose) eating a fetus, though I will spare you of the details. As I said at the beginning, understanding the abortion industry has its place, but there are horrifying details that are hard to get past. If you want to learn more, though, here are the two articles and the police report about him.

So there's one abortion doctor, but are there other connections between abortion and cannibalism? Recent reports show: yes.

China's infamous one-child policy leads to millions of abortions and infanticides each year in an attempt to cut down the population (by half? How can a country stand to lose half its population in one generation? But that's another post for another time). A pharmaceutical company learned how to profit on these millions of deaths. They found they can buy the cadavers of babies killed through infanticide or abortion, dehydrate them, make them into pills, then sell them pills as "stamina boosters." When people were caught smuggling them into South Korea, the pills were taken and tested for DNA.

They were 99.7% human.

More than 17,000 pills were found being smuggled from China to South Korea. How many more are there?

This is very troubling to me. Are there other connections between abortion and the horrendous practice of cannibalism? It makes sense, if life can be thrown away with a couple hundred dollars then what makes a deceased persons' body sacred? What should tell us to give any respect to the bodies of the dead? What's the difference between the meat of a human and that of a chicken or a pig or a cow?

This is why the fight for life is so important. We are so far from a culture of life, where every life is valued, respected, and been worthy of our protection. In a culture of life there is no abortion, no murder, no rape, no bullying, no selfishness. This is impossible for us to create because humanity is so broken and depraved. However, God already died for every sin, including abortion, infanticide, and cannibalism. He rose from the grave but left our sin there. He and only He can create a culture of life.

Kony 2012

Along with the rest of the internet world, a few days ago I watched the Kony 2012 video by Invisible Children on youtube. It's spreading really quickly--when I watched it the day after it came out it already had 7 million views. Today (Friday) it has over 56 million. For some reason I didn't get the same adrenalin rush and excitement from watching it that everybody else seemed to get. Instead it made me really uncomfortable and I couldn't figure out why. I thought about it more today and here's what I came up with.

The video by Invisible Children is brilliantly done. After studying rhetoric last year when we learned about different kinds of appeals, the classical structure for a discourse, different types of conclusions that bring different reactions, ect. The Kony 2012 video was definitely made by somebody who knew what they were doing. It seems to follow the structure of a classical discourse (first an introduction, then giving the background and all the facts, followed by the main argument, then refuting all of the common arguments against your position, and finally a conclusion that ties it all together). They use emotional appeals that get a reaction out of you (the pictures of the children in Africa holding guns, the heartbreaking story from Jacob, and even his adorable son). The conclusion is designed to call the audience to action. The video does all of this so well! It's effective and convincing and brilliantly made. 

However. 

There's still something unsettling about it. It almost feels like propaganda. There is a correct time and place for propaganda, but we still need to be aware of it. The video made the situation in Uganda seem like the worst thing in the world, and if we could fix this problem then the world would be perfect. I have a friend whose family has adopted boys from Africa who come from similar situations as Jacob's and is a lot more informed about it than I am. She pointed out that Kony is not the only man like that. There are people just as evil as him doing similar things, and by giving such emphasis to Kony we risk forgetting about them, even letting them off the hook. If we get rid of Kony, then do we have to then go after all of those other evil people?

That opens a whole new door, a dangerous door. Should America really be the police men of the world? It makes us responsible for far more than we need to be responsible for, it gives the government way too much power, it sounds too imperialist, and it leads right into the one world government idea. Is it the government's job to step in and fight people like Kony who have nothing to do with them? I completely agree with Invisible Children in that what Kony is doing to these children is horrendous and needs to be stopped. No human being should be treated that way, and especially not children. I get angry thinking about that. But I'm still undecided if it's the government's job to fix all of the world's problems. Is the government playing God when they try to punish the wicked? While what is happening in Africa is heartbreaking and should make us incredibly angry, I don't think our government (or any government) can solve all of these problems and fight all of the bad guys. 

There's another side of me that is uncomfortable about the Kony video. It's becoming very popular and even politically correct to support the Kony 2012 movement. Yet at the same time it's still politically incorrect and considered downright offensive to stand for the children in our own country who have no rights, no voice, are "invisible." There may be a part of me that's jealous that that movement got to be the cool one this week and the pro-life movement still isnt' cool, but there is some merit to this. How can we stand for 30,000 children on the other side of the world by posting a video on facebook, but then call it offensive when somebody stands for the 5 million killed by abortion in our own country? It's wrong not to stand for child soldiers in Africa yet alright to allow women to choose whether or not to kill their children. It's politically correct and culturally acceptable to give a voice to the 30,000 Invisible Children in Africa but politically incorrect and culturally unacceptable to stand for the 5 million invisible children in our own land. (For a really good article about this, go here. It's definitely worth the read.) 

And one last thing. That chart they show at the end of the video when he's talking about how it used to be the influential people with the money who made the decisions for our country, but now for the first time ever the people have a voice. That freaked me out a lot. Don't Americans already have a voice? We've always had the right to vote, have representatives, call Senators, ect, because our founding fathers wanted the people to have a say in the government. Are we just now realizing we have a voice and deciding to use it? In history class right now we're studying the rise of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. Maybe it's an overreaction, but the idea of all of us uniting and having one voice and standing up to the government freaks me out more than a little. 

Those are my thoughts. They're not perfect, they're not flawless. But there they are. I'm not against Invisible Children or the campaign to stop Kony, but I think it's important to think this stuff through before jumping on the bandwagon. I can't decide if I'm on this bandwagon or not. Endangering and victimizing children makes me more angry than anything else in the world. However, I'm still uneasy. These are my initial thoughts, not my conclusions. I'm still glad God is in control over all of this. 

One Third.

"At current rates, nearly one third of American women will have an abortion." That's four women in this Starbucks.

That was the final push I needed to finish chapter 1. It's about 5 pages long and desperately in need of a title and a good edit, but it's done. So much love is needed in this broken world, I pray God will use this chapter to help.

Unashamed Narrow-Mindedness

Proverbs 31:1-9

 The words of King Lemuel. An oracle that his mother taught him:

What are you doing, my son? What are you doing, son of my womb? 

What are you doing, son of my vows? 

Do not give your strength to women, 

your ways to those who destroy kings. 

It is not for kings, O Lemuel, 

it is not for kings to drink wine, 

or for rulers to take strong drink, 

lest they drink and forget what has been decreed

and pervert the rights of all the afflicted. 

Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, 

and wine to those in bitter distress; 

let them drink and forget their poverty 

and remember their misery no more. 

Open your mouth for the mute, 

for the rights of all who are destitute. 

Open your mouth, judge righteously, 

defend the rights of the poor and needy.  

Urge Me Not to Use Moderation!

This was originally posted in April, 2011 on http://beccafrench.tumblr.com/post/4298250320/urge-me-not-to-yse-moderation. 

From “For Immediate Abolition” by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, addressing slavery. 

“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not a cause for severity? I will be as harsh as the truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her baby from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.” 

Urge me not to use moderation when speaking of the murder of 115,000 children a day. 

Urge me not to use moderation when speaking of the devastation of 115,000 mothers’ and families’ lives a day. 

Urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. 

Abortion ended another 115,000 innocent lives today, and devastated even more. Will you be a voice? 

(Cite: Biblical Worldview Rhetoric I, by Shauna K. Howat)