Reproductive Health

In an interview with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins yesterday, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) once again expressed confidence that his bill banning abortion after twenty weeks will pass the House. The bill, known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, is set to come to the floor today.

Franks framed the bill as a heroic attempt to protect mothers and children from “heartless monsters” like convicted abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. While Gosnell was a criminal outlier, anti-choice activists have seized on his case to undermine reproductive rights. In an Akin-esque clarification, Franks stated “the medical community – that is, the legitimate medical community,” says that unborn children are able to feel pain twenty weeks. Franks’ source of “legitimate” medical knowledge appears to be a single 2007 paper that used rats as test subjects. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists actually opposes the bill, as well as the validity of the twenty-week pain threshold.

Franks: The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is very truly and simply a deeply sincere effort to protect both mothers and their pain-capable unborn babies entering their sixth month of gestation from these heartless monsters like Kermit Gosnell. That’s the simplest way I know to put it.

Perkins: And Congressman there’s a reason behind this where you have chosen this mark of twenty weeks. This is not just arbitrary but this is based on the testimony of medical and scientific experts that have talked about what takes place at this twentieth week of pregnancy.

Franks: Tony, that’s right. You know, the overwhelming consensus in the medical community, that is, the legitimate medical community, says that these unborn children feel pain at the end of the fifth month or earlier. And the real question here- this is the bottom line. The real question is not whether these unborn children entering their sixth month of gestation are capable of feeling pain. The real question is are we. That’s the big one.

When HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled an FDA recommendation to allow the sale of the Plan B morning-after pill over the counter to women without age restrictions, Religious Right groups weren’t able to come up with a coherent response. Several conservative activists alleged (without any evidence) that the move was intended to compel women to go to Planned Parenthood clinics instead of pharmacies, while Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel came up with the bizarre claim that the Obama administration actually opposed the position it had taken and even defended in court.

Now that the courts have sided with reproductive justice organizations that supported the FDA’s original assessment of Plan B, the administration has relented and agreed to allow sales of Plan B without a prescription.

Naturally, groups opposed to contraception are now enraged that the Obama administration is complying with the rulings.

Concerned Women for America president Penny Nance accused the administration of having “abandoned common sense,” saying she “fear[s] for the future health and wellness of women and children.” CWA senior fellow Janice Crouse warned that “it will not be long before we see girls and women forced to purchase Plan B for their abuser to keep them and others enslaved. This is a pimp, predator, and pedophile’s dream.”

Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life asserted that the Plan B case was further proof the “President Obama is waging a War on Girls” and endorsing “child abuse.”

Anna Higgins of the Family Research Council said girls will now be forced to take Plan B “under coercion or without their consent.”

Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America told LifeNews: “Though President Obama himself has said ‘as the father of two daughters, I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine,’ his administration has abandoned common sense and will allow our nation’s teens and young girls to have access to a highly powerful drug forty times stronger than birth control. I sincerely fear for the future health and wellness of women and children, as doctors, parents, and pharmacists are eliminated from this very serious conversation about sexual activity, pregnancy, fertility, and overall health.”

Janice Crouse, also of CWFA, responded: “Once again, those who yell the loudest about caring about the nation’s children and youth applaud a decision to place our kids in a special interest experiment. Plan B, popularly called the ‘morning-after pill’ is a much-higher-dosage version of the regular birth control pill (which used to require a doctor’s prescription and continued doctor’s supervision). It is irresponsible to advocate over-the-counter use of these high-potency drugs, which would make them available to anyone – including those predators who exploit young girls. Mark my words, it will not be long before we see girls and women forced to purchase Plan B for their abuser to keep them and others enslaved. This is a pimp, predator, and pedophile’s dream – unlimited access to Plan B.”

She added: “This is a political decision, made by those who stand to profit financially from an action that puts ideology ahead of the nation’s girls and young women. Where is the scientific data and solid reasoning behind a decision that endangers minors?”

Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America also weighed in on the decision.

She told LifeNews: “President Obama is waging a War on Girls by allowing young children to get Plan B without a physician or parent’s care or knowledge. The morning after pill is a megadose of the birth-control pill, which has been categorized by the World Health Organization as a Group I carcinogen. That’s the highest possible ranking – cigarettes are also in Group I. So why are drugstores required to put cigarettes behind the counter and ask for a photo id to stop minors from purchasing them, but President Obama is now ordering the morning after pill be sold over the counter, next to candy bars and packs of gum? This is not reproductive justice, this is child abuse.”

…

“There is a real danger that Plan B may be given to young girls, under coercion or without their consent. The involvement of parents and medical professionals act as a safeguard for these young girls. However, today’s ruling removes these commonsense protections,” concluded Higgins.

Did you realize that the decriminalization of abortion is responsible for the creation of the NSA surveillance program? According to Troy Newman of Operation Rescue, because “killing children in the womb is a constitutional right,” there are now “no civil rights in this country” and “everything else can be stripped away from us.”

Newman told LifeSiteNews this weekend that he hopes that President Obama will be impeached over the program and that “the people who are monitoring my conversations will be impacted and turned to life.”

The American Life League’s Jim Sedlak had a similar take, arguing that the NSA program might be targeting groups like his that oppose Planned Parenthood.

Newman linked the administration’s disregard for the most vulnerable human life with its apparent disregard for privacy rights, saying, “If killing children in the womb is a constitutional right, then we have no civil rights in this country. Everything else can be stripped away from us. So, this ought not surprise anyone.”

But just because Newman is not surprised by the government’s spying does not mean he doesn’t want to see the people responsible punished.

Asked what he thinks is the proper response to the news of the NSA’s intelligence gathering efforts centered on ordinary Americans, Newman said, “I think Obama should be impeached.” “I think half of Congress should be thrown out,” he said. “We should fire everybody in the NSA, the heads of the FBI, the CIA, and force everybody to take a basic course on constitutional liberties.”

He admitted such an outcome was unlikely but nonetheless warranted.

Jim Sedlak of American Life League compared the NSA’s tactics to those used in dictatorships and communist countries. He told LifeSiteNews.com that such practices have no place in a free nation.

“We’ve been concerned the the [sic] government would try to regulate speech,” Sedlak said, “and that’s what listening in does, is it tries to put a fear in so that people will be hesitant to say what they really believe.”

“There’s no place for this in the United States of America,” he said. “ They do this in other countries, you know; if you’re in a Middle East country and speaking in the backyard to your neighbor and you say something against the government, you wind up in jail.”

Sedlak said that because his group is on Planned Parenthood’s list of top 15 “anti-choice” organizations, and because President Obama is very closely tied to the abortion giant, he wouldn’t be surprised if they were targeted by the administration for monitoring. But he said the threat of retribution wouldn’t stop him or his group from speaking up for unborn babies.

“What we’re going to do is, we going to do our work,” Sedlak told LifeSiteNews. “We’re going to speak out when we need to speak out, we’re going to write what we need to write in order to get our work done, and trust that if we do the right thing and we do it for the right purpose, which is God’s purpose, God will take care of us.”

He vowed, “We will not be intimidated.”

Newman went one step further, saying that he hopes the government not only listens to but thinks about the words he is saying. “I’m not going to do anything differently,” he said. “I hope that the people who are monitoring my conversations will be impacted and turned to life.”

Today on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson said that Margaret Sanger “was the one who set the stage for Adolf Hitler, she didn’t copy him, he copied her.” After running a story about how President Obama postponed his speech at Planned Parenthood in order to attend a memorial service in Texas for victims of the fertilizer plant explosion, Roberston said that the group founded by Sanger is “evil” and targets black people.

“What they said was, they said ‘what we’ve got to do in order to get the black people in America to have abortions, we have to have some noted black leader who will come out for Planned Parenthood and we’ll give him the Margaret Sanger award and therefore he will be our poster boy showing the black people they should have abortions,” Robertson maintained, “it was strictly genocide.”

Watch:

While Sanger was tied to the eugenics movement, the claim that she intended to exterminate black people and use black leaders to hide such a plan is based on a quote taken badly out of context.

As PolitiFact reports, the eugenics movement was widely popular at the time of Sanger’s work, but there is “no evidence that Sanger advocated - privately or publicly - for anything even resembling the ‘genocide’ of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior”:

"I have never run into any serious academic reference of Sanger or others wanting to ‘kill black babies,’" Indiana University professor Ruth Engs, a eugenics movement expert, told PolitiFact Georgia in an e-mail.

The Washington Post also “found nothing to confirm these allegations” that Sanger targeted the black community for genocide and noted that even Martin Luther King, Jr. had praised her work.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org debunked the claim when Herman Cain made the same argument as Robertson:

Cain isn’t the first to believe that birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) wanted to stop the birth of black babies. Just do an Internet search and see what happens. Sanger made more than her share of controversial comments. But the quote many point to as evidence that Sanger favored something akin to “genocide” of African Americans has been turned on its head.

Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to black women in the South, in an effort that was called the “Negro Project.” Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to gain the trust of the community:

Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim.”

It goes on to characterize beliefs such as Cain’s as “extremist.” The project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”

On today's "WallBuilders Live," David Barton and Rick Green interviewed Frank Pavone of Priests for Life where they discussed the trial of Kermit Gosnell. Following the interview, Barton asserted that the Gosnell case "the biggest mass murder trial in American history" before declaring that activists should not be afraid of placing the blame on the Democratic Party because the Democrats "have wrapped Gosnell around themselves":

The news has done a very, very, very poor job of covering the Gosnell trial which is one of the mass murder trials, the biggest mass murder trials in American history. You know, just basically decapitating a hundred babies or sniping the spinal cords and all the screaming, it's just unbelievable.

Democrats are the ones who have owned the abortion issue. In their platform they proudly proclaim [it,] so why do I feel like I have to tread on neutral ground and not call out Democrats versus Republicans? Hey, the Democrats are the ones who have wrapped the flag of abortion around themselves, they have wrapped Gosnell around themselves. Gosnell is a product of the Democrat thinking and philosophy ... If you're in the Democrat Party,  this is what your party believes, this is what your party platform says, this is what you've wrapped yourself around, this is what you promote as president, this is it.

Barton went on to proclaim that the key to winning the abortion battle is to educate people about the graphic nature of what abortion entails ... just like they should do with the issue of homosexuality in explaining how truly "reprehensible" it is:

Bill Dannemeyer, a Lutheran guy, he said "you Democrats, you're wanting to fund all this homosexual activity, let me describe to you what homosexuality is."  And he just took a homosexual handbook that described the different types of homosexual sex and it grossed all the congressmen out. He said "why are you grossed out, this is what you're funding" and he literally read it into the [Congressional] Record and they wanted to purge the record. But once you get education, you go man, this is gross stuff, whether it's homosexuality, whether it's abortion.

You know, even my grandad, when I got involved in the Republican Party ... he had been a lifelong Democrat, he said "why'd you do that?"  And I said "well, Grandad, because of where they are on abortion and where they are on religious expression and where they are on homosexuality."  We were building a fence at the time and I vividly remember it, we were putting the barbed wire up and nailing it on the post and he just listened to me and for about five minutes, he didn't say anything and about five minutes later he said "sometime you're going to have to tell me what homosexuality is. I hear people use that and I'm not sure what that is."

And there's a guy who has been in the Democrat Party his whole life but because of the reprehensible nature of what it is, he didn't know, it had never been described. The Founding Fathers called it the crime not to be mentioned, it was that reprehensible.

Sen. Rand Paul’s chief of staff Doug Stafford appears to be scrambling to explain the Senator’s recent comments during a CNN interview where he said there would be “thousands of exceptions” to his “Life at Conception Act,” a federal personhood bill that would ban all abortion by granting legal status to embryos. He added that “each individual case would have to be addressed” and that there will “be a lot of complicated things the law may not ultimately be able to address in the early stages of pregnancy that would have to be part of what occurs between the physician and the woman and the family.”

Understandably, many people interpreted his comments to mean that the government shouldn’t be intruding on the medical decisions that are unique to each woman, or the opposite of what his sweeping anti-choice law would do.

But in an interview with LifeSiteNews, Stafford stressed that Paul’s mention of “thousands of exceptions” only “meant that a singular exception to save the life of the mother would likely cover thousands of individual cases.”

So the “thousands of exceptions” was only really one exception.

And when Paul said that women, their doctord and their families would be free from government interference during the early stage of the pregnancy, Stafford said that Paul was only referring to emergency contraception that prevents fertilization.

Emergency contraception, of course, only works up to 120 hours after sexual intercourse.

Stafford noted that such methods won’t be covered by the law because “it is not practically possible to legislate things like the morning after pill or other emergency contraception,” while stressing that Paul still seeks to ban RU-486.

Some pro-life activists were left scratching their heads after a recent interview Senator Rand Paul did on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show “The Situation Room,” in which the senator seemed to say he supported “thousands of exceptions” to his general belief that abortion should be illegal. But Paul spokesman Doug Stafford told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview on Wednesday that the senator’s remarks were misunderstood, reiterating that Paul is staunchly pro-life.

…

After the interview, the Atlantic Wire ran a story with the headline “Rand Paul Isn’t 100% Pro-life Anymore,” arguing that the language Paul used in his answer sounded remarkably similar to pro-choice rhetoric claiming abortion should always be a private matter between a woman and her doctor.

But Paul’s chief of staff, Doug Stafford, said the Atlantic got it wrong.

Paul “was speaking medically,” Stafford said.

By “thousands of exceptions,” Stafford told LifeSiteNews.com, Paul meant that a singular exception to save the life of the mother would likely cover thousands of individual cases – for example, ectopic pregnancies or others that directly threaten the mother’s life.

The senator is not in favor of the more nebulous “health of the mother” exception that pro-life advocates argue can be applied to any woman facing an unwanted pregnancy.

But what about Paul’s statement that the Life at Conception Act may not be able to address early abortions? That, too, was a misunderstanding, according to Stafford. He said the senator was talking about things like emergency contraception pills, which may cause very early abortions, but since they contain the exact same drugs used in standard birth control pills, the senator believes they will be nearly impossible to ban.

Senator Paul “has always said it is not practically possible to legislate things like the morning after pill or other emergency contraception,” Stafford said. “It simply isn't possible to do so. The law will likely never be able to reach that.”

“You can legislate abortifacients like RU-486, and he would,” he said. “But you can’t legislatively ban artificial estrogen and progesterone.”