I’m here at the Family Research Council's offices in downtown DC for the 3rd annual Blogs for Life that's coinciding with the March for Life on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

This conference has been going on since 7:30AM this morning, but I arrived at 9AM planning to catch Star Parker speak. Unfortunately she couldn't make it this morning but Senator Sam Brownback, and many others, will be speaking in a few minutes.

Kevin McCullough of TownHall.com is MCing today.

FRC was orginally having problems with their wireless internet, but it seems to be fixed - as I'm blogging now. You can also watch the conference live streaming at FRC's site.

Peter Shinn – Blogs for Life
Peter was instrumental in putting together this conference, and he issued a call to action for the pro-life movement.

We’re shut out. Our churches don’t want to talk about abortion, the Conservative movement doesn’t want to talk about it.

We elect representatives, and they ignore us.

How do we make this a stronger movement?

Take a look at the illegal immigration bill. In one week the whole thing was shut down, the American people rose up and said no.

It's been 35 years, and 50 million people dead, this is a bigger issue then a few people crossing the border.

Peter ended by noting "We're In it to win. To end abortion."

Michael Illions – Conservatives with Attitude
Michael shared the story about the pregnancy and birth of his son Cole, whom all the doctors advised Michael and his wife to abort, because the ultra-sounds looked like his son would be born without a brain.

Here's an excerpt from a note Michael wrote previously, describing what his family's gone through:

We were taken to a room where we were, and let me be clear about this, URGED many times in those 2 hours of meetings to terminate the pregnancy, not just by the ultrasound doctor but they also brought in a geneticist who showed us all kinds of pictures of children with Trisomy and severe forms of Down Syndrome, something they predicted the baby would have. They couldn't seem to grasp the answer NO.

...

But to cut to the chase, the Doctors offered us death and we chose LIFE. Cole has a condition called Hydrocephalus and is shunted to treat that condition. He doesn't have Trisomy or Down Syndrome either. He's not hooked up to machines 24/7 as they predicted, nor does he have "no quality of life", yet another prediction. Oh, and he has a fully developed and working BRAIN.

UPDATE: 10:24AM

Senator Sam Brownback

The March for Life is the most under-reported event here in DC

I am hopefully the next president will be a pro-life president. I was hopefully that would be me, but that doesn’t look good right now.

We’ll lose ground in the Supreme Court if we don’t elect a pro-life nominee.

Question: will the next president, with a simple signature, cut-off Federal funding for Planned Parenthood?

Unlikely, but I’d hope they’d investigate the health issues of abortion clinics.

I didn’t catch most of the Senator’s remarks but there are other bloggers covering today’s talks.

Maggie Datiles - Americans United for Life
Gave an update on abortion legislation at the State and Federal level.

Only 2 weeks into the 2008 legislative session, and 107 pro-life bills have already been introduced.

The Gonzales decision allows the states to regulate abortion, more so then in the past, and we need to take advantage of it.

Michael New
Gave a humorous and academic presentation.

Asked the question: Why did abortions go down during the 1990s, during the Clinton presidency?

Answer: statistics 101 – correlation doesn’t equal causation. Clinton had nothing to do with the decrease in abortions.

I stayed up all night and couldn’t think of one thing Clinton did to decrease abortions.

Possible Explanations:
*Strong economy
*Increase in pro-life legislation at the state level

New just wrote a response in NRO to a New York Times article that claimed a negligible correlation between Parental Consent Laws and a decrease in abortion rates. Michael said their data was “superficial”.

Most Important Conclusion:

We have made progress!

UPDATE: 12:07AM

Phill Kline
I’ve blogged about Kline’s story previously, he’s the former attorney general for Kansas, and is currently at the center of one of the biggest abortion fights going on in America.

Kline is also the first prosecutor since Roe v. Wade to obtain abortion clinic records, which has garnered him the title of a “domestic terrorist” from Planned Parenthood.

Kline will also be speaking at today’s bloggers briefing, so I’ll be covering more of his remarks for the lunch.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ)
Covered a range of topics, including China’s forced abortion – One Child Policy - which they're now trying to export to other countries, particularly in Africa.

Africa is now being told, this is the brass ring for economic development, and the unborn children suffer.

Millions of Chinese men won’t be able to find wives in China, because more baby girls are aborted then baby boys, which creates a magnet for human trafficking.

Rep. Smith is an acknowledged leader on this issue, and has written three human trafficking bills.

Hadley P. Arkes
Professor at Amherst College.

Leo Strauss once said, the silence of a wise man is always instructive.

Karl Rove, at a GOP conference in 2005, was running through a list of top issues, when he got to abortion, he only stated that the administration had appoint strict-constructionist Supreme Court nominees.

We’re at the end game on abortion. We could have played this, if we had political leadership willing to take some moves.

Abraham Lincoln distilled Stephen Douglas’ position on slavery down to the following phrase:

One person may enslave a second, and a third may not object.

In Arkes view, President Bush, and the GOP in general, should be saying something similar on abortion.

One person may kill a second, and a third may not object.

Arkes concluded,

It’s time you start doing what a Pro-Life president should be doing. Not at the margins, but as if it really mattered, and as if you really meant it.

At today's bloggers briefing at Heritage we heard how the Bush Administration's Department of Justice is siding with the District of Columbia as its 1976 gun ban law is challenged in the Supreme Court. We also got the scoop on Ustream.tv, a new web service that lets anyone quickly and easily broadcast streaming video online.

The DC Gun Ban
Alan Gura, the lawyer who is arguing the pro-Second Amendment side in the DC gun rights case currently before the Supreme Court and John Lott, author and scholar at the University of Maryland, joined us by phone to update us on what's up with the Justice Department filing a brief that effectively supports the District’s gun ban.

Here’s an except from Lott’s recent article in NRO that explains how the case is shaping up:

The Department of Justice argument can be boiled down pretty easily. Its lawyers claim that since the government bans machine guns, it should also be able to ban handguns. After all, they reason, people can still own rifles and shotguns for protection, even if they have to be stored locked up. The Justice Department even seems to accept that trigger locks are not really that much of a burden, and that the locks “can properly be interpreted” as not interfering with using guns for self-protection. Yet, even if gun locks do interfere with self-defense, DOJ believes the regulations should be allowed, as long as the District of Columbia government thinks it has a good reason.

Factually, there are many mistakes in the DOJ’s reasoning: As soon as a rifle or shotgun is unlocked, it becomes illegal in D.C., and there has never been a federal ban on machine guns. But these are relatively minor points. Nor does it really matter that the only academic research on the impact of trigger locks on crime finds that states that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rape. Criminals are more likely to attack people in their homes, and those attacks are more likely to be successful. Since the potential of armed victims deters criminals, storing a gun locked and unloaded actually encourages crime.

When asked to handicap the Court’s likely decision, Gura said:

I think we’ll win, we’re writing the brief right now, there’s a good chance that they’ll go along with us.

Ustream.tv
Brad Hunstable, one of Ustream's founders, walked us through the service and talked about the opportunities for political candidates and non-profits to get up and running with Ustream. David's already blogged about Ustream today, but here's more for ya.

While the service is free, Brad talked about their plan to sell advertising, and add a Pay-Per-View feature.

The Pay-Per-View functionality can be used for fundraisers, for example: to see the Chuck Norris and Mike Huckabee BBQ, you have to contribute to the campaign.

While there's advertising on the homepage, there's currently none on the interior pages, or embedded in the videos. Brad stated that he wasn't keen on using pre-roll or post-roll ads and that he'd like to go with in-video product mentions, where the video host would talk up an advertisers product.

Rob Bluey asked if Ustream had thought of streaming Congressional committee hearings.

Lots of committee meetings take place that are never recorded, and Liberal members are getting away with saying and doing nutty things in the hearings, and there's no sunlight in the process.

Brad said he'd look into it, noting:

The Mainstream Media can’t cover everything, and we’re trying to fill that gap.

Blogs for Life 2008
Next Tuesday the Family Research Council is hosting Blogs for Life and our weekly bloggers briefing at their DC headquarters. They've got a great line-up of speakers including Star Parker.

I'll be there live-blogging it for you loyal techRepublican readers. Should be fun.