Pro-life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt called on an abortionist to help in their legal defense. Forrest Smith, who claims to have committed 50,000 abortions in his career, testified for the defense last week at the pre-trial hearing for Daleiden and Merritt, who face more than a dozen felony charges related to their work exposing how Planned Parenthood sold aborted babies’ body parts. Smith told a judge last week that Planned Parenthood’s practice of delivering live babies and harvesting their organs defied even the abortion industry’s standards of decency.

WASHINGTON—A congressional act that would protect babies who survive abortion attempts needs just 17 more signatures from lawmakers to advance in the House. Last week, pro-life Republican representatives urged voters to call their representatives and ask them to sign onto the effort if they haven’t already.

“Ask them if they’ve signed the discharge petition, and, if not, why don’t they want it to come up to a vote on the House floor?” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said at a hearing on the bill last week. “We know there are people who have survived abortions.”

Pro-life activists Sandra Merritt and David Daleiden exposed the sordid underbelly of fetal tissue trade practices in 2015. Their undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood executives talking about selling the body parts of dead babies led to serious curbs on such transactions in the United States. Now Merritt and Daleiden are defending themselves from criminal charges in a California courtroom.

When Texas legislators considered a bill earlier this year requiring medical care for babies who survive an abortion, news outlets reported the state had received no reports of such cases happening. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, called a similar effort in his state “redundant” and “not a productive use of time.” And a spokesman for North Carolina Gov.

Mayra Rodriguez thought she was helping women when she reported problems at the Planned Parenthood Arizona facilities she ran.

Her supervisors didn’t see it that way and fired her in 2017. Rodriguez filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination, and last week, a jury awarded her $3 million in damages.

Planned Parenthood said Monday it will no longer accept Title X family planning funding because of a pro-life rule enacted by the Trump administration. The regulation, issued in February, prevents taxpayer dollars from funding organizations that provide or refer women for abortions.

Neuroscientist Stephen Sammut saw a scientific gap in research on the effects of drug-induced abortion and decided to tackle it in his area of expertise: pre-clinical research using rat models.

The hypothesis, he told me, was simple, but no one he knew of had investigated it: “If pregnancy is a normal physiological process … terminating a viable pregnancy using abortion is going to potentially cause significant physiological and ultimately behavioral issues.”