This Just In ...

Planned Parenthood has begun using the extremely dangerous RU 486 web-cam abortion technique in Minnesota.   According to Planned Parenthood Minnesota spokesperson Connie Lewis, the organization began providing web-cam abortions at their Rochester, Mn. clinic.  This marks the first time that Planned Parenthood Minnesota has expanded its abortion practice beyond its St. Paul, Mn. abortion center.

We have known for some time about Planned Parenthood’s deadly plan to bring RU 486 web-cam abortions to cities and towns throughout the nation. First it was Iowa, then Minnesota.  Now it appears Planned Parenthood is set to begin expanding its abortion business here in Wisconsin.

Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI) is already the state’s largest abortion provider but it is not content to limit the performance of abortions to its three abortions clinics in the state.  Now it appears it wants to offer dangerous RU 486 chemical abortions to women in towns and cities like Portage, Beaver Dam, Delavan and other Wisconsin locations where PPWI has not previously operated abortion clinics.

Since only a handful of doctors want to perform abortions, it would be difficult for PPWI to expand its surgical abortion operations.  But by providing RU 486 web-cam abortions, PPWI can expand its lucrative abortion business without even having a doctor physically present! Web-cam abortions were initiated by Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and piloted in Iowa where 2,000 of these abortions took place, with the intention of exporting this technique to other states.  A woman enters a Planned Parenthood facility and discusses her abortion by web-cam with an abortionist in another city or perhaps even another state.   After the information exchange, the abortionist presses a button which opens a drawer at the woman’s location.  Her abortion drugs (RU 486 and prostaglandin, a labor-inducing drug) are in the drawer and the abortionist watches her take the medication via web-cam.  The woman is never examined by the physician!

RU 486  and its companion drug are administered between the fifth and ninth weeks of pregnancy, after pregnancy has been confirmed. An RU 486/prostaglandin-induced abortion usually involves three trips to a doctor. About half of the women abort while at the doctor’s office. An additional 26% abort within the next 20 hours – in the shopping mall, grocery store or in their homes, for example. The remainder abort sometime in the next few weeks or not at all. A woman who doesn’t abort is advised to have a surgical abortion because the RU 486/prostaglandin chemicals may have injured the unborn child.  RU 486 is not the morning-after pill.

Through April 0f 2011, the FDA reports 2207 adverse events related to the use of RU 486.  These events include 14 deaths, 612 hospitalizations, 58 ectopic pregnancies, 339 blood transfusions, and 256 cases of infections.  A European drug manufacturer has publicly stated that 28 women have died worldwide after using RU 486.

Given the grave dangers associated with RU 486, Planned Parenthood’s potential plan to bring web-cam RU 486 abortions to towns and cities in Wisconsin should be of grave concern to anyone concerned with the health and welfare of women. Fortunately, legislation is pending in the state legislature to stop Planned Parenthood’s irresponsible plan to bring web-cam RU 486 abortions to cities and towns throughout Wisconsin.

Senator Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) and Assembly Representative Michelle Litjens (R-Oshkosh) are drafting the Woman’s Protection Act.  Among other things, the Lazich/Litjens legislation requires that the administration of RU 486 or other similar chemicals used to induce an abortion be done in the same room and in the physical presence of the physician who prescribed or provided the drug to the patient.  Reasonable efforts to ensure the patient returns for a follow-up visit are also required.

Planned Parenthood’s utter disregard for the health and safety of women is appalling. It would be a tragedy if web-cam RU 486 abortion came to Wisconsin.  Their deadly plan must be stopped in its tracks.

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You can add your name to the online petition encouraging our state legislators to pass the Woman's Protection Act here: http://www.wrtl.org/petition/index.aspx

 

 

A top legislative priority of Wisconsin Right to Life is to have Wisconsin "opt-out" of certain abortion subsidies related to Obamacare.  There are a number of provisions in Obamacare that would result in the funding and subsidizing of abortion that cannot be altered at this time.  However, there is one area in Obamacare where states can move to protect taxpayers from subsidizing abortion. 

Under Obamacare, states are required to operate and maintain "health insurance exchanges" where people would go to choose their health insurance package. The plans included in the exchanges would receive federal subsidies (your tax dollars) for those individuals who qualify for insurance under the exchanges.  Only in this one area of Obamacare are states are permitted to prohibit coverage of abortions under the health plans offered through the exchanges.  Unless Wisconsin specifically "opts-out" of abortion coverage, abortion will be covered and subsidized by you, the taxpayers of Wisconsin.

We are so grateful that Senator Rich Zipperer (R-Pewaukee) and Assembly Representative Robin Vos (R-Racine) have authored legislation to make sure Wisconsin taxpayers are not subsidizing abortion in the health care exchanges.

The Zipperer/Vos legislation,Senate Bill 92, would opt Wisconsin out of abortion coverage under the health insurance exchanges and is now pending in the State Senate.  Please contact your State Senator and urge him/her to support Senate Bill 92.  If you do not know who your State Senator is or how to contact him/her, click here: http://www.wrtl.org/find.html and follow the instructions. 

The elected officials who represent you will appear along with their contact information.  Make sure to scroll down to get contact information just for your State Senator.  Your other elected officials will not be voting on this issue.

 

 

 

 

The following information was included in a National Right to Life press release following the vote on the Protect Life Act.  The National Right to Life Committee is the parent organization of Wisconsin Right to Life.

By a bipartisan vote of 251-172, ( Link: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll789.xml ) the U.S. House of Representatives last week approved the Protect Life Act (H.R. 358), a bill to nullify the multiple abortion-expanding provisions of the 2010 federal health care law ("ObamaCare").
 
In an October 6 letter to U.S. House members, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC)  noted that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, Public Law 111-148, "ObamaCare") ". . . contained multiple provisions that provide authorizations for subsidies for abortion, both implicit and explicit, and also multiple provisions that opened doors to abortion-expanding administrative actions."  The Protect Life Act would prohibit the use of any PPACA-authorized funds for abortions or to subsidize health plans that cover abortions, except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest.   The Protect Life Act would not restrict the sale or purchase of insurance coverage for abortion with non-federal funds.
 
During debate, opponents of the bill repeatedly claimed that it would allow hospitals to deny women "emergency" abortions.  In reality, the bill does not change the longstanding federal law in question, called EMTALA, which requires that in an "emergency" a hospital must do its best to stabilize both the pregnant mother and her "unborn child" (which is the term used in the statute).  The Protect Life Act allows federal funding of an abortion required to save a mother's life.
 
The Protect Life Act is sponsored by Congressman Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) and Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-Il.).  The bill was supported by 236 Republicans and 15 Democrats.  It was opposed by 170 Democrats and two Republicans.
 
NRLC's Douglas Johnson presented detailed information on the abortion-expanding provisions of ObamaCare, and regarding the need for the Protect Life Act, in testimony before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce on February 9, 2011:

www.nrlc.org/AHC/ProtectLifeActDouglasJohnsonTestimony.pdf

 

By Wesley Smith writing in First Things

The Washington Post headline is misleading: “Scientists Report Possibly Crucial Advance in Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.” In actuality, this is a potential advance in human cloning research.(Scientists have long known how to create ES cell lines from destroyed embryos.)

The story, byline Rob Stein, begins vaguely about what was actually done. From the story:

Scientists reported Wednesday that for the first time they used cloning techniques to coax human eggs to generate embryonic stem cells containing the genes of specific patients.

And there’s a junk biology bias penalty flag thrown on the field!  If the researchers had obtained stem cells from eggs, it would be process known as parthenogenesis, that is, stimulating the egg to divide.  But that isn’t what this was.  It was a form of human cloning via a procedure similar–but different as we shall see below–to somatic cell nuclear transfer.  SCNT, the process that created Dolly, makes an embryo asexually. That means the stem cells were obtained from embryos, not eggs.

Back to the story, the reporter then changes his story.  The cells didn’t come from eggs, but “mutant” embryos.

At the same time, the researchers made the cells by producing and then destroying mutant embryos, whose moral status immediately became a matter of sharp debate.

How were they “mutant?” When the scientists tried to create embryos via standard SCNT, they failed.  So rather than taking the nucleus out of the egg before inserting the somatic cell nucleus–as is usually done in SCNT cloning–they left it in.  That meant the resulting embryo was “triploid,” that is it had 23 extra (69 rather than 46) chromosomes.  That makes these clearly useless in treatments.  And as for use in drug or other patient specific research, we already have induced pluripotent stem cells that have the normal set of chromosomes.  So, this is more a novel proof of theory, it seems to me, than an actual breakthrough.

So, that means the embryo could never have become a baby, right? Nope. Triploid babies are occasionally born (although they usually miscarry).  It is a terminal condition, but they can live for weeks, or even months, after birth.  From a scientific paper published in 2005:

Triploidy is estimated to occur in 3% of recognized human conceptuses. Most triploids are aborted spontaneously between 7 and 17 weeks of gestation, while those who proceed to live birth die at an early postnatal stage (Hasegawa et al., 1999). Twenty different clinical features have been described in 69,XXX triploid infants (Doshi et al., 1983). According to the literature, triploid cases with a survival of more than 60 days are very rare (Sherard et al., 1986). In this report we present a case of a 69,XXX triploid infant who survived for 164 days. This is the longest survival reported for this condition to date in Greece. A review of the literature uncovered six cases of a 69,XXX triploid infant who survived more than 45 days.

These children are not “mutants.” They are fully equal human beings born with a terminal disability.

So, this is what I think: Human  cloning is intrinsically unethical because it creates human beings (or, if you prefer, human organisms) as a method of manufacture.  This process is also, because it creates a human life for the purpose of destroying it in research.

And then there is another problem: These scientists paid women for their eggs to allow their research:

The research was possible because for the first time scientists paid women for their eggs for human embryonic stem cell research, stirring worries about women being exploited and putting their health at risk. At the same time, the researchers made the cells by producing and then destroying mutant embryos, whose moral status immediately became a matter of sharp debate.

Yes, as the award winning documentary, Eggsploitation, (produced by the CBC, for which I am a paid consultant) clearly demonstrates, egg extraction can be very dangerous to women’s health–potentially including death.  Egg selling is now allowed in New York, which is how these researchers obtained the gametes.  It should be outlawed, and indeed, is generally deemed unethical for use in biotechnological research. Even the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine doesn’t permit it (although watch for a push to allow that to change).

So, this seems the bottom line:

• Scientists still have not succeeded in creating human embryos via usual SCNT processes, at least not that were maintained to the blastocyst stage of embryonic development.
  
• The 69 chromosome stem cells derived from the cloning procedure are of limited value in and of themselves, although Stein reports that the scientists said the advance could be used to “decipher how eggs reprogram genes.”
  
• IPSCs are already producing patient specific, tailor made pluripotent stem cells for use in drug testing and disease research, which we were once told would require human cloning to do

Here’s the macro bottom line: Even if IPSCs eventually provide every benefit supposedly to be obtained from human cloning for experimentation (therapeutic cloning), many scientists would shrug and keep on cloning anyway.  That’s because the ultimate agenda goes far beyond stem cell research and into Brave New World technologies that require cloning, e.g., genetic engineering, fetal farming and experimentation, and eventually cloning to produce babies.  Indeed, some bioethicists already support allowing cloning and gestating to birth.

 

 

 

Thurs. April 19, 2012

Join us at our Annual Wisconsin Right to Life Education Fund Dinner & Auction with Special Guest Speaker, Laura Ingraham!

Laura Ingraham is a nationally syndicated radio host, best-selling author, a regular Fox News contributor and the principal substitute host on The O'Reilly Factor.

More information including her biography can be found here:

http://www.wrtl.org/events/educationfunddinner.aspx