Tag Archives: parenthood

Lemony Snicket Explains Why He Ponied Up $1 Million to Planned Parenthood

by ShellyWeissmull Posted on September 29, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket and the author of the Series of Unfortunate Events children’s books, announced yesterday that he and his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, would donate $1 million to Planned Parenthood.

The women’s health care provider, which has been the target of multiple suspected arsons this summer, is currently facing potential funding cuts from Congress. We spoke to Handler and Brown about their decision to support the organization.

Mother Jones: Why did you decide to give such a large sum to Planned Parenthood?

Daniel Handler and Lisa Brown: We’ve been enthusiastic supporters of Planned Parenthood for a long time, and watching their recent deceitful pummelling was frankly more than we could take.

MJ: What’s your connection to the organization?

DH & LB: We’re Americans and human beings. We believe in people making their own reproductive choices. Planned Parenthood has been essential in the lives of many, many people around us.

MJ: Why do you think your donation is needed right now?

DH & LB: Arson and propaganda, not to mention the umpteenth threat of defunding, seemed to demand some counterbalancing.

MJ: Where do you think reproductive rights are headed in the US?

DH & LB: Truth and justice will prevail, but we ought to make it happen sooner rather than later.

Planned Parenthood tweeted back at the couple:

Continued: 

Lemony Snicket Explains Why He Ponied Up $1 Million to Planned Parenthood

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lemony Snicket Explains Why He Ponied Up $1 Million to Planned Parenthood

Here’s What the GOP Candidates Had to Say About Reproductive Rights at the Debate

by RenaR37tqbryn Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The moderators of CNN’s Wednesday night debate didn’t finish their first round of questions for the Republican presidential contenders before talk turned to Planned Parenthood. State after state investigating the explosive but doctored sting videos accusing Planned Parenthood of selling fetal organs has found the allegations—such sales would be illegal—to be false. But that hasn’t stopped the 11 top-ranked GOP candidates from skewering the organization and promising to strip its federal funding. Here’s what they said:

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — CNN corespondent Dana Bash asked Cruz if his determination to shut down the government in order to defund Planned Parenthood was deadly to the Republican ticket for president. “These Planned Parenthood videos are horrifying,” Cruz said. “Planned Parenthood also essentially confesses to multiple felonies…Absolutely we shouldn’t be sending $500 million of taxpayer money to funding an ongoing criminal enterprise, and I’ll tell you, the fact that Republican leadership in both houses has begun this discussion by preemptively surrendering to Barack Obama and saying, ‘We’ll give in because Obama threatens a veto.’ We need to stop surrendering and start standing for our principles.”

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio — Bash asked the governor if he supported Cruz’s strategy to defund Planned Parenthood. “I agree that we should defund Planned Parenthood,” he said. “And in my state, we’re trying to figure out how to get it done.” At the same time, he said, he opposed shutting down the government. “The president of the United States is not going to sign this, and all we’re going to do is shut the government down, and then we’re going to open it up, and the American people are going to shake their heads and say, ‘What’s the story with these Republicans?'”

Read more about how Scott Walker and Chris Christie became part of the 30-year fight to defund Planned Parenthood.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — “I’ve vetoed Planned Parenthood funding, now, eight times in New Jersey,” Christie said. “Since the day I walked in as governor, Planned Parenthood has not been funded in New Jersey.”

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — The former tech CEO made the night’s oddest remark about Planned Parenthood: “I would like to link these two issues, both of which are incredibly important: Iran and Planned Parenthood.” Without strictly linking them, she continued, “As regards to Planned Parenthood, I dare Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain'”—a moment that does not actually appear in the videos.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin — As CNN’s Jake Tapper tried to redirect the conversation away from abortion, Walker interrupted him. “I, like so many other governors here, defunded Planned Parenthood, four and a half years ago, in a blue state,” Walker said. “But I think the bigger issue here is we should be able to do this nationally, and this is precisely why so many Republicans are upset with Washington.”

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — Bash asked Bush to discuss his remark that he was “not sure we need a half billion for women’s health issues”—which Bush called a misstatement. “I’m the most pro-life governor on this stage,” Bush said. “Life is a gift from God. And from beginning to end we need to respect it and err on the side of life. And so I defunded Planned Parenthood. We were the only state to fund crisis pregnancy centers with state monies. We were totally focused on this. And I would bring that kind of philosophy to Washington, DC.”

“There are 13,000 community-based organizations that provide health services to women, 13,000 in this country,” Bush said, repeating a popular conservative myth that other groups could step up to replace Planned Parenthood. “I don’t believe that Planned Parenthood should get a penny from the federal government.”

Read More – 

Here’s What the GOP Candidates Had to Say About Reproductive Rights at the Debate

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What the GOP Candidates Had to Say About Reproductive Rights at the Debate

Louisiana: Women Don’t Need Planned Parenthood. They Have Dentists.

by BrandiPeden Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The task seems straightforward: Make a list of health care providers that would fill the void if Louisiana succeeded in defunding Planned Parenthood. But the state, which is fighting a court battle to strip the group of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicaid funds, is struggling to figure out who would provide poor women with family planning care if not Planned Parenthood.

Nowhere is this struggle more apparent than in a recent declaration by Louisiana’s attorneys that there are 2,000 family planning providers ready to accommodate new patients. A federal judge, reviewing the list in an early September court hearing, found hundreds of entries for specialists such as ophthalmologists; nursing homes caregivers; dentists; ear, nose, and throat doctors; and even cosmetic surgeons.

“It strikes me as extremely odd that you have a dermatologist, an audiologist, a dentist who are billing for family planning services,” said the judge, John deGravelles, who will determine in the next week whether it is legal for the state to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid contracts. “But that is what you’re representing to the court? You’re telling me that they can provide family planning and related services?”

His harsh questioning sent the state back to the drawing board. On Tuesday, the state’s attorneys acknowledged that the dentists and other specialists didn’t belong on the list. They filed a pared-down version that lists just 29 health care providers.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican contender for the presidency, moved to cut off $730,000 in Medicaid reimbursements to the state’s two Planned Parenthood clinics in late August in response to several heavily edited, widely circulated videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood employees selling fetal parts, which is illegal.

Planned Parenthood denies the charges and has asked for an injunction to block Jindal.

In straining to identify alternate providers, the state has added to a growing body of evidence that other health care providers would have a difficult time accommodating low-income women if Planned Parenthood were no longer able to take Medicaid. Planned Parenthood clinics in Louisiana do not provide abortions. Instead, the clinics provide thousands of annual cancer and STI screenings, overwhelmingly to low-income women on Medicaid. In Louisiana alone, the group last year performed 2,100 well-woman exams, 1,200 pap smears, and 11,000 STI tests, and it administered long-lasting contraceptives 4,100 times, to 5,200 patients, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast said.

Several Louisiana health care providers that would have to take over Planned Parenthood’s patients have stressed that their capacity to do so is very limited. “You can’t just cut Planned Parenthood off one day and expect everyone across the city to absorb the patients,” Stephanie Taylor, who oversees the state’s efforts to curb sexually transmitted diseases, told the New York Times. “There needs to be time to build the capacity.”

Another obstacle is the dearth of family planning clinics and doctors that accept women on Medicaid or other forms of public funding. Across the country, Planned Parenthood provides contraception to almost 40 percent of women who rely on public programs for family planning. The Times notes that four out of five Planned Parenthood patients have incomes below 150 percent of the poverty level, at a time when two-thirds of states reported difficulties ensuring there are enough health providers, especially OB-GYNs, for Medicaid patients.

On Tuesday, there was fresh evidence for what the fight to defund Planned Parenthood means for poor women. The Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think tank, published an analysis of nearly 500 counties where Planned Parenthood operates clinics. In 103 of those counties, Planned Parenthood is the health care provider for every single woman who relies on public funding for contraception. In an additional 229 counties, Planned Parenthood clinics provide care for at least half of patients who rely on Medicaid.

“Certainly in the short term, it is doubtful that other providers could step up in a timely way to absorb the millions of women suddenly left without their preferred source of care and whether those providers could offer the same degree of accessible, quality contraceptive care offered by Planned Parenthood,” the Guttmacher researchers wrote.

But the notion that patients could turn elsewhere remains a key rationale when abortion foes attempt to strip the group of $528 million in federal funding. The argument came up frequently in a Wednesday hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on the Planned Parenthood sting videos. “We often hear that if Planned Parenthood were to be defunded, there would be a health crisis among women without the services they provide,” testified Gianna Jessen, an anti-abortion activist who was born after an unsuccessful abortion. “This is absolutely false. Pregnancy resource centers are located nationwide as an option for the woman in crisis.” Abortion foes have also touted a map showing more than 13,500 clinics that could replace Planned Parenthood.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the junior Republican from Louisiana, has said there were more than 100 community health care centers “scattered all over the state” that could accept Planned Parenthood’s patients.

Lawyers for the state appeared to contradict him after they whittled down their list of capable providers to 29. And even among those providers, their ability to pick up Planned Parenthood’s slack is questionable. In Baton Rouge, the site of one of two Louisiana Planned Parenthood clinics, the state lists five alternate providers. But only three of those offer contraception, according to the state’s filing, and two of those have wait times ranging from two to seven weeks. One of the Baton Rouge clinics the state suggested is not accepting any new patients for STI, breast cancer, or cervical cancer screenings.

The state did not withdraw its original list without a fight. When pressured by Judge deGravelles, an attorney for Louisiana stood by the list, saying it represented every provider in the state that had used a family-planning billing code for insurance reimbursement. Here is an excerpt of the transcript:

The judge is set to rule on Planned Parenthood’s call for an injunction before September 15, when the state’s contract with Planned Parenthood would expire and Medicaid reimbursements would stop flowing.

In the September 2 hearing, deGravelles expressed reluctance to allow the contract to expire, since the state hadn’t articulated a good reason for doing so. “You have 5,200 women who are getting their care at these facilities,” he said. “If these contracts are terminated that care is going to be disrupted…for no reason related to the health care they’re getting.…They’re going to have to get other doctors, they’re going to have to seek out other places to get their health care. Correct?”

“They will have to do that,” a lawyer for the state replied. “Correct.”

View the original here – 

Louisiana: Women Don’t Need Planned Parenthood. They Have Dentists.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Louisiana: Women Don’t Need Planned Parenthood. They Have Dentists.

It Turns Out That Those "Full and Unedited" Planned Parenthood Videos…. Aren’t

by WillKulaciowg Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I gave up on the Planned Parenthood sting videos a long time ago. It’s pretty obvious there was no criminal behavior unmasked, or even any unethical behavior.1 The claims of the producers never matched the reality of the videos, so I stopped watching when new ones came out.

But Sarah Kliff soldiered on! She not only watched them all, she watched the full, unedited versions. And she discovered something after reading a forensic analysis of the videos from Planned Parenthood: they aren’t actually full and unedited. The folks who ran the sting claim that they did nothing more than edit out bathroom breaks, but Kliff isn’t buying it:

Take the first example I wrote about here, the meeting with the Texas Planned Parenthood clinic where the tape appears to jump forward a half-hour. In that case, nobody suggests a bathroom break. There’s no change in meeting; when the video jumps forward, they’re still sitting in the exact same seats.

Meanwhile, the longer videos show lots of small-talk footage that isn’t especially relevant to the argument over fetal body parts. I know because I watched all of it. There are moments in a car, where directions are being given and all the camera footage is totally blurry, where people stand around in hallways, where they talk about the relationship between caffeine and headaches. Those moments weren’t cut from the tape — and it’s hard to know what would make those different from the bathroom breaks and other moments deemed irrelevant to the audience.

I guess we need a chant for this. Release the video! We demand to see the bathroom breaks! Explain the timestamps! Or something. As far as I’m concerned, Planned Parenthood has long since been exonerated in this episode, so I don’t really need to see anything. But I am curious about just what they decided to leave out.

1Standard caveat: If you think abortion is murder, then everything on the video is unethical and immoral.

Original source:

It Turns Out That Those "Full and Unedited" Planned Parenthood Videos…. Aren’t

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It Turns Out That Those "Full and Unedited" Planned Parenthood Videos…. Aren’t

Ben Carson: Abortion Is the No. 1 Killer of Black People

by JeannaPTLP Posted on August 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday, Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate, double downed on his recent assertion that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger used abortions as a population control tool in order to try and destroy the black population.

When asked by Fox News if he stood by his eyebrow-raising comments, Carson answered unequivocally, “Absolutely. No question about it.”

“Anybody can easily find out about Margaret Sanger and what kind of person she was and how she was a strong advocate of eugenics,” he explained. “She wrote articles about eugenics and believed that certain members of the population weakened the population and was not enamored of black people. And it is quite true that the majority and plurality of their clinics are in minority neighborhoods.”

But Carson then brought the discussion up to 2015. “It brings up a very important issue and that is do those black lives matter?” Carson added. “The number one cause of death for black people is abortion. I wonder if maybe some people might at some point become concerned about that and ask why is that happening and what can be done to alleviate that situation. I think that’s really the important question.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease is the number one cause of death for African Americans.

His attack on the women’s health organization comes the same week that it was revealed Carson used fetal tissues to conduct medical research—a practice that has come under fire in recent weeks after an anti-abortion group published a string of a heavily-edited video footage appearing to capture Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissues.

Despite his very vocal anti-abortion criticism, Carson defended his past research on aborted fetuses and argued that there was no inconsistency with this and his continued attacks on Planned Parenthood. “Killing babies and harvesting tissue for sale is very different than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it,” he said. “Which is exactly the source of the tissue used in our research.”

Source:

Ben Carson: Abortion Is the No. 1 Killer of Black People

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ben Carson: Abortion Is the No. 1 Killer of Black People

No, the fight over Planned Parenthood is not over

by BrandiKirke0 Posted on August 4, 2015

Protesters stand on a sidewalk outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Vista, Calif., on August 3, 2015. Reuters / Mike Blake

No, the fight over Planned Parenthood is not over

By on 4 Aug 2015commentsShare

On Monday, the Senate — by a margin of seven votes — voted down the Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-Iowa)-sponsored bill that would eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Fifty-three senators voted in favor of said bill, with 46 voting against it, which failed to meet the 60-vote majority required for the bill to avoid a filibuster. On one hand, great — the bill didn’t pass, as was expected! But on the other hand, more than half of our elected officials in the Senate don’t believe that Planned Parenthood, an indispensable institution for national public health, deserves public funding. As a result, this issue is certainly going to come up again this fall, when it’s time for the government spending bill to pass.

Planned Parenthood is under attack on a state level, too: After the Senate GOP loss, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced that the state would immediately terminate its Medicaid contract with Planned Parenthood, effectively cutting off access to services for 4,300 low-income, uninsured clients. Louisiana is already the not-so-proud mother of some of the worst reproductive health statistics in the country.

To review, this whole mess is spurred by one extremist organization releasing intentionally misleading and inaccurate videos on Planned Parenthood activities surrounding abortion — which, for the record, only make up 3 percent of the organization’s services and have not been federally funded since 1976.

A very brief rundown of the public health good that Planned Parenthood provides: The organization serves 37 percent of all clients who rely on Title X-funded health centers and offers contraceptive care that prevents over 500,000 unintended pregnancies annually. And overwhelmingly, the women and men who depend on Planned Parenthood are low-income and, without its services, would be left without access to necessary procedures like Pap smears, STD testing, and breast, ovarian, and uterine cancer screenings.

Ongoing threats to defund and destroy Planned Parenthood, and publicly funded family planning organizations like it, are more than just large-scale acts of aggression on women. They are direct attacks on a very specific segment of women — those who are poor, or undocumented, or very young. They are those who, quite literally, have nowhere else to go.

It’s 2015, and the United States is still torn in two over a woman’s right to control her reproductive health. If you’d like to go ahead and cryogenically freeze yourself to get away from this absurd saga, don’t bother — I’m willing to bet, based on history, that we’ll still be in the same spot in 50 or 100 years. That is, if we’re not all underwater or on fire by then.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Read original article:  

No, the fight over Planned Parenthood is not over

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No, the fight over Planned Parenthood is not over

Abortion Is Not Murder

by LizzieAppel Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal tissue from the abortions it performs:

A recent Sarah Silverman tweet distilled one argument many liberals are making about the Planned Parenthood videos into a few characters: ”Abortion is still legal in the great U.S of A. It would be insane not to use fetal tissue 4 science & education in such cases. #StandwithPP.”

The death penalty is also still legal in our great country. Should we employ methods of execution so as to yield the highest number of usable organs?….

Whenever I write about abortion, I usually get a bunch of tweets or emails asking if I even understand the conservative position. Answer: of course I do. Most conservatives say that abortion is murder. Given that premise, their opposition to funding abortion, legalizing abortion, using some day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.

So I’m going to ask the mirror image question here: does Ponnuru understand the liberal position on abortion? Most of us don’t think of fetuses as persons, which means abortion doesn’t involve killing a human being in any meaningful sense. Given that premise, our support of funding abortion, legalizing abortion, promoting day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.

To us lefties, the death penalty involves killing a human being. Abortion doesn’t. So it’s perfectly reasonable to have different views about how the remains are treated in each case.

POSTSCRIPT: There are, of course, nuances in these positions regarding abortion on both sides. We’re all familiar enough with them that it seems unnecessary to repeat them here. That said, at its most basic, liberals don’t generally consider aborting a fetus to involve killing a human being. Obviously the rest of our views follow from that.

Link:  

Abortion Is Not Murder

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Abortion Is Not Murder

Planned Parenthood "Sting" Video Is Yet Another Right-Wing Nothingburger

by SharynChin Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Yesterday I watched the (now infamous) hidden video from the Center for Medical Progress, which allegedly shows a couple of undercover “buyers” for a fetal tissue procurement company having lunch with Deborah Nucatola, director of medical services for Planned Parenthood. And it was obviously pretty fishy. Nucatola was talking very openly about how they dispose of fetal tissue from abortions, and doing it in a way that exhibited no stress and no sense at all of being involved in a shady operation. The price per specimen was $30-100,which obviously covered no more than shipping and normal handling. It plainly wasn’t enough for this to be an illegal for-profit business.

So I shrugged and went on with my day. Then the video landed on the front page of the Washington Post and it went mainstream. I assume Fox has been running it on a 24/7 loop as well. But as near as I can tell, it’s completely bogus. The video tries to imply that Planned Parenthood is performing illegal abortions and that it’s selling fetal tissue for profit, also a felony. But there’s not the slightest evidence of either. In fact, as Media Matters points out, if you watch the unedited video it’s crystal clear that the charges for the fetal tissue they sell are designed only to cover the actual costs of the process. Nucatola says repeatedly that affiliates want to “break even,” not make a profit.

So there’s basically nothing here. Bioethicists have been debating for years whether it’s a good idea to sell fetal tissue, and as you can imagine, they’ve been disagreeing for years and show no signs of ever coming to a consensus. Some think it’s wrong and some think it’s OK. That’s not surprising since some people think abortion is wrong and some think it’s OK. And if you think abortion is wrong, you’re certainly not going to be happy about the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses.

Nonetheless, it’s a common practice, and one that’s critical for a lot of medical research. What’s more, it’s only done if the mother wants the tissue donated.

So: scandal? Not hardly. Is it wrong? If you think abortion is murder, then of course you think it’s wrong. If you think abortion is morally benign, as I do, then you’re glad to see donated tissue being used in important medical research. And that’s pretty much that. In the end, this is just another sad attempt at a sting video that goes nowhere once you get beyond the deceptive editing. It’s time for conservatives to find a different toy to manufacture fundraising opportunities for their base.

Link:

Planned Parenthood "Sting" Video Is Yet Another Right-Wing Nothingburger

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Planned Parenthood "Sting" Video Is Yet Another Right-Wing Nothingburger

GOP Governors Paying Big Bucks to Contoversial Marriage Therapist to Defend New Abortion Laws

by MaryannPHIE Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over the past two years, at least four Republican-controlled states have paid nearly $200,000 in taxpayers funds to Vincent Rue—a marriage therapist whose testimony has been repeatedly disregarded by judges—to help defend ultra-strict abortion laws in court.

Rue, who holds a doctorate in family relations from the University of North Carolina School of Home Economics, has claimed that “abortion reescalates the battle between the sexes” and “abortion increases bitterness toward men.” For decades, he has strived to convince mainstream researchers to recognize “post-abortion syndrome,” a supposed mental illness resulting from abortion.

But “after submission for peer review by scientists with the Center for Disease Control, the National Center for Health Statistics and other scientific institutions, Rue’s study was found to have ‘no value’ and to be ‘based upon a priori beliefs rather than an objective review of the evidence,'” according to Daniel Huyett, a federal judge who disregarded Rue’s testimony in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a landmark 1990 abortion case that eventually ended up before the Supreme Court. “His testimony is devoid of…analytical force and scientific rigor,” Huyett added. “Moreover, his admitted personal opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, suggests a possible personal bias.” Rue “possesses neither the academic qualifications nor the professional experience of plaintiffs’ expert witnesses,” another federal judge wrote in 1986 after hearing Rue’s testimony in another landmark abortion case, Hodgson v. Minnesota.

Rue “has been really thoroughly discredited by trial courts,” says Priscilla Smith, who faced Rue many years ago as a litigator and now directs the Yale Law School’s reproductive justice studies program. (Rue said he couldn’t comment for this story without the permission of the state attorneys general who’ve hired him.)

But Rue’s history hasn’t prevented Republican administrations in Alabama, North Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin from giving him lucrative work as a legal consultant. These days, though, he rarely testifies himself. Instead, he works behind the scenes to handpick expert witnesses, write reports, and guide states’ legal strategies for defending abortion restrictions. From 2012 to 2014, North Dakota paid Rue $19,936 to help defend its six-week abortion ban—which legal scholars criticized as patently unconstitutional. (A federal court struck down the ban in April; the state is appealing.) In the same time period, Alabama paid Rue $79,087.50 to defend a law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges with a local hospital. (The law threatens to shut down three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics; the case, brought by Planned Parenthood, is ongoing.) In 2014, Texas paid Rue $36,392 in “other witness fees” for work on an unspecified lawsuit.

Continue Reading »

Continue reading:  

GOP Governors Paying Big Bucks to Contoversial Marriage Therapist to Defend New Abortion Laws

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GOP Governors Paying Big Bucks to Contoversial Marriage Therapist to Defend New Abortion Laws

WATCH: Front-Runner in GOP Senate Primary Says Planned Parenthood Wants to Kill Newborns

by AmberPkk Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

According to North Carolina GOP Senate candidate Greg Brannon, Planned Parenthood has a secret plan to legalize the killing of newborn babies as old as three months. Brannon, a Rand Paul-backed obstetrician who is a front-runner for the GOP nomination, made the allegations at a November fundraiser for Hand of Hope, a chain of crisis pregnancy centers he operates in North Carolina.

Well how far will it go? Last year, February 29, 2012, the Journal of Ethics in Australia, they debated that. They said we already know abortion is fine, why stop in the womb? Why not three months after. Why should we end the responsibility at that point? It could happen in America. Florida’s trying to do it right now and so is Georgia. Planned Parenthood. Because we allowed that slippery slope. Every human being deserves life, liberty, and property.

Brannon’s statement appears to be based on testimony given last year by a lobbyist for the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates. Asked how the organization’s physicians would respond if a baby were born alive during an abortion, the lobbyist appeared confused and said she’d have to check. But in a follow-up statement, Barbara Zdravecky, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, unambiguously rejected the notion: “In the extremely unlikely event that the scenario presented by the legislators ever happened, of course Planned Parenthood would provide appropriate care to both the woman and the infant.”

“These absurd and patently false claims by Greg Brannon demonstrate just how extreme and out of touch he is when it comes to women’s health issues—and the rest of the Republican Senate candidates in North Carolina are just as dangerous,” Planned Parenthood Action Fund Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens said in a statement. Brannon’s campaign did not respond to request for clarification.

In the same speech, Brannon said women get abortions because of the same nihilistic worldview that causes them to believe in evolution. “We have people who believe they evolve from nothing, they came from nothing, they’ll go to nothing, and today doesn’t matter, so when they have a mistake, why not move on?,” he said.

The most recent survey of the race, from Public Policy Polling, showed Brannon tied with Thom Tillis, the speaker of the state house of representatives, for the Republican nomination—and running even with Sen. Kay Hagan (R-N.C.) in a hypothetical November matchup.

Original link:

WATCH: Front-Runner in GOP Senate Primary Says Planned Parenthood Wants to Kill Newborns

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on WATCH: Front-Runner in GOP Senate Primary Says Planned Parenthood Wants to Kill Newborns