New York

How should we regard my home state of New York?

• by Rebecca Down

I’ve lived in New York all of my 22 years. Even during college I lived in the Bronx and for the rest of my life I’ve lived on Long Island. I have loved living here, and I love the city and the island. At least, I used to.

As some states seem to be moving forward with pro-life laws, New York is moving in completely the opposite direction. There’s a post on Live Action Thursday morning from Cassy Fiano, about an app and website for finding an abortion clinic, as well as birth control and some story about a teen who has had sex with her boyfriend but wants to have sex with a girl now as well. There’s all of this, plus a reminder their parents don’t need to know. Honestly, nothing surprises me anymore.
I used to hope I was just being pessimistic about New York. The state has had a long history of being pro-abortion. But the state has been in the news quite a bit this past year. And for those who are going to take issue with calling New York a pro-abortion state, I ask what else you would call a state that has an abortion rate double the national average, and where in the city, particularly the Bronx, the numbers are worse. New York hardly has any abortion restrictions, especially compared to other states. This is something TIME  has also noted. Americans United for Life ranked New York State #48 most pro-life for 2013, worse from #44 in 2012. I have a feeling in 2014, New York will be ranked #50. And yet Governor Cuomo still thinks more abortion access is needed?! If I were given the opportunity to ask the governor myself, in person, I assure you, my question would not be rhetorical.

I have to admit, sometimes I feel like there is no hope for New York. Let me be clear though, that does not mean I do think that babies conceived and born in New York are any less deserving of the right to life. I was conceived and born here, remember? There just seems to be so much against us, though. Speaking as a religious person, I truly feel that God will judge New York one day for the state’s backward stance on abortion.
But again, just because we may have a tougher time here in New York does not mean that the efforts of pro-lifers is not courageous and worth it. It must not be easy trying to be pro-life in the state which is the third worst. But may God bless pro-lifers for their dedication and efforts. New York may not be able to be great again until it does away with such a heavily pro-abortion mindset, but there is still the possibility. If the Reproductive Health Act passes, New York state will still have a fundamental right to abortion, even when Roe v. Wade is overturned. But the bill may not pass. Fortunately, State Senate Republican Leader, Dean Skelos has said it won’t be voted on. And perhaps one day, if Senator Skelos is not already that man, we will have another person in New York state with such influence as Ellen McCormack, who ran for president twice and was a founding member of New York’s Pro-Life Action Committee (PLAC).

Unfortunately right now, it hardly seems like there could be a worse place in this country for a child in the womb than New York, particularly the city. And when the state does nothing to protect these children, and in fact even makes their demise even more accessible, the state should truly be ashamed. I want to be angry sometimes with those who promote abortion even further, but at the end of the day feel we should be hoping that God may have mercy on Andrew Cuomo’s soul. No matter how bleak the situation may be in New York, I hope that one day this state can once again become great and that the dignity of all persons can be recognized, even here.


Source: LiveAction News

Stuff on Planned Parenthood

 

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Planned Parenthood sues over notification laws, CA midwives’ abortion bill moves forward, and more

by Ben Johnson

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 30, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As the Kermit Gosnell trial has led to a renewed surge in pro-life regulations, the abortion lobby and its allies on the political Left are suing to overturn the will of the people, on often confusing grounds. And California leads the way with multiple laws to expand abortion, punish those who object to homosexuality, and distribute condoms more widely.

Montana
Planned Parenthood of Montana has filed a lawsuit to strike down two parental notification laws – one of which was passed by more than 70 percent of state voters during a ballot referendum. Montana voters overwhelmingly backed Legislative Referendum 120 in 2011, when Republicans in the state legislature put the question to them rather than see then-Governor Brian Schweitzer veto their own bill. It required parental notification if a minor girl sought an abortion. House Bill 521, which would take effect on July 1, required parents to consent. Planned Parenthood says the bills violate the constitutional rights of unemancipated minors.

Arizona
The NAACP and an Asian women's group have sued to block Arizona's law banning women from having abortions because of a baby's race or sex – on the grounds that the 2011 law is racist and sexist. The ACLU filed the case, which left many puzzled, on behalf of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum and Maricopa County's chapter of the NAACP. Miriam Yeung, executive director of NAPAWF, told the media, "We hope the judgment in this case will expose the true intentions of the politicians behind these abortion bans and show unequivocally that they discriminate against women of color, Asian-American and African-American in particular." Arizona is the only state to bar women from aborting babies because of the baby's race. Five other states -- Illinois, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, -- have passed bans on sex-selective abortions. Arizona Congressman Trent Franks introduced a similar bill in U.S. Congress last year, but it could not clear the legislative hurdle House leadership placed in front of it.


California
The California Assembly has approved a bill to allow non-physicians to perform abortions. The bill, introduced by Toni Aktins, D-San Diego, would allow midwives and nurses to carry out early abortions without the supervision or participation of a trained physician. Its sponsors note the bill is inspired by the lack of medical professionals willing to terminate the unborn. The bill now heads to the State Senate.

The State Senate on Tuesday passed S.B. 323, a bill intended to revoke the tax-exempt status of youth organizations like the Boy Scouts that “discrimiante” against homosexuals. Legislators made clear the BSA's decision to admit homosexual scouts while barring adult homosexuals from serving as scoutmasters was not enough State Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, said, “We’ve given the Boy Scouts ample time to solve their discrimination problem and they have chosen a path that still leads to discrimination.” But critics like Karen England, Executive Director of Capitol Resource Institute, said the bill echoes the Obama administration's use of the IRS to punish its political enemies. “This bill is about government vilifying our values and abusing its power to penalize, through taxation, those who hold different beliefs and values,” she said. “SB 323 is an unprecedented intrusion by the government and a far reaching assault on freedoms of association, speech, and religion.”
A bill that would have required pornographers to use condoms in all films shot in the state of California died in the Appropriations Committee last Friday. The measure would extend a local L.A. County ordinance, passed after numerous STD and AIDS outbreaks within the adult film industry, statewide. Assemblyman Mike Gatto, who represents the heart of the nation's porn industry in the San Fernando Valley, said, "A legislator has about as much right telling a performer to use condoms as we have telling Rush Limbaugh to wear a dunce cap during his radio shows."
Meanwhile, Democratic Assemblyman Rob Bonta of Oakland had better luck with his bill to distribute condoms in state prisons. The Appropriations Committee gave his AB 999 unanimous approval.
Illinois

Illinois has one day left in its legislative session to pass a bill redefining marriage. The Assembly's African-American Caucus has demonstrated strong opposition to the Orwellian-named "Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act." Attorneys from the Thomas More Society warn “Senate Bill 10 provides the worst religious liberty protections of any same-sex marriage bill in the country." S.B. 10 “would make Illinois the most hostile state in the country to the religious freedoms of people of faith," said Peter Breen, vice president and senior counsel at the Chicago-based society. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has a different view. He has weighed in on the bill numerous times, including at a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee held Wednesday night at the home of his friends Bettylu and Paul Saltzman. “I just want to say for the record it’s something that I deeply support,” Obama said. “I am absolutely convinced it is the right thing to do.”
 
Louisiana
Telemed abortions may have a limited future in the Pelican State. The state House passed a ban on the procedure by an overwhelming vote of 99-3. S.B. 90, introduced by Republican State Senator Fred Mills of Breaux Bridge, is intended to assure that women who swallow the cocktail of pills that lead to forceful contractions – and often result in an incomplete expulsion of the unborn baby – have adequate supervision. It now goes to the State Senate for final passage.

Wisconsin
Lawmakers in Wisconsin are considering three pro-life bills introduced by one state representative. The measures would respect the consciences of religious employers not to cover abortifacient drugs or contraction in their insurance plans; ban sex-selective abortions; and end taxpayer funding of elective abortion in state employees' insurance plans. Rep. André Jacque, R-De Pere, introduced all three bills last week. The Assembly Committee on Health held a hearing on the bills Wednesday. In response to an objection from Rep. Erik Severson, R-Star Prarie, Jacque said he would be willing to discuss adding an exception for birth control that was prescribed for non-contraceptive reasons. Many religious employers already have such an exception.

Source: LifeSite News

More Information on Baby 59

 

 

Mother of newborn trapped in sewer was present for rescue, authorities conclude it was an accident and mother will not be charged

 

By Dave Andrusko
On Monday we ran a story about the incredible two-hour rescue of a Chinese newborn found trapped in an L-shaped section of sewage pipe just below a squat toilet in a bathroom in an apartment in a province in eastern China. Initially, the China Daily reported that firefighters had responded to a call from a building resident who reported hearing a baby crying in the toilet on the fourth floor.
The baby became known as “Baby No. 59” — so named because of his incubator number in the hospital.

A lot has happened in two days, including the correction of various initial reports and more detail. It turned out that the mother was present for the entire time of the rescue (caught on video) and, in fact, had raised the initial alarm about the baby’s plight. However she denied being the baby’s mother, according to Tang.

“Police became suspicious when they found baby toys and blood-stained toilet paper in the 22-year-old woman’s rented room, in the building where Saturday’s rescue occurred in eastern China,“ Tang reported, based on a report from the state-run, Hangzhou-based newspaper Dushikuaibao. When confronted by police, the woman admitted she was the mother and police attributed her initial denial to being frightened.

“The woman told police she could not afford an abortion and secretly delivered the child Saturday afternoon in the toilet,” Tang reported. “She said she tried to catch the baby but he slipped into the sewer line and that she alerted her landlord of the trapped baby after she could not pull the child out, the state-run, Jinhua-based Zhezhong News said.”

“[A]uthorities have concluded it was an accident, meaning his unwed mother is unlikely to be criminally charged,” reported Didi Tang for the Associated Press.

On Wednesday the baby, who miraculously was mostly unharmed, was released to the parents of the 22-year-old mother who took him home. The state-run Jinhua Evening News reported that the baby’s mother remains under medical care. The baby weighed 6 pounds, 2.8 ounces at birth.

Tang added that the video of the rescue of Baby No. 59 “was shown on Chinese news programs and websites starting late Monday and picked up worldwide, prompting both horror and an outpouring of charity on behalf of the newborn. The mother’s reported confession raises questions about whether she intended to abandon the baby, while suggesting that she was desperate and did not know what to do.”

Source: NRLC News

Henry Morgentaler and Canada

 

There’s a life at the heart of the matter

 

By Andrea Mrozek
Editor’s note. Henry Morgentaler passed away Wednesday morning at the age of 90, the most famous—or infamous—abortionist in Canada. He made abortion his life’s work. He broke Canada’s existing abortion law in order to change it, culminating in R v. Morgentaler at the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988. This case overturned Canada’s abortion laws, at the same time asking Canada’s Parliament to decide the issue, something that has not happened 25 years later. As a result, abortions in Canada are legal at any time during the pregnancy, for any reason.

The late Canadian abortionist Henry Morgentaler

There’s some irony in the passing away of Dr. Henry Morgentaler. Regrettably, Morgentaler, whose name will forever be connected with opening Canada up to abortion on demand, cannot be celebrated. Making abortion mainstream is something few can celebrate
.
Instead, some will celebrate the word “choice.” This neutral term is now a universal euphemism for abortion. People will freely say, “I’m pro-choice.” Yet the term holds in it another irony: That for so many women, abortion was only an answer in the absence of real choice. The father left, there’s no money, I can’t tell my parents, I can’t cope, we’ll never be able to make it work, and so on.
Abortion is the “choice” in that critical moment in a woman’s life when hope went on holiday.
This is Morgentaler’s legacy: The death of a child, renamed a choice, and without limit in Canada.
He deserves neither all the credit nor all the blame, of course. When the Supreme Court of Canada heard the now infamous Morgentaler case in 1988, their intention was not to bestow abortion as an unfettered right. Instead, the court went so far as to acknowledge a legitimate public interest in restricting abortion, and then threw the question back to Parliament — which has been holding the ball ever since.

As a result, we have no law at all and abortion is used in ways it was never intended. About one-quarter of pregnancies in Canada end in abortion.
Initially, for its advocates, abortion was a measure of last resort. Though statistics are sorely lacking, in Canada we turn a blind eye to more than 100,000 abortions annually. The genuinely tough cases, don’t make up more than two or three per cent.

Though abortion is rare in the third trimester, there is in fact no law against abortion at any time, for any reason. Doctors and bio-ethicists acknowledge cases of abortion for cleft palate, for Down syndrome and for other reasons that can only be diagnosed late term.
Abortion is also used to eradicate one gender: Women. While this unique form of barbarism is late to Canada, we do have firm evidence it is happening here. And in other countries it’s just a matter of counting the millions of missing girls.

Perhaps the richer irony is that in face of this injustice, Morgentaler’s supporters maintain abortion as central to women’s rights. How can surgically circumventing women’s natural reproductive cycles advance the cause of women’s rights? How does this advance the lasting well-being and dignity of women?

Sex can result in pregnancy. If carrying a pregnancy to term is a “choice,” it reduces our responsibility to help mothers who face difficult circumstances. Certainly, it’s all the more difficult to justify any number of programs to help mothers if they didn’t have to have children in the first place. A community can now abdicate responsibility from caring for children by declaring them to be “not my problem,” but rather, “her choice.”

Under choice rhetoric, whether children are punishments or gifts to be welcomed or resented, depends entirely on the woman. So total is the woman’s right to decide that the other party to the pregnancy — the man — gets only the choice to walk away. Small wonder then that so many do.
Vicky Green is a social worker living in Ottawa, who has had three abortions, the last one done by Henry Morgentaler. Vicky told me of how she cried in front of him and said “I don’t want to do this to my baby.” To which Morgentaler replied it wasn’t one and she’d have more.
It’s too convenient to simply ignore the life at the heart of the matter. Ultimately, the choice is whether to keep a child, or not. There’s a life who, granted, is growing within the woman, but has a heartbeat. That heartbeat was something Morgentaler chose not to hear.

Celebrating Morgentaler for introducing choice, without referring to the choice itself is a bit like celebrating Steve Jobs, without ever once mentioning an Apple computer.
And it’s ironic, because for so many women, the abortion clinic is at the end of a road on which all other choices have faded from view.

Andrea Mrozek is executive director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada and the founder of ProWomanProLife.org. This first appeared in The Ottawa Citizen.

Source: NRLC News

Suicide Views

 

Suicide views depend on how question phrased, Gallup finds

 

By Burke J. Balch, J.D., director of NRLC’s Powell Center for Medical Ethics
Americans’ views on legalization of assisting suicide depend on how the question is phrased, a May Gallup survey shows. Released on May 29, the results of a poll of 1,535 adults conducted May 2-7 showed 51% support for a law allowing doctors “to assist the patient to commit suicide if the patient requests it” but 70% support for a law allowing doctors “to end the patient’s life by some painless means.”

Euphemisms to hide a deadly reality are often an effective propaganda tool of pro-death forces, and it is doubtless awareness of polls like this one that has lead them to insist that what they promote is not “assisting suicide” but rather “death with dignity” and similar sweet-sounding sobriquets.
It is notable that even the summary of the poll question using the term “suicide” was quite biased in its favor. The full question read, “When a person has a disease that cannot be cured and is living in severe pain, do you think doctors should or should not be allowed by law to assist the patient to commit suicide if the patient requests it?” In fact, with the tools available to modern medicine, there is no excuse for health care providers failing to relieve pain, so that no one need be “living in severe pain.” See www.nrlc.org/euthanasia/asisuid2.html .

This year, death advocates succeeded in legalizing assisting suicide by legislative action in Vermont. Oregon and Washington State have legalized it by initiative measures, and the Montana Supreme Court has held that consent is a defense to charges that might be brought against those assisting suicide. In California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Michigan, while initiatives to legalize assisting suicide have initially demonstrated broad public support as measured by opinion polls, education of voters concerning their risks and probable abuses has ultimately led to their defeat.
When the term “suicide” was used, the Gallup survey showed 45% opposition with 4% expressing no opinion (4% margin of error with 95% confidence). When the euphemism “end the patient’s life by some painless means” is used, there was 27% opposition, with 3% expressing no opinion (5% margin of error with 95% confidence).

That same Gallup poll found 49% saying “doctor assisted suicide” was morally wrong to 45% saying it was morally acceptable.
A report on the poll is available at gallup.com
General information on the dangers of legalizing assisting suicide may be found at www.nrlc.org/MedEthics/ProtectingagainstDirectKilling.html .

Source: NRLC News

Nightmare

 

‘Absolute Nightmare’ at Wilmington Planned Parenthood clinic, former nurse testifies

 

By Dave Andrusko

Former Planned Parenthood nurses Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich (left) and Joyce Vasikonis were sharply critical of Planned Parenthood of Delaware in testified given Wednesday. Photo credit: GARY 

EMEIGH/THE NEWS JOURNAL

Trying to contain the damage arising from the Kermit Gosnell murder trial (and all that was revealed), the Abortion Industry insists that –Gosnell aside—their abortion clinics are the model of “quality care.” That’s never been the case, of course, and of late there has been more evidence from insiders that Planned Parenthood is guilty as well.

Last month we wrote about Planned Parenthood of Delaware and how its Wilmington abortion clinic had suspended surgical abortions following allegations of unsafe and unsanitary conditions and 911 calls.
Yesterday the two nurses who blew the whistle–Joyce Vasikonis and Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich–testified before a packed Delaware Senate hearing room. In their remarks delivered at an ad hoc hearing called by one Republican and one Democratic state senator, the two reiterated and elaborated on charges they had made in an April investigative report on WPVI-TV ABC News.

The lead paragraph in a story that appeared in the [Delaware] News Journal only hinted at the magnitude of the charges leveled by the two nurses who both quit last year: that “the Wilmington clinic performed ‘meat-market style assembly line’ abortions, focused most on profit margins, and put patients at risk for infection and other serious medical problems by neglecting proper standards of care.”

Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, who resigned after a few weeks on the job and noted that she (like Vasikonis) is not against abortion, said, “It was an absolute nightmare.”
“This is not about abortion,” Mitchell-Werbrich emphasized. “This is about patients. Their lives are at risk.” She added, “I feared that a patient was going to end up being harmed and that I would lose my nursing license.”

Adding further intrigue was that the Delaware Division of Public Health released results of its survey of Planned Parenthood’s Wilmington clinic just hours before the hearing. “The state cites more than a dozen ‘unsafe and unsanitary’ practices and conditions there,” according to reporter Beth Miller.
As we reported last month, the two reports broadcast by WPVI TV ABC News’ Action News got the ball running. Here is a snapshot of a few conclusions drawn by the station:

“In Delaware, abortion clinics are not subject to routine inspections. The state only steps in when they have a patient complaint. Planned Parenthood is essentially in charge of inspecting itself. …Action News has learned during our investigation that one doctor and two more nurses at the [Planned Parenthood of Delaware] clinic have mysteriously left.” In addition, Action News reported that “several 911 calls [were] made from inside the Wilmington facility for patients in distress.”

According to yesterday’s News Journal story, those emergencies triggered the review by the Delaware Division of Public Health which (Miller wrote)

“found 14 kinds of violations at the clinic – including inadequate documentation of narcotics, supplies that had exceeded expiration dates, lax practices to ensure sterility, unlabeled bottles of fluid, overdue or uncertain maintenance records.”

In an April 24 letter, “Division Director Dr. Karyl Rattay said the clinic had 10 days to correct the violations, produce evidence that the problems had been addressed, and present a plan to prevent those problems from reoccurring,” Miller reported. In a May 22 response, Ruth Lytle-Barnaby, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Delaware, said “that policies and procedures, including staff training, had been modified and improvements implemented.”

In her prepared statement Vasikonis said, “It would take me the entire afternoon to discuss all the deficiencies I discovered at Planned parenthood of Delaware during the 10 months I worked there.” She listed 22 separate problem areas that included severe management problems and insufficient staff training; outdated (and broken) equipment; “Quality and Risk management policies were not followed or enforced’; an abortionist who did not wear sterile gloves; and sexual and racial harassment.
In her prepared statement, Mitchell-Werbrich explained that she had worked only 27 days at the Willingham and Dover sites. “I was forced to resign on August 8, 2012 as the conditions at Planned Parenthood continued to very unsafe and potential life threatening for the patients” despite numerous reports provided to Planned Parenthood administrators and a flock of state health regulatory agencies.
She said that “one abortion would be completed every 8-10 minutes” at the Wilmington PP site—evidence of what she called its “meat-market style assembly line abortions.” Her charges were every bit as lengthy and even more critical of the “poor, unsafe patient care.” To quote just part of one paragraph, Mitchell-Werbrich alleged that she had reported to two state agencies

“that most of the Planned Parenthood Staff members did not wear protective gear or utilize universal blood and body fluid precautions; consent for sedation and procedures were sometimes obtained late as staff was rushed and hurried; registered nurses had to hide the patient’s chart from [one abortionist] so the pre-procedure medications could have time to take effect because he was in such a rush to get to the next patient; lab work not being performed correctly thus the lab value results were incorrect; patients given sedation were found outside walking down Market Street dazed and confused. …[the same abortionist] once left sedated patients in the middle of an abortion procedure waiting for hours in order to handle a mechanical issue with his private airplane; and more.”

Not surprisingly, Sen. Greg Lavelle “said he was shocked’ to learn of ‘horrible patient care,’ lack of response to the nurses’ concerns, and the state response to their complaints,” Miller reported

Source:NRLC NEWS

Just When U Think You Have Heard Everything

 

Abortion? There’s an app for that

• by Cassy Fiano

Are New Yorkers seeking to eradicate all children from the Big Apple? With a state abortion rate almost double that of the national average, you could be forgiven for thinking so — especially when it turns out that apparently, there aren’t enough abortions being performed already in New York, even with almost half of all pregnancies ending in abortion. While abortion is widespread throughout the state, it’s worst in New York City. And evidently, it isn’t enough for the bureaucrats there, who according to CNS News have decided to launch an official abortion app for teenagers:

The New York City Health Department’s NYC teen website now includes an app that teens can download to their smart phones to get information on “sexual health,” including where they can get birth control and abortions.
The app, under the heading “Important Links and Info,” has three main links – Where to Go; sexual health services, What to Get; condoms and birth control; and What to Expect; at the clinic.

Under the health services link the user can choose what service they want, including Gold Star clinics (those that offer free birth control and other services), emergency contraceptive or Plan B, and abortion.
If the user picks abortion, they can then choose the area in the city where they want to find services. If the user picks Manhattan, for example, they will be directed to three places that perform abortions – Family Planning Clinic, Harlem Hospital; Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Center; and Project Stay – Services to Assist Youth at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

The website also helpfully reminds teens that their parents don’t need to know about the fact that they’ll be undergoing a medical procedure which has the potential to leave their children injured or killed. The website also encourages teens to get birth control, and features a teenage girl named “Samantha”, who has sex with her boyfriend, but also wants to have sex with her female best friend.
And why shouldn’t the city of New York encourage teenagers to have sex? It’s like, totally cool if they do. They can take birth control if they don’t want to get pregnant, because that is just guaranteed to work, right? If not, they can always just go get an abortion. Whatever they do, they shouldn’t keep the baby — Michael Bloomberg evidently hates teenage moms, so if an oopsie happens, best that teens know how to get rid of the problem ASAP.

In all seriousness, does New York really feel that the city needs more abortions? The abortion rate is already horrifically high, but considering that both the city and state of New York are trying to make it even more widespread must mean that New Yorkers only want that number to climb some more. In New York City, college students turn abortion into a disturbing game and the morning-after pill is given to high-schoolers like candy. Abortion can’t just be legal, it has to be an everyday occurrence, so common that apparently almost half of all pregnancies being aborted still aren’t enough.

It’s enough to make one wonder, will there come a point when New Yorkers will finally say enough? How many babies need to be killed before that number becomes too high? 50%? 75%? Or does New York just need to become a baby-free zone? It seems ludicrous, but where is the tipping point? How pervasive does the culture of death need to become before New Yorkers say stop?

Source: LIVE ACTION NEWS

Healing Power of Human Touch

 

Premature Twins Thrive with a “Rescuing Hug”

By Liz Townsend

Editor’s note. We received some very nice feedback to yesterday’s story by Kathy Ostrowski, “The unborn child, human touch, and music therapy.”  This story, from the April 2001, edition of National Right to Life News is in that vein: the critical importance of human touch, music, and the affection of fellow humans. This story is part of our year-long “Roe at 40” series in which we are reprinting some of the best stories from NRL News going all the way back to 1973. If you are not a subscriber to the “pro-life newspaper of record, call us at 202-626-8828.
Premature babies have a better chance of survival now, due to advances in medical technology and knowledge. But sometimes the best medicine lies not in expensive machines but in the simple touch of another person.

The story of twins Brielle and Kyrie Jackson of Westminster, Massachusetts, made national headlines five years ago and began a revolution in the way multiple-birth babies are treated in their first weeks of life.

Not yet a month old, Brielle was losing her fight for life. Born along with her twin, Kyrie, on October 17, 1995, she weighed only two pounds at birth. While Kyrie, three ounces heavier but much stronger, thrived, Brielle’s breathing and heart rate were poor and nothing the doctors at The Medical Center of Central Massachusetts-Memorial tried seemed to make any difference.
On November 12, Brielle’s condition worsened dramatically. “She was turning colors,” the twins’ mother, Heidi Jackson, told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. “She was getting really worked up. Her heart rate was way up. She was getting hiccups. You could tell she was just completely stressed out.”
Nurse Gayle Kasparian, desperately seeking something to help Brielle, remembered hearing about a technique rarely used in America called “double bedding” or “co-bedding.” Twins and other multiple-birth babies are put in the same crib, where, like in their mother’s womb, they lie close together.

Kasparian put Brielle in the incubator with Kyrie, whom she hadn’t seen since birth. To the amazement of everyone, Brielle showed improvement from the first moment she touched her sister.
“[Kasparian] closed the door and Brielle snuggled up to Kyrie and she was just fine,” said Jackson, the Telegram & Gazette reported. “She calmed right down. It was immediate. It was absolutely immediate.”

Brielle and Kyrie went home with their family just before Christmas, when they were only two months old. When they left the hospital, they each weighed well over five pounds and were considered healthy. “They’re doing fantastic,” Heidi Jackson told the Telegram & Gazette.
The nation learned about Brielle and Kyrie when a beautiful photograph of Kyrie’s arm protectively around her sister, known as the “Rescuing Hug” picture, was published in Reader’s Digest and Life magazine in 1996. People were deeply touched by the expression of love between the two tiny sisters and inspired by the healing that can happen with just the warmth of another person.

The conventional thinking of doctors at that time was that tiny preemies should be kept apart so infections couldn’t spread. But experts now believe that the threat of infection is minimal, and the benefits of the comfort and security gained by the presence of the baby’s twin far outweigh any risks.
“When you consider what these babies have already experienced – - being thrust too early out of the soothing environment of the womb and into the noise, glare and physical discomfort of life in the hospital – - you wonder what added stress is caused by being separated for the first time from the comfort of the other baby,” wrote Patricia Maxwell Malmstrom and Janet Poland in The Art of Parenting Twins. “There is considerable evidence that multiple infants who are co-bedded handle the stress of being hospitalized, and of all the procedures they must endure, better than those who are separated.”
Successes in cases such as Brielle and Kyrie’s have led to many more hospitals adopting the practice of co-bedding.

Children’s Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, first began co-bedding in 1998 when the parents of twins Meagan and Jacob Breid asked that they be placed together. Medical staff at the hospital agreed after reading studies from other hospitals in this country and around the world.
“Research indicates that co-bedded infants tend to have better feeding patterns and thus develop at a faster rate,” according to the University of Missouri Health Care web site. “And, because they help regulate each others’ breathing, these infants also present improvements in respiratory control and heart rate.”

The Breid twins showed immediate improvement, according to the web site. Children’s Hospital continues to practice co-bedding.
Marquette General Hospital in Wisconsin also allows parents to choose co-bedding for multiple-birth babies. “Besides being more comfortable, they usually gain weight quicker and maintain body temperature better,” said Cindy Ampe, maternal/child nurse manager, according to the hospital’s web site.

“We have had nothing but positive feedback from parents who have used co-bedding for their twins.”

Source: NRLC News

Is This How History Will Remember Us

 

Flushed China Baby Symbol of the Times

 

By Wesley J. Smith
A newborn baby was flushed down a toilet in China, but luckily saved. From the Telegraph story:

“The abandoned two-day-old child was discovered on Saturday afternoon in Jinhua, a city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, after the residents of a tower block reported hearing crying.Unable to pull the baby free, fire fighters were forced to saw off a four-inch wide piece of piping from the floor below and then take the baby to hospital while still inside the pipe.

“The five pound baby boy was finally extracted from the pipe after nearly an hour, according to a local news website. Chinese television showed white-gloved hospital staff using a pair of red pliers and a yellow saw to pull open the pipe. Inside was a tiny baby, filthy and terrified but alive.”

This ugliness is probably a consequence of China’s tyrannous one-child policy:

“Cases of abandoned babies are common in China with young mothers and strict family planning rules often blamed for the phenomenon. But Saturday’s highly unusual case provoked a furious response on Chinese social media sites with hundreds of thousands of comments posted this week. ‘The parents who did this have hearts even filthier than that sewage pipe,’ wrote one user of the Twitter-like Weibo. Other abandoned babies are not so lucky. On May 22 another child was found in a dustbin in Hebei province, wrapped in a pink cloth and badly bruised.”

It strikes me that the symbolism of this story captures the zeitgeist of the times. There is a war against the sanctity of life of babies out there. Think late term abortion justified by Planned Parenthood, to the point that a Florida official even asserted that saving a baby that survived a botched abortion should be up to the mother and doctor. Think Gosnell. Think late-term abortionists given a standing O at the Sundance Film Festival. Think “after-birth abortion” advocacy and the denial of the personhood of infants by the ilk of Princeton’s Peter Singer. Thank advocacy for a right to a dead fetus. Think radical environmentalists’ extreme Malthusianism, with some warming hysterics calling for universal China-type population policies to “save the planet.”
Do most people believe that fetuses and babies are the moral equivalent of solid waste? Of course not. But too many sure talk as if they do.

Editor’s note. This appeared on Wesley’s great blog.

Source: NRLC News 

Editor’s note. This appeared on Wesley’s great blog.

2 Deaths in China

 

Mom dies after forced abortion at six months in China: report

 

By John Jalsevac
Yuyue, Hubei, May 29, 2013 — In the wake of the heartbreaking story about how a newborn baby in China was rescued after apparently being flushed down a public toilet and becoming lodged in a sewage pipe, comes a report that a woman has died after being forced to abort by Chinese family planning officials.

On May 23, 2013, 26-year-old pregnant mother Zhang Yinping was dragged to the local Family Planning Office in Yuyue, Hubei, for a forced abortion, according to the human rights group All Girls Allowed.

Despite being 6-months pregnant, the Family Planning Officials reportedly went ahead with the forced surgery. After the surgery, Ms. Zhang suffered a massive hemorrhage and died the following morning on May 24th.

According to All Girls Allowed, local Jiayu county officials are investigating this case as a “medical accident” and the Family Planning Office has been closed during the investigation. Ms. Zhang’s relatives surrounded the office in protest, but the county sent police officers to stop the protest. There are reportedly no signs of a criminal investigation or criminal charges.

“Please pray for this unfolding story, that All Girls Allowed would be able to get a hold of the victim’s family and obtain more details, photos and even video evidence of this horrific forced abortion and murder,” said the human rights group in a statement. “Pray that the mainstream media would pick up this case, especially as it comes alongside the announcement of Two-Child Policy in Myanmar to restrict the growth of the Muslim population there.”

China’s one-child policy is routinely enforced through brutal measures including forced abortions and sterilizations, and crippling fines that can amount to several times a family’s annual income.
Editor’s note. This appeared at lifesitenews.com

Justice

 

Sentencing of former Gosnell employees continues; Pearl Gosnell sentenced to 7-23 months

 

By Dave Andrusko

Pearl Gosnell

One after another, former employees of convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell are themselves being sentenced. Today it was Gosnell’s third wife, Pearl Gosnell, who was sentenced to seven to 23 months in prison, according to blogger JD Mullane. Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner said she benefitted from a “foul operation masquerading as a medical facility.” She was charged with racketeering and performing an illegal abortion.

MaryClaire Dale, writing for the Associated Press, ran a highly sympathetic piece last evening. Mrs. Gosnell has spent two years on house arrest, and, according to Dale, Kermit Gosnell ”had turned down a plea offer that would have let her keep their house and stay home on probation with their teenage daughter.” Gosnell did not testify in his own defense nor did he speak to judge prior to sentencing.
“You can tell from the arrogance that he displayed – turning down the deal, as well as refusing to speak – he’s left her holding the bag in terms of talking to the public and apologizing,” defense lawyer Michael Medway told The Associated Press.

Mrs. Gosnell, however, was also the only employee whom her husband trusted to assist him on the most disgusting illegal abortions, according to the grand jury report.

“Gosnell made little effort to hide his illegal abortion practice. But there were some, ‘the really big ones,’ that even he was afraid to perform in front of others. These abortions were scheduled for Sundays, a day when the clinic was closed and none of the regular employees were present. Only one person was allowed to assist with these special cases – Gosnell’s wife. The files for these patients were not kept at the office; Gosnell took them home with him and disposed of them. We may never know the details of these cases. We do know, however, that, during the rest of the week, Gosnell routinely aborted and killed babies in the sixth and seventh month of pregnancy. The Sunday babies must have been bigger still.”

Meanwhile, Adrienne Moton, who prior to the trial confessed to killing 10 babies aborted alive using the technique Gosnell taught her, was released today after Judge Lerner sentenced her to 28 months time served. Judge Lerner specifically cited her cooperation with prosecutors.
In a six-week-long trial filled with dramatic (and nauseous) testimony, Moton’s ranked near the top. Moton, 35, testified that she, Gosnell, and other employees cut the spinal cords of dozens of babies – some still moving. Three paragraphs from the story by the Philadelphia Daily News’ Mensah M. Dean deftly summarized Moton’s powerful testimony:

“Moton’s memory of one baby – known in court as ‘Baby A’ – brought her to tears. The child was born in July 2008 so large and seemingly healthy in the 29th week of pregnancy that Moton took a cellphone picture before Gosnell rushed in and carried the boy away, she said. Abortions after the 24th week of pregnancy are banned in Pennsylvania.

“’I just saw a big baby boy. He had that color, that color that a baby has,’ a weeping Moton said under questioning by Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron.

“’I just felt he could have had a chance. . . . He could have been born any day,’ added Moton, who has been jailed for 26 months.”

Mullane tweeted that

“Moton told Judge Lerner that ‘I am truly sorry for the role I played’ and that snipping necks of babies now ‘bothers me to my soul.’”

Yesterday Elizabeth Hampton received one year of probation after pleading guilty to have perjured herself in testimony to the grand jury. “Hampton, 55, had grown up in foster care with Pearl Gosnell,” Dale reported. “Hampton cleaned instruments at the clinic and worked the front desk, while her husband worked as a janitor. They also lived in one of Gosnell’s rental properties.”
Sentencing of Lynda Williams was deferred until July 1. Gosnell will stand trial (or more likely plead guilty) to charges that he illegally distributed prescription drugs. Authorities accused Williams of aiding him.

Media Bias

 

 

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition challenges Global News on its one-sided reporting

 

By Alex Schadenberg, executive director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC)
Today, Global News has published another one-sided article concerning assisted suicide. The article is connected to a one-sided poll that asks: Should doctor-assisted suicide be legal?

The options are: YES, dying adults should be able to get help to end their life, or NO, it is wrong on moral grounds.

The poll is skewed by its wording. Everyone wants their life to end well but that doesn’t mean they want assisted suicide. And many people oppose assisted suicide for reasons other than morality.
Yesterday I sent this email to Global news concerning their promotion of assisted suicide. I wrote:

I am very disappointed with the one-sided article produced by Emily Mertz concerning assisted suicide in Canada.

It appears that Global News wants to promote assisted suicide rather than report on the issue in an honest and straight forward manner.

As the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition we will be sending a strong complaint to the CRTC [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission] unless you decide to change your policy and produce TV news programs that are balanced.

In your program there is no information about the abuse of assisted suicide in Switzerland or the abuse of euthanasia in the Netherlands and Belgium.

There is almost no information about the possible negative consequences associated with euthanasia and assisted suicide. There is no information on why disability groups, such as the Council of Canadians with Disabilities and Community Living oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide.

___________
Global News re-published the original article and added an online poll.
The online poll asked the question: Should doctor assisted suicide be legal in Canada? YES or NO.
___________
On the Global news website under the title of Principles and Practices, Global News claims:

“Our primary directive is to report accurate, balanced, timely and comprehensive news and information in the public interest …

News events and public issues may be analyzed and put into context, as long as comment or opinion is clearly identified and kept distinct from regular news coverage.”

Global News is contravening its own principles and practices and they are presenting a one-sided view on an issue of social importance with Life and Death in the balance.
Last year the Global News 16 x 9 program aired a eugenic euthanasia program titled “Taking Mercy “ featuring a woman who wanted her adult children with significant disabilities to be euthanized.
The Taking Mercy show was then featured on the Dr. Phil show.

The Council of Canadians with Disabilities responded to the Taking Mercy segment.
EPC is tired of the one-sided reporting and we demand balanced programming on the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Source: NRLC News

Expanding the Killing Pool

 

California bill advances to allow non-physicians to perform certain first-trimester abortion

 

By Dave Andrusko

California Assemblywoman Toni Atkins

Already one of the states with the most liberal abortion laws and the least abortion clinic supervision, the California Assembly is moving closer to a vote that would widen the pool of those who can perform some first-trimester abortions to include physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and nurse midwives.

Assemblywoman Toni Atkins (D) is the author of Assembly Bill 154. The measure would allow these non-physicians to perform early-term surgical “aspiration” abortions. (These personnel are already allowed to administer chemical abortifacients.)
Although obliquely described in news accounts, what happens is an aspiration abortion is that a powerful suction tube with a sharp cutting edge is inserted into the womb through the dilated cervix. The suction dismembers the body of the developing baby and tears the placenta from the wall of the uterus, sucking the baby’s remains into a collection bottle.
The bill redefines the abortion technique as “non-surgical,” according to Margaret A. Bengs in an op-ed for the Daily News.

Democratic Assemblyman Richard Pan’s companion measure—AB 980— “would exempt clinics performing these ‘nonsurgical’ abortions from the more stringent building code standards for surgery,” Bengs wrote.
The rationale for the move (as always) is expanding access.
“The growing shortage of abortion providers creates a significant barrier for women’s access,” Atkins said, according to the Mercury News. “Authorizing trained health professionals to provide early abortion services removes those barriers.”

The justification is a state pilot program created in 2007 (and recently extended to next January). Under it, 8,000 aspiration abortions have been provided by non-doctors. NRL News Today has written about the program on multiple occasions and in one analysis by Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, critiqued a study appearing in the “American Journal of Public Health” which claimed that first trimester surgical or suction aspiration abortions can be done just as safely by nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants as they can be by doctors.
Combining the insights of Dr. O’Bannon and Ms. Bengs we see the study (produced by researchers from the University of Southern California-San Francisco (UCSF), “America’s abortion training academy”) is woefully inadequate.

#1. [Dr. O’Bannon] “As a group, the number of complications for the [non-physicians] were almost exactly twice (100) what they were for the abortion doctors (52). Researchers glide over this by noting that numbers of ‘major complications” were equal for both groups (a total of six–two uterine perforations, three infections, and one hemorrhage spread between the two groups). The difference, they point out, was really in “minor complications.” What were some of those “minor complications?
They included incomplete abortions; failed abortions” retention of blood in the uterus, cases of infection, endocervical injury, anesthesia-related reactions, and uncomplicated uterine perforation”—to name just a few categories where non-physicians had many more problems than physicians.

#2. [Ms. Bengs] “The bill’s advocates claim that because some counties don’t have an abortion provider, women must drive ‘long distances’ to get abortions, but only 1 percent of women live in those counties, according to the Guttmacher Institute. California, in fact, has one-third of the nation’s abortion providers and its abortion rate is 27 percent, far higher than the national average.”

#3. [Dr. O’Bannon]. In fact the problems may be even larger than reported. “It should also be noted that 30.5% of the patients participating in the study never came back to fill out follow-up surveys. Researchers counted them in the study anyway. They said that 41 of those patients did contact the facility when they experienced a complication and that what they ‘discovered via medical chart abstraction’ suggested ‘a low likelihood of missing complications among this group.’ Especially in light of the low follow up rate, it is important to note that researchers give no indication that they considered an alternative explanation: that these women, rather than returning to the abortion clinic where they were injured, may have instead sought help from a local emergency room or their own personal physician.”

How ironic at a time of Kermit Gosnell that a state—any state—would undermine some of the very few protections that exist for women.

Source: NRLC News

Only Help Offered Family "Planning"

 

UNFPA to war-torn, disaster-ravaged countries: we’ll send you birth control

by Kirsten Andersen

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA, May 29, 2013 (LifeSiteNews) – Fewer people = fewer problems. At least, that seems to be the philosophy behind the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) latest partnership with abortion giant Planned Parenthood to increase aid to war-torn and disaster-ravaged countries in the form of "family planning."

UNFPA Director Babatunde Osotimehin says his group will work with International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to “galvanize political commitment” to increase access to birth control and "modern family planning" in what the group says are “13 countries with some of the lowest contraceptive prevalence,” including Bolivia, Côte d'Ivoire, Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Kenya, Liberia, Myanmar, Nigeria, the Pacific Islands, Pakistan and South Sudan.
These "post-conflict and post-disaster" countries, said the UNFPA, are "some of the most-hard-to-reach areas around the world."

While the UNFPA press release does not make clear whether the initiative will include abortion, the UNFPA and Planned Parenthood both view abortion as a central element of family planning.
The details of the initiative will be announced Thursday at the controversial “Women Deliver” conference, where pro-infanticide philosopher Peter Singer, late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart, and pro-abortion Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius are featured speakers.
Osotimehin said he especially hopes to reach “young people.”
Father Peter West, Vice President for Missions at Human Life International, criticized the UN’s approach in a statement to LifeSiteNews.

 


“What refugees of war torn countries and victims of natural disasters need most are food, shelter, clean water and medicine, not ‘family planning services,” Fr. West said.  “The United Nations Population Fund has one agenda: population control through the elimination of future generations. They push this agenda whatever the circumstances, including international crises.”

“That UNFPA is teaming with the world’s largest abortion provider International Planned Parenthood Federation on this project speaks volumes,” added West. “The goal is not authentic humanitarian aid, but to pump women with harmful drugs and devices to destroy these already suffering families.”
The UNFPA has long touted the “unmet need” for contraceptives around the world.  The group estimates there are “222 million women” who lack access to wanted contraceptives, but those numbers have been called into question by World Bank economists and other experts who say the UN’s definitions of “unmet need” and “demand” are scientifically flawed. 

In 2012, the organization went so far as to call contraceptives a basic human right.  “Family planning is a human right. It must therefore be available to all who want it,” declared the UNFPA annual report. “But clearly this right has not yet been extended to all.”
The report called on nations of the world to fight “cultural barriers” such as religious convictions and legal constraints that cause women to forgo the use of birth control.

Source: LifeSite News

HHS Mandate

 

 

ObamaCare in court: 19 of 26 plaintiffs win a stay against HHS mandate

by Sarah Torre

 

 

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 30, 2013 (Heritage Foundation) - Three family businesses were in court last week asking federal judges for relief from a coercive ObamaCare mandate that forces employers to provide and pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs and contraception—regardless of moral or religious objection.

The Green family, which runs the arts-and-crafts company Hobby Lobby, was represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty at a full-court hearing of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on May 24. The family business, which employs over 22,000 individuals in 41 states, will be forced to provide and pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs or face up to $1.3 million in fines per day.

Hobby Lobby President David Green.

 

“The conflict for me,” explains David Green, founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, “is that our family is being forced to choose between following the laws of the country that we love or maintaining the religious beliefs that have made our business successful and have supported our family and thousands of our employees and their families.”
Hobby Lobby’s arguments at the 10th Circuit came just one day after two other family businesses were represented at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Both companies asked the court to lift the coercive mandate’s burden on their free exercise of religion by awarding a permanent halt to the mandate for each company.

Cyril and Jane Korte’s Illinois company, Korte and Luitjohan Contractors, was represented by the American Center for Law and Justice. Their family business could face federal penalties of more than $730,000 annually for not complying with the mandate.
In exercising its newfound authority over health care through the overreaching arm of ObamaCare, the administration has run roughshod over many employers’ religious liberty, explicitly denying for-profit companies any protection from the ObamaCare mandate.
 
The Kortes were joined in court by the Grote family, which owns the Indiana-based vehicle lighting manufacturer Grote Industries and employs over 1,400 individuals throughout its various locations. The Grotes want to continue offering their employees a generous health care plan without violating their faith. Yet under the mandate, their only options are devastating federal fines for resisting the mandate or dropping health insurance altogether—which would harm their employees.
“Forcing them to surrender their faith in order to earn a living is unprecedented, unnecessary, and unconstitutional. The administration’s attacks on faith and business prove that it doesn’t respect either one,” explains Mike Wilkins, an allied attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the Grote family.

Over the next few weeks, two more family businesses will be in federal courts seeking relief from the mandate. Already, 19 of 26 plaintiffs who have had rulings touching on the merits of their cases have been awarded stays against the coercive rule. In total, more than 190 plaintiffs are involved in over 50 cases.
But even if the mandate is rescinded or thrown out by a court, the government will retain the authority through other parts of ObamaCare to coerce insurance companies and employers and trample on individuals’ constitutional freedoms by imposing additional objectionable mandates.
Employees and individuals should be able to choose health care that best fits the needs of their families and respects their freedom. Employers should be able to build and grow job-creating businesses in accordance with their values without threat of government penalties. The first step on the road to regaining that freedom is rescinding the ObamaCare anti-conscience mandate—and protecting Americans’ liberties more generally will require full repeal of ObamaCare.
This article originally appeared on the Heritage Foundation and is reprinted with permission.

HUMMMM

 

 

 

All signs are that Gosnell will plead guilty June 6 to illegally writing thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances

 

By Dave Andrusko
There were broad hints from Kermit Gosnell’s attorney on the day the abortionist was convicted of three counts of first degree murder that his client would plead guilty to charges that he operated what the grand jury described as a “pill mill.”
A further and unmistakable sign was that yesterday he filed a “change-of-plea notice “with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. That new plea will be formally entered in front of U.S. District Court Judge Cynthia M. Rufe June 6.

“Gosnell and six of his employees are accused of writing thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances with no legitimate medical purpose between June 2008 and February 2010,” The Philadelphia Daily News reported. “According to the indictment, Gosnell made more than $200,000 on the scam.”

NRL News Today has frequently mentioned the irony that Gosnell’s “Baby Charnel House” was discovered only because local and federal authorities raided his house for evidence he was distributing drugs, Oxycontin in particular. But a closer look at the grand jury report indicates that a member of the District Attorney’s office came along because he had heard of a woman dying at Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society. The way the two intersect—the illegal prescriptions and what turned out to be Gosnell’s “House of Horrors”– can be summarized in four bullet points.
(From the section of the report titled, “The Raid.”)

#1. The FBI and local authorities executing search warrants on February 18, 2010, as part of a drug-trafficking investigation (“illegal prescription drug activity”). But prior to the raid, they’d heard of a woman who had died the previous November [Karnamaya Mongar].
#2. During the drug trafficking investigation, they learned that “Gosnell routinely relied on unlicensed and untrained staff to treat patients, conduct medical tests, and administer medications without supervision. Even more alarmingly, Gosnell instructed unlicensed workers to sedate patients with dangerous drugs in his absence.”

#3. District Attorney’s Detective James Wood believed the woman’s death needed further investigation. “The detective searched for a police report on the incident, but finding none, he went to the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office to try to identify the woman and to find out more about her death. Detective Wood learned that the dead woman was Karnamaya Mongar, and that her toxicology report revealed an extremely high level of Demerol, a drug Gosnell used at the clinic to anesthetize patients.”

#4. Putting this all this together—“this suspicious death and the other significant health and medical concerns”—DEA Agent Stephen Dougherty “invited personnel from the Pennsylvania Department of State (which regulates doctors and the practice of medicine) and the Pennsylvania Department of Health (which regulates health care facilities) to accompany law enforcement officers on the February 18 raid. No one from these agencies had visited the clinic in more than 15 years, even after the Department of Health had been informed of Mrs. Mongar’s death months earlier.”


Source:LifeSite News

No Waste of Time Here

 

Did Chinese firefighters waste their time in saving ‘unwanted’ baby in pipe?

• by Gina L. Diorio

A human rights victory emerged this weekend in an unlikely location as firefighters in China rushed to free a newborn baby wedged in a sewer pipe beneath a squat toilet in a residential building. It appears that the infant – just 6 pounds, 2.8 ounces and with his placenta still attached – was dumped down the toilet by his mother.

Yet, while abandoned in that four-inch pipe, that newborn infant did something that is the instinct of every human being: he cried for life. And his cry was heard.

What’s especially notable in this story, though, is not how a mother could so casually discard and attempt to kill her newborn baby; not how that helpless infant used the only resource he had – his breath – to fight for life; not even how strangers have flooded the hospital with gifts and even adoption offers for the baby.

No, what’s notable is that rescuers recognized that this baby’s life was a life worth saving. His mother may have intended to discard and kill him, but those who freed him recognized that the mother’s desire for her child does not determine that child’s value.

Ironically, here in the United States – where our human rights record is supposedly second to none – those who argue for “choice” posit every day that wantedness determines value. Few would openly admit it, of course, but the degree to which our culture lacks outrage at open arguments that even born-alive infants may be killed at the pleasure of their mothers is the degree to which we have accepted the belief that wantedness determines value – specifically, that our desires determine someone else’s value.
Tragically, such egocentricity unavoidably begets loathing for anything that does not serve our self-interests. Indeed, lobbyists for post-birth abortions no longer even pretend to base their arguments on science.

But there is that nagging issue of a newborn baby crying for life in a four-inch sewage drain in China. If wantedness determines value, then firefighters wasted their time. But if value stems from elsewhere, then attempts to tether it to self-centered desires are not simply fruitless; they are fatal.

Source: LiveAction News

Are We Really Civilized When We Allow This

Horrors at Texas abortion clinic: slashed necks, babies pulled apart piece by piece, assistant drenched in blood

• by Kristi Burton Brown

If Americans found the Gosnell trial to be disturbing, there can be no words to describe Douglas Karpen’s abortion clinic in Houston, Texas. Operation Rescue has been on the scene for years, working to stop Karpen. Thanks to Operation Rescue’s Abortion Whistleblowers Program, four women who previously worked for Karpen at the Aaron Women’s Clinic have come forward to describe their horrific experiences.
Like many abortionists, Karpen has had a string of problems at his clinics. A young teenager died from a botched performed on her by Karpen. He has been called before the Texas Medical Board to answer allegations. In one of the most horrifying accusations, “waste” from Karpen’s clinic began leaking into a neighboring parking lot:

[O]n February 6, 2005…a sewer broke at Karpen’s Texas Ambulatory Surgical Center, located at 2421 N. Shepherd in Houston, causing sewage to spill into the parking lot of a neighboring car dealership. Maribeth Smith, an employee of the car dealership said she is convinced she saw human body parts mixed in with the sewage. She took photographs, believing the human tissue came from the clinic.
‘Whether it’s legal or not, it’s not right,’ Smith said. ‘This whole area is nothing but raw sewage and bloody pieces. There were little legs coming out from one side.’

Three of the four whistleblowers from Karpen’s clinic – Deborah Edge, Gigi Aguliar, and Krystal Rodriguez – allowed Life Dynamics to film them telling about their unimaginable experiences while working for Karpen. The video, below, is a must-see for any American. If Americans are willing to support abortion, they must ask themselves if they are truly willing to accept the inhuman horrors that come along with it.

Operation Rescue reports that the women from Karpen’s clinic brought evidence with them when they left. They took photos on their cell phones of illegally murdered babies.

In both cases, the babies’ skin is pink, noting a lack of masceration, an early form of decomposition that happens in babies that die in the womb. Massive bruising on the extremities of one of the babies indicates the baby’s heart was pulsing with life when the trauma was inflicted likely when grasping instruments latched on to bring the baby down into the birth canal. The eyes of the other child are open in a nightmarish expression of pain, revealing development greater than 26-28 weeks. Both sets of photos were taken sometime in 2011.

Deborah Edge, who worked as a surgical assistant, explicitly described how – and how often – Karpen would kill newborn babies:

When he did an abortion, especially an over 20 week abortion, most of the time the fetus would come completely out before he cut the spinal cord or he introduced one of the instruments into the soft spot of the fetus, in order to kill the fetus. …
I think every morning I saw several, on several occasions. … If we had 20-something patients, of course ten, or twelve, or fifteen patients would be large procedures, and out of those large procedures, I’m pretty sure that I was seeing at least three or four fetuses that were completely delivered in some way or another.

Edge continued to reveal even more mind-blowing information about Karpen’s actions:

She described how some babies would emerge too soon and would be alive, moving, and breathing. She also told of how Karpen would sometimes deliver the babies feet first with the toes wiggling until he stabbed them with a surgical implement. At the moment the toes would suddenly splay out before going limp. Sometimes he would kill the babies by ‘twisting the head off the neck,’ according to Edge.
But not all the babies came out intact. When there was difficulty, Karpen would dismember them, a process that was, according to the surgical assistant Deborah Edge, a bloody mess.
‘Sometimes he couldn’t get the fetus out,’ she explained. ‘He would yank pieces – piece by piece – when they were oversize. And I’m talking about the whole floor dirty. I’m talking about me drenched in blood.’

The U.K.’s Daily Mail describes the women’s tragic account of one baby who attempted to hold on for dear life at Karpen’s clinic, and failed.

The women described one occasion where a fetus that Karpen thought was dead suddenly ‘opened its eyes and grabbed (the doctor’s) finger’ after he wrenched it from the womb. However, it met a similar fate to the other fetuses at the clinic, the women said.

Breitbart also reported on the video expose of Karpen’s clinic which demonstrated that Karpen purposely risked the lives of women who came to him for abortions.

Rodriguez also accused the abortionist of showing disregard for the safety of his patients. She indicated that he would sometimes insert the instruments through the woman’s stomach if it was the easiest way to kill the baby.
Edge also claimed that she routinely observed Karpen ‘hurting patients on the table’ and not telling victims of botched abortions that he had lacerated their cervix or uterus.
A third former employee, Gigi Aguilar, alleged, ‘If he had a patient that asked a lot of questions, he would prefer for them to be put to sleep.’
‘The women who go there had no idea what they were getting themselves into,’ Edge said.

The numbingly ugly truth about Douglas Karpen’s clinic demonstrates that, despite claims from Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and other abortion supporters, Kermit Gosnell was not alone. He was not an aberration. When women, doctors, and clinic workers are sucked into the lie that abortion is just a matter of simple “choice,” they are all too often blinded to the fact that it never ends there. Gosnell, Karpen, Nicola Riley, LeRoy Carhart – and others – demonstrate that abortion is nothing but the horrific taking of innocent children’s lives. Such a “choice” should never be allowed in a civilized society.
Two weeks ago, after intense pressure from pro-life activists and a demand from Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office announced that it would look into the former workers’ claims against Karpen. The Texas Department of State Health Services also claims to be investigating the facts.

Pro-lifers ought to keep the pressure on and ensure that a full investigation is truly performed so that Karpen can be brought to justice. You can contact the following Texas government officials to ask that the investigation continue in an appropriate and thorough way. You can also get updated about Karpen and participate in action items by visiting the Texas Gosnell website.
Mike Anderson, District Attorney Harris County, Texas

1201 Franklin Street, Suite 600, Houston, Texas 77002-1923
Voice: (713)-755-5800
E-Mail: Armand_Stephanie@dao.hctx.net
Greg Abbott, Attorney General of Texas

Office of the Attorney General
PO Box 12548
Austin, TX 78711-2548
Voice: (512) 463-2050
E-Mail: robert.allen@texasattorneygeneral.gov
Texas Medical Board
333 Guadalupe
Tower 3, Suite 610
Austin, TX 78701
Voice: (512) 305-7010
E-Mail: verifcic@tmb.state.tx.us

Source: LiveAction News