Planned Parenthood Misleads Women With the Government’s Help

So, if a woman or girl goes to Planned Parenthood for an abortion – what will they be told about the risks?

I’m looking at an actual hand-out from Planned Parenthood of Idaho which claims that the risk of death from abortion “occurs in fewer than 1 per 100,000 abortions. This should be compared with the risk of death from a full-term pregnancy and childbirth, which is seven times greater than that from early abortion.”

Interesting. We have heard such rhetoric from the Abortion Lobby during the abortion debate in the State Capitol many times over the years. But is it accurate?

A recent article from the Elliot Institute reports that international health experts have just published a new study. It found that 94% of maternal deaths associated with abortion are simply not identifiable from death certificates alone. Proper reporting requires linking death certificates to the woman’s medical records.

The presumption that abortion is associated with fewer deaths than childbirth simply doesn’t hold up once the pregnancy history of the woman is investigated. Once the woman’s medical records are attached to death certificates, it turns out that the death rate associated with abortion is actually three-times higher than that of childbirth.

This study poses yet another challenge to data coming from the government’s Center for Disease Control. In fact, pressure has become so great on this dysfunctional and pro-abort agency that Dr. Louise Gerberding, Director of the CDC admitted in 2004 that numbers on childbirth deaths vs. abortion deaths were simply not comparable.

Her letter states, in part, that maternal mortality rates and abortion mortality rates compiled by the CDC “are conceptually different and are used by the CDC for different public health purposes”.

While the CDC admission is progress – it is certainly not sufficient to improve its credibility. Mark Crutcher, president of Life Dynamics, has blasted the CDC for its strong pro-abort bias. Rather than providing the public benefit of oversight, he believes their mission is to defend and promote abortion: “When it comes to abortion, CDC stands for ‘Center for Damage Control’.”

So – will Planned Parenthood clean-up its act and tell women the truth? Don’t bet on it.

Hope for Schwarzenegger?

The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California excited many across the land – but I was not one of them. I knew of his long-standing support for liberal social policies, especially legalized abortion, even as he sought to impose some financial sanity on the socialist republic of California.

So, while I love his movies, I was hoping he’d stay busy making new ones.

But in recent weeks a new aspect of his personality has emerged. He reluctantly stared down the homosexual lobby and vetoed their bill making marriage legal between men. And then he came out with this whopper:

“I have a daughter, Schwarzenegger said in an interview with the Sacramento Bee. “I wouldn’t want to have someone take my daughter to a hospital for an abortion or something and not tell me. I would kill him if they do that.”

The “Governator” obviously loves his children, and sees himself as their primary protector and provider. Just like millions of other fathers across this nation.

So why doesn’t he come out in support of a new citizens initiative in California which would give parents the right to be notified if their daughter is seeking an abortion? Why can’t he make that leap from his own righteous feelings to imagine that other parents feel just that way about strangers manipulating their daughters?

We might ask Judge Lynn Winmill the same question. I don’t know if he has children of his own – but surely he would be outraged and angry if an abortionist killed his grandchild without his even knowing his daughter was pregnant. Why is it so hard for the powerful to use their empathy and defend parents’ rights to protect and care for their children?

Hopefully Idaho’s federal judge will ponder his own family as he decides the fate of Idaho’s Parental Consent Law.

France Reaps the Whirlwind

Our socialist neighbors in France continue to struggle with the fall-out from years of rampant abortion. To increase the birth rate among professional women in that nation, the government has announced that it will start paying women to have a third child.

France, along with the rest of Europe, is suffering from a declining native population and is threatened with being swamped by a growing Muslim population imported from the Middle East. The government is planning to pay women up to $1250 per month, for up to a year, if they will have a third baby and stay at home during that time.

The benefits are, apparently, available only to women in certain demographic groups. It seems that France’s social engineers want not just any kind of baby boom – but children from the “right” kind of family.

This little news story is loaded with big chunks of thought food. Notice first the elitist tone of this new policy – which is rooted in the eugenics movement. Since the days of Margaret Sanger, the whole abortion and birth control movement has been seeking the perfect society, in which only certain kinds of people are allowed to sire children.

Secondly, realize that this social crisis is of their own making.

I ran across a story the other day from our archives. In 1988, the French manufacturer of RU-486, the chemical abortion drug, declared it would stop manufacturing the killer. But the French government ordered it to continue making it available to women. Hence the modern plague in Europe and America.

And, lastly, the folly of mankind is on full display in France. When we defy God’s will and the natural order of things, we make more problems than we solve. Despite the pretensions of modern science and the dominating socialist we are simply not wise enough to make life-and-death decisions for whole classes of the human family.

Shake-Up at FDA Not Good for Families

While the nation’s attention was riveted on Texas and Louisiana a potentially important development for America’s families took place back in Washington, D.C.

The top guy at the Food & Drug Administration, Lester Crawford resigned. Some reports indicate that he was asked to do so by the President, who immediately appointed an interim commissioner, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach. The latter was serving as director of the National Cancer Institute.

At least from the outside, this appears to be a serious setback in the battle to keep the “Morning After Pill” away from teenagers – at least without a doctor’s supervision. As you know, the Abortion Lobby has been pushing to make this dangerous drug available to teenagers without a prescription, to make it available “Over the Counter”. That will provide a windfall of new profits for Planned Parenthood.

Lester Crawford had been a central figure in the FDA’s decision to indefinitely put-off Planned Parenthood’s drive to make the “Morning After Pill” easily available. Their attack cats in the U.S. Senate – including Washington’s Patty Murray and the infamous Hillary Clinton – have been howling for Crawford’s head. It would appear that they finally got it.

While we don’t have specific information about the new appointee, the long history of the National Cancer Institute’s pro-abortion politics are reason enough for grave concern. Among other outrages is the fact that the NCI has played a pivotal role in denying women and girls crucial information about the linkage between abortion and breast cancer.

A recent study by the University of California at San Francisco found easy access to the “Morning After Pill” did not reduce pregnancy rates – but did drive up Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

O’Connor Gets a Last Shot to Undermine Our Constitution

With Judge Roberts’ confirmation all but certain in the U.S. Senate this week, it is clear that the political focus in Washington shifts to the President’s next nominee. Speculation is rampant about various strategies the White House is considering to ensure that the replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor does not get hacheted by Democrats frustrated with their inability to get at Roberts.

“I think that there’s been a lot of frustration on [Roberts] … and I think that frustration may well be vented on the next nominee,” said Republican Chairman Arlen Specter.

The International Herald Tribune reports that the White House is looking primarily at female nominees even as the left-wing Ruth Bader Ginsburg complains of being the only woman on the high court.

Meanwhile, a Florida television station ran an insightful article on the role that Sandra Day O’Connor will play in the interim. She was asked by Bush to stay on until her successor is confirmed. O’Connor, the pivotal figure in the nation’s struggle over abortion for some fifteen years – is expected to be sitting on the court when cases involving assisted suicide and the rights of disabled school children are considered.

Given the warped political process in the Senate, she may still be there when the New Hampshire abortion case is considered by the court on November 30th. That case involves a parental notice statute. It is being challenged by the anti-family forces at Planned Parenthood because it does not include the hurricane-wide exception for a girl’s “health”.

Given her long pro-abort record, it seems unlikely that O’Connor would suddenly find the heart to defend parents and girls against the sordid manipulations of Planned Parenthood and the rest of the Abortion Industry.

We must pray, therefore, that President Bush is granted great wisdom in making his historic choice for the O’Connor seat. May he not only find a candidate strong enough to withstand the withering attack sure to come – but may he also hold tight his integrity by nominating a strong pro-Life lawyer.

Ukrainian Atrocity Raises Profound Questions

I must warn you. This story is not for the feint of heart.

I ran across a column by Wesley Smith – a leading defender of human dignity. The title asks the question, “Have Ukrainian Babies Been Stolen to Supply Body Parts?”

He references a recent story in The London Times, which we have previously discussed here, in which some Ukrainian women have alleged that their babies were stolen from then at birth to be sold for adoption – or worse, used as a natural resource. Smith worries that many such stories are “urban legends”, but he is moved to comment because of this paragraph in the London Times article:

“Video footage seen by the Times shows four fetuses which have clearly had their insides and brains surgically removed, and fragments of a larger baby, about one month old, also with many organs removed.”

Smith says that if this story is true, it is “beyond criminal”. Amen. In fact, the very horror of the picture now in our minds will push many of us to simply dismiss or ignore the painful evidence of a medical community unmoored. For those of us too young to know, perhaps we now have some insight into how people reacted during World War II, when stories of gross atrocities began seeping out of Europe.

But this evidence also points us toward deeper questions. Smith asks, “Should human life ever be reduced to the status of a natural resource to be exploited?” Indeed, some who would be offended by news of this atrocity are able to rationalize the destruction of human embryos in order to allow medical researchers the legal sanction to harvest stem cells.

Aside from the obvious question of lesser or greater development – what is the moral difference? In fact, much of the debate over embryonic stem cells involves the question of human cloning for the purpose of harvesting organs and cells from living human beings.

We once knew the answers to these questions. But no longer. Now the status of the human being is up for grabs, as a direct result of the abortion culture we have built in America.

Update on Kansas Battle

There are new twists and turns in Kansas over the crucial issue of abortion records. As you remember, Attorney General Phill Kline has been waging battle for over a year to determine whether various abortionists, including Planned Parenthood, are violating the law.

Two crucial laws are at stake: one requires all medical personnel in that state to report suspected cases of child sexual abuse to law enforcement authorities. Most states have such laws, including Idaho. The other is a law which bans late-term abortions, that is, after 22 weeks, unless there is a serious threat to the mother’s health.

Kansas is the home of the infamous George Tiller, who has established a nation-wide abortion practice specializing in killing late-term babies. The Attorney General of Kansas strongly suspects that Tiller is systematically violating the law; it seems unlikely that hundreds of women could all be suffering from acute health threats, year after year. The AG wants to see those medical records to determine if there is a shred of medical reason for all those late-term abortions. We reported last week that Tiller has been busily shredding documents – even before the state supreme court issues a ruling.

Just days ago, the AG narrowed the scope of his request for records – an issue now pending before the court.

In response, Planned Parenthood has issued a public threat. In order to stop the Attorney General from getting at their records involving teenage girls, they have publicly stated that even if the Supreme Court orders them to release documents – they will continue to fight to keep cases of suspected abuse secret.

Planned Parenthood says it will help girls to file individual lawsuits to keep their records secret, including hiring attorneys for them. That should keep the AG tangled up for years – meanwhile, predators are free to continue their search-and-destroy habits.

We continue to emphasize this story because it has direct application to the families in Idaho. It demonstrates the appalling arrogance of Planned Parenthood and its partners in the abortion industry. But it also helps explain why so few law enforcement officials are willing to hold Planned Parenthood accountable to the law.

You may be certain that more than a few attorneys general and local prosecutors are watching this story to gauge the integrity of our court system.

Planned Parenthood Fights to Skirt Parental Consent Laws

Sometimes these daily news stories must sound like a journey into Alice’s “wonderland”, particularly when we talk about courts and their response to legislative efforts aimed at protecting our kids.


Take the latest battle in Missouri, for instance. Governor Matt Blunt signed legislation last week that would strike you and I as pretty common-sensical – in fact, down-right necessary to protect parents and girls. But then you and I, and most Americans don’t think like Planned Parenthood and their friends on the federal bench.

Legislators in Missouri passed a bill this session which outlawed any adult, except her parents, from taking a girl to another state to obtain an abortion. This is a big problem in Missouri, because it has a Parental Consent Law; it also borders the liberal state of Illinois.

Idaho has much of the same problem, which is why we are supporting federal legislation to make it a felony to transport teenage girls across state lines in order to avoid Parental Consent Laws.

The Missouri legislation was immediately challenged in federal court by Planned Parenthood, despite passing the House of that state on votes of 115-35 and by the state senate on a 26-6 vote.

We believe that a federal judge has already issued a temporary injunction in the case, which the state’s attorney general has promised to “vigorously defend”.

The new legislation also contained a provision which would require abortionists to have admitting privileges at a local hospital within 30 miles of the abortuary. This language is intended to protect the health of women and girls. The requirement is especially important because most abortion clinics are only loosely regulated and monitored; it’s part of the pathetic “pro-woman” legacy of the abortion-rights crowd.

We’ll monitor the progress of this important battle for you.

Howard Helps Lead Abortion Rights Conference

We’ve just seen a copy of the program for the upcoming fall conference of the Idaho Women’s Network. It is a fascinating read – in that it helps fill in some details about the people and agenda of this radical organization, funded in good part by Idaho’s classroom teachers.

Our regular listeners will know that the Idaho Women’s Network is one of the leading voices for abortion rights and homosexual rights in the state. They are regularly partnered with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU in opposing legislation like Parental Consent for teenage abortions.

The conference has a number of speakers, including one from the former director, Lee Flinn. Ms. Flinn is now the head of an environmental rights group.

Attendees will also hear from Nancy Sapiro, a lawyer from the Northwest Women’s Law Center, based in Seattle. This group is regularly involved in pressing a radical social agenda through the nation’s court system. Specifically, they support homosexual marriage, public funding of abortions for low-income women and requiring hospitals to provide “Emergency Contraception”.

The group will also get a chance to hear from two women sent by the Western States Center, based in Portland. This organization is funded by such social engineers as the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Family Fund.

Their agenda is to “build a progressive movement for social … and environmental justice” in the west.

With such an agenda, it was surprising to see Republican State Representative Kathy Skippen on the agenda. This liberal comes from Emmett and will speak on the topic of “Women and Politics”. She will be joined by Democrat Marilyn Howard – chief of the state’s public school system.

We are particularly troubled to see Howard in such company. It demonstrates her leftist value system and confirms the threat she poses to our children.