Life Links 4/12/11

The Miami Herald has a long AP story on the lack of written reports by doctors at the University of Pennsylvania Health System regarding abortion complications on women who received abortions at Kermit Gosnell's clinic.

The health system - in apparent contradiction of the grand jury report - released a statement saying that it had "provided reports to the authorities regarding patients of Dr. Gosnell who sought additional care at our hospitals" starting in 1999.

But the system's attorneys could only produce a single report for the grand jury. That involved 22-year-old Semika Shaw, who died at the university hospital of internal bleeding and sepsis after a botched abortion in 2000. Gosnell's insurers ultimately paid out a $900,000 settlement in that case.

Health system spokeswoman Susan Phillips later clarified the statement, saying "we have staff who specifically recall making oral reports" to state officials about Gosnell.

"Unfortunately, we have not been able to find additional written reports from these past years," she wrote in an email.

The article then lists various women who were injured by Gosnell and whose cases were never reported.


Pro-aborts in D.C. are mad their tax dollars won't be paying for abortions as a result of the budget negotiations.

Elective abortions for poor women in the District of Columbia — a central bargaining chip in the deal — have cost the city $62,300 since August, city officials say......

“It looks to me that we were easy enough to throw under a bus, and that’s where we landed,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s delegate in Congress.

I'm very skeptical of the number above. If it's $62,300 for abortions from August to the end of March that would mean D.C. spends approximately 100K per year on tax-funded abortions. That would mean only about 200 abortions a year would be paid for with tax dollars which seems quite low for a city with a historical high abortion rate (remember the Dick Durbin scuffle with Sam Brownback?) which has dropped in recent years though that's at least somewhat because reporting isn't mandatory.

Washington D.C.'s mayor even got arrested along with six city council members protesting the budget restrictions. From the article:

The fact that Congress will likely re-impose the ban on abortion funding wasn't a shock to Tiffany Reed, the president of D.C. Abortion Fund, a non-profit organization that makes grants to poor women to pay for abortions, which can cost $300 to $500 or more. Reed said her group, which helped pay for more than 300 abortions a year, had expected the ban to be re-imposed, but she was angry Congress had stepped in again to local affairs just as the lifting of the ban was beginning to take effect.

"It gives me a lot of rage quite frankly," she said. "I'm really disappointed in our pro-choice president that he allowed this to happen."

In an incredibly superficial post on Planned Parenthood's services, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein notes he thinks Planned Parenthood's services are needed because supporting poor people's children is costly.

It’s somewhat cold to put it in these terms, but taxpayers end up bearing a lot of the expense for unintended pregnancies among people without the means to care for their children.

Abortion organizations are claiming their supporters are becoming more active since the Planned Parenthood budget fight began.

Online gifts to Planned Parenthood have surged by 500 percent since Republicans passed a budget amendment stripping the group of its federal funding.

NARAL Pro-Choice America’s email activist list grew by 1,000 subscribers per day at the height of the budget debate.....

Planned Parenthood’s Facebook fans surged 992 percent after the House approved the budget amendment to defund the group in mid-February. More than 810,000 supporters signed its petition denouncing the amendment — more than half of them new users who had never been active with Planned Parenthood prior to the budget debate. The social media activity also drove Planned Parenthood’s surge in online donations.

I think Cecile Richards is wrong on this point.

Planned Parenthood’s Richards believes her organization has emerged from the budget battle stronger, with a slew of publicity for the preventive services it provides. Many news accounts have reported that abortion makes up 3 percent of the group’s services.

Many news accounts also informed readers and viewers that Planned Parenthood was America's largest abortion provider. Prolifers could have spent millions on ad campaigns linking Planned Parenthood to abortion and would have never got anywhere near the publicity we got by fighting to defund them. I think public knowledge regarding Planned Parenthood's abortion activities is likely higher than it has ever been. That's not good Planned Parenthood in the long run.