Reclaiming Fatherhood Conference: A Multifaceted Examination of Men Dealing with Abortion - www.menandabortion.info

NEW UPDATE! Unlicensed Abortionist Bertha Bugarin Arrested and Jailed After Botched Abortion Victims Come Forward

Council of Europe Presses Member States to Lift All Restrictions on Abortion

British Doctor Columnist Notes that Abortion Often Ends More Than Life

Newborn Boy's Body Found in Toilet Tank at Cumberland County Fairgrounds

Teens Get Life Term In Assault That Killed Human Fetus

National Law Banning "Live Birth" Abortions Needs Better Enforcement

Scottish Abortion Rate Continues to Rise in Tandem with “Values-Free” Sex Education

Using Maternal Mortality to Promote Abortion

Maternal Mortality Decreases in Nicaragua after Abortion Made Illegal

Abortion Businesses Sued Over Botched Abortions

UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Award Ceremony Honors Abortion Advocates

Historic Human Life Amendment Officially on CO Ballot

Planned Parenthood Sued for $50 Million for Injuring Teen in Failed Abortion

NEW! Sufficient Evidence: 18 Counts, Practicing Medicine Without a License

NEW! United Nations Agencies Use Stealth Strategy to Promote Abortion in Documents

NEW!  KY Abortionist’s License Suspended, Business Closed

NEW! Life Advocates Relieved about the Closing of New York City Abortion Business

NEW! Abortion Increase Among Young Girls in British Isles

NEW! RU-4Safety?

NEW! Mexico Tamaulipas State Legislators Reject Legalization of Abortion

El Salvador Lawmakers Sign Petition to Oppose Abortion, Other Nations Encouraged to Follow

Reproductive Racism: Planned Parenthood Targets Native Americans with Abortion 

The Unborn's Silent Suffering: They Are No Strangers to Pain...

CONFERENCE ON MEN AND ABORTION. Contrary to what the culture of death will tell you, women are not the only ones who feel the affects of abortion.
Reclaiming Fatherhood: A Multifaceted Examination of Men Dealing with Abortion
September 8-9, 2008 at the Chicago Marriott, Oak Brook.
Contact: or call 414-483-4141; www.menandabortion.info...

Father's Day isn't easy for those who have lost a child to abortion...

"Fathers and mothers of aborted children … struggle with how to grieve the loss of a person who 'disappeared' from their lives." —Wayne Brauning, M. Div., D. Min.

"Meds and massive amounts of therapy helped. But not completely. Something was still missing."

"There is a myth in society that says men don’t care. … that men are untouched by the experience. … My experience of having listened to men’s stories over the years is that the scenarios are much more complicated." —a post-abortion counselor

UNLICENSED ABORTIONIST ARRESTED AND JAILED AFTER BOTCHED ABORTION VICTIMS COME FORWARD. Bertha Bugarin was arrested on Thursday and jailed in San Diego on ten felonies and one misdemeanor for practicing medicine and prescribing drugs without a license. If convicted, she faces nine years in jail.

Bugarin, who has no medical training, owns five abortion sites in Southern California, including one in Chula Vista, a southern suburb of San Diego. She had been posing as a doctor, performing abortions illegally for $500.

Nine women came forward with stories of botched abortions received at Bugarin's hand. Many women suffered from incomplete abortions and were forced to return to have their abortions done again. One woman was hospitalized three times, and birthed a live baby that died three hours later.

Bugarin made a court appearance yesterday dressed in blue jail-house garb and shackled at the waist. She was being held on $500,000 bond. Her arraignment is scheduled for July 2.

These charges add to Bugarin's legal woes. In August, 2007, Bugarin was arrested in Los Angeles after the police raided four of her businesses. She was charged in Los Angeles County with 18 counts of committing abortions without a medical license.

Her sister, Raquel, was charged with four counts of aiding and abetting her sister in their illegal abortion operation. In addition one of Bugarin's hired abortionists, Laurence Reich, was also arrested after he was found to be doing abortions months after losing his medical license for sexually molesting his patients.

Bugarin's abortion chain, Clinica Medica Para La Mujer De Hoy, preys on Hispanic women, and would often pass out abortion discount coupons in Hispanic neighborhoods.

Many people of good will began working to expose and close these dangerous abortion businesses in 1999. As a result, six of Bugarin's businesses have closed, at least five of her hired abortionists lost their medical licenses, and three abortionists have received discipline from the California Medical Board.
[SAN DIEGO, Calif.,  June 21, 2008 /Christian Newswire; PharmFacts Email Update, 21June08]
 

Abortionist Arrested
A 48-year-old woman has been arrested in San Diego County for performing abortions without a medical license. The Los Angeles Times reports (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-abortion22-2008jun22,0,3284857.story) that Bertha Bugarin has been charged with 10 felony counts, which, if she is convicted, could bring her a nine-year prison sentence. Bugarin's clientele was mostly Hispanic, since her Clinica Medica para la Mujer de Hoy chain (six centers) targeted the Latino community with Spanish-language coupons, advertisements and television commercials.

Even more shocking is the fact that Bugarin was arrested almost one year ago in Los Angeles (http://www.operationrescue.org/?p=978) and charged with 18 counts of committing abortion without a medical license.

Her sister was also charged, as well as one of her abortionists, who had been committing abortions despite having had his medical license revoked for sexually molesting patients.

This raises several very important questions:

Pro-lifers in Southern California, with Operation Rescue leading the charge, have been raising a ruckus over Bugarin and her chain of centers since 1999. What took so long for authorities to take action?

Did racism play any part in the long period of time between the illegal actions coming to light and charges finally being brought against Bugarin? Her businesses were targeting Hispanic women, and with the heated debate over undocumented immigration, one has to wonder if the fact that Hispanic children were the ones being killed had anything to do with the lack of action ...

Where's the outrage from abortion advocates? Bugarin is the epitome of what pro-lifers have been saying for years – that abortion centers can be extremely dangerous places run by people who will go to great lengths to make money. Why isn't there an outcry from a chorus of pro-abortion bloggers and organizations trying to distance themselves from her and her shady operations?

Bugarin was arrested in Los Angeles in August 2007. How is it possible that she could continue illegally operating her business in Chula Vista this long after being arrested and charged in LA?

So long has justice been denied in this situation that RFL staffer Phil remembers collecting petitions for a pro-life effort to have this abortion chain shut down while he was still a senior in high school, way back in 2001!

Does it infuriate you that abortion advocates have hung women out to dry with their silence on this?  [Rock for Life Report, 28 June08]

COUNCIL OF EUROPE. While the ACOG positions itself to control our individual conscience convictions, the Council of Europe positions itself to control the national conscience convictions of Ireland, Malta, and Poland. The following is information that you (and I) didn't know, but that we really ought to get a grasp of. The noose of unfettered abortion access is tightening around the pro-life world's neck. But we will NOT allow ourselves to be strangled.
 
The following is from the Population Resource Institute:
The Council of Europe Presses Member States to Lift All Restrictions on Abortion
 
A resolution approved by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is demanding that its 47 member states "legalize abortion if they have not done so."

Although legally non-binding, the resolution not only effectively endorses the "right" to kill the unborn, it puts pressure on nations to lift any and all restrictions on abortion throughout the whole continent.  

The resolution, named "Access to Safe and Legal Abortion in Europe," was approved by a vote of 102-69, with 69 abstentions. (See
http://assembly.coe.int/ASP/Votes/DBVotesResults_EN.asp?
VoteID=793&DocRef=11537&SessionID=317). The full text of the resolution is available at the official website of the Council of Europe. (See http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?
link=/Documents/AdoptedText/ta08/ERES1607.htm )
 
The first section of the resolution states: "The Parliamentary Assembly reaffirms that abortion can in no circumstances be regarded as a family planning method." (Resolution, n. 1). While this statement sounds pro-life, in fact it has the opposite intent. What the Council of Europe is actually demanding is that the countries in which abortion is permitted, but carefully restricted, make the procedure readily available to all women who ask for it. Abortion on demand, in other words.
 
Although the Parliamentary Assembly's decision is non-binding on member states, it puts pressure on the Council of Europe to make abortion an unconditional "right." Even without a formal and binding decision from the Council of Europe, the resolution has a certain moral force, and can be used to intimidate countries such as Poland into establishing a "right to abortion."
 
Gisela Wurm, an Austrian Socialist parliamentarian, was the chief promoter of the
resolution. She was at pains to explain that the resolution is intended to ensure that
"society can protect women who don't want to continue with their pregnancies." She made no mention of particular countries. In fact, however, the resolution is clearly targeted at three countries which forbid all abortions: Ireland, Poland, and Malta.
 
Much of the resolution simply details the current European status quo. It reads: "In most of the Council of Europe member states the law permits abortion in order to save the woman's life for a number of reasons including to preserve physical and mental health, rape and incest, fetal impairment, economic and social reasons and in some countries on request.". The only three European countries that do not conform to this standard are, once again, Ireland, Poland, and Malta.
 
The seventh paragraph of the resolution--although it doesn't name names--is clearly
directed at these holdouts. It states, "The Assembly invites the member states of the Council of Europe to ... decriminalize abortion within reasonable gestational limits, if they have not already done so."
 

Abortion in Ireland has been illegal since the founding of the Republic. The operant law, the "Offences Against the Person Act," was inherited from the United Kingdom. Under this Act, procuring or performing an abortion is an "unlawful" act, with both the person performing the abortion and the pregnant woman subject to imprisonment. While Great Britain later changed its laws to allow abortion up to 20 weeks gestation, Ireland moved in the opposite direction. The 1983 abortion referendum added even stronger anti-abortion language to the Irish Constitution. A 1992 decision by the Supreme Court of Ireland weakened the Offences Against the Person Act by ruling that an abortion could be lawfully performed if the continuation of the pregnancy would cause substantial risk to the woman's life. This decision aside, Ireland today has one of the most restrictive abortion
laws in Europe.
 
The legal situation in Malta is even more straightforward, and thus poses even more of an irritant to the pro-abortion lobby. The Criminal Code of Malta simply prohibits abortion under all circumstances. Moreover, when Malta joined the Council of Europe, it insisted on the following condition: It would not change its laws concerning human life.
 
The resolution passed by the Parliamentary Assembly essentially targets three pro-life nations: Ireland, Malta, and Poland.
 
Abortion resolution or no, Malta is not about to back down. In the words of Maltese lawmaker Leo Brincat: "It is impossible to legalize abortion" in Malta. Even the country's socialists oppose the practice.
 
In Poland, abortion is illegal except for certain narrow exceptions. Moreover, it is as a practical matter, almost impossible to obtain. The Population Policy Data Bank of the U.N. Population Division notes that "the pregnant [Polish] woman would be required to undergo counseling, give written consent to the operation, and wait three days after the counseling until the abortion took place. . . At the same time, growing numbers of physicians and hospitals refused to perform abortions, as they were allowed to do under a conscience clause contained in the law. In some cities, there were no public institutions willing to perform abortions, leaving private clinics with much higher fees as the only resort for women seeking abortions. Some estimates were that almost half of all public hospitals in Poland had adopted this approach to the issue."
 
The resolution itself recounts in detail the various roadblocks that the country  has placed in the way of abortion: "The Assembly also notes that, in member states where abortion is permitted for a number of reasons, conditions are not always such as to guarantee women effective access to this right: the lack of local health care facilities, the lack of doctors willing to carry out abortions, the repeated medical consultations required, the time allowed for changing one's mind and the waiting time for the abortion all have the potential to make access to safe, affordable, acceptable and appropriate abortion services more difficult, or even impossible in practice."
 
The Council of Europe is not happy with this deviation from the prevailing cultural line. It is attempting to use its diplomatic clout to bludgeon these three countries into line. Let us hope that it does not succeed.
[May 4, 2008, AAPLOG; Carlos Beltramo is a PRI correspondent, European Union]
 

BRITISH DOC: OFTEN ABORTION ENDS MORE THAN A LIFE. In his regular health column in the London Times, responding to the question, "I had an abortion recently, and though my boyfriend and I agreed it was the right thing to do, I feel guilty and I've gone off sex. Will these feelings pass?", Dr. Thomas Stuttaford remarked that the loss of libido following an abortion is "so common that it can almost be said to be expected."

Stuttaford continued, "It is possible, but by no means inevitable, that the changes this will have wrought in the way you feel about a future together may have irretrievably undermined your relationship...Years of experience with patients have reinforced the teaching I received in my early medical life that even the most ardent affair may not survive an abortion... Frequently, there has been too much emotion around, even if there have been no spoken recriminations...usually the underlying cause of the continuing grief was that unavoidable pressure to have a termination, placed on the woman by her family or her partner..."
 
The other columnist, Suzi Godson, responded in part: "The irony, of course, is that the 'choice' to have an abortion is one that no woman wants to make. Though yours was a mutual decision, abortion often unsettles relationships. Couples can feel subconscious hostility towards each other, and withdrawing from sex is an obvious way of manifesting conflict." [“I’ve lost interest in sex after an abortion,” TimesOnline, 05-02-08, http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article3860978.ece; Abstinence Clearinghouse, 7May08]
 


NEWBORN BOY'S BODY FOUND IN TOILET TANK AT CUMBERLAND COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS. On Sunday, the Cumberland County Fairgrounds was the site of a celebration. On Monday, with Cinco de Mayo revelers long since gone, cleaning crews made a gruesome discovery when they found what was originally thought to be an aborted fetus in the upper tank of a public toilet.

A preliminary investigation revealed it was a newborn baby boy brought to full-term. County Prosecutor Ron Casella said an autopsy is scheduled for today to determine whether or not the baby was alive when it was born. [http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/182/story/150858.html, The Press of Atlantic City, ALL News, 7May08]
 

 
TEENS GET LIFE TERM IN ASSAULT THAT KILLED HUMAN FETUS. A judge sentenced two teens to life in prison for a beating that injured a pregnant woman and killed her unborn child.

Alfonso Price, 16, and Jebrell Wright, 17, will be eligible for parole in 23 years for their convictions on murder, felonious assault and kidnapping charges in the July 2007 attack. Authorities said the pair attacked 18-year-old Kerria Anderson, who told Price she was pregnant at the time with his unborn child. [WLTL-TV Channel 5, http://www.wlwt.com/news/16179390/detail.html; ALL News, 7May08]

NATIONAL LAW BANNING "LIVE BIRTH" ABORTIONS NEEDS BETTER ENFORCEMENT; SUGGESTIONS. Until a whistle-blower blew the lid off a little-known practice, babies that survived abortions lacked clear legal rights and protection. Jill Stanek, once a nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, IL, entered the abortion battle in 1999 when she discovered that babies that “accidentally” survived abortions were placed in a closet and left to die.

In 2000 and 2001 she testified about her experience to the US House Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on behalf of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.

Her credible eye-witness testimony thrust this practice before lawmakers and helped pass a federal law defining that a baby who is born alive is in fact a person deserving respect. She now faces the challenge of ensuring that this law is enforced.

Stanek’s public stance eventually cost her job at Christ Hospital, but their loss was the pro-life community’s gain. She is currently an activist, columnist and blogger.

Congress passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA) and it was signed by President Bush in 2002. More than 30 states had already passed similar measures beforehand.

But legislation is just empty words without enforcement.

A little research renders stories of breathing infants being smothered in biohazard bags or refusal by clinic workers to administer emergency care as in the case of baby Rowan. Both of these situations occurred after the passage of the Act and there are no doubt countless other violations of BAIPA that have gone unreported.

Why does this barbaric activity continue?

One answer lies in the legislation itself. BAIPA lacks penalties for violations.

However, there are possible avenues for enforcement. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) have been charged with this task.

Jill Stanek offers suggestions for ju