Life Links 6/29/12

Deng Jiyuan, the husband of the Chinese woman who was forced into a 7-month abortion has resurfaced in Beijing after leaving his hometown and is seeking help to get his wife released from the local hospital.

Despite her requests to leave, Ms. Feng has been held in Shanxi Zhenping County Hospital watched over by local government officials, since being forced to abort her seven-month-old fetus on June 2.

In a sign that local officials may be bending to public pressure, Ms. Feng's sister-in-law, Deng Jicai, said by phone Friday evening that doctors had told her Ms. Feng would be released from the hospital following a final check up on Saturday. "Right now there is no one blocking us from leaving," Ms. Deng said. "Those government people have been gone since yesterday."

The New York Attorney General's office wants former New York NARAL leader Kelli Conlon to repay all of the NARAL money she spent on herself (apparently hundreds of thousands).

The complaint cites more than $250,000 of improper expenses, some falsely documented, while noting Conlin's salary was $380,000 in 2010 and she exercised increasing control over its outside bookkeepers and intimidated staff.

They included $75,000 for retail purchases, with nearly $50,000 for designer clothing and shoes at stores such as Barneys and Giorgio Armani, some described in expense claims as "event decor" for the nonprofits' fundraisers.

Others were $17,000 for a July rental of a Southhampton house; $12,200 to pay her children's nanny; $26,000 for personal travel; $18,500 in hotel expenses in Manhattan, where NARAL-NY has its office, though she lived in Brooklyn; $50,000 for non-business meals, including 120 from a sushi restaurant near her home; and $70,000 for car services, most for shuttling her children.

In another brick in the mounting tower of evidence that human embryonic stem cell research is so 2002, the University of Massachusetts embryonic stem cell bank will close at the end of the year as funding dries up. The state of Massachusetts wasted $8.6 million on it since the legislation passed in 2008.

The state invested $8.6 million in public funds to establish the bank at the medical school's Shrewsbury campus.

That decision in 2008 was seen then as a bold statement of support for research on human embryonic stem cells during a time when federal funding for work on the controversial cells was restricted. But advances in technology and changes to federal policies rapidly made the bank obsolete, state officials said......

Originally, the bank was seen as a repository for embryonic stem cell lines that were being created but were not eligible for federal funding under Bush-era restrictions. The field has evolved significantly since then, with President Obama's loosening of restrictions on federal funding and the development of new technologies for making stem cells......

"It's certainly unfortunate that this investment hasn't panned out as planned, but I think it's a very different case from investing large amounts of money in a single company," Widmer said.

Some scientists said they were not surprised to learn of the endeavor's failure. Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his impression was that the banking effort never fully got off the ground. It did not announce the availability of its first stem cell lines until 2011.

So they blew through nearly $9 million in tax funds and will only have been a functioning embryonic stem cell bank for 2 years?

Life Links 6/28/12

The last abortion clinic in Mississippi is suing to stop enforcement of the state's abortion clinic regulation law. None of the three abortionists who are employed there can get admitting privileges.

The clinic said the unjustified requirement in the law is that it requires anyone who performs an abortion at a clinic to be an OB-GYN with privileges to admit patients to a local hospital. Lawmakers said that is for patients' safety. The lawsuit says it's impossible for the clinic's physicians to get local hospital admitting privileges by Sunday......

Clinic spokeswoman Betty Thompson said last week that the three physicians who work at the clinic are OB-GYNs and have applied for privileges but haven't received them.

Two local Maryland law regulating crisis pregnancy centers have been struck down.

In a 2-1 ruling Wednesday, a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond ruled that the Baltimore and Montgomery County ordinances violated the pregnancy centers' free-speech rights.

In China, the husband of a woman forcibly aborted at 7 months has gone missing.

Deng Jiyuan traveled to Beijing last week to meet with lawyers and journalists to discuss the incident. But, according to his sister, Mr. Deng was met with fierce resistance. "More than 100 people and a dozen of cars showed up to stop him, and a man suddenly appeared and kicked my brother in the stomach," Deng Jicai said.

On Sunday, government officials purportedly urged local townspeople to unfold a banner near the hospital where Feng was located, which called the family "traitors" and ordered that they be excommunicated from the town. Meanwhile, photos were posted online displaying a red banner that reads, "severely beat the traitors and expel them."

Life Links 6/27/12

The Los Angeles Times is reporting the family planning officials who forcibly aborted a woman at 7 months pregnant and then laid the child's body next to hers for a picture have been supposedly punished.

Following the outcry, a municipal government investigation found that forcing the young woman to terminate her pregnancy so late in its term violated her rights, the official Xinhua news agency reported Tuesday. The township also illegally demanded an approximately $6,200 payment for a certificate allowing her to have a second child, which her family did not pay, the report stated.

The investigation found that officials "used crude means to violate her intentions," Xinhua reported.

The head of family planning in Zhenping county has been removed from his post, Xinhua reported. Other township, county and hospital officials were also punished, including another Zhenping family-planning official, who was given "administrative demerits," the news agency reported.

Meanwhile, the family of the woman is allegedly being harassed.

The Chinese father of a forcibly aborted baby whose case prompted an international outcry has been beaten and forced into hiding, while his wife and other family members have been labeled traitors by fellow townspeople, the man's sister said Tuesday.....

Apparently angered over the family's contacts with journalists, the local government has since organized a backlash against the family members, calling them traitors and keeping them under surveillance, Deng Jicai, a sister of the 30-year-old father Deng Jiyuan, said.

The Planned Parenthood in Columbia, Missouri is indefinitely suspending abortions again. This has happened before because of a lack of abortionist.

This isn't the first time Planned Parenthood has suspended abortions at the Columbia clinic while doctors were unavailable. The clinic halted abortions for four months beginning last October after its lone Columbia physician was sent overseas on active military duty.

Part of South Dakota's informed consent law will go into effect on July 1.

Women seeking abortions in South Dakota will be advised about the risk of adverse psychological outcomes and assessed by a doctor for the possibility that she was coerced into getting the procedure, under an agreement between Planned Parenthood and state officials.

Overheard: Ann Coulter on Rep. Lisa Brown

Ouch.

Her smashing crescendo was: "And finally Mr. Speaker, I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no'!"

It's not clear where Rep. Brown got the idea that the Republican caucus was planning on date-raping her, but I think there's been a terrible misunderstanding. The bill under consideration merely ensured the safety of women having abortions -- and, in a small way, the safety of the fetus, whom the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited legislatures from protecting directly......

For making inappropriate remarks during a legislative session, Brown was prohibited from making floor speeches for one day. Being an hysterical drama queen who believes the Michigan Legislature was thinking about her and her vagina, Rep. Brown responded to the sanction by claiming she had been "silenced." A vulgarian gets a one-day penalty, and suddenly she's Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Rep. Brown was not being silenced. She was being admonished for a crazy display of narcissism utterly irrelevant to the bill under discussion. I would never in a million years silence a woman because of her views on abortion, but I'd vote for a month of silence from this self-dramatizing freak.

Life Links 6/22/12

In Kansas, the State Board of Healing Arts has revoked the medical license of former abortionist and late abortionist George Tiller’s former rubber stamper Ann Neuhaus.

The administrative judge concluded in February that Neuhaus performed inadequate mental health exams in 2003 on 11 patients, aged 10 to 18. The judge said Neuhaus’ records didn’t contain the information necessary to show that she did thorough exams, and the patients’ care was “seriously jeopardized.”

“Her actions clearly show a disregard for her patients’ safety and care, which causes her to be a threat to any future patients she might have,” said Reese Hays, the attorney on the board’s litigation team who presented the case against Neuhaus.

MSN India has a story a couple whose sex-selection abortion business was shut down.

Sources in the police said the couple has admitted to running the abortion clinic but is not revealing the exact details. A sting operation conducted two years ago on the Mundes had revealed their willingness to conduct an abortion on a seven-month pregnant woman for just Rs 2,500.

Advocate and activist Varsha Deshpande, who runs the NGO Lek-Ladki Abhiyaan, said: 'Our scrutiny on them has revealed that they conduct, on an average, 20 abortions per day, which comes to 7,200 abortions in one year. The Mundes are known to be in collusion with a lot of doctors from remote districts in Maharashtra as well as Andhra Pradesh, from where people come to them to get their ultrasound examinations done'.

The local CBS news station in Miami has the story of an in-utero surgery in which a tennis ball sized tumor was removed from Lyna Gonzalez’s mouth when she was in the 17th week of gestation.

During her pregnancy, Gonzalez’s doctors discovered a benign tumor the size of a tennis ball growing on her unborn baby’s mouth. Doctors told Tammy there was little chance her daughter would survive birth – and if she did, she would require an immediate tracheotomy in order to breath and have multiple surgeries thereafter....

On October 1, 2010, Leyna Mykaella Gonzalez was born healthy, weighing 8 pounds, 1 ounce. The only sign of the surgery is a tiny scar on her mouth.

The Indianapolis Star has a long article on Planned Parenthood of Indiana CEO Betty Cockrum.

Life Links 6/21/12

At the Atlantic, Richard Florida discusses the Geography of Abortion in the U.S. A lot of it shows how incredibly wrong pro-choicers are when they act like prolife policies do nothing to effect the abortion rate(my emphasis).

First and foremost, the geography of abortion follows the red and blue political patterning of the states. It is positively associated with the share of state voters who voted for Obama in 2008 (.60 to .65) and negatively associated with McCain votes (-.58 to -.63). This is a dramatic change from 1974-1988, the period covered by the 1994 NBER study, which found that "extensive Republican or Democratic control in a state is uncorrelated with abortion rates."
...........
Abortion is most strongly associated with the fault-line of socio-economic class, across three key dimensions—income, education, and occupation. Abortion rates track closely with the wealth and affluence of states: the richer the location, the higher the rate of abortions (the correlations between the two range from .53 to .65). This effect is in line with previous studies and thus appears to be of long standing.

Planned Parenthood is no longer planning on turning a property they purchased in Auburn Hills, Michigan into an abortion clinic.

The proposed clinic was a source of tension in the community, with groups opposed to abortion conducting several protests at the site because they believed the procedure would be conducted there.

The group hadn't determined what services would be offered at the clinic, said Desiree Cooper, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan.

"We do not offer all of our services at all of our health centers. It just depends on the community and the need, and we hadn't made that assessment," she said.

Yeah, except the Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan president said a long time ago that Planned Parenthood was planning to provide abortions there.


Live Action released another video showing two abortion clinics in North Carolina willing to perform sex-selection abortions.

The local Planned Parenthood caught on tape has issued a statement from the national office. No word on whether the employee was fired or not.


The Detroit News has a lackluster editorial which attempts to argue that providing regulations on the abortion industry is bad because it would make abortions "needlessly costly and cumbersome." The editorial claims abortion clinic regulations aren't need because "Physicians already are personally licensed by the state and have to adhere to professional standards governing their treatment decisions. A state medical board will suspend or strip a doctor's license if he or she violates the standards."

Later, it notes a report which showed a number of abortionists who have violated basic medical standards and are still licensed but claims new regulations aren't need because "weeding out bad actors through heightened surveillance and enforcement of laws on the books would be a better approach than onerous new restrictions that discourage good doctors from providing the service. Perhaps the state's enforcement division needs more inspectors."

Michigan pro-abort reps. can't understand why their tantrums and lack of professionalism led to them being silenced for a day

Michigan pro-abort Representative Lisa Brown is making the news again after her speech against prolife legislation lost her House floor speaking privileges for a day (Rep. Barb Byrum also lost her privileges for throwing a mini-tantrum on the House floor). Another recent time Brown made the news was when a former staffer accused Brown of firing her because she was pregnant. The staffer also accused Brown of making a crude abortion comments during a prolife rally (another staffer claimed Brown would never say something that crude).

Some people who don't understand the state House rules on protocol and decorum seem to think that saying the word vagina is what got Brown in trouble and can't seem to fathom the context in which she said it might be at issue.

Let's examine the quote:

"I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no,' "

If I was a Michigan House member who favored the prolife legislation being voted on, I would consider this a personal attack. She claims they are interested in her vagina and uses the "no means no" phrase which is often used to discuss sexual assaults.

Besides Brown's accusatory comments and Byrum's mini-tantrum, Rep. Rashida Tlaib couldn't come up with argument so she called for a sex boycott.

State Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, called for women statewide to boycott having sex until Republican lawmakers reconsider the bills.

"Stop having sex with us, gentlemen," Tlaib said. "Find somebody else to do it with."

Life Links 6/5/12

Jordan Sekulow and Matthew Clark write about pro-choice hypocrisy on sex-selection abortions.

Writing at the XX Factor blog at Slate, pro-choice advocate Allison Benedikt demonstrated the convoluted logic of those on the pro-choice side who express discomfort with sex-selective abortion:

If pro-choicers object to aborting because of the sex of the fetus, aren't we then saying that abortion is "murdering" girls? Aren't we basically arguing that a fetus is not a blank slate but a future possibility? That is not the case to make if your goal is to protect abortion rights.

Benedikt is exactly right. If "these are fetuses with female genitals or male genitals—not little girls and little boys," why would the pro-choice community condemn sex-selection abortion at all?

At Slate, Rachel Larimore tries to reason with pro-choicers opposed to banning sex-selective abortions.

At the same time, too many in the pro-choice movement refuse to believe that anyone who's pro-life actually cares about the unborn. They can't allow themselves to believe anything but that we hate women and are afraid of sex, because if they acknowledge that our concern is for the unborn, they might have to challenge their own beliefs.

And so we can't even find agreement on an issue that should bring us together. I find the pro-choice critiques of PRENDA to be either tired and lazy or strangely hypocritical. As to the idea that sex-selective abortion isn't a big deal because it doesn't happen that often, well… women who work at Catholic hospitals only make up a tiny percentage of the overall workforce, so I guess all that hubbub about whether they should have employer-provided birth control isn't that big of a deal.

A girl from Arizona with hypotonia (aka Floppy Baby Syndrome) is walking after receiving a transplant of her own cord blood stem cells and physical therapy.


In other cord blood stem cell news, a Florida newspaper has a long story on a toddler who is part of an FDA-approved clinical trial to see if their own cord blood stem cells can help children with sensorineural hearing loss.

Planned Parenthood says it opposes sex-selection abortion. Say what?

In a letter to the Washington Post, Planned Parenthood employee Chloe Cooney (director of global advocacy) claims, "Planned Parenthood opposes sex-selection abortion." Huh? Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards claims the same thing in a press release.

“As the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health provider and advocate, Planned Parenthood knows all too well that women still face gender discrimination in this country,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “We oppose sex selection abortion."

What's going on here? Planned Parenthood is actually stating they oppose a type of abortion. Isn't that a first?

Shouldn't someone ask them why they're now supposedly suddenly opposed to a woman freely exercising her right to abortion based on the child's sex?

Don't they trust women to make the best decision for themselves and their families anymore?

Are they saying that some women's reproductive choices aren't valid?

Because that goes against everything Planned Parenthood and the pro-choice movement has been preaching for decades.

Persuasion is now apparently beyond the pale at Auckland University

Auckland University has apparently caught a sickness which has previously taken hold in Canada.

Auckland University Student Association president Arena Williams has called for a special general meeting next month, which could see ProLife Auckland being barred from associating itself with the university.

An announcement for the meeting said the association would consider whether the "Prolife Club be disaffiliated for propagating harmful misinformation [sic]".

"Recently we've received complaints from students after [ProLife Auckland] handed out fliers at the campus," said Williams.

"On the fliers there was information which some felt was pressuring them into making different decisions than they normally would."

The horror!!!

No word on whether the debate club will also be purged.

The idiocy continues:

Williams said it was not appropriate for her to say how the distributed information was harmful.

So the club should be banned for distributing harmful but no evidence is provided for how it was harmful? Classic.