End of Life

 

Advance Planning for Treatment Denial “Conversations” Spread — But What is Driving the Conversation?

By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics

From her cubicle at Vital Decisions in Cherry Hill, N.J., Kate Schleicher counsels people with terminal illnesses. (Photo by Emma Lee/WHYY)

Those seeking to fund advance planning “conversations” — efforts to encourage doctors or others to talk with potential patients about whether they should receive life-saving medical treatment if incapacitated– are progressing on many fronts. Not only are there several bills pending before Congress, but some insurers have gone ahead and started paying health care providers to have these conversations with patients– even using “cold calls” to question them about whether they really want life-saving treatment, food, and fluids. Additionally, the federal government’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is expected to decide on an American Medical Association (AMA) proposal to give these conversations a medical billing number which would mean that doctors across the country could begin receiving tax dollars to pay for them.
During the debate over Obamacare’s enactment, there was considerable controversy over a provision in an early version under which health care providers would have been paid by Medicare to discuss with their patients whether they would want life-saving medical treatment.
After former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin dubbed the planning sessions “death panels,” the provision was dropped from the law ultimately enacted. Now, however, widespread efforts are underway to resurrect the measure.
Even those who promote advance planning consultations, like Harold Pollack, recognize (as noted in his Politico piece “Let’s Talk About Death Panels”),
The ‘death panel’ charge stuck because it tapped into the primeval fears of millions of Americans. It’s only human to worry that we might someday be abandoned when we are old and sick, and thus judged to be a social burden. Such worries run especially deep among senior citizens, who had the most reason to feel vulnerable, and who perceived that they had the least to gain from the ACA.
In the time since the “advance care planning” provisions were struck from the Obama Health Care law, there have been several attempts to revive the concept through various stand-alone bills in the House and Senate. Now, the AMA is working directly with the Obama Administration to implement reimbursement by administrative action, bypassing Congress. In addition, rather than wait for Congressional or administrative action, private health insurers have gone ahead and started paying providers to have these conversations.
An August 30, 2014 New York Times piece, “Coverage for End-of-Life Talks Gaining Ground” by Pam Belluckaug, details this reimbursement trend. We read
“We are seeing more insurers who are reimbursing for these important conversations,” said Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade association. The industry, which usually uses Medicare billing codes, had created its own code under a system that allows that if Medicare does not have one, and more insurance companies are using it or covering the discussions in other ways.
This year, for example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan began paying an average of $35 per conversation, face to face or by phone, conducted by doctors, nurses, social workers and others. And Cambia Health Solutions, which covers 2.2 million patients in Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington, started a program including end-of-life conversations and training in conducting them.
Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield of New York does something similar, and its medical director, Dr. Patricia Bomba, has spearheaded the development of New York’s advance directive system. Doctors can be reimbursed $150 for an hourlong conversation to complete the form, and $350 for two hours.
Detailing another trend, Kaiser Health News published a story on August 27, 2014 by Elana Gordon titled, “Operator? Business, Insurer Take On End-of-Life Issues By Phone”. In the piece, Gordon details how insurers are cold-calling lists of people the insurance company provides.
From her cubicle at Vital Decisions in Cherry Hill, N.J., Kate Schleicher counsels people with terminal illnesses. “My name is Kate. I’m a health care counselor,” the gentle voice says from her cubicle in Cherry Hill, N.J..
This is no telemarketing call … it’s about the end of your life. Kate Schleicher, 27, is a licensed clinical social worker, who knows almost as little about you as you do about her. Except she knows your phone number, your insurance provider and that you are pretty sick.
Schleicher is one of 50 social workers at a company called Vital Decisions. After sending a letter (people rarely respond) counselors essentially cold-call to offer what they describe as “nondirected” end-of-life counseling.
While the stated goal of these conversations is to elicit patients’ views on treatment, another more sinister motivation often emerges. As Kaiser reported,
And when these conversations do happen, there can be another byproduct: reduced costs. Research is finding that when patients fully understand aggressive care, many choose less of it. By Daitz’ [Vital Decisions CEO Mitchell Daitz] own rough estimate, the company’s services have resulted in about $10,000 less in health care spending per patient, “$100 million to the health care system in 2014.”
Gordon goes on to report that

[S]ome people are wary of the company’s approach. Dr. Lauris Kaldjian, professor of bioethics at the University of Iowa, has concerns about the social worker, patient and family never actually meeting. “Because if you don’t have enough knowledge about what’s actually going on with the patient, it would actually be irresponsible to pretend to have discussion that depends upon such knowledge.”

End-of-life decisions are hard to keep totally neutral, he says, so that’s why he’d want full transparency from insurers and the company to guard against bias in the sessions.
But in a move that would be far more significant, Medicare may begin covering end-of-life discussions next year if CMS approves a request from the AMA. One of the AMA’s roles is to create billing codes that all of the different providers can use to have a uniform system to be paid. Up until now, there has been no Medicare code to submit for payment regarding an advance planning consultation. A decision is expected this fall.
Such federally funded “advance care planning” conversations pose a very real danger, because they are likely to be used to nudge people to reject life-saving medical treatment they might otherwise want.
Advocates of using tax dollars to pay for “advance care planning” often claim it is intended to promote neutral, fully informed planning by which patients can be assisted to implement their own values through legally valid advance directives. Unfortunately, however, there is abundant evidence that a combination of cost pressures and the ideological commitment of a significant number of health care providers to limitation of life-saving treatment for those deemed to have a “poor quality of life” would in practice lead to many federally funded advance care planning sessions being used to exercise subtle – or not-so-subtle – pressure to agree to reject life-preserving treatment.
While the advance care planning provision in the early version of what became Obamacare was being debated in Summer 2009, author and blogger Lee Siegel, in general a strong advocate of President Obama’s approach to health care restructuring, wrote:

[O]n one point the plan’s critics are absolutely correct. One of the key ideas under end of-life care is morally revolting.

. . . .

The section, on page 425 of the [original House] bill, offers to pay once every five years for a voluntary, not mandatory, consultation with a doctor, who will not blatantly tell the patient how to end his or her life sooner, but will explain to the patient the set of options available at the end of life, including living wills, palliative care and hospice, life sustaining treatment, and all aspects of advance care planning, including, presumably, the decision to end one’s life.

The shading in of human particulars is what makes this so unsettling. A doctor guided by a panel of experts who have decided that some treatments are futile will, in subtle ways, advance that point of view. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar, calls this “nudging,” which he characterizes as using various types of reinforcement techniques to “nudge” people’s behavior in one direction or another. An elderly or sick person would be especially vulnerable to the sophisticated nudging of an authority figure like a doctor. Bad enough for such people who are lucky enough to be supported by family and friends. But what about the dying person who is all alone in the world and who has only the “consultant” to turn to and rely on? The heartlessness of such a scene is chilling.

It has become common now to talk about treatment as being costly and burdensome, depending on one’s ‘quality of life.” Pollack himself illustrates this, writing,

“Under the current system, physicians can bill Medicare for aggressive imaging, procedures and chemotherapies treatments that may bring little patient benefit in advanced illness. Doctors and hospitals are far more handsomely rewarded for the placement of a feeding tube or a ventilator than they are for meeting with patients and families to determine whether these therapies are helpful or wise.”

In a taxpayer-funded advance care planning session, a patient with cancer might well be told chemotherapy provides little benefit because it will leave him or her with a disability and only “prolong life,” without a cure. The extra period of life might be exactly what a person would want, but because the treatment was presented in such a negative way the patient might well be lead to agree to reject treatment.

Importantly, there is no apparent realistic way to adequately monitor the interactions in such tax-funded sessions so as to ensure that the presentation of options is done in a neutral way, rather than one biased toward rejection of treatment.
A precedent on the federal level is a Veterans Affairs patient decision-making aid that was the subject of considerable discussion during the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a 53-page production entitled “Your Life, Your Choices.” The booklet had worksheets to fill out for “Current Health,” “Permanent Coma,” “Severe Dementia,” “Severe Stroke” and “A future situation of concern when I might not be able to express my wishes.”
For each of these there was a section on “quality of life.” Only for current health was there a choice to affirm that life is worth living without reservation. For all of the others, the choices were “Life like this would be difficult, but acceptable,” “Life like this would be worth living, but just barely,” and “Life like this would not” – the “not” is underlined – “be worth living.” In each circumstance except current health a negative picture was given. For example, “Terminal Illness” was described as a state in which you “have a lot of discomfort that requires medication [,] are in bed most of the time due to weakness [, and] need help with getting dressed, bathing, and bowel and bladder functions.” You can read more about this here.

Of course, what people experience when terminally ill varies widely depending on the particular illness and many other factors, but this booklet seemed designed to lead people to believe that life with terminal illness will be almost unremittingly bleak. In the words of Paul Malley, President of the national non-profit organization Aging with Dignity, “’Your Life, Your Choices’ encourages our nation’s service men and women to look at illness and disability as things that render life not worth living.”

When “advance planning” is so heavily promoted by advocates of cost-cutting and the “quality of life” ethic, we need to consider it with a critical eye – one that asks “who is driving these conversations, and what will they say to people in a vulnerable position?”

Note: The National Right to Life Committee supports the use of advance directives by which individuals may indicate their wishes regarding medical treatment should they become incapable of making health care decisions; indeed, we promote our own alternative, the “Will to Live,” and make available separate forms complying with the laws of each of the states.

Our concern is that in practice federally funded “advance care planning sessions” are likely to pressure patients into rejecting treatment essential to preserving their lives in a manner they would be unlikely to agree to under conditions of truly informed consent.

Source: NRLC News

Abortion Clinic Regulations

 

Protect the Moms, Protect the Babies

By Carol Tobias, NRLC President
Last Thursday evening, NRLC’s communications department received an email, asking if I would be available as a guest on the ABC Sunday morning show, “This Week,” to discuss the Texas abortion law passed by a special session of the legislature last year. We said yes, and found out Friday night that I had been confirmed.

I arrived Sunday morning at the ABC News studio in Washington, DC, and met some very nice members of the show’s production staff. I had a few minutes of conversation with a very pleasant Martha Raddatz, guest host of the show that morning. I also met my “opponent” for the show’s segment, David Brown, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The segment focused on U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel’s decision, handed down last Friday, to strike down portions of the 2013 omnibus Texas law, specifically the part that would require abortion facilities to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers. (See “Texas’ pro-life A.G. files emergency motion to the U.S. Court of Appeals following judge’s decision”) The abortion industry and its allies are protesting the law, saying that it creates an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions.

The fact is that the “burden” is on the abortion facilities who don’t want to spend money to upgrade their facilities to meet minimum health and safety standards.
For those facilities unwilling to meet the minimum safety threshold, the law would have the effect of shutting them down. In so doing it would protect the health and safety of women and save the lives of babies.

I was asked by Raddatz if the law was an attempt to protect the safety of women or to restrict access to abortion. The answer is obvious: it was both. I said

“We want to protect unborn children from death. But we also want to protect the women who are going to be harmed by abortion. It might not be an immediate physical reaction. There are long-term physical consequences. There are long-term mental and emotional consequences to abortion. This is about protecting women and children.”

The pro-abortion delirium that erupted after the show was probably predictable, and quite hilarious. One headline read, “Anti-abortion leader admits clinic restrictions are not about safety.”
Anyone who listened to what I said would know that I “admitted” nothing of the kind. But pro-abortionists seemed to think this is a great “gotcha” moment –or pretended to. What it showed was either their total insincerity or a total misunderstanding of what the Pro-Life Movement has been about for well over 40 years.

The pro-life movement does not want women to suffer from their abortions—physically, mentally, emotionally, or in any other way. Of course we don’t want women going into unsanitary and unsafe conditions. But we also don’t want them to kill their babies– period.
If a law that requires abortion providers to upgrade their standards to those that other ambulatory surgical centers have to meet means that there are fewer abortion clinics and, as a result, babies are saved, no one should be surprised that pro-lifers recognize, promote, and applaud those efforts.

Source: NRLC News

Unborn Babies

 

The “coolest” baby yet—and not even born!

By Dave Andrusko
I first saw this on Labor Day, although the ultrasound was actually posted August 28. For those of us of a certain age (old), the instant reaction was “The Fonz.” He was the iconic character played by Henry Winkler on the comedy “Happy Days” whose signature gesture was the thumbs up.

Like so much on the Internet, you never know what will go viral. The massive attention came when the ultrasound was posted on Reddit by the brother of the baby’s father, who had originally posted the baby’s ultrasound on his Facebook page.

Brandon Hopkins, the baby’s father, told HLN that the ultrasound photo was taken early last week. After his brother posted on Reddit, “My brother called me and said ‘Your babies are famous!’” Hopkins said.

And get this–his wife is actually pregnant with twins! (The babies are due next January.) The couple lives in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
As someone commented, if the baby is imitating Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, the epitome of cool (at least between 1974 and 1984), the baby can only be the coolest baby yet—and he/she is not even born!
We often discuss the impact of ultrasounds on women facing crisis pregnancies. What, I wonder, would be the response if a mom saw this?

Source: NRLC News

Planned Parenthood and Teens

Planned Parenthood Sex Ed Website Now Takes Teens to Porn Site

by Steven Ertelt 

The main web site behind Planned Parenthood’s attempt to lure students with a sex educational campaign that leads to abortion now points those teenagers to a web site promoting pornography.
The pro-life group Iowa Right to Life discovered the change and how the Planned Parenthood Teenwire web site — which is linked to by thousands of web sites across the country and whose URL is printed on sex ed literature distributed in schools nationwide — now points to a pron site.

“Over the holiday weekend, we became aware of a new danger for Iowa children and teenagers,” Iowa Right to Life told LifeNews. “Planned Parenthood’s former URL, teenwire (dot) com, is now occupied by a pornographer advertising teen escorts, online sex and other bad content.”

In fact the former Planned Parenthood sex education web site now depicts scantily-clad women and it links to web sites such as “100 Free Sex Dating Sites,” “Adult Asian Dating,” and “Live Sex Cams.”
That concerns Iowa Right to Life officials, who say school students throghout the state are being expoesed to Teenwire by virtue of official sex education materials that still bear the web site’s URL. The pro-life group has contacted school administrators and is now trying to get parents and pro-life advocates to speak up.

“School districts throughout Iowa and beyond that are using any sex ed materials with content from Planned Parenthood or the Guttmacher Institute may still be sending kids to this website,” it said. “Earlier today, we sent a message to every school district regarding this urgent matter.”

“Now we desperately need your help,” the group adds. “Whether you have children or grandchildren in an Iowa school or you’re a concerned citizen, please contact your local school administrators today.  Tell them it is imperative that they get these materials out of the hands of our students! Our children simply cannot be lured into dangerous situations that they will surely encounter by visiting this website.”

Source: LifeSite News

Euthanasia

 

Memorial to the T4 euthanasia program victims opens today in Berlin

By Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director – Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
A memorial to the victims of the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program will open today in Berlin near the central Tiergarten park.
The Times of Israel reported that a memorial to the approximate 300,000 physically and mentally disabled people who were murdered by the German regime between 1939-45 was approved by the Parliament in November 2011. “The Berlin government selected a design featuring a 24-meter-long (79-foot-long) transparent blue-tinted glass wall on a dark base.”
The article stated that:

“The murder of tens of thousands of patients and residents of care homes was the first systematic mass crime of the National Socialist regime,” said Uwe Neumaerker, director of the memorial foundation.

“It is considered a forerunner of the extermination of European Jews.”

The Times of Israel told the story of Benjamin Traub who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 16 and died in the gas chamber at the Hadamar Psychiatric hospital at 27.

In 1941, he was taken to a clinic nearby in the town of Hadamar which had been transformed into a factory of death. There, immediately after his arrival, Traub was sent to a gas chamber and murdered with carbon monoxide.

His parents received word from the clinic that their son ‘died suddenly and unexpectedly of flu with subsequent meningitis.’

Because he suffered from a “serious, incurable mental illness,” the letter continued, the family should see his death as “a relief.”

The article describes the T4 euthanasia program:

In an elegant villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4, more than 60 Nazi bureaucrats and like-minded doctors worked in secret under the “T4″ program to organize the mass murder of sanatorium and psychiatric hospital patients deemed unworthy to live.

Between January 1940 and August 1941 doctors systematically gassed more than 70,000 people — the physically and mentally handicapped, those with learning disabilities, and people branded social ‘misfits’ — at six sites across the German empire.

Protests by members of the public and leaders of the Catholic Church ended the T4 program but the killing went on [under wraps].

From August 1941 until the war’s end in 1945, tens of thousands more died through forced starvation, neglect or fatal doses of painkillers such as morphine administered by purported caregivers.

The memorial will be opened by government leaders and Helmut Traub, Benjamin’s nephew.
As the Times of Israel noted, “The T4 program was only one part of an orchestrated campaign to eliminate the ‘unfit’ and the memorial is intended to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of victims…”
The Times of Israel article added:

Few of the killers were brought to justice after the war, despite high-profile trials like those of doctors at Nuremberg 1946-47, and many of the implicated medical professionals simply continued with their careers.

Meanwhile both West Germany and the communist East did little to recognize or compensate survivors.

Smaller plaques and markers have been installed at relevant sites across Germany in recent years but the T4 site is the first national memorial to honor these victims.

The story ends by quoting from Berlin’s daily Der Tagesspiegel which “noted that unlike other groups, the ‘euthanasia’ victims lacked a ‘strong lobby.’
“Many were forgotten for decades and still are, even by their own families.”

Source: NRLC News

Obama

 

Politico: Obama to Limit Campaigning to ‘States Where He’s Still Popular’; Make That ‘Less Unpopular’

By Tom Blumer

Pro-abortion President Barack Obama

A Friday afternoon dispatch at the Politico from Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein tells us that “The White House is putting the finishing touches on a post-Labor Day schedule that will send the president to states where he’s still popular.”

The list of states where the Politico pair alleges that’s the case is quite short: “Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.” That’s it.

Obama, in a situation resembling that of Richard Nixon in the final months of his presidency, when “Tricky Dick” was mocked for being able to find friendly audiences in just a few Southern states, is apparently toxic everywhere else, just in time for midterm elections. Moreover, it didn’t take much research to show that the Politico’s pair’s claim Obama is “still popular” in most of those five states is either false or shaky — especially after considering that such polls are all too often overloaded with Democrat and liberal respondents.
Take Pennsylvania. On June 5, Politics PA reported the following (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Quinnipiac’s most recent poll finds that just 44% of Pennsylvanians approve of the way President Obama is handling his job while 53% disapprove.
Though slightly higher than February approval rating of 42% released by Quinnipiac, Obama’s approval rating seems to be stagnating at low levels.
Even if Obama has gotten back to above the break-even level in the Keystone State, which is highly unlikely, the statement that he is “still popular” there would be false, because he clearly wasn’t popular during the year’s first five months.

On to Wisconsin. As of six weeks ago, via the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama’s approval rating is almost unchanged in Wisconsin, with 46 percent of registered voters saying they approve of the job he’s doing.
A Marquette University law school poll released Wednesday says 47 percent disapprove of his performance, and 4 percent don’t know.

Illinois? Here’s what Lynn Sweet at the Chicago Sun-Times wrote in late April:

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll put President Barack Obama’s approval ratings at a new low — with voters preferring Republicans controlling Congress for the last two years of his second term.
 The poll helps explains why, in the two big Chicago area House contests it would not be surprising to find Democratic Reps. Bill Foster and Brad Schneider distancing themselves from the White House — they certainly did during the sequestration — as their Republican challengers, state Sen. Darlene Senger and former Rep. Bob Dold make the case for checks and balances in Congress.

Illinois is really two states. One is Chicago and some of its inner-ring suburbs. The other is “everywhere else.” Obama is overwhelmingly popular in Chicago, and mostly toxic, as Sweet exemplified, “everywhere else.”
Now to California, where the President should still be a runaway fave. Well, he’s got the upper hand, but by nowhere near as much as one might think — via the AP in June:
President Obama Still Enjoying Higher Approval Ratings In California Than Most Other States
A new Field Poll finds that half of all Californians approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing, a sharp contrast with his lower approval ratings in the rest of the country.
… Field says public opinion of Obama has remained steady in California over the last year. Half of those polled said they approve, 39 percent disapprove and 11 percent had no opinion.
So just half approve of Obama in a state he carried by 23 points in 2012. [Editor's note:  For more on California, see "The Obama Administration bordering on meltdown?"]
Finally, let’s go to Michigan. I could not find anything recent, but this item from December paints the landscape:

PPP Poll: Obama Hurting Democrats in Michigan Races
The Republican candidates for governor and senator in Michigan have made strong gains in a new poll as Democrats continue to feel the backlash over the botched rollout of President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform law.

… “Democrats who looked a few months ago to be favorites for governor and Senate in Michigan are now on the ropes, casualties of the dip in favor of the Democrats around the country over the Affordable Care Act,” says the poll.

PPP is considered a left-leaning polling firm. Anyone who believes that Obamacare has faded as a relevant issue just because the press isn’t talking about it, or that Obama’s standing in the Wolverine State has somehow improved, is sadly mistaken.
Politico’s breezy assumption that Obama is presumptively popular in four of the five states they identified doesn’t hold up. Imagine how bad things would look in these polls if some of them didn’t have skewed samples.

Notably absent from the list: Oregon, where Obama would until recently have been a shoo-in to help the Democrats’ cause, and where there is a competitive U.S. Senate race. But apparently the Beaver State is not on Obama’s campaign agenda. I wonder why?

Editor’s note. This appeared at newsbusters.org.

Source: NRLC News

Birth and Babies

 

“Stunning photos” of newborns show unmistakable continuity of human life

By Dave Andrusko
How many million times have pro-lifers made the simple—and absolute correct—assertion that birth is just a change in location? That while the law may allow for the absurd conclusion that a child in utero is something/someone different than the baby who makes her appearance when she is delivered, commonsense and experience say otherwise.

When making the transition from in utero to ex utero, the baby is not even changing zip codes.
There is a blog called babycenter.com which recently ran a delightful piece under the headline “Stunning photos show how a baby fits in your womb.” Sara McGinnis starts with this question:

“Have you ever wondered how your baby managed to fit inside your body? Sure, there are some amazing illustrations out there depicting how things generally fit — but what about your son or daughter in your womb?

In the next sentence McGinnis clues us into something absolutely fascinating:

“I recently came across the work of Marry Fermont, a photographer who lives in the Netherlands, and was amazed to see this photo of a “little guy [who] just laid still in the hands of the midwife. Just like inside the womb.”

As you can see from the photo, this is an ex utero pose of the curling position the child had adopted while in his or her mother’s womb. In other words, this is how a baby in the very latter stages of gestation can ‘fit’ inside—by scrunching up.

Fermont assures McGinnis, “The babies are mostly totally relaxed in this pose. They feel secure and comfortable. They are used to being folded up this way.” Fermont says she was “the first birth photographer in the Netherlands to start taking these types of pictures.”

Most often it is the midwife who holds the baby for the photo, but sometimes it’s the dad who likes to show the newborn in this position. But as fascinated as he might be (and it is remarkable), obviously it is far more revealing for the mother who carried the baby for nine months. Fermont says

“Most of the parents cannot believe that their baby was inside of the belly when it’s born. It’s hard to imagine how your baby was curled up inside of you after it came out. You see it coming out, but you still cannot believe it was ever inside of you as soon as you have him or her in your arms. This disbelief has been voiced many times, and that’s why midwives started showing this pose — because of the curiosity of the parents.”

Disbelief? That is not an exaggeration. I remember when my wife delivered our first child. All that humanity in such a small space….
But there is a different kind of disbelief, the kind that disbelieves in the continuity of human development. That can convince itself that suddenly when the child takes the first breath outside the womb, he or she is magically transformed into something new. In fact, all they have done is change addresses.

What a wonderful account. You can read it in full—and see another pose—here.
Tip of the hat to lifenews.com.

Source: NRLC News

Courage

Pro-Abortion Democrats Scream at 11-Year-Old Pro-Life Girl at Convention

by Bryan Kemper 

I want you to meet my friend and fellow abortion abolitionist, 11-year-old Zoe Griffin. In a world when grown adults ignore, deny or just don’t care about the abortion holocaust that has claimed over 55 Million of Zoe’s generation, she is willing to take a stand no matter what people think. Zoe joined her mother and friends to lay thousands of roses outside the site of the democratic convention and pray for the babies, the politicians and this generation.

While Zoe was praying, pro-abortion activists who claim to stand up for women began to belittle and scream at Zoe for her stand for life. What is so sad is that one of the women who did this to Zoe, Sunsara Taylor, is a well know anti-porn activist who claims to be against the degradation of women. I guess just not 11-year-olds who believe that women should not be dehumanized by the abortion industry. Sunsara Taylor’s Blog http://sunsara.blogspot.com

I could write a lot about this and how much I am sickened by what happened, but I wanted to let Zoe tell you in her own words how what happened and why she will never quit being a Stand True Activist. Praise God for young women like Zoe, she is why this is the generation who will abolish abortion.

Here is Zoe’s account:
“Hi, I’m Zoe. Something happened Friday night that a friend wanted me to blog about. I don’t have Facebook or Twitter or anything like that so I’m borrowing my mom’s page for now.
“What happened was a pro-life rally. We had showed up when only 4 people were there. I guess we were supposed to get there early. As more and more people came, a car arrived. A woman came out and opened the trunk. There were 3,300 carnations in the back of that car. We started to unload and unwrap the flowers. Lily, Bella, and I started to write pro-life statements with chalk on the sidewalks when some pro-abortionists came.

They were holding signs and chanting: “A baby’s not a baby till it comes out, that’s what birthdays are all about!” They were blowing whistles and jumping around acting like 5-year-old children. I was so sad that these people were so blinded I started crying. Then we started laying down the flowers all across the sidewalk. When we finished, the line of carnations was probably a mile long. A pro-life woman let me hold a crucifix that she had. I started clutching it close to my heart. My knees were shaking, so were my hands.

“The pro-abortionists turned to us and started pointing at different people, saying, “You’re a person! You’re a person! Fetuses are not!” Then the woman saw me crying and said,” You are making this girl cry with your bull____”. I couldn’t stand any more of those lies. They pushed it too far. In the highest-pitched voice I have ever spoken in, I screamed, “THEY ARE NOT THE ONES MAKING ME CRY! YOU ARE! WITH YOUR DARK HEARTS, YOUR DARK MINDS TURNED AGAINST GOD!” My mom ran over to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and calmed me down. Then she went up to them and said, “HOW DARE YOU ATTACK A CHILD LIKE THAT!” While she was yelling, pro-lifers came over to me to calm me down. My whole body was shaking. Our friend, Mrs. McKinney, took me, Jack, and Bella to a CVS that was nearby. We got water and chips and went back. I sat down on a bench when a man from the Charlotte Observer came over to me and started interviewing me. Once he was done, a man came over and gave us ice cream. While I was eating, the pro-abortionists left. Then we started to clean up.

“On the way home I felt sorry that I yelled at those people. I told my mom, and she said, “Do you know why you feel that way? It’s because you have a heart. You have a conscience, and you know what’s right and what’s wrong. Those people attacked you like that because they don’t have a heart.”
I will never, ever forget what happened last night. I had a dream that night that they all converted to pro-life activists. I hope that dream becomes a reality.”

LifeNews.com Note: Bryan Kemper is the youth director for Priests for Life. He is the author of Social Justice Begins In The Womb. Photo by Anthony Perlas, seroptics.com, for the Catholic News Herald.

Source: NRLC News

Webcam Abortion

 

 

 

Webcam abortions, Do-It-Yourself Abortions, and the “Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion”

By Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D., NRL Director of Education & Research

Rebecca Gomperts

So how are a boat anchored in international waters off Dublin, Ireland, border town flea markets in Texas, a businessman in India, and a storefront in rural Iowa all related? According to an article written by Emily Bazelon appearing in last Thursday’s New York Times (8/28/14), they’re all key pieces of the abortion industry’s transition from relying almost exclusively on standard brick and mortar clinics that performed surgical abortions to a new model where chemical abortifacients can be ordered over the internet or purchased over the counter and performed at home by women on themselves—hence the acronym D-I-Y (Do-It-Yourself) abortions.

Bazelon’s article, “The Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion,” begins largely as a profile piece on Rebecca Gomperts. As we will explained later in this story, while Gomperts herself is not currently working in countries where abortion is legal, abortion activists in the United States are watching her “radical idea of providing abortions without direct contact with a doctor” with great interest. (NRL News Today last wrote about Gomperts, a Dutch general-practice physician, at “’Women on Waves’ bringing abortions performed off shore to Morocco.”)

Gomperts is the former Greenpeace activist who launched the “Abortion Ship” from the Netherlands in June of 2001, heading for the coast of Ireland on a ship stocked with abortion pills—mifepristone (RU-486) and the prostaglandin misoprostol. She called her effort “Women on Waves.”
The plan was to anchor just outside Ireland’s coastal boundary and have women ferried out to the ship to take the pills and start their abortions. However disputes over licensing and strategy kept the group from performing any abortions there.
Undeterred Gomperts tried again in Ireland the following year, then tried Poland and later, Portugal. Met with great fanfare every time, but also resistance (according to Bazelon, warships, in one case), it is unclear whether Gomperts or her crew ever performed a single abortion or even gave out any abortifacients pills.
Gomperts was the beneficiary of enormous publicity, nonetheless, and made use of it. Gomperts began appearing on TV promoting chemical abortions and telling women there were other pills already on the market (misoprostol, which is legitimately used to deal with ulcers) that women could use. Bazelon says Gomperts began receiving emails from women from all over the world. At that point, Gomperts revised her strategy.

Women on Waves, Gompert’s group, set up hotlines in several countries where abortion was not legal – Chile, Argentina, Peru, Pakistan, Venezuela, Morocco – telling women how they could get misoprostol and use it to self-abort. Misoprostol is a widely available prostaglandin that is used to help prevent stomach ulcers in patients taking lots of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. It also has, used in a particular fashion, the property of inducing powerful uterine contractions that can kill and expel the unborn child. Misoprostol is used in conjunction with RU-486 to complete those abortions, but can and has been used as a stand alone abortifacient.

Seeing an opportunity, Gomperts shifted her attention to the development of the website, womenonweb.org, where women from all over the world could click a few buttons, say “I need an abortion,” and have pills shipped from a manufacturer in India, Kale Impex, to have them delivered to their door in a matter of weeks. Indian pharmaceutical firms manufacture generic versions of many popular drugs, and several advertise and sell mifepristone (RU-486) and misoprostol on-line.
This is not the only effort to push for DIY abortions. Another Indian firm, Sun Pharmaceuticals has teamed with international abortion promoters like IPAS, PATH, and the Concept Foundation to push “Medabon,” a prepackaged blister pack of RU-486 and misoprostol pills, complete with cartoon illustrations of administration and complications for those who might be illiterate.

As noted Gomperts doesn’t work in the U.S. or in countries where abortion is legal. But the move to reduce direct medical involvement in abortion have already been seen here. Here is a key paragraph from Bazelon’s 7,000+word long profile:
Gomperts designed her program — based on the radical idea of providing abortions without direct contact with a doctor — for women in countries where abortion clinics are nonexistent or highly restricted. But her model is invigorating abortion rights activists in the United States, where the procedure is simultaneously legal and increasingly hard to access. In their eyes, medical abortion, delivered through a known, if faraway, source, could be a transformative response: a means of access that remains open even when clinics shut.
Note the “progression”: From a multi-step, highly supervised regimen that was recommended by the FDA when it approved use of the chemical abortifacients RU-486/prostaglandin combination in September of 2000; to fewer trips to the abortionist’s office (not coming back to take the prostaglandin in his office); to so-called “webcam abortions” where the abortionist never even sees the woman in person; to advertising how a woman can avoid a physician’s involvement all together—Womenonweb.org.
(For more background on webcam abortions, see here.)
The next “logical” step for abortion advocates, as we will see below, is to figure out how to make mifepristone available “as a normal pharmaceutical product physicians can write a prescription for.” This would be followed (they hope) by making the RU-486/prostaglandin available over the counter.
DIY today
Much has been made of the abortion clinic closures in Texas that followed the legislature’s effort in 2013 to make sure that those clinics met basic safety standards and require that abortionists have admitting privileges in a local hospital if women suffer complications from their abortion. Many clinics decided they’d rather close than bring their buildings up to code and word on the street went out that women could get black market misoprostol pills at border town flea markets.
Bazelon shared the story of one activist, Yatzel Sabat, from Austin who was setting up a website called the “Texas Abortion Access Project.” There, on a page declaring “Abortion Without Apology,” Sabat shared a map of abortionists in other states and links to groups who would offer to assist women with travel and abortion expenses.
On another page titled “What Else Can I Do?” Sabat offered information on misoprostol. While avoiding saying directly where or how women could get the pills, she did offer standards (presumably some sort of protocol) from the World Health Organization telling women how to use misoprostol and links to Women on Web.
Though, as mentioned earlier, Women on Web does not officially sell to women in the U.S., it not only tells a woman how to do a chemical abortion on herself, but refers women back to the Women on Waves site. That site tells women not only how they might go about obtaining misoprostol from the black market but also how they might persuade a local pharmacist to write a fake prescription or dupe the pharmacists that saying, for example, that she needs a few pills for her visiting grandmother who has rheumatoid arthritis and forgot to bring her prescription.

That is hardly the end of it. Bazelon points to an article appearing in this past February on the pro-abortion website RH Reality Check, in which Francine Coeytaux and Victoria Nichols “argued for over-the-counter status for misoprostol.” They called it “Plan C,” hoping to follow the pattern of “Plan B,” the so called “morning-after pill,” which a federal judge declared in 2013 had to be made available over the counter to women of all ages.
It wouldn’t end there.

Beverly Winikoff was one of those originally responsible for bringing RU-486 (mifepristone) to the U.S., now heading a group called Gynuity Health Projects. She told Bazelon that a first step towards increased access to chemical abortions would be making mifepristone available “as a normal pharmaceutical product physicians can write a prescription for.”
The next step would be “we could carefully think about how the combination of mife[pristone] and miso[prostol] might become available over the counter. How do you organize that, with the proper safeguards, so that women have the information they need?”
Bazelon mentions, but downplays the considerable risk involved. She admits that these abortions “take place over hours instead of minutes and can be more painful than surgical abortions.” (In fact, it is a matter of days.)

And there is the issue of ectopic pregnancies. A clinic with an ultrasound and a trained technician should be able to identify an ectopic pregnancy, which these pills have no effect on. The impact could prove deadly.
She shares that cramps, pain, diarrhea, vomiting may be part of the process (most of these are standard) and even grants that there have been 11 reported deaths.
In fact over three years ago, the FDA admitted (in April of 2011) that at that time, there had been 14 deaths reported in the U.S. and another five identified in other countries. Because patients are advised by groups like Women on Web not to tell doctors they’ve taken abortion pills, there is reason to believe that there may be many more.
This, of course, is largely under the current, doctor [read abortionist]-supervised protocol. Minimal though it is, at least a woman has a trained doctor to tell her how to take the drugs, how they work, how to recognize and deal with problems, and to answer any questions she might have if she has any. It is hard to imagine that any remote session will be as thorough. In addition, the woman should be able to contact the abortionist who performed the abortion if there are complications.
None of that is the case, of course, if she merely buys her abortifacient drugs over the counter or orders them over the internet.
The more you read Bazelon, the more worried you should be worried that women are placing themselves at enormous risk.
Women on Web’s site asks women if they have any high blood pressure, heart, kidney or liver conditions or other diseases that might disqualify them as candidates. But only a doctor can examine a woman, ask questions, and determine whether there are signs of such conditions that she may not be aware of and may not have been previously diagnosed.
When any chemical abortion begins, there is considerable pain, cramping, bleeding and often some form of gastrointestinal distress. The problem is, these are also the sort of signs and symptoms a woman might display if she were dealing with an infection or a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. It is hard enough for a doctor to tell the difference, much less a woman out in a rural farm village without emergency facilities or professionals nearby.

Bazelon writes

“When women do seek medical attention, Women on Web also counsels them about how to avoid criminal charges if they live in countries where they have reason to fear prosecution. To ingest the mifepristone and misoprostol they are told to place the drugs in their cheek or under their tongue, where the medicine cannot be detected in the body. (If they are inserted vaginally, they may leave fragments.) Gomperts says there is no medical reason for women to tell anyone they’ve used pills. Treatment, if needed, is the same as it would be for a spontaneous miscarriage. ‘Women shouldn’t be afraid to look for care when they need it, and at the same time they shouldn’t do anything to incriminate themselves,’ Gomperts said.”

It seems, though, such information would have been highly relevant to doctors treating the inordinate numbers of chemically aborting women who suddenly and mysteriously came down with rare but lethal Clostridium sordellii infections in their reproductive tracts. That these were not simple miscarriages, but initiated events whereby certain bacteria could have been introduced into their birth canals was significant medical information.

The biggest lie, of course, behind this whole push for DIY abortions is that there is ever going to be some simple, private, safe way to dissolve the reality of baby away.

Will Women on Web be there when the woman is suffering through the throes of her chemical abortion? Will the web-cam abortionist be there when she is all alone, bleeding, doubled over in pain, struggling with the reality of her lost child? Will Gynuity make sure that there are instructions on how to deal with post-abortion grief stuffed into the bottle of pills sold over the counter?
They’ve disregarded the child all these years. Why should we be surprised if they abandon the mothers as well?

Source: NRLC News

Abortion Clinic Regulations

 

Texas’ pro-life A.G. files emergency motion to the U.S. Court of Appeals following judge’s decision

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-life Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott at 2013 NRLC Convention

Late Sunday night, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed an emergency motion to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit asking that the state be permitted to enforce a provision of Texas’ HB 2 that requires that abortion clinics meet the same building standards as ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs).

Abbott’s move was as expected as U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel’s Friday afternoon decision declaring the provision unconstitutional. The provision was to go into effect yesterday.
According to Brian M. Rosenthal of the Houston Chronicle

“Abbott criticized Yeakel in his motion to the appellate court, saying the district judge ‘failed even to mention (much less follow) precedent’ from the appellate court and U.S. Supreme Court.

“He also argued that the state is likely to be able to get Yeakel’s decision reversed on appeal.

“That is what happened last fall, when Yeakel struck down a different part of House Bill 2 only to have his decision overturned by the appellate court.”

The latter is an allusion to a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upholding a provision that required abortionists to have admitting privileges at a local hospital so that they might accompany women who have had complications following their abortions.

Judge Yeakel also struck down that part of HB 2 that required abortionists to have admitting privileges in a hospital within a 30-mile radius of the clinics where they work. Yeakel had previously struck down that requirement only to be reversed by that same federal appeals court panel which held the requirement was constitutional “on its face.”
However, on Friday Yeakel revisited the admitting privileges challenge “as applied.” He wrote, “The court concludes that the act’s ambulatory-surgical-center requirement, combined with the already-in-effect admitting-privileges requirement, creates a brutally effective system of regulation that reduces access to abortion clinics.” Together, he concluded, these provisions “place an unconstitutional undue burden on women throughout Texas and must be enjoined.”
In his 21-page decision, Judge Yeakel wrote that the ASCs requirement “burdens Texas women in a way incompatible with the principles of personal freedom and privacy protected by the United States Constitution for the 40 years since Roe v. Wade.”

Pro-life Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed the omnibus HB 2 bill into law in July 2013.
Opponents did not challenge the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which is part of HB 2. This provision prohibits killing unborn children who have reached the developmental milestone of being able to feel pain, which substantial medical evidence places at 20 weeks, if not earlier.
Pro-abortionist have contested other provisions of HB 2, including (as noted above) the requirement that abortionists secure admitting privileges in a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic when there are complications. In their 34-page opinion, Judges Edith Jones, Catharina Haynes, and Jennifer Walker Elrod carefully outlined why the provisions are not an “undue burden” on the right to abortion.

HB 2 also requires that the abortionist be in the same room as the woman receiving the chemical abortifacients (which is not the case with so-called ‘web-cam” abortions) and that abortionists follow the protocol approved by the FDA for the use of the two-drug “RU-486” abortion technique. The appeals panel upheld that provision as well.

Litigants, represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, contesting the building requirements told Yeakel during five days of testimony that the requirement is not needed and would have the effect of closing many abortion clinics in places outside major metropolitan areas.
But according to Kaiser Health News’ Carrie Feibel, Melissa Conway, spokeswoman for Texas Right to Life, said, “if the number of abortions and the number of clinics drops in Texas, that’s something she’s glad about, but it wasn’t the intent of the law. She said the regulations are about making abortion safer, so abortion providers should invest in the required upgrades.”

“’The choice to have fewer clinics comes down to the abortion providers,’ Conway said. ‘If they choose to have disregard for the health of women, and the safety standards, which are practical, common-sense and best standards, that’s their choice. But that points highly to the fact that they care more about their bottom line than they do their patient care.’”

Source: NRLC News