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House Votes To Nuke Federal Health Metrics That Deem People With Disabilities Less Valuable Than People Without

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The House of Representatives voted on legislation Wednesday that would send an important message to our nation’s most vulnerable. Lawmakers considered a bill that would prohibit the federal government’s use of a discriminatory metric that devalues individuals with disabilities. 

As the mother of a daughter with special needs, I’m grateful the House passed this important legislation this week, and I hope the Senate will follow suit in short order.

The bill is H.R. 485, the Protecting Health Care for All Patients Act. The legislation would prohibit all federal health programs from using the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) metric, or any similar measure, to determine the cost or coverage of health care treatments.

The QALY cost-effectiveness metric values an additional year of life for a person with disabilities as less than an additional year of life for a person in “normal” health. In so doing, this metric discriminates against some of the most vulnerable in our society. The National Council on Disability, on which I have served, published a report indicating that “QALY-based programs have been found to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

Yet many countries use the QALY metric to determine the cost-effectiveness of prescription drugs or other treatments. For instance, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) often refuses to cover effective therapies, because bean-counting bureaucrats deem them too “costly” for the government. This form of rationing — denying patients life-improving, or even life-saving, care on cost grounds — is most harmful to individuals with disabilities, because the QALY metric views their

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Pro-Life Family Tours Abortion Hot Spots Across The Eastern Seaboard

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One Missouri family of nine returned home this week after a month touring the Eastern Seaboard, visiting roughly 20 states in just over 30 days and exploring some of the most unregulated abortion states in the country.

Brian Westbrook, executive director of the pro-life nonprofit Coalition Life, set out with his family in late May, inspired by David Bereit, the now-retired founder of 40 Days for Life, who visited 89 sites in 40 days with his wife and children during the organization’s first campaign in 2007.

“It was a huge task in front of them … to support these people on the ground,” Westbrook said. “[Bereit’s] last season at 40 Days, he did another tour and visited all 50 states.”

Documenting their journey with daily videos including feature interviews with pregnancy resource professionals, Students for Life leaders, and other pro-life activists, the family traveled from Missouri to Florida and all the way up the coast to New York.

First and foremost, the Westbrooks wanted to incorporate their children, ranging in age from 16 to just under 1 into the tour, providing a powerful testimony as they prayed outside dozens of abortion facilities.

“Secondarily, we wanted to tell the stories of the people who are on the ground,” Westbrook said. “There are a lot of unsung heroes who don’t have the ability or capacity to create a video that highlights their story. So we wanted to do that. Thirdly, we wanted to scout out different post-Dobbs challenges in every state and

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3 Ways Feminism Laid The Groundwork For Transgenderism

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The trans movement is in full bloom. Many are scratching their heads as to how we got here.

A survey of the last two centuries reveals that it was long in the making, with deep roots found in feminist ideology, as discussed at length in my book, The End of Woman. Feminism ushered in significant shifts in thinking about women, fundamentally changing the way Western civilization considers biology, language, and law.

Each of these shifts on its own would have been damaging enough, but like the poisonous tentacles of a jellyfish, when taken together, they were fatal and brought about the triumph of the LGBT movement.

Biological Argument: Make Women More Like Men

One of the earliest efforts of the feminist movement was to help women with the suffering associated with fertility. It is a laudable goal, except that rather than help women as women, the feminist vision was to help women become more like men, namely, rendering their bodies sterile to enable sex without consequences.

The idea was to get rid of the connection between women and motherhood. Among first-wave activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.” A few decades later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman said motherhood made it “impossible for women to achieve their potential.” And by the 1960s, Betty Friedan completed the transformation by famously encouraging every woman to leave the “comfortable concentration camp” that is the home to do productive work. The message was clear: Career is more important than motherhood.

The biological transformation

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Activist Judge Blocks Law Protecting Minors From Filth Online

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Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Young temporarily blocked enforcement of a new Indiana law requiring porn sites to implement age verification services. 

Young, who has a history of activism from the bench, ruled that the law was “likely unconstitutional” after a lawsuit was brought against the Indiana attorney general by the Free Speech Coalition and several pornography lobbyists. Though several courts have already given the green light to similar regulations — and the Supreme Court has declined to block them — Indiana must now wait for a full review of Senate Enrolled Act 17 by a higher court.

If an adult website consists of more than one-third “material harmful to minors,” or pornography, the bill requires them to institute an age verification method such as a “mobile credential,” or scan of a driver’s license or other form of ID; an “independent third party age verification service” that compares identifying information entered by the individual with a commercial database; or any other commercially reasonable method that “relies on public or private transactional data,” such as what can be provided by a credit card.

In his order granting the preliminary injunction, Young parrots the argument of the Free Speech Coalition, that pornography access is a fundamental right protected by the First Amendment. As a result, he says, laws regulating its distribution must pass “strict scrutiny” or be the “least restrictive means” of accomplishing a compelling government interest.

However, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court has already ruled on an equivalent Texas law

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