Woman Graphically Describes Holding Her Chemically Aborted Baby on Bloody Bathroom Floor 

A woman who considers herself the victim of a chemical abortion says she “was not prepared for how severe and devastating” the abortion-inducing drugs she took would be. 

In an interview with The Daily Signal, Elizabeth Gillette said she took prescribed drugs in 2010 to abort her unborn baby.  

She now deeply regrets the abortion, Gillette said.  

In graphic terms, Gillette described her experience 14 years ago to Daily Signal reporter Mary Margaret Olohan outside the Supreme Court Building as the nine justices heard oral arguments Tuesday in two cases centered on abortion-inducing pills such as mifepristone and misoprostol. 

“I found myself on the bathroom floor, covered in a pool of blood, wondering if I was going to survive the procedure , completely alone,” Gillette said. 

“I reached down and lifted out of my body the perfectly formed transparent sac with a recognizable baby inside,” she told Olohan. 

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As Gillette spoke, activists on both sides of the chemical abortion issue rallied outside the Supreme Court in anticipation of oral arguments in the two cases, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.  

Last year, the FDA approved the use of chemical abortion drugs without earlier safeguards, which pro-life activists consider dangerous.  

“It was so incredibly traumatic,” Gillette said of her own experience with abortion-inducing drugs. “I suffered horrific side effects, not only physical … to this day, I still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.” 

“It’s something that has followed me since that day,” she added. 

She was between six and seven weeks pregnant when she took unspecified chemical abortion pills, Gillette recalled. 

“They said it was going to be like a double period, and that just wasn’t true,” she said. “No one told me that I would hold my child in my hands and would need to decide what to do with that body. I ultimately flushed him down the toilet, into the septic tank.” 

Fourteen years later, Gillette said, she relives that moment of being “terrified, wondering if I’m going to survive, hoping and wishing that I would be able to get out of that situation.” 

“Nobody was there to help me. I was completely alone,” she told Olohan. 

Use of the abortion drugs she obtained was subject to restrictions at the time, she said, but she doesn’t think she received the care to which she was legally entitled. 

“So imagine now, with no restrictions in place, what is a woman going to experience without any of that care?” Gillette asked. 

“This isn’t something that’s safe, like Tylenol,” she said. “This is something that will follow women for the rest of their lives.” 

“I am here today at the U.S. Supreme Court because I want the FDA to do its job,” she said. “I want them to keep women safe.” 

Another woman, Catherine Herring, told The Daily Signal that she “got violently ill” after her husband spiked drinks with an abortion-inducing drug.  

“I ended up in an emergency room, with a urine sample that was black in color,” Herring said. 

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Herring said she had severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, and bleeding after consuming the drugs. She currently suffers from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, she said. 

“Medical personnel need to be involved. For the states that continue to offer abortion pills, there need to be safety standards,” Herring told The Daily Signal. 

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Most Believe in Jesus Christ’s Resurrection, New Poll Finds 

Nearly 70% of registered voters believe that Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead, and more than 70% plan to celebrate Easter this year, a new poll finds.  

A Scott Rasmussen National Survey poll, conducted March 20 and 21 among 1,000 registered voters, found that 73% of respondents will celebrate Easter this year. When asked whether they would celebrate the holiday primarily as a religious holiday or as a secular holiday, 56% of participants responded with religious, 16% said secular, and 27% said both secular and religious equally.  

The poll reflected voters’ belief that Jesus physically rose from the dead, by a margin of 68% to 13%.  

Participants were asked to select which religion or faith best described what they practice. The survey found that Bible-believing Christian, Protestant, and Catholic each drew 21% of those polled. Evangelical Christian was chosen by 12%. Jewish identity made up 2% of the poll participants, with 1% Muslim and 6% atheist. The option “none of the above” was selected by 16%.  

Some 49% said they were “very likely” to go to church on Easter Sunday, and 23% were somewhat likely, while 10% said they were not very likely, and 16% said they were not likely at all to do so. 

Respondents were also asked how often they attend church, synagogue, or other religious services. Some 49% of participants said they rarely or never attend a religious service , while 23% said they go once a week, 12% said they go a couple of times a month, and 6% said once a month. About 9% of voters said they attend some form of religious services more than once a week.  

Those polled were also asked about their prayer habits; specifically, how often they pray in a week. Some 45% of participants answered every day or nearly every day, and 21% said they pray several times a week, while 18% said they rarely or never do, 7% said about once a week, and 6% said less than once a week.

Again, regarding the upcoming Christian holiday, voters were asked whether they view Easter as one of our nation’s most important holidays, least important holiday, or somewhere in between. The latter view received 48% support, while 33% of voters said Easter is the nation’s most important holiday, and 15% of voters said Easter is the least important. 

Respondents were asked whether a series of statements were true or false. They were asked to evaluate whether “the man known to history as Jesus Christ actually existed and walked the earth,” or not.  

By a margin of 83% to 5%, voters said they believe that Jesus Christ did in fact exist and walked the earth. 

The margin of error for the survey was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, according to Rasmussen.  

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Higher Ed’s Dilemma: Punish Plagiarism or Stick With DEI

Academic culture is facing a crisis of its own making.

The now myriad plagiarism and other scandals rocking the ivory tower increasingly are being waved away by left-wing media. But this growing phenomenon represents an existential crisis for institutions that have long coasted on flimsy claims to their exalted position in our society.

Following the January resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay , who a month earlier had had a disastrous performance before a House committee hearing on antisemitism, several other professors and diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators have been hit with serious accusations of plagiarism.

The latest is influential Harvard sociology assistant professor Christina J. Cross, whose writing on families and race have appeared in The New York Times . She’s been accused of lifting huge sections of uncited work and claiming it as her own—among other, smaller infractions.

The Left’s message on these scandals—copied and pasted, it seems—is that plagiarism has been “weaponized” by the Right .

“As the culture wars lurch on, the Right has found a perfect weapon with which to hit the university—taken straight from the academy’s arsenal itself: claims of plagiarism,” wrote the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson in February.

Yes, how dare those mean conservatives use basic academic standards against academics for the purpose of the “culture war,” which our unbiased and totally meritocratic universities surely never engage in.

Defenders of the academy have also gone with the old standby of crying “racism.”

Tiresome, but all very predictable.

I will have to concede one thing, though: In a certain sense, plagiarism has been “weaponized,” by the Right, which holds no power in academia outside of a handful of small, isolated bastions. This method of criticism has only become possible because higher education has made itself so open to attack.

To use a historical comparison, the peoples conquered by Islam in the days after the rise of Muhammad were typically preyed upon and powerless. What those living under dhimmitude had was the Quran. Their only protection came from pointing out the violations of faith by their new rulers. That forced a choice on their Muslim overlords: Weaken their rule or weaken their faith, which was ultimately tied to their power and status.

That’s the dilemma facing academia.

While universities don’t punish leftist students for shutting down politically incorrect speakers and other kinds of illiberal conduct, they still—for now, at least—make an attempt to punish those who have violated their most basic standards.

Here’s a question, though: Would plagiarism and other kinds of scandals have been such a problem if our elite institutions weren’t filled with so many superfluous, underwhelming hacks?

That may sound mean, but it’s impossible not to notice that the quality of our most elite schools—and of the people who staff them—is quickly dropping.

Stories about left-wing insanity on college campuses became run-of-the-mill generations ago. But now, something new is happening.

Now, many Americans, even ones who placed a huge amount of faith in higher education despite its flaws, are coming to see that they aren’t even providing the most fundamental service they—at least in theory—promise to provide; namely, an elite education delivered by scholars in pursuit of the truth.

With the costly, borg-like takeover of DEI initiatives that have bled into all disciplines, it’s become obvious to all who are not wholly blinded to reality that higher education now places more emphasis on ideology and identity politics than teaching and scholarship.

In the end, those who hired and appointed the DEI administrators and “anti-racism” swamis like Ibram X. Kendi didn’t expect them to produce high-quality research. No, they are there to demonstrate institutional commitment to leftist beliefs. Nothing else has mattered, and now the original product that allowed them to amass such power is slipping away.

Consider this: Harvard University’s history department finally brought back an introductory history course after going nearly 20 years without one. The previous yearlong survey course was dropped in 2006 for being too “Eurocentric,” according to the Harvard Crimson .

A description of the class makes it sound more like an NPR podcast than a high-minded instruction at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. It’s apparently been designed to teach “empathy,” and according to one of the professors, “on Wednesdays, they will ‘riff’ on recent headlines for a portion of the lecture.”

I only wonder what famed Harvard alum John Quincy Adams would think about this kind of coursework. In his day, its students used to be required to know Latin and have a deep understanding of the classics before they attended the school.

Now, they don’t even require courses in Latin or Greek to complete a degree in the classics.

The dirty open secret is that higher ed has abandoned its role of providing trustworthy research and transmission of Western ideas to new generations. It is increasingly an environment more committed to enforcing extremely narrow left-wing ideology and ensuring that all other governmental, political, and civic institutions throughout the West maintain the same level of ideological gatekeeping.

Legacy admissions may be on the decline, but they are being replaced by new, smugger so-called “meritocratic” pseudo-elites who lecture America about all its problematic history while making excuses for genuine evil in the here and now.

As the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel starkly revealed, these institutions hardly have claims to moral authority. Hating the West and excusing savagery are just part of the overall package.

While the power that elite academic institutions have in Western societies is immense—perhaps greater than it has ever been—they nevertheless have a collective weakness.

These schools are ultimately dependent on the support, both social and material, of the rest of society. They’ve operated for decades with nearly a blank check of private and public funding. And higher education has run up a massive bill on their graduates, too, that they expect taxpayers to pay .

Let me ask: Would you rather pay for your groceries with money to spare or ensure that a Starbucks employee with pronouns on his or her name tag can get his psychology degree paid for? Exactly.

The goodwill from times past is long gone. In its place is well-earned doubt and hostility.

Higher education is now left with a choice: Abandon the path of DEI and ruthless ideological enforcement in a return to genuine merit or double down on them with the fading support from the rest of society.

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Wishing John Crace and the NHS a good recovery | Letters

Readers respond to an article by the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer about his heart attack, and share similar stories of their own

Thank you to John Crace for this article (‘Is this how I die?’ John Crace on his terrifying heart attack, 21 March ). It has allowed me to start the process of accepting that although my two heart attacks on Christmas Day 2022 were mild and sorted by some stents, they were still serious. Surrounded by men on my ward who were recovering from, or waiting for, various heart bypass procedures, I felt almost like a fraud – after all, a stent is at the lower end of the scale, or so I convinced myself.

I have laughed off the concern of loved ones and friends, and dined out on a good story that involved me thinking I had a bad chest infection on the day, accounting for my chest pains and breathlessness and symptoms that in general did not conform to my view of what a heart attack should be like.

Continue reading…

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