Tag Archives: clinic

Which is More Important: Organic or Non-GMO?

by ChanceHailes Posted on January 22, 2016

While shopping at your local grocery store, youve no doubt come across the labels non-GMO and organic. Many health-conscious people try to avoid genetically modified ingredients, and they also tend to prefer organic goods to conventional ones. However, the two designations are not at all the same. As you make purchasing decisions about natural foods, its important to know the differences between these two labels so that you can determine which products are the best choice for you and your family.

Whats the difference between non-GMO and organic?

Foods that are labelled as non-GMO dont contain any genetically modified ingredients, but they arent necessarily organic. The opposite is true of USDA-certified organic foodsthese items are required by law not to contain any genetically modified ingredients, as well as to be raised orgrown without the use of synthetic pesticides.

Which is more expensive, and why?

Some retailers and food industry professionals have wondered how non-GMO and USDA-certified organic foods impact each others sales. Though many natural-minded consumers prefer non-GMO and organic foods, theyre likely to choose the former over the latter when faced with both options. The reason? Non-GMO foods dont also have to be certified organic, so they are usually less expensive.

“The non-GMO label threatens the USDA Organic label,” director of The Scoular Company Greg Lickteig told Organic Connections Magazine. “Given two products on the grocery store shelf, one being non-GMO and the other organic, the non-GMO product will most certainly be less expensive.”

Are there any major health differences?

The Mayo Clinic notes that while there arent any nutritional differences between organic and conventional foods, there are major differences in pesticide levels and instances of food additives.

On the GMO side of things, many food activists have demanded better research on the long-term consequences of genetic modificationbut there havent been any proven health risks noted yet.

Your personal beliefs about the environment, sustainable agriculture and pesticide risk should guide your decision to buy non-GMO or organic goods. If youre interested in avoiding genetically modified crops and reducing your pesticide exposure, those are good reasons to look for the USDA Organic and non-GMO labels on your food. Just remember that by purchasing non-GMO products, you’re not necessarily getting a certified organic good. If you buy something that’s USDA-certified organic, you can rest assured your food doesn’t contain any genetically modified ingredients.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Which is More Important: Organic or Non-GMO?

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The New, Ugly Surge in Violence and Threats Against Abortion Providers

by TrentLangston11 Posted on November 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Firefighters battle a blaze at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Washington September 4, 2015. KREM.com/AP Photo

Three people were shot dead and nine others were injured Friday at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, the first time since 2009 that anyone has been killed in an incident linked to activity at an abortion clinic. The attack comes amid an exponential increase in threats and violence against abortion providers since the release of a series of viral—and widely debunked—videos.

While police have not discussed the alleged motives of the suspect, who has been arrested, the attack began at the clinic. According to authorities, the gunman entered the facility Friday afternoon and began shooting. During an hours-long standoff, he exchanged fire with police, killing one officer.

Since the release of the Center for Medical Progress’ videos that purport to show Planned Parenthood selling fetal issue, harassment, threats, and attacks against abortion providers, their staff, and facilities have surged dramatically across the country, according to new numbers from the National Abortion Federation.

The clinic attacked on Friday is part of the Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains affiliate, which was featured in the Center for Medical Progress’ videos.

“Since the series of highly edited, misleading anti-abortion videos was released in July, we have seen an unprecedented increase in hate speech and threats against abortion providers,” says Vicki Saporta, the president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, which has been tracking violence against providers since the 1970s.

“We have been quite worried that this increase in threats would lead to a violent attack like we saw” on Friday, she added.

The Federation is suing Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress for allegedly setting up a sham biomedical organization and misrepresenting their identities in order to gain access to and record a federation meeting.

Abortion providers have grappled with harassment and threats for years, but the tide of vitriol began rising dramatically in July, after the first video was released. Soon after that, an anonymous reader posted a message on Fox Nation’s website.

“I’ll pay ten large to whomever kills Dr. Deborah Nucatola. She should be summarily executed. I’ll do it myself if no one else does.” A month later, another physician, Dr. Savita Ginde, came home to find 50 people protesting outside her door. They left fliers around her neighborhood that said, “Savita Ginde Murders Children.”

Nucatola and Ginde both work for Planned Parenthood and were featured in videos surreptitiously recorded by the Center for Medical Progress. They are among a handful of abortion providers who have been catapulted into the public eye by the group and its public face, David Daleiden. But harassment has not been limited to the providers spotlighted in the series—the first video of which has received more than 3 million views on YouTube.

Clinics targeted

Violence against reproductive health clinics dates back to at least Roe v. Wade, when anti-abortion animus swelled in reaction to the 1973 landmark Supreme Court case. In 1982, an Illinois-based provider and his wife were kidnapped, and three clinics in Florida and Virginia were bombed in the same year. In 1984 there were more than 25 cases of bombings and arson attacks across the country.

Coordinated attacks reached a fever pitch in the early 1990s. Anti-abortion activists, led by Operation Rescue—a group whose president, Troy Newman, is also currently the secretary of the Center for Medical Progress—created large-scale human blockades in major cities across the United States. These protests prevented anyone from leaving or entering clinics, which led to hundreds of arrests by law enforcement.

Meanwhile, the number of violent incidents also increased, and in 1993 Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed in the parking lot of a clinic he worked at in Pensacola, Florida. Gunn had been the subject of wanted-style posters distributed by Operation Rescue. In 1994, an abortion doctor, a clinic escort, and two receptionists were killed in two separate incidents.

Congress enacted the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994, making it a federal crime to injure, intimidate, or interfere with abortion providers or those seeking their care. But in January 1998, an abortion clinic security guard was killed during a bombing at his workplace. And in October, abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was murdered in his home.

Two weeks after Dr. Slepian’s death, Attorney General Janet Reno created the Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers, led by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and staffed by investigators from the FBI and other federal agencies. Violence plummeted in the years following the clinic access law and the creation of the task force. According to the FBI, in 2012 violations of the clinic access act made up only 2 percent of the bureau’s civil rights cases.

A new surge

But harassment, threats of violence, and attacks against clinics have gone up again following the release of the Center for Medical Progress’ videos in July, according to recent National Abortion Federation court filings. That month, incidents of harassment against Planned Parenthood facilities increased ninefold compared with June, and those numbers continued to rise through August.

In the four months following the release of the videos, there have been at least four suspected arsons that targeted abortion clinics, compared with just one in all of 2014 and none in 2013. There have been at least five cases of vandalism since August. In comparison, there were 12 total cases of clinic vandalism in all of 2014 and just five cases in 2013, according to federation figures.

In one of the recent vandalism cases, a young man entered a Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire and destroyed medical equipment, phones, and computers. This month, an unidentified person smashed the windows of Kentucky’s only full-time abortion provider, twice in three weeks.

Anne, the executive director of the clinic, who declined to give her last name for security reasons, told Insider Louisville that in its 20 years of operation, the clinic had never before been vandalized.

The deaths of three people at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on Friday were the first slayings linked to an abortion clinic in six years. The last was in 2009, when the abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church in Wichita, Kansas. Scott Roeder, who was found guilty of Tiller’s murder, said he shot the doctor because “preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger.”

The FBI has also reported an increase in the number of attacks on reproductive health care facilities across the country since the videos were released in July. A spokesperson from the FBI was not immediately available for comment.

“It’s a concerning time,” says duVergne Gaines, director of the National Clinic Access Project.

The project, which is a program of the Feminist Majority Foundation, has trained clinic escorts and helped clinics increase security with surveillance cameras, alarm systems, bulletproof glass, and vests. When Gaines spoke with Mother Jones earlier this month, she said “the trifecta of efforts excoriating, and inspiring individuals to go out and target providers by demonizing them” leaves providers vulnerable, and that they were lucky no one had yet been hurt.

“But we fear that may be around the corner,” Gaines said at the time.

The violence is intended to silence providers and drive them away from their jobs, but officials from the National Abortion Federation and the National Clinic Access Project say women should feel safe going to clinics. Law enforcement agencies are aware of the issue, they added.

Indeed, the number of abortion providers decreased 38 percent between 1982 and 2000 and continues to decline today. According to research from an anti-abortion group, the number of surgical abortion clinics dropped to 582 in 2013, down from more than 2,000 clinics in the early 1990s. And in the last two years, surgical abortion clinics have been closing at a rate of 1.5 clinics every week.

And though it’s hard to pinpoint every cause for the decline, “stigma and fear of violence…are powerful barriers to abortion provision,” according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

For some abortion doctors, violence only deepens their resolve to provide abortion care. LeRoy Carhart quit doing surgery and opened his abortion practice in 1991 after a massive fire on his family’s 65-acre Nebraska farm. The day after the fire, Carhart said he received a letter that said the abortions made his property a target for the fire. No one was ever convicted.

The physician now operates a clinic in Nebraska and travels to Maryland each week to perform abortions. For security reasons, he says he avoids staying in the same hotel twice and tries to take different routes to work.

“After the fire, it totally changed everything. That’s when we decided to just do abortions full time,” Carhart said, “It was my way of getting back.”

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The New, Ugly Surge in Violence and Threats Against Abortion Providers

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Here’s What You Need to Know About the Supreme Court’s Big Abortion Ruling

by ErnestiGoshorn Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a Massachusetts law creating a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics in which protest was forbidden is a violation of the First Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, which held that the law was unconstitutional because it blocked peaceful protest on public streets.

The ruling will make it difficult for states to justify laws that establish buffer zones for abortion clinics. In cases where anti-abortion protesters obstruct access to clinics, the court says, states must pursue alternatives, such as court orders to limit protest. A problem with access to a clinic, for example, “could be addressed through a law requiring crowds blocking a clinic entrance to disperse for a limited period when ordered to do so by the police.” Only if those narrower measures fail and a state compiles a long record of problems caused by clinic protests, can the state generally bar clinic protest.

Three states, Massachusetts, Montana, and Colorado, have buffer zone laws on the books. The case, McCullen v. Coakley, was brought by a grandmotherly anti-abortion “sidewalk counselor” named Eleanor McCullen, who argued that the zone violated her First Amendment right to peacefully protest. Massachusetts countered that the law protected a competing right protected by the constitution: the right to obtain an abortion—which prior to the establishment of buffer zones, clinic protesters had endangered through threats, harassment, and physical hindrance.

The court agreed that buffer zones impeded the rights of McCullen and others who wish to “engage in personal, caring, consensual conver­sations with women about various alternatives.”

The fate of a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that permitted states to enact small “floating buffer zones” around people who are entering or leaving abortion clinics is not clear. The Court did not address that case, Hill v. Colorado, in this opinion. But the validity of floating buffer zones now seems in question, according to SCOTUSblog‘s Tom Goldstein. Floating buffer zones have been difficult to enforce, and abortion rights advocates have argued that they provide scant protection from violent protesters.

Here’s more background on the case:
In order for Massachusetts’s buffer zone law to survive a First Amendment challenge, lawyers for the state had to prove that the legislature had a compelling reason to limit speech, that the law wasn’t aimed at suppressing ideas, and that the law didn’t restrain speech more than necessary.

The Supreme Court agreed with Massachusetts that the state had a compelling interest and that the law didn’t target specific ideas. However, Roberts wrote, “The buffer zones burden substantially more speech than necessary to achieve the Commonwealth’s asserted interests.”

The Supreme Court’s decision partially hinged on how serious of a threat protesters posed to abortions rights.

In its argument to the court, Massachusetts noted that it has a history of violent protests at clinics. The state created buffer zones in 2000 in reaction to the 1996 murders of two abortion clinic workers. But the law was also a response to routine protests outside clinics in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, where activists threatened women and physically barred them from entering the clinic. Here is a vivid, but typical example from a clinic worker who testified before the Massachusetts Legislature in 1999 about witnessing a particular protest:

A woman in her mid-20s and her elderly grandfather…were trapped inside the cab for several minutes…Two escorts were able to make their way to the woman’s side as she ran crying into the clinic. Her grandfather, who walked with a cane, was unable to run…In the amount of time it took him to walk from the cab to the clinic entrance, he was shoved and almost fell down twice. He was also forced to endure various insults about his race and remarks about how his handicap was a punishment from God.

Other clinic staff testified that protesters blocked them from going to work, pressed a clinic escort up against a car, and pushed a clinic worker into a moving car.

The Supreme Court issued its guidelines for buffer zones in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, the same year Massachusetts passed its law. Following the court’s lead, Massachusetts created six-foot “floating buffer zones” around any person within 18 feet of an abortion clinic’s entrance or exit. Protesters were still allowed to stand next to a clinic’s doors, and they could approach within six feet of a person with that person’s consent.

The floating buffer zone law proved impossible to enforce. It was unclear to police what constituted an approach, and some protesters interpreted eye contact as consent to approach women and scream in their faces. In 2007, Captain William Evans of the Boston Police Department testified to the Legislature that his officers had probably arrested no more than five protesters in seven years (most for violating laws other than the buffer zone) despite the fact that protesters probably violated the law almost every weekâ&#128;&#139;end.

So that year, Massachusetts abandoned the floating buffer zones sanctioned by the Supreme Court, and established a more ambitious, hard buffer zone of 35 feet surrounding an abortion clinic’s entrance, exit, or driveway.

In oral arguments before the court in January, Mark Rienzi, the attorney for McCullen, dismissed incidents of violence and aggression at abortion clinics as the work of a few bad actors. He focused on McCullen, who plasters her refrigerator with baby photos she says she has received from women she talked out of having abortions.

This tactic worked. Roberts noted, “The record indicates that the problems are limited principally to the Boston clinic on Saturday mornings, and the police there appear perfectly capable of singling out lawbreakers. The petition­ers are not protestors; they seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion,” but to counsel women. “It is thus no answer to say that petitioners can still be seen and heard by women within the buffer zones. If all that the women can see and hear are vocifer­ous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively sti­fled petitioners’ message.”

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Here’s What You Need to Know About the Supreme Court’s Big Abortion Ruling

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Read the Supreme Court’s Decision Striking Down Abortion Clinic Buffer Zones

by AngelaJNTN Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Read our explainer of the Court’s ruling here.

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Read the Supreme Court’s Decision Striking Down Abortion Clinic Buffer Zones

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