Our own Allison Morales, the GEMS Coordinator for the CPLC, was in Austin yesterday at a press conference Governor Perry was holding to support a proposed "Choose Life" license plate bill.

The bill would raise awareness of adoption and provide funding to those organizations that help in the process.

From the Governor's press release:

"I am here today to endorse an effort that will allow Texans to support the humane choice of adoption,” Gov. Perry said. “The majority of Texans believe in the sanctity of life, and this license plate will give them a means to tell the world in a subtle but meaningful way, while providing support to pregnant women making the decision to choose adoption.”

The governor was joined today by Rep. Larry Phillips who will sponsor the bill in the Texas House of Representatives and Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life.

“The Choose Life license plate will help to create a win-win situation for all those involved—the birth mother, the adoptive parents, the baby, and the pro-life organizations that assist them,” said Pojman. “It’s time Texas joined the 19 other states that already have a Choose Life license plate to promote adoption.”

GEMS (Gabriel Education Ministry & Support) is an outreach of Project Gabriel of the CPLC and that "offers mothers instructional modules in character-building and life skills, and encourage them to set personal and professional goals, while completing course work toward graduation." GEMS accomplishes this by" . . offering mothers opportunities to learn more about themselves, about their Christian faith, about being better parents, and about gaining the knowledge and skills to help them take their place in the larger world of work, education and service."

Click here for more information about GEMS and Project Gabriel.

Click here for more information about the Choose Life License Plates.

** Picture: Kelly Shackleford (Free Market Foundation), Governor Rick Perry, Allison Morales.

Labels: Texas Legislature

The New York City Council thinks it's real smart. They have devised a way to protect women who are going in for their abortion from harassment, coercion and threats of free bottles of water. Really.

New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn introduced the "Clinic Access Act" back in September and held a hearing on the bill last week. The bill creates a 15 foot "buffer zone" that protects women from sidewalk counselors or "protesters" when attempting to access reproductive health care.

Supposedly they are only trying to go after those who break the law or otherwise intimidate women into not having an abortion, but the language used in the text of the bill is open enough that any attempt to talk to a woman who is entering the mill could be seen as violating the law.

Chris Slattery, the President of Expectant Mother Care, is doing a fantastic job of rallying the troops to prevent this dumb bill from becoming law. He has done this in the past when former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer tried to shut down all the CPC's in New York and failed.

Speaker Quinn's press release about the bill will make you shake your head. She gives what she calls "Real-life examples of such harassment and coercion" which include "Patients being offered bottled water by protesters in order to forestall her abortion procedure, which endangers the life and well-being of women seeking pain-relief during the abortion procedure." No kidding.

Also on the list of documented harassment and coercion are:

- Protestors using NYPD-owned barricades to hang posters and signs outside of the clinic

- Protestors offering free sonograms to patients but instead showing graphic anti-abortion propaganda

- Protestors shouting at patients that they were desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Topping it all off though is the sympathetic article written by the New York Times and the reporters notation in the last paragraph that on a visit to a local abortion mill to write the story, all the chairs in the waiting room were filled. "By 10 a.m., every one of the room’s 60 chairs had been claimed."

But wait a minute. If every chair is filled, doesn't that mean that women are waiting which could "forestall her abortion procedure, which endangers the life and well-being of women seeking pain-relief during the abortion procedure."