Life Advocacy Briefing

Stop Subsidizing Abortionists!

THE ENORMITY OF TAXPAYER SUBSIDIES TO ABORTIONISTS is a wrong which must be righted by concerted, persistent advocacy on the part of citizens and officials alike.

Last Wednesday, a team of 11 Members of Congress took up the cause in a “special order” hour of speeches in the House chamber immediately after the close of business for the day. Carried on C-SPAN as well as through the Capitol Hill television circuit, the special order was led by Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), chairman of the pro-life caucus in the House.

The object was to build support for the initiative of Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) to amend the annual spending bill for the Dept. of Health & Human Services (HHS) to bar Title X (Ten) family planning funding to any grantee or contractor which commits or refers for abortion, a limit long established for foreign aid but unaddressed in domestic spending.

It is through Title X that Planned Parenthood draws much of its enormous funding, though the huge and expanding promiscuity promotion outfit commits by far the most abortions each year within the United States.

We begin today to publish the special order speeches (see the close of this Life Advocacy Briefing), urging our readers to inform themselves about this issue and then take up the cause with calls to their respective Members of Congress. Calls may be placed via the Capitol switchboard at 1-202/224-3121. Any citizen who does not yet know who represents him or her in Congress may furnish his or her zip code to the operator to be connected to the appropriate office.

Abstinence Education Renewal Passes

THE EXTENSION OF TITLE V (FIVE) ABSTINENCE EDUCATION, riding on the extension of Medicare provisions, has gone to the President’s desk.

The stalled Medicare extension bill was taken up when Senators returned from the Independence Day recess. Having already passed the House, it now awaits action by the President, who has indicated dissatisfaction with certain of the Medicare provisions. He is expected to veto it, and an override is likely in both houses of Congress. The abstinence provisions are no longer considered controversial.

The Definitive Report on the Obama ‘Born-Alive’ Record

COLUMNIST JILL STANEK HAS WRITTEN the definitive report on Sen. Barack Obama’s sordid record of opposition to legislation defining newborns who survive abortions as human beings – technically, “persons” – for purposes of medical assessment and treatment.

Since the Illinois Democrat’s campaign has sought to obfuscate his extremism on this disturbing issue, pro-life citizens need to arm themselves with the truth about the Presidential nominee’s record on this matter.

Mrs. Stanek is highly qualified to document Sen. Obama’s record on Born-Alive Infant Protection legislation; she is the whistleblower who brought the enormity of intentional neglect of abortion survivors to the attention of the public and of lawmakers both in Congress and in the General Assembly of Illinois, her home state.  Mrs. Stanek was, at the time, a labor/delivery nurse who personally held such a baby 45 minutes until he died, helpless under hospital policy to engage neonatal physicians to assess and treat the vulnerable little one. She appeared before Sen. Obama’s state senate committee and had numerous encounters with him.

Her column appears in the “Columnists/Wednesday/Jill Stanek” archives of WorldNetDaily.com, published July 9.

Not on Your Life!

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAS REJECTED A REQUEST by the Danish government, reports Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-Fam), “‘to accelerate implementation of Millennium Development Goal 3,’ which calls for ‘gender equality and women’s empowerment.’”

The Danish-instigated campaign is going beyond the wording of the development goal, reports C-Fam, and expressly “calls on governments to ensure women’s ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights,’ a term that has been interpreted by some to include abortion, claiming that ‘access to services and information on sexual and reproductive health will empower women to make their own choices about the number of children they have, safe pregnancy and delivery.’” The language in the Danish campaign is borrowed from propaganda of the international abortion cartel, led by International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Jesse Helms, RIP

A GIANT OF THE PRO-LIFE CAUSE – indeed, a giant of modern American history – has passed to his reward. A persistent, articulate defender of the paramount God-given right to Life and chief sponsor of some 27 pro-life bills and amendments during his 30 years in the  Senate, former Sen. Jesse Helms departed this world on Independence Day, leaving a legacy of clear thinking, bold speaking and determined action. Though his later days were spent in the privacy of his family, still we will miss him.

Covert Eugenics Pogrom Exposed

July 10, 2008, Friday Fax by Susan Yoshihara PhD, Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-Fam)

A book recently published by Harvard University Press explains how eugenics united some of the richest and most powerful elites of the 20th century into a movement “to remake humanity by controlling the population of the world,” answering to no one and bringing untold misery upon the world’s poor.

The book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population was written by Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly and shows why today’s reproductive rights advocates are “faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea where it comes from or where it can lead.”

In 1952, at a secret, invitation-only gathering in Colonial Williamsburg, John D. Rockefeller III brought together what would become the modern population control establishment. Setting the agenda for the following decades were the heads of the US Atomic Energy Commission, National Academy of Sciences and top scientists “from embryology to economics,” including past and present Nobel Prize winners.

From verbatim transcripts of the “Conference on Population Problems,” just one of the countless number of such meetings the book exposes, Connelly found that what drove them were the questions of how many people the world could hold, along with “whether ‘industrial development should be withheld’ from poor, agrarian countries like India.” By decreasing mortality and encouraging “breeding,” development would increase inferior populations and further degrade “the genetic quality of the human race.” They decided radical measures to reduce birthrates were justified in order to save “Western Civilization” from being dragged down by the growing humanitarian demands of Third World countries.

Thus was born the Population Council, which would in turn become the nexus of the entire population control movement, going on to coordinate the work of the United Nations, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) – founded three weeks later – as well as major pharmaceutical firms.

The founder of IPPF, Margaret Sanger, selected for its first director general the psychologist C.G. Blacker, who called for a strategy of “crypto-eugenics,” saying, “You seek to fulfill the aims of eugenics without disclosing what you are really aiming at and without mentioning the word.”

When Nehru presented India’s first population-limitation policy in December 1952, the population establishment found a willing government that would allow them to start experimenting on its people to find a cheap contraceptive “to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles and among the most ignorant people,” as Margaret Sanger put it. Years later, Planned Parenthood would import the experiments back into poor neighborhoods in the United States. Sanger said, “I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”

According to Connelly, it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson, prodded by a few highly influential advisors, that American funding soared, turning Sanger’s vision of forcing birth control on the world’s poor into reality in India and beyond. As the initiatives gained unstoppable momentum, the brutal consequences shocked even the most enthusiastic population controllers.

Making the Case for the Pence Amendment

July 9, 2008, special order speeches in the House of Representatives; source: Congressional Record

REP. CHRIS SMITH (R-NJ): … Most Americans, I suspect, probably have no idea whatsoever that our tax dollars have enabled abortionists to establish and to run hundreds and hundreds of abortion mills throughout America. Indeed, America’s biggest abortion chain is Planned Parenthood. Each year, approximately 290,000 children are aborted in Planned Parenthood clinics. Each year, Planned Parenthood gets more than $335 million in taxpayer funds, including huge amounts from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Title Ten program. Tragically, as their business grows – and they now have some 850 clinics, and they have embarked on a building binge – … as the taxpayer funds go up, the number of abortions go up, because more venues are then provided to destroy the unborn child.

It may come as a surprise to at least some of my colleagues and the American people that the babies lost and women wounded by abortion are disproportionately African American and Hispanic. A study in 2005 found that 62% of Planned Parenthood abortion mills are located in African American communities. And when Hispanics are included, that percentage rises to over 70%. Of course, every human life is sacred, regardless of race, gender, disability or condition of dependency. Every human life is of infinite value. But the disproportionate number of minorities who are aborted in Planned Parenthood clinics begs the question.

… Mr. Speaker, it is time, it is long past time, for us to take a serious – and for some a second – look at Planned Parenthood, its origins and the fact that since 1973 – the year the US Supreme Court issued its infamous Roe v. Wade decision and legalized abortion – that approximately 4.5 million babies, disproportionately African American and Hispanic, have died in Planned Parenthood clinics.

It is time to look past the slogans and the rhetoric and the cheap sophistry, the euphemisms that are used to mask and to cloak this deed that kills a child. Abortion is big business, and it is destroying the next generation of Americans. And you and I, Mr. Speaker, are subsidizing it.

Tragically, the seemingly benign Planned Parenthood, which works overtime to market its image and its brand, is in the grisly business of dismembering the fragile bodies of unborn children with chemicals, sharp knives and hideous suction machines that are 25 to 30 times more powerful than a vacuum cleaner used at home. Planned Parenthood ought to be known as Child Abuse, Incorporated, for the large number of children, 4.5 million, that it has already killed and continues to kill, all while being subsidized by American taxpayers.

This is not a business of healing or nurturing or caring. This is a business of destroying the most vulnerable and weakest members of our society.

For Planned Parenthood, business is good. Violence against children pays handsomely. In 2006, it actually increased the number of abortions it performed by nearly 25,000 (while abortions nationwide were in decline), for a total of 289,750, a new pathetic record of kids killed even for Planned Parenthood. For so-called medical abortions, Planned Parenthood quotes prices from $350 to $650. For surgical abortions, they earn $350 to $900 apiece. These fees for so-called “services rendered” boost the bottom line of this big business.

To put the annual number of child deaths in perspective, I ask my colleagues and the American people to picture this: 71,000 fans filled the University of Phoenix stadium to watch the Super Bowl this past February. … The number of unborn babies whose lives were taken from them before they could take their first breath by this one corporation in one year could have filled that enormous stadium more than four times over. Planned Parenthood is now responsible for committing more than one out of every five abortions performed in the United States of America.

If the number of abortions performed alone doesn’t convince you of Planned Parenthood’s agenda, just compare it with other services it provides to pregnant women. Planned Parenthood – they have got the word “parenthood” in their slogan, in their name – but they provided a mere 11,000 clients with prenatal care. You walk into what is called a Planned Parenthood clinic, and you would expect to walk out with a baby, but prenatal care is not something they put an emphasis on. That is a ratio of one parent to every 26 women who lose their children to abortion. After it was revealed that Planned Parenthood had referred a meager 1,414 clients to adoption services in 2004, Planned Parenthood stopped reporting this minuscule adoption referral number. So, again, those children who go to abortion clinics with their mothers – in utero, that is – don’t walk out as potential adoptees.

… There are thousands of American families waiting to adopt, and we all know that. There are upwards of two million families who would love to adopt, but unfortunately, the babies are aborted.

Finally, if that is not enough, this so-called “pro-choice” organization does everything within its power and massive budget to prevent women from knowing all of their options and from being certain that their choices are truly informed.

Let’s not forget that Planned Parenthood lobbies this Chamber and the Senate and certainly in each legislature throughout the country, and they litigate and litigate and bring court cases over and over again in all of the states, against virtually every child protection initiative at both the state and federal levels, including that of parental notification, spousal notification, women’s right-to-know laws, informed consent laws – which actually bring down the numbers when women get the booklet and are informed about the growth and about the development of their child as well as about deleterious effects to their health – waiting periods, partial-birth abortion [bans], the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, statutory rape reporting laws and, of course, abortion funding bans.

Can we trust Planned Parenthood? They say their vision is to be the nation’s most trusted provider of sexual and reproductive health care. This is from an organization that targets minorities, that performs millions of abortions and barely even attempts to help women carry the babies to term. Reproductive health should include – not exclude – babies.

Mr. Speaker, the truth about Planned Parenthood’s long, systematic destruction of vulnerable human life, at long last, must be brought to light. The cover-up must end.