As the pro life guy for the San Joaquin Valley mister Right to Life for the San Joaquin Valley. I am often called upon what do you think about so and so, what do you think about suggeens? At any time there's news that hits the airwaves regarding the abortion issue, I have to be the one that explained, explain yourself, especially when anything happens that seems to be indicating that there is a public opinion shift in favor of the pro abortion viewpoint
in some fashion. So I'm getting a little bit of that with this news that was hitting even you know, mainstream nightly news, this new information about increasing abortion rates. The Goutmacher Institute, which, by the way, it's this weird thing with abortion and research. One of the main entities that studies abortion is called the Goutmacher Institute, which is a very aggressively pro abortion think tank. It was like actually an official part of Planned Parenthood. It's somewhat
separated itself from Planned Parenthood. It's still named after the guy who was like Planned Parenthood's second I think he was like Planned parentoedd second or third, like president, like after Margaret Sanger. By the way, one of the many people who could not survive the post George Floyd a Black Lives Matter canceling campaign from the left was Margaret Sanger. Even Planned Parenthood has to finally on their
website admit that she was pretty darn racist and kept very conveniently pushing all of her birth control advocacy towards races that she didn't really like, like black people. Now, the gout Macher Institute is like tied to Planned parentid when they release researchers just oh, research from the gout Macher Institute indicates and there's no like caveat given, whereas if a pro life think tank releases it, it'll
be your research from the anti abortion Charlotte Loser Institute indicates. Yeah, so only the pro life think tank is biased, not the openly avalidly pro abortion thing tank. Anyway, the gout Macher Institute released updated abortion estimates for twenty
twenty three. The new figures indicate or show that one million twenty by their figures, one million, twenty six six and ninety abortions were performed in twenty twenty three, an increase of ten percent since the year twenty twenty, so a ten percent increase twenty twenty, and I think you may be wondering, well, why, well, we had all these states pass laws to limit
abortion, yet here all these abortions happening. So I want to break this down for why we're seeing an increase in abortion, and it has to do with a case that's in front of the Supreme Court, right it's going to be in front of the Supreme Court very soon regarding the abortion pill. And I want to educate you guys about this because I think there's still a lot
of confusion about this. I think a lot of pro lifers still think of abortion as primarily a surgical intervention, and I want to explain to you that that is not the case. And the reason why abortion numbers are going up is because abortion is more and more becoming not a surgical procedure. Sure, it is a drug intervention, the abortion pill. Now let's define our terms. There's Plan B and there is the abortion pill. They are two separate
things. Plan B, levono or jestral. I believe the name of the drug. Plan B mostly functions as a contraceptive. The goal of Plan B is to prevent ovulation. That's the goal to stop ovulation from happening. It has a backup mechanism that alters the lining of a woman's uter is to prevent a new human embryo from adhering to the uterine wall. So it could be abortifation, but it's chief mechanism is stopping ovulation to be a contraceptive. It
is very bad for you, I think in other respects. It's basically a massive, massive, massive dosage all in one shot. Not a shot. It's a pill in one go, a massive massive dosage of hormonal contraception. And so it is not exactly healthy for you. It is not exactly good for you by any stretch of the imagination. But that's what Plan B is.
The abortion pill is something different. The abortion pill, otherwise known as mifipristone, is a pill, a drug that you can take up to ten weeks into a pregnancy in order to artificially induce a miscarriage, artificially induce an abortion up to ten weeks into a pregnancy per current FDA guidelines, and what nobody talked about prior to the twenty twenty election. And I think it was the mostant other than me, other than myself and Jonathan Keller from California Family
Counsel my intrepid co host for Right to Life Radio. The biggest issue of twenty twenty that nobody talked about, the biggest abortion issue of twenty twenty that nobody talked about once was what would the FDA do with the abortion pill? And it was very clear what was going to happen if Donald Trump got reelected in twenty twenty. The FDA wasn't going to change anything about the abortion pill. Now, that in itself is problematic. It's been very problematic to see
over the last you know, twenty years. You know, actually, let's go back to nineteen ninety two, so that would be thirty two years, thirty one year, let's say January nineteen ninety three, so thirty one years. Over the last thirty one years. Democrats have held the presidency for about nineteen of those years, eight years of Clinton, eight years of Obama, three years of Biden, and the abortion pill has advanced regulatorily over all of
that timeframe. To Clint eight years to get the abortion pill FDA approval in the year two thousand, Obama loosen, loosen, loosen the regulations on the abortion pill. Biden immediately loosened the regulations on the abortion pill. But in the twelve years that Republicans have been president in that same time frame, you know how much rolling back the regulations on the abortion pill, there have been
none. George W. Bush and Donald Trump didn't do jack anyway. In twenty twenty, the stakes were either reelect Donald Trump and have no change to the regulation of the abortion pill, or elect Joe Biden and he was going to massively deregulate the abortion pill, to allow the abortion pill to be prescribed without the patient actually having to go see a physician physically, and to allow the abortion pill to be shipped through the mail or shipped directly to a pharmacy.
That is precisely what happened. Joe Biden got elected and the abortion pill lost even the slightest vest most of the regulatory restrictions that were placed on it, the health and safety restrictions that were placed on it. So prior to the Biden administration, you had to at least go to the doctor once to get the abortion pill. At least one time a doctor was looking at you
checking to see the just aal age of the unborn child. By the way, the later into pregnancy you are, the more and the more serious the complications can be from the abortion pill. So now the abortion pill is being prescribed to people with no in clinic examination whatsoever. The abortion pill can be shipped to people through the mail. It can just be picked up at a
major pharmacy rather than given to you and ingested in a clinic. So, by the way, while the abortion pill is constantly referred to the media mantras that it's safe, it's safe, it's safe, it's safe, it's safe. There's even this mantra that it's safer than tile, and all that is a lie. About five percent of women who go through the abortion pill process wind up in an er, usually from hemorrhaging, excess bleeding, incredible pain,
and cramping. There have been approximately twenty eight known cases of women dying from the abortion pill, usually from infection and sepsis. Five to eight percent of the time with the abortion pill process, one has an incomplete abortion, meaning the baby's not entirely expelled, and if that's not treated with follow up care, it can result in infection and serious complications. So the abortion pill
has become so massively deregulated by the Biden administration. When the abortion pill was first legalized in two thousands, you had to have three doctor visits for it, a visit before, a visit where they gave you the pill, and a follow up visit. Obama changed the regulation said you only needed one in clinic visit. Biden completely eliminated any need for an inclinic visit, and the result is this massive spike in the number of abortions that are done via the
abortion pill. That's what's driving the increased abortion rate in America. Sixty three percent of abortions now are being done via the abortion pill. That's almost an eight percent jump from twenty twenty two. So that I think is the key reason why we're seeing this massive jump in the number of abortions in this country. It's this bizarre dystopian liberal dream of making abortion universally accessible basically to anyone who's got a mailbox. And by the way, it's not just happening legally,
it's also happening illegally. There's very little power that even states that have outlawed abortion, I think they have very little ability to stop women from ordering from illegal sites abortion pills that get shipped into Texas that can get shipped into Indiana, that can get shipped into all these states that have outlawed abortion and mainstream left you know, abortion providers are trying to provide online resources specifically to
allow women in those states to help the guide them through the process of having a pill abortion illegally. I just went to a conference just a couple of weekends ago. I went I zoom attended a conference a couple of weeks ago where the head of obgyn at UCSF Fresno was talking about this very thing. So I want to sort of encourage some skepticism about these new abortion figures. One. I think, first of all, it's numbers that are coming from
a huge pro abortion think tank. I don't know that that necessarily is going to be you know, we have to take that with a bit of a grain of salt. Abortion figures are always sort of difficult to figure out because California does not report its abortion figures to the Centers for Disease Control. So any estimate of how many abortions happen in the United States is an estimate is a best, you know, good faith guess. But I think that it's
not because necessarily individual state laws to ban abortion have been totally ineffective. I think they have been effective. I think there have been a lot of analyzes done of states like Texas, and the reality is that tens of thousands of fewer abortions are happening in states like Texas because of the laws they have passed since Dobbs. But the reality is that I think the increased number of abortions
that increase is because of the abortion pill. It's because we live in this terrifying dystopia where we're selling to people, oh, it's safe, it's fine, and giving them this pill after getting rid of all the health and safety restrictions that surrounded the abortion pill. When we return, I want to talk a little bit more about that history and that sort of dereliction of duty by Republican presidents, this aggressive expansion by Democrat presidents. That is next on the
John Girardi Show. The new numbers that have come out on the number of abortions that have happened in America. These new numbers that have been released by the Goutmacher Institute, which I think we should all take with a grain of salt, are indicating that the number of abortions has increased in America significantly by about ten percent since twenty twenty. And I think the clear answer for why the number of abortions have increased is because of the deregulation of the abortion pill
process. Not Plan B. This is not a day after contraceptive. This is the abortion pill, a pill that results in the death of a fetus up to ten weeks into a pregnancy. So the abortion pill process is basically, you take one drug called mifipristone that cuts the developing embryo or feed us off from the uterine wall from its food supply. The baby dies. The mother then takes another drug called mesaprostol, which expels the baby from her body.
And this is not an easy process. It involves heavy bleeding, It's very painful, involves heavy cramping some it' said right there on the FDA label about five percent women will probably need an er visit as a result of it because of bleeding. There is a five to eight percent chance of an incomplete abortion, meaning not everything is expelled from the woman's body that it might therefore need a follow up surgical procedure. And what people don't realize is that this
process is how sixty three percent of abortions now are done in America. This is the most Abortion is not any more a surgical thing. For the most part, in America, it is primarily a medical thing, a drug thing. I shouldn't say it's a medical thing. I don't want to concede that ground. I don't think abortion is something is medicine or healthcare if it is fixing something wrong with the body. Pregnancy is not something wrong with the body.
Now, I want to talk about basically what happened that made the abortion pill so available. What happened was consistent effort by Democrat presidents and their FDAs to take away regulations on the abortion pill. So let's do the history here. Bill Clinton comes to office in nineteen ninety three. He looks across the pond at Europe and sees that the abortion pill was created over there in France, and he thinks, by golly, wouldn't it be awesome if we had
that in America. So he works for eight solid years, works with the Ford Foundation to do all the necessary you know, clinical trials and testing, et cetera. Blah blah blah, goes through all the stuff. He realizes he's running out of time. His administration is wrapping up its second term. He's afraid that this George W. Bush guy might beat Al Gore for the
presidency in two thousand and stop all of this. So in September of two thousand, the FDA issues an expedited approval, which frankly I think was illegal, an expedited approval for the abortion pill, which is otherwise known as mifipristone. That's the name of the active drug. So in two thousand, MiFi pristones approved. But Clinton realizes this is politically unpopular in a lot of ways, seems kind of dystopian uphill to bring about an abortion well, it's totally
bizarre. So he has these safeguards, these health and safety restrictions on it, called the rems, and basically what these do as it imposes certain restrictions on how physicians can prescribe. The abortion pill has to be prescribed with three different patient visits before when you give the pill to the woman, and then after for follow up. So there are a lot of different health and safety
restrictions on it. George W. Bush does get elected in two thousand and from two thousand and one to two thousand and nine, he and his FDA and his Department of Health and Human Services does nothing. They do nothing to roll back the FDA approval of the abortion pill. They don't acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the FDA's expedited approval for the abortion pill in two thousand, even though the expedited process is only supposed to be done with drugs that
treat serious illnesses. Pregnancy is not, last I checked, a serious illness. It's not an illness at all. It's a natural bodily process. Barack Obama comes into office and over his eight years he lessened, weakens, gets rid of a bunch of the health and safety restrictions around the abortion pill. Says, no, no, no, you don't need three in person visits. You only need one in person visit just to determined, justtational age, and then we'll give you the abortion pill. You don't need a follow up.
In spite of the fact again that five to eight percent of the time women have what's called an incomplete abortion, meaning not everything is expelled from their body, that leaves with it serious risk if it's not treated, serious risk
of infection. But oma almost does that. Forget it. Also, Obama issues a regulation to stop requiring the collection of any adverse health event data from the abortion pill other than death in twenty sixteen, so he says, oh, it's so safe to take the abortion pill under the old safety guidelines. So let's get rid of a bunch of those safety restrictions and let's stop collecting
data on safety. Donald Trump gets elected in twenty sixteen and for four years again another Republican president who does absolutely nothing to roll back regulations on the abortion pill, even though he's in charge of the executive branch, even though he
controls the FDA. Finally, Joe Biden gets elected and immediately Biden further loosens the restrictions on the abortion pill, as all of the left wing activists around him were urging him to do. He immediately allows the abortion pill to be prescribed with no in person patient visit, just to tell him medicine visit. Since there's no need for an in person visit, the abortion pill can now
be shipped to people through the mail. You can get an abortion pill mailed to your house without ever leaving your home, or you can pick it up at a major pharmacy. And we're now at the point in twenty twenty four where those Biden regulations, which were initiated in twenty twenty one and finalized at
the end of twenty twenty one, have now become mainstreamed. All these large pharmacies are now capable of receiving A lot of them have decided to stock the abortion pill, and so now the abortion pill has gone from being sort of the minority way in which abortions were done most abortions were still done surgically to now sixty three percent of abortions are done via the abortion pill. In California.
It may be more. One of the biggest network of abortion providers in California, planned paradig Marmonti, does seventy five percent of their abortions through the abortion pill. So this is why we need Republican presidents who are good at regulation, good at running the administrative state. Democrats do an awesome job of it, and Republican presidents suck at it. When we return, I ride to the defense of homeschooling against recent attacks. That is next on the John
Girardi Show. Our family is homeschooling our kids. I myself was homeschooled as a kid, my wife was homeschooled as a kid, and it is a thing that the left hates. Why well, just the idea that they are not controlling what your kid learns is infuriating to them. And I think at some point the left is going to get around to trying, in different individual
states, trying to shut down homeschooling. Now, they haven't necessarily done so yet, I think because there's a certain segment of crunchy liberals who like homeschooling their kids, So for their sakes, maybe they'll hold off and leave us alone for a bit. But we're beginning to see the wheels turn. There's
a big, big conference about the dangers of homeschooling. I think it happened kind of before COVID, So I wonder if COVID sort of put the halt on some of these things because everyone realized, oh wait, homeschoolers can just kind of keep on doing school during COVID and actually have much better results in a lot of cases. So there was a little bit, I think during COVID of a pumping the breaks about how evil and dangerous homeschooling is. But
it seems that it is now back in full swing. The Washington Post recently did a series on the dangers and terribleness of homeschooling, and one of the big arguments that's being pushed is that children who are being homeschooled can be abused
and it can go undetected by society. That basically, if a kid is being abused at home, that is much more likely to be detected because at a public school you have all these other adults who are able to look at your kid, and you've got teachers, and you've got principals, and you've got school nurses and whatnot who can see that a kid's got bruises or whatever or seems, you know, malnourished or whatever, and that child abuse can
get reported. That's the theory. The problem is it's not really backed up. If anything, it's the opposite. The place where a child is most likely to be abused in America is at a public school. So there's this interesting piece in The Spectator written by Amber Duke, the Reality of Homeschooling. Reporters claim that abuse is rampant, but the data tells a different story. Are children more likely to be abused in homeschool in a homeschool environment than in
a public school? That key question has emerged in response to the recent surge of parents who have chosen to homeschool their children. Late last year, I wrote in this newsletter Spectator about an anti homeschooling series by the Washington Post. The Post series argued that parents regularly use the homeschooling as a shield for abuse, most aggressively in an article headlined what homeschooling hides a boy tortured and starved
by his stepmom. Most schools, this is the Post writing here, Most schools have teachers, principles, guidance counselors, professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent. Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of such people. The article says.
The research suggests that when abuse does occur in homeschool families, it can escalate into especially severe forms, and that some parents exploit lack home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies. Now, Duke writes in this piece in The Spectator, there are several serious problems with the quote research presented by the
Post. One study only collected data from six school districts across a period of a few years to claim half of students who are homeschooled were removed from school after an allegation of abuse at home. Not only is this not a representative sample of homeschooled kids, but it also lumps in substantiated with unsubstantiated allegations of abuse. The Post cites another survey of children who ended up in the hospital with signs of torture. About half of them had been homeschooled. The sample
size seventeen children. So this is just the Washington Post taking these certain different, very small sample sizes to try to extrapolate it into half of homeschooling parents are monsters who are ready to abuse their kids. One thing that really caught my eye continues when looking into the suggestion that homeschoolers are more likely to be subjected to severe abuse, was the media's prominent citation of a group called the
Coalition for Responsible Home Education. The CRCHE says they are a group of formerly homeschooled kids who are either abused or not properly educated and want to reform the
homeschooling system. They mostly advocate for tighter regulation of homeschooling, random home drop ins, registration with the state, social worker check ins, etc. The group sounds innocent on its face, It's not totally unreasonable to believe that homeschooling children should not be totally isolated from the outside world in the case they need to report abuse. However, as I dug further into the group's assertions and
accompanying research, there were some fundamental dishonesties I couldn't overcome. I was led to believe that CRCHE and the media outlets who were reflexively citing it as an expert organization are just part of a first step to discredit homeschooling entirely. The first red flag popped up when I was digging around in Croch's database of what
they referred to as quote victims of homeschooling abuse. The database is called Homeschooling's Invisible Children and compiles public cases of children who were abused in a homeschool environment. The HIIC database is cited by many media organizations as evidence of widespread homeschooling abuse. On its website, CROCH publishes a chart purporting to show that abuse fatalities among homeschool children are higher than children who attend public or private schools,
even though they admit the difference is not statistically significant. So I discovered that the croch Lives lists, for example, Elizabeth Smart as one of these victims of homeschooling abuse. Now, you guys remember the Elizabeth Smart case. She was that girl in Utah who got abducted from her home. Yeah, she was abducted from her home, not by her parents. Wasn't abused by her parents at all. Smart was kidnapped from her bedroom by a depraved couple that
raped and tortured her. The only connection she has to homeschooling is that her kidnappers instructed her to tell strangers that she was homeschooled to avoid investigation. So Elizabeth Smart was not a homeschooling She was not being homeschooled. She was abducted by strangers who were torturing her and threatened her and told her, you need
to tell people that you're homeschooled. Perhaps an intellectually dishonest person could make the case that Smart's kidnappers took advantage of lax homeschooling regulations to avoid questions and ultimately prevent her rescue. But what regulation proposed by proposed by anybody would have prevented this. No social workers were going to drop into these people tent in the
woods where they were torturing this girl. So when you keep digging, So basically, there's this one database that all of these anti homeschooling people use to say, oh, look at all these examples of homeschoolers who are tortured or abused. But it's got cases like Elizabeth Smart in it, who that is not an example of a homeschooler being abused. That's an example of someone being abducted by a complete stranger who then tells her to lie and say that she's
homeschooled. Like that is not You cannot lay that at homeschooling's door. I'm sorry, that's ridiculous that no regulations would have stopped that. No homeschooling regulations would have stopped that. There were at least twenty other children listed in that database who had been abducted from their parents and whose abductor claimed to be homeschooling them. So again, though homes regulating homeschooling wouldn't stop that because those kids
were not actually homeschooled, they were just abducted. Furthermore, a lot of the other incidents of kids being abused or harmed by homeschooling. There's situations where there's no there wasn't any kind of prior warning sign or anything that any kind of regulation would have stopped and they could justice and that homeschooling wasn't really an
issue with it. So like some case where you know a dad, Like there are certain kinds of suicide cases with usually with men, called family annihilation suicide, and these these horrible incidents you probably heard stories about it, where the dad snaps, kills his family, kills himself. They're counting that as instances of homeschool abuse when that can just that doesn't have anything to do with homeschooling. That could happen just as well with a kid in a normal school
as it could with a kid who is home. Doesn't have anything to do with it. That's a horrible thing, obviously, but the idea that homeschooling makes a kid so much more particularly susceptible to that is an enormous stretch at
best. So all of these arguments that you're seeing to say that homeschooling needs to be regulated because kids are being abused be a homeschooling it's relying on this data set that is completely divorced that basically is riddled with flaws, and there are other flaws with this data set, and again it kind of ignores the reality that the place where a kid is most likely to be abused is the public school system. That's the most likely place where a kid is likely to
be sexually abused. So with all of those people around to oversee things, that's where sexual abuse is happening most often. When we return the dumbest event in all of Washington in the last year, the barf worthy Saint Patrick's Day
Party at the White House next on the John Jerardy Show. The stupidest thing that I have seen that I saw a bunch of photographs of and the little reports of and things like that over the last week had to have been the Saint Patrick's Day party that was held at the White House under our beloved Irish
Catholic President Joe Biden. Joe Biden's Irish Catholicism is basically redu down to the level of it's a thing that he kind of does that sort of is like a cultural thing, and his Catholicism basically has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on his actual policies, his actual as far as I can tell, no actual bearing on his public life whatsoever, even like, even in ways that would be
easy for a liberal like you know, the church. The bishops in the United States have been opposed to the death penalty for decades and decades and decades. Here and probably not the right time to dig into all of the debate around the death penalty within Catholic contexts and Catholic teaching surrounding the death penalty, but let's just suffice it to say that in present American conditions, the American bishops don't think that death penalty is a good idea and that it should be
opposed. Okay, Biden says he opposes the death penalty. The Democrat Party says they opposed the death penalty. Biden becomes the president of the United States, where he can one hundred percent tell the Justice Department, hey, don't pursue the death penalty for federal cases, or he could just grant clemency to people convicted who are sentenced to the death penalty in the federal system. And
he hasn't. He basically let Merrick Garland go ahead and pursue the death penalty for the guy who did that horrible shooting in Buffalo like his Catholic faith impacts him so little that even for something that would be a slam dunk, he either doesn't know or doesn't care, like he just does not care. It is unbelievable how little his actual governance is impacted by Catholicism. And let's not even get into obviously he ignores what the church teaches wholesale about abortion, about
same sex marriage, about transgenderism. It's a not insignificant thing that Biden himself,
as Vice president, officiated two gay weddingsitiated them. So they have the Saint Patrick's Day Party, and all of these liberal Catholic writers like James Martin and Thomas Reese, the'se like Jesuit priests, who are super duper lefty commentators, have these groveling Twitter posts say, oh look, you can see me in this picture with Joe Biden. Oh Andy, This Saint Patrick's Day Party was basically the everything I hate about boomer baby boomer liberal sort of pseudo Irish
tinged Catholicism in America. Every sappy, emotive, non substantial thing about American Irish Catholicism all boiled down into one party at the White House, including someone playing on a violin, the worst hymn in the history of the Catholic Church, on Eagle's Wings. If my eyes rolled in my head any harder, they would have rolled out of their sockets. That'll do it for John Girardi Show. See you next time on Power Talk.