US Abortion Industry Wants Canadian Doctors Forced to Perform Abortions

Cosmetic Abortion an Ugly Science

Medical Students for Choice: Next Generation of Abortionists

Pro-Life Woman Approach Gets Boost 

Man Who Sold Abortion Business a Bogus Malpractice Insurance has been Sentenced

UN Pressuring Philippines to Reduce Population Numbers & Support Abortion

World Bank to Continue Promoting Abortion in Developing Nations After US Drops Opposition

El Salvador “An Army Opposed to Abortion” Says Nation’s President 

Missouri Supreme Court Upholds Parental Consent Abortion Law

Utah Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Case Reopened by Federal Judge  

Ohio Planned Parenthood Abortion Center Sued Over Incest Case Coverup  

Kansas Governor Signs Bill Protecting Pregnant Women & Unborn who are victims of violence

New York Abortion Practitioner Who Sexually Abused Patient Loses License...     

US ABORTION INDUSTRY WANTS CANADA DOCTORS FORCED TO DO ABORTIONS. The head of an abortion business trade group that is comprised mostly of American-based abortion facilities wants Canada to change its laws and force doctors there to do abortions. Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, claims Canadian women are having to wait too long to get one.

The waiting time, she said, comes about because she claims just 15 percent of doctors in Canada are willing to do an abortion -- with the rest refusing for professional or personal reasons. Though doctors hold to the Hippocratic Oath and its belief that physicians are meant to heal, not harm or kill their patients, Saprota said they should instead put doing abortions for women who want them ahead of "their own religious and moral convictions."

Her group has called on the Canadian Medical Association to change its policy, which currently allows physicians to opt out of doing abortions.

"We're hearing from women across Canada and from our providers that this is a problem," she told the National Post. "It has reached a critical mass that many women are upset that they haven't been able to get referrals from their physicians."

Saporta claims that making women wait to have an abortion makes them more dangerous, even though early-term abortions cause women significant physical, spiritual and mental health problems.

Dr. Williard Johnston, president of Canadian Physicians for Life, responded to the pro-abortion group's call and said that whether women have a risky abortion isn't up to the doctor.

"It's not within the control of the physician who doesn't want to participate, how much longer the delay will be," she told the Calgary Sun newspaper. "That is entirely the responsibility of the system at large."

Johnston's group wants the CMA to go the other direction and strengthen its policy so doctors aren't pressured or forced into doing abortions or making abortion referrals.

"Now is not the time for us to be weakening the conscience protection for health care workers with the huge changes we are facing with technological capabilities," he said.

CMA President Dr. Colin McMillan defended the group's current policy saying it does not "treat women unfairly or impede their access to critical health care." The CMA's abortion policy was passed in 1988 and is "re-confirmed" every year, with the most recent vote in February. [13-14May07, LifeNews.com, Ertelt, Ottawa, Canada]COMMENT: Canada -- trying to set precedent by forcing doctors to have to do/refer for abortions (in a socialized medical system). This would provide leverage when they go after American physicians with the same demands...AAPLOG, 23May07]

COSMETIC ABORTION AN UGLY SCIENCE. In England, it now seems, a baby can be aborted for not being pretty enough. Maybe this was inevitable as genetic screening and techniques such as ultrasound advanced.

The London Daily Telegraph Web site reports that the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has licensed a fertility clinic to screen embryos for a genetic defect that causes a severe squint.

A squint? The aborting of babies with undesired characteristics is hardly new. In China, where people have a strong preference for boys, so many female babies have been aborted that a serious imbalance between the sexes exists. Babies with fatal conditions have been aborted. We now seem to have invented cosmetic abortion.

The man to whom the license was granted, professor Gedis Grudzinskas, was asked whether he would screen babies for hair color. He replied that hair color "can be a cause of bullying, which can lead to suicide. With the agreement of the HFEA, I would do it."

As medical genetics advances, it will become possible to predict more and more characteristics of an unborn child -- hair color, height, likelihood of obesity, perhaps intelligence. Presumably, it will then be possible to try again and again until you get your ideal baby. This is strange territory.

The list of techniques lengthens: artificial insemination, sperm banks, in vitro fertilization, DNA screening for abortion and cloning just around the corner. Selective abortion might be called passive genetic engineering. Though it is further in the future, design from scratch by genetic manipulation looks possible in principle.

The idea of matching a child, or a soon-to-be child, against a checklist to decide whether to keep it struck me as repellant, but I wasn't sure why. I asked several friends what they thought. Their reaction was pretty much mine. One woman made a face and just said, "Creepy." Yes, but why?
These people weren't against abortion in general. If abortion is all right because you don't want a baby at all, why is it unsettling to have an abortion because you don't want a particular baby?

Increasing biological knowledge raises a lot of ethical questions that didn't exist before. For example, it used to be that if you suffered severe brain damage in an accident, you died. Today, medical machinery can keep a body alive when the brain is dead. It might make sense to unplug the victim when there is clearly no one home, but that's euthanasia, and where do you draw the line?

Similar questions come up in the case of premature babies. In the past, babies more than somewhat premature just died. Today medical science can keep extremely premature children alive, including crack babies with grave defects. Some of them are nightmarishly deformed. Where do you draw the line?

Mr. Grudzinskas further said that "he would seek to screen for any genetic factor at all that would cause a family severe distress."

Here is another step into a curious future. First, screening tried to eliminate babies who had some inevitably fatal disorder, like cystic fibrosis. Then Mr. Grudzinskas gets a license to screen for a condition that would be unpleasant, specifically an ugly squint. Now he wants to screen for anything that might make mommy and daddy unhappy. Maybe the child screens to be healthy and in fact brilliant, but maybe daddy can't stand nerds, or the DNA says the child might be overweight. This makes abortion begin to sound like a branch of psychotherapy, and child-bearing like shopping. "Creepy" isn't a scientific term, but maybe it fits. [19May2007, http://www.washingtontimes.com/technology/20070518-100822-2536r.htm, By Fred Reed; N Valko RN, 23May07]

MEDICAL STUDENTS WEIGH BEING NEXT GENERATION OF ABORTION PRACTITIONERS. Taking the life of one patient and likely hurting the other isn't the idea most medical students have in mind when they're thinking of a specialty or career after college. But for some pro-abortion students, becoming an abortion practitioner is not only an option, but, they feel, an obligation because of declining numbers. Plastic surgeons are often looked down upon by the rest of the medical community but there are more than three times as many people doing cosmetic surgeries as there are abortion practitioners. That's how frowned upon the profession is within the medical world -- and the number is on the decline.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood -- the nation’s largest abortion business -- estimates that there are about 1,800 abortion practitioners in the United States; but the number has fallen about 37 percent from 1982-2000 for a variety of reasons.

Most abortion practitioners are older and retiring, many come from the bottom ranks of medical school and have had run-ins with state health departments over botched abortions or health violations, others have converted to a pro-life position.

Looking at the equation from the pro-abortion side, groups like Medical Students for Choice say the decline is the result of stepped up protests against abortion practitioners at both the abortion centers as well as their homes. And abortion advocacy groups say the decline has been caused by more state regulations on abortion facilities to ensure that women's health is better protected and to reduce the number of abortions.
But two students at the very liberal University of Colorado in Boulder say they're likely going to enter the field.
Fourth year medical student Megan Lederer, who is 30, told the Los Angeles Times that she's being drawn into considering becoming an abortion practitioner because of horror stories groups like NARAL still perpetuate about women dying from illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade.

Never mind that women still die from abortion despite its legality and that the abortion advocates at the time cooked the books.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, NARAL's co-founder before Roe was handed down in 1973, admits his group lied about the number of women who died from illegal abortions when testifying before the Supreme Court in 1972.
"We spoke of 5,000 - 10,000 deaths a year," he has said previously. "I confess that I knew the figures were totally false [but] it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

Still, Lederer admits she's drawn to the practice because abortion is an act of defiance -- a way to thumb her nose at a society that is increasingly pro-life. "It's like when your big brother says you can't do something," Lederer said. "That just makes you want to do it even more."
If she becomes an abortion practitioner, her decision would be particularly ironic as her father is a pediatrician. But the woman's studies major whose mom bought her a book on Gloria Steinem says she may be needed to do abortions for the next generation of women. She attended a recent MFC conference with abortion practitioners and other medical students and was amazed that people who could otherwise be respected physicians could make a profit and career in the abortion business.
Meanwhile, third-year medical student Lysie Cirona, told the Times that her possible decision to devote her medical career to taking the lives of unborn children is a backlash at the Supreme Court's recent ruling upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortions. "It wasn't on my radar screen" a year ago, Cirona told the newspaper, but now she envisions herself flying to states like Nebraska or North Dakota to do abortions because large portions of the state don't have abortion centers.
Cirona's roommate, Michelle Cleeves, told the Los Angeles paper that she's drawn to becoming an abortion practitioner because doing simple things to promote abortion -- voting for candidates or putting a bumper sticker on her car -- are no longer enough. "It doesn't matter what you believe if you don't back it up with action," she said. "The right to abortion doesn't mean anything if women don't have access."

Access is what abortion advocates desire most -- not just in terms of the number of abortion centers but the number of medical school programs where doing an abortion is part of the curriculum. Lois Backus, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, says that just 20 out of 400 family practice residencies include abortion training. It appears likely that the number will have a direct correlation with the number of abortion practitioners in the future. [22May07, Ertelt, LifeNews.com Denver, CO]

PRO-LIFE'S PRO-WOMAN APPROACH GOT BOOST FROM ABORTION RULING.  Key leaders in the pro-life movement see the Supreme Court's recent ruling upholding the partial-birth abortion ban as the latest step in proving that pro-life doesn't mean anti-woman. Some see the decision as validating the assertions pro-life advocates have made in the last several years that abortion hurts women. For the pro-life community, opposing partial-birth abortions makes common sense.

A partial birth abortion medical description sounds something akin to a horror film -- birthing a baby most of the way from her mother's womb, puncturing her skull, and suctioning out the contents of her skull. The abortion procedure itself is revolting to all but the most hard-core pro-abortion advocates but it also makes no sense from the standpoint of women's health.

Dr. Anthony Levatino, a Las Cruces, New Mexico OBGYN who formerly did abortions in New York, says a partial-birth abortion is a three day long process and would never be a medical procedure a doctor would need to use to protect a woman's health.

"The way you end a pregnancy to save a woman's life is to deliver the (baby)," Levatino said. "If you wait three days to do a partial birth abortion, she's going to end up in the morgue."

That's a point that pro-life advocates across the board say not only refutes the arguments of abortion advocates that partial-birth abortions ought to remain legal but shows that they are more in tune with the concerns of women than groups like Planned Parenthood or NARAL.

“We think of ourselves as very pro-woman,” said Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told the Associated Press. “We believe that when you help the woman, you help the baby.”

While NRLC highlights the pro-woman arguments associated with the pro-life position, other groups like Feminists for Life take the point even further. The group has championed the argument since its founding in the early 1970s and its "Women Deserve Better" signs are now a staple of any pro-life event.

The group has made a point of not only showing abortion hurts women by causing a variety of medical and mental health problems but works to reduce the so-called socioeconomic need most women say they have for an abortion by helping them find other options.

On college campuses, pro-life groups sing the praises of Feminists for Life for their ability to help them organize pregnancy resource forums or giving them a means of communicating with a culture that normally knee-jerks away from the standard "pro-baby" arguments the pro-life movement has relied on since Roe.

The pro-woman, pro-life perspective has made its way throughout the pro-life movement and even state legislators are embracing the concept that the pro-life position embraces both mother and child.

When the state of South Dakota passed an abortion ban that would have been a direct attack on the Supreme Court's landmark abortion ruling, it released a several-dozen page report on the state of abortion.
The report could have been filled with polemic remarks condemning abortions, the women who have them or the practitioners who do them. Instead, page after page of the report highlighted the various ways abortion has hurt women and cited the commentary of thousands of women who know firsthand how abortion destroyed their lives.

Allan Parker, the head of the Justice Foundation, a Texas-based pro-life law firm that helped organize the testimonies for the South Dakota legislature, talked with the Associated Press about the direction the pro-life movement is headed based on the pro-woman and post-abortion perspective.

He compared the newer direction to the approach taken by the anti-smoking community. “We’re kind of in the early stages of tobacco litigation,” Parker said. Parker also pointed out how Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in the partial-birth abortion case, cited a Justice Foundation brief in his decision.
"It