 The "Pro-Choice" Follies |
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A quote on Reproductive "Choice" from the Founder of Planned Parenthood
"Possibly drastic and
Spartan
methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to
encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our
stupidly cruel sentimentalism."
--Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921.
How the AMA adjusted the truth
In a letter to health care professionals in September 2004, the DURA Med subsidiary of Barr Pharmaceuticals tells how they have just acquired the
rights to "Plan B", the "Morning After Pill". In bold letters it says, "Plan B is not an abortifacient". In the "full prescribing information", however, it says under Chemical Pharmacology: "In addition, it may inhibit implantation (by altering the endometrium)", as every other hormonal contraceptive or IUD insert says. How did these pills and devices magically become non-abortifacient? By changing the definition.
> It may not be known to many of the nonmedical folks or some of the younger medical folks but the definition of the beginning of pregnancy was changed
> a few years ago, actually around the time I was in medical school. I have a medical dictionary that defines pregnancy as beginning with fertilization
> of the ovum. The shift to the current "accepted" definition was of course a public relations ploy as it became apparent that the mechanism of action
> of the IUD and (some of the time) the OCP's [Oral Contraceptive Pills] was abortifacient by the old definition. Then as IVF became popular there was greater >support to accept the redefinition of pregnancy for how could you be pregnant with the baby outside of the uterus? It seems amazing to me that we have largely
> sat by and watched this disinformation campaign with little real challenge.
> In other settings if large portions of the population were misled in areas of serious personal choice with related financial gain for those providing
> the misinformation we would use terms like "fraud", "scandal" or similar appropriate words.
-- Stan L., MD
Good rant, Stan. Nowadays most OB-GYNs will tell you that birth control pills are NOT abortifacient, because they were taught that in med school. We are left with the question: what is the destruction of a fertilized egg outside the uterus called? How about inside the uterus, where OCPs and IUDs can work by inhibiting implantation, thereby starving your child to death? "Premeditated killing of a human" (Hint: six letters, starts with M).
What's a human? Count the chromosomes. Sperm or egg cells are parts of the parents' bodies. Fertilized eggs are not. They grow in an unbroken time line until they graduate from college and start growing beer bellies. There are distinct events like implantation, birth, graduation, etc. but none of these mean "becoming a person". You are already a person when you're conceived, and your gender and hair color are already determined. Lately you may see a resurgence in the term "pre-embryo", which has no medical significance but was coined in 1979 by embryologist Clifford Grobstein, a specialist in the study of frogs, who admitted that in this way he wanted to "reduce the status of the early human embryo" from human to sub-human.
So by simply changing the definition of abortion, drug companies and doctors can claim that early abortifacients "prevent unintended pregnancies, and thus prevent abortions" and are thus "pro-life", notwithstanding that they can cause the death of an unborn child.
The prescribing information for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a popular oral contraceptive, tells doctors that the pill works in 3 ways: suppressing ovulation, preventing fertilization, and precluding the implantation of an already fertilized egg. The third one constitutes an abortion, but it is excluded from the patients' information. The PDR (Physician's Desk Reference) is well referenced and the prevention of implantation is listed with the mechanism of action of every oral contraceptive.Your doctor (and you) can look up the pills they commonly script and get references from there. Manufacturers' websites also list these effects.
How the AMA covered up the truth
The American Medical Association voted overwhelmingly in December 2001 against informing women about the potential for birth control pills to cause the abortion of an embryo by preventing implantation in the uterus. The doctor who put forward the proposal before the AMA "believes that in the spirit of enhancing the patient/physician relationship, that information ought to be disclosed to patients to help them make choices."
Walter Weber, senior litigation counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a Virginia-based public interest law firm, said, "If [pro-life women] are using a method that can operate after fertilization as well as before fertilization, and they don't know it, they are basically being deceived by lack of information into violating their own consciences."
John Diggs, MD, a Family Research Council Advisory Board Member, said "The AMA is doing a great disservice to women by refusing to fully inform them of their birth control options. Since informed consent is a basic medical ethic, it should be standard operating procedure to tell women that the birth control pill can cause an abortion. Each woman has the right to know what's good for her health and acceptable to her conscience. If the AMA has suppressed its conscience, it shouldn't draw American women into its own ethical lapses."
An excellent paper that uses evidence based medicine to examine the current literature on this subject is Larimore, W. L. et al., (2000)
"Postfertilization effects of oral contraceptives and their relationship to informed consent", Archives of Family Medicine (AMA Journal), 9:126-133.
--Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921.
How the AMA adjusted the truth
In a letter to health care professionals in September 2004, the DURA Med subsidiary of Barr Pharmaceuticals tells how they have just acquired the
rights to "Plan B", the "Morning After Pill". In bold letters it says, "Plan B is not an abortifacient". In the "full prescribing information", however, it says under Chemical Pharmacology: "In addition, it may inhibit implantation (by altering the endometrium)", as every other hormonal contraceptive or IUD insert says. How did these pills and devices magically become non-abortifacient? By changing the definition.
> It may not be known to many of the nonmedical folks or some of the younger medical folks but the definition of the beginning of pregnancy was changed
> a few years ago, actually around the time I was in medical school. I have a medical dictionary that defines pregnancy as beginning with fertilization
> of the ovum. The shift to the current "accepted" definition was of course a public relations ploy as it became apparent that the mechanism of action
> of the IUD and (some of the time) the OCP's [Oral Contraceptive Pills] was abortifacient by the old definition. Then as IVF became popular there was greater >support to accept the redefinition of pregnancy for how could you be pregnant with the baby outside of the uterus? It seems amazing to me that we have largely
> sat by and watched this disinformation campaign with little real challenge.
> In other settings if large portions of the population were misled in areas of serious personal choice with related financial gain for those providing
> the misinformation we would use terms like "fraud", "scandal" or similar appropriate words.
-- Stan L., MD
Good rant, Stan. Nowadays most OB-GYNs will tell you that birth control pills are NOT abortifacient, because they were taught that in med school. We are left with the question: what is the destruction of a fertilized egg outside the uterus called? How about inside the uterus, where OCPs and IUDs can work by inhibiting implantation, thereby starving your child to death? "Premeditated killing of a human" (Hint: six letters, starts with M).
What's a human? Count the chromosomes. Sperm or egg cells are parts of the parents' bodies. Fertilized eggs are not. They grow in an unbroken time line until they graduate from college and start growing beer bellies. There are distinct events like implantation, birth, graduation, etc. but none of these mean "becoming a person". You are already a person when you're conceived, and your gender and hair color are already determined. Lately you may see a resurgence in the term "pre-embryo", which has no medical significance but was coined in 1979 by embryologist Clifford Grobstein, a specialist in the study of frogs, who admitted that in this way he wanted to "reduce the status of the early human embryo" from human to sub-human.
So by simply changing the definition of abortion, drug companies and doctors can claim that early abortifacients "prevent unintended pregnancies, and thus prevent abortions" and are thus "pro-life", notwithstanding that they can cause the death of an unborn child.
The prescribing information for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a popular oral contraceptive, tells doctors that the pill works in 3 ways: suppressing ovulation, preventing fertilization, and precluding the implantation of an already fertilized egg. The third one constitutes an abortion, but it is excluded from the patients' information. The PDR (Physician's Desk Reference) is well referenced and the prevention of implantation is listed with the mechanism of action of every oral contraceptive.Your doctor (and you) can look up the pills they commonly script and get references from there. Manufacturers' websites also list these effects.
How the AMA covered up the truth
The American Medical Association voted overwhelmingly in December 2001 against informing women about the potential for birth control pills to cause the abortion of an embryo by preventing implantation in the uterus. The doctor who put forward the proposal before the AMA "believes that in the spirit of enhancing the patient/physician relationship, that information ought to be disclosed to patients to help them make choices."
Walter Weber, senior litigation counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a Virginia-based public interest law firm, said, "If [pro-life women] are using a method that can operate after fertilization as well as before fertilization, and they don't know it, they are basically being deceived by lack of information into violating their own consciences."
John Diggs, MD, a Family Research Council Advisory Board Member, said "The AMA is doing a great disservice to women by refusing to fully inform them of their birth control options. Since informed consent is a basic medical ethic, it should be standard operating procedure to tell women that the birth control pill can cause an abortion. Each woman has the right to know what's good for her health and acceptable to her conscience. If the AMA has suppressed its conscience, it shouldn't draw American women into its own ethical lapses."
An excellent paper that uses evidence based medicine to examine the current literature on this subject is Larimore, W. L. et al., (2000)
"Postfertilization effects of oral contraceptives and their relationship to informed consent", Archives of Family Medicine (AMA Journal), 9:126-133.
Coercion
in China: forced sterilization and abortion continue. (Meanwhile, some
good news: Billings NFP
continues to expand there.)
UN Population Fund Refuses to Ask
China to End Coercion (C-FAM FRIDAY FAX, July 30, 2004,
Volume 7, Number 32)
[Excerpts]
A little reported aspect of the recent US decision once more to withhold funding from the UN Population Fund was the Fund’s refusal to ask China to end coercion in family planning. This according to a recently released report from the US State Department.
Until the release of the report, it was not widely known that the Bush administration had been actively engaged with UNFPA in order to make its program consistent with US human rights law, or that UNFPA had declined to adopt the US recommendations. The State Department report says that UNFPA has not even asked that China “eliminate coercive ‘administrative’ or ‘disciplinary’ punishments” against women, “thus continuing to reflect UNFPA’s support for China’s coercive program.”
The report cites a number of areas of concern, including the continued existence of heavy fines, called social compensation fees, levied against women who break family planning laws by becoming pregnant. “One county where UNFPA has activities, Liuyang in Hunan Province, assesses a fee of two times the average annual income.”
The report also establishes that UNFPA actually assists the Chinese government to enforce its coercive population control laws. The report claims that UNFPA’s “resources are provided directly or indirectly to the State Family Planning Commission in counties where it enforces the fines and administrative penalties such as job loss, demotion, and expulsion from the Communist Party.
UN officials, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, continue to voice outrage that the US will not fund UNFPA, but have yet to address the specific findings of the report.
Copyright 2004 – C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute)
(Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.)
[Excerpts]
A little reported aspect of the recent US decision once more to withhold funding from the UN Population Fund was the Fund’s refusal to ask China to end coercion in family planning. This according to a recently released report from the US State Department.
Until the release of the report, it was not widely known that the Bush administration had been actively engaged with UNFPA in order to make its program consistent with US human rights law, or that UNFPA had declined to adopt the US recommendations. The State Department report says that UNFPA has not even asked that China “eliminate coercive ‘administrative’ or ‘disciplinary’ punishments” against women, “thus continuing to reflect UNFPA’s support for China’s coercive program.”
The report cites a number of areas of concern, including the continued existence of heavy fines, called social compensation fees, levied against women who break family planning laws by becoming pregnant. “One county where UNFPA has activities, Liuyang in Hunan Province, assesses a fee of two times the average annual income.”
The report also establishes that UNFPA actually assists the Chinese government to enforce its coercive population control laws. The report claims that UNFPA’s “resources are provided directly or indirectly to the State Family Planning Commission in counties where it enforces the fines and administrative penalties such as job loss, demotion, and expulsion from the Communist Party.
UN officials, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, continue to voice outrage that the US will not fund UNFPA, but have yet to address the specific findings of the report.
Copyright 2004 – C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute)
(Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.)
Breastfeeding seen as "Disgusting"
Over the Fourth of July weekend 2004, 32 year old Amy Schoon was "discreetely" breastfeeding her 8-month-old son, Henry, while having lunch at the Hoover House Restaurant in West Branch, Iowa with her husband and brother-in-law. Amy said co-owner Janet Nelson approached her and told her to stop breastfeeding in view of other customers.
"She found it distasteful and disgusting that I was feeding my child. The two other people in the restaurant didn't even seem to know what was going on. I never expected to be discriminated against for doing what's best for my child," said Amy. She left the restaurant at the owner's request.
http://www.dailyiowan.com/news/2004/07/14/Metro/Breastfeeding.Sparks.Eatery.Brouhaha-693358.shtml
This has happened other places in the USA. Perhaps our whole country needs an attitude adjustment.
"Choice" liberates men to be free of responsibility
A comment by social scientist Francis Fukuyama on the decision in 1999 by the Japanese government to allow oral contraceptives (after decades of prohibition due to safety convcerns):
"Although we take the birth-control pill for granted, its introduction into Western societies in the 1960s had far greater consequences than anyone imagined at the time. The pill was supposed to give women more control over their reproductive lives; instead, in the U.S. and other Western countries, its introduction was followed by an explosion of illegitimacy, divorce and single-parent families.
"This conundrum can be explained by the emergence of a totally unanticipated consequence: By giving women the means to prevent pregnancy, the pill freed men from the social responsibility of dealing with the consequences of sex.
"The economists Janet Yellen and George Akerlof recently demonstrated that the pill led to, among other things, a sharp decrease in the rate of shotgun marriages in the United States between the early 1960s and the 1980s. At the beginning of this period, society enforced strict rules on young men who got their girlfriends pregnant; 20 years later, the pill had paradoxically liberated men rather than women from the responsibility for the children they created. The fatherless household that subsequently emerged contributed to a host of other social ills, like poverty, crime, poor educational achievement and drug use."
"Choice" means statutory rape goes unreported
HARTFORD, June 6, 2002 (LSN.ca) - Connecticut Chief State's Attorney John M. Bailey said he plans to meet with Planned Parenthood next week to remind the organization of its statutory obligation to report suspected cases of child sex abuse. The news comes after Life Dynamics Inc, a Texas-based pro-life group released the results of a sting operation where Planned Parenthood clinics were discovered to be concealing statutory rape cases.
Tape recorded evidence of calls to Planned Parenthood made by a Life Dynamics worker, posing as an abortion seeking 13-year-old girl alleging a pregnancy by a 22-year-old boyfriend, were submitted to police. The Journal Inquirer reports that on one of the tapes, a West Hartford branch Planned Parenthood employee told the caller that she had given too much information. "The fact that your boyfriend is 22 and the fact you're 14 ... we're mandated reporters. That means we have to report that," the employee said. But no reports ever were made, state officials said.
In a related development, Nebraska Attorney General Don Stenberg asked the Health and Humans Services System to look into allegations by Nebraskans United for Life that Planned Parenthood clinics in Nebraska fail to report statutory rape cases when they are made aware of them. (c) Copyright: LifeSite Daily News
It gets worse. Read the whole story at the Life Dynamics site.
"Choice" means anti-family, and parents have no choice
Karin Helsecke of Planned Parenthood's European Network wrote a memo, obtained by C-FAM, urging its European allies to pressure governments to ratify sexual rights for children while ignoring the role of parents. Written in preparation for a September 2001 U.N. Special Session on Children, it expresses fear that the final U.N. document will not establish sweeping enough "reproductive rights" for children. In essence, it holds that parents are the potential enemies of children's rights.
"Right-wing governments and groups are … attempting to insert language in the outcome documents that would strengthen parental authority and control to the detriment of established children's rights," C-FAM quoted the memo as saying. The language in question required parental consent for HIV/AIDS counseling, "education, and services" (i.e., contraceptives, abortions and sterilizations) for children and adolescents.
Planned Parenthood also criticized the traditional understanding of family as "based on a man and woman united by marriage and their children," because these families "are neither safe, particularly for young girls, nor models of gender equality."
The war on Procreative and Religious Rights in Africa
After overshooting the mark in Europe, creating the possibility of zero population rather than just zero growth, the population controllers are now taking aim at Africa. Instead of clean water and less dictators and wars, their answer is abortion, sterilization, contraception, and deception. A collection of papers exposing these methods is at the Africa2000 website.
There are lessons to be
learned from this in Western countries also. In "The Greatest Modern Threat to Genuine
Reproductive Freedom,
Elizabeth Liagin appeals to all true feminists:
"If reproductive freedom is to mean anything at all, it cannot
be appropriated only by those who wish to avoid having children.
If it is, it becomes a euphemism only. It can then be used to
conceal the actual involuntary nature of efforts to induce people
not to have children. "This aspect of reproductive freedom is
especially important to
women.... women bear the brunt
of the intra-uterine devices, Norplant and the quinacrine treatments
as well as surgical sterilizations.Furthermore, the improvement of women's conditions should not be held hostage to whatever impact such activity has on population numbers.
"The World Bank has explicitly indicated that population control is more important than reproductive freedom.... When resources are not used for empowerment, but rather compel women to use "services" for which they have no desire, then genuine reproductive rights are clearly threatened. The extensive nature of this danger under current conditions world-wide should cause alarm among feminists and other human rights advocates."
Religious Warfare: Population Control and the Right of Conscience shows that the objective of population controllers is to replace religious beliefs with a new secular culture that is friendly to western capitalism, and examines subversive actions against the Catholic Church in Colombia and against Islam in Gambia.
The American Baby Code
"Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit for parenthood." And it goes on like that. Written by Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood, there's a copy at L.E.A.R.N. Inc., America's largest African American pro-life network There were certain races Sanger was particularly interested in getting rid of.
Dangerous ideas must be suppressed: Send in the lawyers
The National Organization for Women (NOW) and others sued in Florida Circuit Court in 2001 to get Florida's Choose Life license plates recalled because the message violates the First Amendment religion clauses (not the part that goes "...or prevent the free exercise thereof"). Their contention was that theoffending phrase from the Bible (Deut. 30:19), "Choose Life", violates the "separation of church and state" which is not in the Constitution.
James A. Smith Sr., executive editor of the Florida Baptist Witness, wrote in an editorial that it "merely demonstrates the true agenda of the pro-choice lobby -- actually, the pro-abortion lobby. They don't believe in choice. Abortion advocates believe that their cause is righteous and that those who oppose it must be silenced."
The Medical establishment vs. conscience
"A Barrie [Ontario] doctor could lose his license to practice medicine because of his religious beliefs. Dr. Stephen Dawson faces a discipline committee at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in April because he refused to prescribe birth control pills to unmarried women.
"'If a Christian physician must forsake his religious beliefs to maintain his medical license, we cannot delude ourselves to believe we live in a free country,' said Dawson "(quoted in the Barrie Examiner).
