{"id":260847,"date":"2010-02-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rhrealitycheck.org\/blog\/2010\/01\/29\/chris-smith-prays-obama"},"modified":"2010-02-01T05:46:38","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T10:46:38","slug":"chris-smith-prays-for-obama-i-am-praying-for-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/260847","title":{"rendered":"Chris Smith Prays for Obama. I Am Praying for Smith."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\nRepresentative Chris Smith of New Jersey used last week\u2019s March for Life as another opportunity to sound the alarm<\/a> on the administration\u2019s \u201cvirulently pro-abortion\u201d agenda and to declare that President Obama is \u201cobsessed with promoting abortion.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\nAu contraire, President Obama, whose responsibility it is to run America, has his hands full cleaning up the mess left by the last guy and winning over Americans who have been incensed ever since he offered them a cheaper, more efficient, and more ethical way of caring for their health. He doesn\u2019t have time to be \u201cobsessed\u201d with abortion.\n<\/p>\n

\nChris Smith, on the other hand, is obsessed with abortion. Smith, whose top campaign contributor for the last election was Right to Life\u2019s PAC<\/a>, has made it his mission to make abortion inaccessible both here and abroad. As Michelle Goldberg reported<\/a> last year in the American Prospect<\/em>:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n\tSmith, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has devoted much of his career to fighting reproductive rights<\/acronym><\/a> worldwide, personally prevailing on foreign politicians not to liberalize their abortion laws and, during the Bush years, leading the charge to freeze the American contribution to the United Nations Population Fund.\n\t<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nSmith co-sponsored a bill<\/a> prohibiting taking a minor across a state line to obtain an abortion if the minor lives in a state that requires parental notification. He also co-sponsored a bill<\/a> to allow federal funding to be used for alternative-to-abortion services, that is, services that promote \u201cchildbirth instead of abortion\u201d and provide \u201cinformation or education (including classes), regarding prenatal care, childbirth, adoption, parenting, chastity, or abstinence.\u201d These \u201cCrisis Pregnancy Centers\u201d, which often set up shop across from reproductive health<\/acronym><\/a> clinics, promote childbirth by giving women medically inaccurate information about abortion<\/a>, often insisting that abortion causes breast cancer, infertility, and the non-existent post-abortion syndrome. They disseminate overtly religious information\u2014that abortion will cause you to go to hell, for example. Smith has worked to impose anti-contraception, anti-abortion policy on other countries, as well, authoring a bill<\/a> to deny funding to any foreign organization that promotes or performs abortions\u2014a reintroduction of the Mexico City Policy that Obama rescinded last January.\n<\/p>\n

\nOne of Smith\u2019s tactics is, perversely, to present himself as an advocate for women\u2019s health. He claims that abortion leads to depression, suicide, and a 40 percent increase in breast cancer risk. These claims have been refuted again and again by the American Psychological Association<\/a> and the National Cancer Institute<\/a>, respectively. (The NCI points out that studies that have shown such a link \u201cused recalled information in populations in which induced abortion had a social or religious stigma, differential reporting of prior abortion by breast cancer patients, and controls\u201d\u2014as in, \u201cI am pro-life, so are most people I know, and I know a woman who I think had an abortion and later, she developed breast cancer.\u201d Not science.)\n<\/p>\n

\nIn his speech at the March for Life, Smith called the right to life movement \u201cthe greatest human rights struggle on earth.\u201d And he addressed the following to President Obama: \u201cwe do pray and fast for you, even as we tenaciously fight your anti-life policies.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n70,000 women die each year<\/a> as a result of illegal abortions. Through his work on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Chris Smith is doing his best to drive that number up. So, Chris Smith, though your use of the words \u201chuman rights\u201d is nauseating, I will pray and fast for you, even as I tenaciously fight your anti-life policies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey used last week\u2019s March for Life as another opportunity to sound the alarm on the administration\u2019s \u201cvirulently pro-abortion\u201d agenda and to declare that President Obama is \u201cobsessed with promoting abortion.\u201d Au contraire, President Obama, whose responsibility it is to run America, has his hands full cleaning up the mess […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5032,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5032"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}