Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who stirred up controversy after saying that there can be "thousands of exceptions" to a ban on abortion, has clarified that he is still a pro-life politician.

"What I would say is that there are thousands of exceptions," Paul told CNN on Tuesday.

"You know, I'm a physician and every individual case is going to be different and everything's going to be particular to that individual case and what's going on with that mother and the medical circumstances of that mother," he stated. more >>

For people of faith in America, the Obama administration's birth control mandate represents an unprecedented assault on religious conscience. It seems that the President and his surrogates have little appreciation for the role that faith plays in the lives of many Americans, and even less respect for the Constitution's protection of religious liberty. As if to confirm this impression, the U.S. Justice Department is doubling down on the Administration's anti-faith stance with a lawsuit against a German family seeking religious asylum in the United States. According to our esteemed Attorney General, the right to choose the best education for your child is not a fundamental individual liberty. When it comes to the education of our children, the government – not the parents – is the final authority.

Joe Carter writes about the plight of the Romeike family for the Action Institute's "Power Blog":

"The Romeikes had withdrawn their children from German public schools in 2006, after becoming concerned that the educational material employed by the school was undermining the tenets of their Christian faith. After accruing the equivalent of $10,000 worth of fines and the forcible removal of their children from the home, they chose to flee their homeland and seek asylum in the United States. They believed our government was more respectful of religious liberties. more >>

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of mint, dill and cumin, yet you have neglected the more important matters of the law–justice, mercy, and faith. These things you should have done without neglecting the others." (Matthew 23:23, HCSB)

A friendly exchange over the weekend addressed whether abortion is "the human rights issue of our day." It will be obvious to most that I believe abortion to be a human rights issue. My challenge concerned the use of the word the. Can we rightly hold the position that abortion is the human rights issue of our day? I contend abortion is an incredible injustice carried out not only in the United States, but worldwide. But I am not persuaded it is any greater moral evil than human trafficking, slavery in its various forms, governmental "disappearing" of those who resist injustice, or other types of oppression.

Since 1973 many Christians have elevated one injustice, abortion, to a level above all others. Emphasizing the "right-to-life" for unborn babies is important, but we have understood it less within a framework of biblical justice than as a constitutional right. As many Christians cannot articulate a fully biblical view of justice we have watched abortion become a political rallying cry for our two party system of mutual antagonism. Failure to declare the biblical breadth of God's justice allows "woman's right to privacy"–which should be discarded as a non-sequitur–to guide the conversation. more >>

Even though conservatives suffered some major losses in the 2012 elections, in part due to losing the youth vote by a large margin, conservatives are winning the abortion issue among young voters, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, told The Christian Post Thursday.

Hawkins was at the Conservative Political Action Conference and spoke on a Friday panel about how conservatives can better communicate their message to young voters.

Today's young generation is the most pro-life generation since 1973, when abortion became legal, Hawkins explained, "because we've had a different experience with abortion. We've seen the ultrasounds of our brothers and sisters. We've googled abortion, we've seen the bloody images. We all know somebody who has had an abortion." more >>

The North Dakota Senate voted Friday to approve new measures that ban abortion at the first sign of fetal heartbeat, which can be as early as five or six weeks into pregnancy.

House Bill 1456 will also block doctors from performing abortions due to gender or genetic abnormalities, The Associated Press reported, making North Dakota one of the hardest states to obtain a legal abortion. Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple is expected to sign the measures into law.

"The heartbeat is society's marker for life," said state Representative Bette Grande of Fargo, one of the co-sponsors of the bill. more >>

Atheist professor Richard Dawkins has stirred up a firestorm on his Twitter account by suggesting that the only moral question behind abortion is whether a fetus can feel pain or not, by which logic he reasoned that they are "less human" than adult pigs.

"With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig," Dawkins, who is an evolutionary biologist, posted on March 13.

In response to Tweets questioning his reasoning, the author of The God Delusion tried to explain that he wasn't arguing that pigs have human DNA, but that this point concerned solely the morality of abortion: "Of course potential to be human is among fetus' qualities. But my pig comparison was careful to specify 'relevant to morality of abortion.'" more >>