Twelve New Jersey nurses have won a smashing victory against their employer, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, which established a policy in September telling nurses working in the Same Day Surgery Unit they must assist in abortions. The nurses were “repeatedly threatened that they must assist abortions or be terminated,” according to Matt Bowman of the Alliance Defense Fund who served as the attorney for the nurses.
Bowman was engaged when the nurses rebelled and fought for their jobs and their conscience rights. The nurses took the hospital to court where a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order in November ordering the hospital to stop all training, procedures and performances related to abortion. This week, the nurses reached an agreement with the hospital that allows them to keep their jobs and not have to assist with abortions.
Bowman says the settlement is a huge victory. “It is a victory because the hospital finally agreed to obey the law and not force our clients to do any work on abortion cases in violation of their beliefs. The hospital agreed not to penalize our clients in any way because they choose to not help abortions, according to their legal rights. The hospital is required to fully staff all abortion cases so that our clients would never be needed for those cases, and the hospital cannot use pro-abortion staff to replace our clients or reduce their hours.”
Shortly after the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision, Wisconsin passed a law protecting the conscience rights of medical professionals and facilities who did not want to participate in the performance of abortions. Many other states followed suits as did the federal government. The proponents of abortion, in their attempts to make abortion “mainstream” have wanted to force participation. The net effect would be that pro-life people would just not enter the medical field.
Kudos to the twelve nurses who had the courage to stand up to their employer, and to Matt Bowman who expertly defended them.
Just in time for Christmas, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins has approved still more human embryonic stem cell lines (hESC lines) for taxpayer funding. Today’s NIH approval brings the total number of human embryonic stem cell lines at the federal trough to 142.
This approval was not all that surprising. The four new lines, from the University of Queensland, Australia, were recommended for approval by the “Stem Cell Working Group” at the December 9, 2011, meeting of the Director’s Advisory Committee. The Stem Cell Working group had also voted not to approve six lines from China.
The four new hESC lines that have been approved are not for clinical use, however. Subsequent to the meeting and before the latest approvals, NIH also approved two other hESC lines, from Mt. Sinai Hospital in Canada. Those two lines are also restricted:
NIH-funded research with this line may only be conducted at Mount Sinai Hospital and “other Canadian laboratories affiliated with the Canadian Stem Cell Network for further research or potential clinical use.”
These latest approval come a little over two months after Collins’ last approval. The line, “HUES PGD 14,” was created by Harvard University from a female embryo. According to the information provided on the NIH website:
“The embryo from which this hESC line was derived was determined through preimplantation genetic diagnosis to be affected with Spinal Muscular Atrophy.”
This highlights the point made by Dr. James Sherley and Dr. Theresa Deisher in the ongoing Sherley et al. v. Sebelius et al. case that there is a continued demand for more embryo destruction and more hESC lines. As evidenced by the steady growth, the current NIH guidelines continue to provide an incentive for additional human embryo destruction.
That October addition came less than three weeks after Collins had approved three more human embryonic stem cell lines for taxpayer funding. Two of the three new lines from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center appear to have chromosomal abnormalities, as well as to be from the destruction of full siblings (having the same mother and father).
In August Collins approved four hESC lines for the embryonic stem cell registry. They are sold by the company BioTime, Inc., which had two other hESC lines approved on June 2, 2011.
Details of the embryo destruction and hESC derivation (including from siblings)) were published by ESI and Sydney IVF workers in 2007, around the time that ESI abandoned its schemes for therapies based on hESC. BioTime subsequently acquired ESI in 2010.
While NIH continues to waste more taxpayer funds on destructive embryo research, adult stem cells are the only stem cell treating patients, with more and more published evidence accumulating every week.
Published scientific evidence over the last few months shows effectiveness of adult stem cells in helping patients with angina pain, aggressive multiple sclerosis, enlarged hearts, systemic sclerosis, and creating new windpipes, to name just a few examples of adult stem cell successes.
Dr. David Prentice, Senior Fellow for Life Sciences at Family Research Council
Through organ transplantation, medicine has come up with an extraordinary way to extend life for an individual in danger of dying from organ failure. Organ donation is promoted in numerous ways. Everyone knows someone who has had a lifesaving organ transplant.
The Chinese and Belgians have taken organ transplantation to a new and sickening level. Just a few short years after euthanasia became legal in Belgium, doctors there have linked euthanasia with organ harvesting. Wesley Smith reports that between January of 2007 and December of 2009, 17 lung transplants were performed with four or them following euthanasia of the donor patients. Smith notes the danger of this process because vulnerable people with disabilities, perhaps who believe they are or could become a burden, could be coaxed into offering a “benefit” to society by agreeing to be be killed for their organs.
The Chinese theory is — why waste an execution? A recent article in the Weekly Standard describes in gory detail how Chinese prisoners were taken to a remote location where graves had been dug. Ambulances stood by to receive prisoners who had been shot in the right side of the heart, providing maximum conditions for harvesting their organs. After the organs are retrieved, the prisoners were buried and the ambulances sped to medical centers where transplant recipients awaited.
How sickening that a positive lifesaving process can be so distorted.
Youth Health Educator. Sounds impressive. Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI) is advertising this job and those who apply must be at least 14-years old. Essentially these young people will do peer-to-peer sex education.
“This position will further the department’s mission of creating sexually healthy communities with a focus on reducing the rate of teen and young adult pregnancy and STIs…..More specifically, this position will provide one-on-one health education to youth in our Youth Health Clinics, assist with providing direct sexuality education to youth via the youth text hotline and “Youth Nights” programming, and act as community advocates regarding issues of responsible sexuality education among adolescents and young adults,” states the Purpose of Position statement on the PPWI website. The applicant must have the “Ability to relate to and influence peers..”
Planned Parenthood is masterful at luring young people into its circles, giving them a known place to go if a pregnancy occurs. If pregnant, the young woman is conveniently steered into one of PP’s abortion clinics. A built-in referral network. It would be interesting to know if our taxpayer dollars are funding these positions.
The ABC 20/20 news story is riveting — a revealing look at why there are so many fewer women than men in India. Reporter Elizabeth Vargas traveled to India to bring this story of what is called “Gendercide” home to a stunned American audience.
Here are the numbers: An astonishing 50,000 girl babies are aborted each month. One millions girl babies die every year. Over 40 million girls have been killed through sex selection abortions, neglect or outright murder in the past decades.
The main reason for male preference is money. Indian culture demands that a woman entering a marriage provide a dowry. In order to avoid impoverishing the family, girls are simply eliminated. Sex selective abortions are not used just by poor families, however, as middle and upper class families also seek ultrasound to guarantee the birth of a son.
Vargas explains that India has laws against ultrasounds to determine the sex of the baby, and sex selection abortion itself is illegal. These laws are so poorly enforced that Vargas walked down street after street and saw signs everywhere offering ultrasound services. “There are even technicians who pack portable ultrasounds and travel to villages offering their services.”
Vargas traveled to a village to view the long-term impact firsthand. “Everywhere we looked, we saw boys, young men, old men, but very, very few women. It was unsettling, especially because we knew this was not some freak of nature, but a results of the deliberate extermination of girls.”
Some girls who are “lucky” are born and abandoned, taken in the middle of the night to a “drop box.” Vargas says one drop box “is at a place called the Unique Orphanage in Punjab. We went from the village with no women, to the orphanage with no boys. There are only girls here…60 of them…all cared for by a wonderful woman who will raise each and every one…No one knows their real birth date, so once a year they have one giant birthday party for everyone. As we left the orphanage, I thought back to a temple I visited days earlier where newlyweds make a pilgrimage, to kneel and pray. Not for wealth, or long lives, or success. They pray for a baby boy, and not for a girl. Some of them are willing to kill to make that wish come true.”
A chilling story with enormous moral and demographic consequences that breaks one’s heart.
In what can only be described as a new low, students in the Vermont Essex High School Social Justice Theater class have produced a video promoting doctor-prescribed suicide. “The students became aware of the issue of Death with Dignity this fall, and wanted to add their voices, their opinions, and their insight as teenagers to this issue, in the hopes of inspiring action in the Vermont legislature this session,” says the Patient Choices at End of Life website which houses the video.
Six students tout the “benefits” of doctor-prescribed suicide with the recurring theme of “It’s my life.” They spout the rhetoric of euthanasia advocates chanting words like “choice,” “dignity,” and “control.” It is chilling that a school and students would be used for this purpose.
Vermont, Hawaii and Massachusetts are 2012 battleground states for legalization of doctor-prescribed suicide.
Sue Thayer came to town and will not soon be forgotten. Sue served as manager of a Planned Parenthood (PP) family planning clinic in Storm Lake, Iowa for 18 years. She came to Wisconsin to testify in favor of SB 306, the Coercive and Web Cam Abortion Prevention Act — a bill that would prohibit web cam abortions in Wisconsin.
Sue Thayer’s journey is fascinating. She loved her job at Planned Parenthood, believing she was helping to prevent abortions. Around 2007, Planned Parenthood of Iowa dreamed up the web cam abortion scheme and mandated that all of its family planning clinics participate. Sue was aghast. She, a non-medical person, would be trained to do vaginal ultrasounds and would have the web cam apparatus in her clinic. This would force her to directly participate in abortion. Sue spoke up forcefully against this scheme and was fired (they were downsizing, she was told).
Sue related all of this as part of her testimony at yesterday’s public hearing on SB 306. Senator Jon Erpenbach, a committee member, asked Sue why she stayed so long at Planned Parenthood. Her response was immediate — because Planned Parenthood changed. PP no longer was following its mission of prevention and was now setting abortion quotas to fatten up the bottom line. Web cam abortions were just as expensive as surgical, yet much of the overhead was eliminated, given Planned Parenthood more profit.
Sue’s personal life is just as fascinating as her professional one. Two days ago, she adopted a 16-month-old Native American girl. Little Zoe joins Sue’s two natural children, two adopted children and one foster child to make a family of seven. Sue is a single parent. She has fostered over 100 children over the years and is quite a remarkable woman with a huge heart and love for children.
What a privilege it was to meet this woman and learn of her journey! She is in a good place now, out of the clutches of Planned Parenthood, eyes opened wide to the abortion-minded direction of her former employer. Sue Thayer is one of the signers of a letter to Congress offering to give personal testimony to a committee conducting an investigation of Planned Parenthood. We welcome her with open arms to our movement and our work. She is our new and beloved BFF.
The Wisconsin Right to Life State Political Action Committee won a sweeping victory today in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals which allows our organization to accept unlimited contributions to carry out our election work.
The Wisconsin Right to Life State PAC challenged a state law which limits individuals’ total annual contributions to PACs and candidates to $10,000. In its brief, Wisconsin Right to Life State PAC asked the three-judge panel to enter a permanent injunction in our favor. In a unanimous decision, a permanent injunction was issued “enjoining the enforcement of section 11.26(4) as applied to contributions to independent-expenditure committees.” The decision does not apply to political action committees that give contributions to candidates or political parties, only to those that act independently of candidates or political parties.
This victory is one more in a series of wins for Wisconsin Right to Life and the Wisconsin Right to Life State PAC in the areas of free speech and election law. We acknowledge the brilliant work done by our attorneys allowing Wisconsin Right to Life and its entities to significantly contribute to the state and national dialogue on speech and elections.
As reported, a congressional committee is conducting an investigation of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and its affiliates. Seven former employees of Planned Parenthood have written to the committee chairman, Rep.Fred Upton, and Rep. Henry Waxman stating that they can testify “from personal experience …that abortion is indeed deployed as a means of family planning” and that “one or more of us have personally witnessed and can testify to the validity of specific concerns raised by subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fl).”
The seven employees state they are prepared to testify on instances where an employee of Planned Parenthood or an affiliate did not:
Properly separate government funds prohibited for use for abortions from other funds.
Notify parents when a young girl is seeking an abortion.
Provide accurate information to a women seeking an abortion.
Detect and act upon a situation when a woman seeking an abortion is under coercion.
Engage in appropriate financial controls and billing practices in compliance with applicable state and federal laws.
The seven employees include Abby Johnson, whose defection as director of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic rocked the world. Abby Johnson is now a prominent right-to-life advocate and has been a featured speaker at several Wisconsin Right to Life events. Three other employees, Catherine Adair, Ramona Trevino and Sue Thayer, are scheduled to speak at WRTL events.
We applaud their courage in stepping forward to expose the radical abortion agenda of Planned Parenthood and look forward to their appearances in Wisconsin and, hopefully, before the subcommittee conducting the investigation.
As expected, Wisconsin Right to Life has been vindicated in John Doe proceedings related to recall elections initiated by a complaint to the District Attorney’s Office. We knew we had done nothing illegal, nor did we ever intend to do anything illegal. Wisconsin Right to Life is and always has been a revered organization that works within the law to correct a grave injustice in the law.
Our concern going forward is future unfounded complaints against Wisconsin Right to Life or other citizen groups. If the prosecutor had decided in favor of the complainants, ordinary campaigning, such as paying a television station to run ads, would have been outlawed. Wisconsin Right to Life is relieved that complainants’ extreme interpretation of the law has been rejected.
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