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Source: Pro-Life Infonet, AP; June 4, 2003
Washington, DC -- The House of Representatives easily approved a ban on partial birth abortions on Wednesday, a measure supported by President Bush and championed for nearly a decade by pro-life groups. The House backed the bill with a 282-139 vote -- a 20 vote larger margin than last year that pointed to the pro-life election victories in 2000.
Because the Senate approved the ban with a resolution expressing its support for the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, the bill must go to a conference committee to iron out the differences. Conferees, including pro-life Reps. Henry Hyde (R-IL) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) on the House side, are expected to delete the pro-Roe provision. Once that happens, President Bush said Wednesday he would sign the bill. Bush applauded House passage of the ban and said, "Passage of this important legislation is a shared priority that will help build a culture of life in America." Following his signature, the questions begin.
Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the organization would file a suit immediately after Bush signs the bill and would seek an injunction to stop its implementation. "It still doesn't contain an exception for the health of the woman and it criminalizes doctors trying to provide the best care to their patients," she said.
Pro-life groups argue would render the law meaningless by allowing all partial-birth abortions to remain legal. The Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska partial-birth abortion ban and agreed the health exemption was necessary. If the bill withstands legal challenges, it would be the first time a specific form of abortion has been criminalized since the Roe decision. The deciding factor in any Supreme Court decision could be the court's makeup. Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor, two of the five who voted to strike down the Nebraska law, are considered among the three justices most likely to retire in the near future, allowing Bush to nominate a pro-life replacement.
Sponsors of the bill included congressional "findings" in this new version of the ban that state partial-birth abortions are never medically necessary to protect a woman's health, which they believe will enable it to pass the constitutional test. "Partial birth abortion is the termination of the life of a living baby just seconds before it takes its first breath outside the womb," said Rep. Steve Chabot, the Ohio Republican who is the lead sponsor of the bill. "The procedure is violent. It's gruesome. It's horrific. It's barbaric. It's infanticide." Under the bill, abortion practitioners could face up to two years in prison as well as civil lawsuits.
The two sides disagree how common it is, but the National Right to Life Committee estimates several thousand a year, "mostly on healthy babies of healthy mothers." Led by pro-abortion Reps. James Greenwood (R-PA) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD), some lawmakers offered a "phony" partial-birth abortion ban that included a health exception. It was defeated 287-133. The House also defeated 256-165 a motion to send the bill back to committee and add a "health" exception. The vote was also by a larger margin than last year. "It would be impossible for an abortionist to 'violate' a bill that empowers him to perform third-trimester abortions whenever he asserts that they protect mental health," Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee said in a statement.
Some 30 states have passed bans on partial birth abortions although courts have blocked those laws in about 20 states. The federal legislation, if it becomes law, would apply to procedures in all states. Democratic president candidate Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-MO), who is pro-abortion, was not present to vote on the ban while Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) voted against it, confirming his new pro-abortion stance. Pro-life groups of all stripes hailed passage of the bill. Some of the groups included the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Right to Life, West Virginians for Life, Concerned Women for America, Susan B. Anthony List, Family Research Council, Knights of Columbus, Feminists for Life, Life Resource Network's Women's Task Force, The Second Look Project, Women and Children First, Solidarity with Women, and the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.

ACTION: See how your representative voted on the ban at http://clerkweb.house.gov/cgi-bin/vote.exe?year=2003&rollnumber=242 and how they voted on the phony ban at http://clerkweb.house.gov/cgi-bin/vote.exe?year=2003&rollnumber=240

For info on Partial Birth Abortion click here(National Right to Life)

Washington, DC -- If the recent debate over partial-birth abortion is any indication, abortion advocates are sticking to the mantra that abortion is beneficial for a woman's health. Not so say Dr. Elizabeth Shadigian and Dr. Joel Brind, two leading researchers on abortion's effects on women, who say women can suffer a range of short and long-term complications from abortion.
As part of a series of lectures designed to highlight the Family Research Council's "Building a Culture of Life," a broad-based action plan for reducing abortion, the two focused on the much ignored dangers of abortion to the lives and health of women. The symposium is also a part of the Women Deserve Better campaign, an effort by FRC and several pro-life organizations to emphasize the pro-woman message.
Abortion can take a tragic toll on the physical health of a woman, but none greater than the loss of her life. Unfortunately, accurate data on the incidence of maternal death as a result of a botched abortions is perhaps one of the least-known and most obstructed health figures in the U.S.
Dr. Elizabeth Shadigian, a clinical associate professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical Center, told the audience maternal death following abortion is not monitored closely by the Centers for Disease Control in the same way it monitors deaths from other surgical procedures. "There is no mandatory reporting of any abortion complications in the United States, including maternal death," Shadigian explained. As a result, "publications on maternal mortality are not accurate."
Shadigian said the CDC has an 8 year lag time between an incident of maternal death and its report. The CDC data is also not comprehensive. Researchers in a 1990 report in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found 19 unreported abortion-related deaths from 1979 to 1986. Shadigian's own research has uncovered more newspaper articles recounting legal abortion deaths than the numbers reported by the CDC for the same given time. Shadigian says better reporting could take place if doctors and medical professionals more thoroughly asked about abortion. "No one asks a woman, when seeking her medical history, if she's had an abortion," said Shadigian. "Women are also scared to tell their doctor they've had an abortion."
Long-term health risks following abortion are a very real consequence for women who've had one. Such risks include an increased possibility of contracting breast cancer, ectopic pregnancies, placenta previa, secondary infertility, and subsequent miscarriages or premature births in later pregnancies. Unfortunately, Shadigian notes, abortion advocates have omitted studies on these complications in publications they produce. "If people care about women's health, we'll find all the data that's accurate."
One risk factor, suicide, directly correlates with the choice a young woman makes about abortion. If she chooses to have an abortion, she faces a three times greater risk of taking her life. If she carries the pregnancy to term, she cuts her risk in half. "That's a six-fold overall increased risk," Shadigian explained.
Perhaps the most controversial abortion risk involves breast cancer. Abortion activists and pro-life advocates have fiercely debated the legitimacy of the abortion-breast cancer link. The evidence, however, is very clear to Dr. Joel Brind, a professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York. According to Brind, since 1981, 28 of 37 studies worldwide have shown an increased risk of contracting breast cancer following induced abortion and 13 of 15 U.S. studies have confirmed the link. Brind said the first study to reveal the link was performed by researchers in Japan in April 1957. Following the legalization of abortion in the United States, researchers at UCLA conducted a full-scale study of the link and found that women have almost a two and a half times higher chance of contracting breast cancer. Because of abortion politics, the National Cancer Institute has refused to acknowledge the abortion-breast cancer link. Moreover, the NCI web site claimed no link existed.
Brind reported that 28 pro-life members of Congress wrote to the cancer awareness group and asked the organization to remove the web site. Following the letter and pressure from pro-life advocates, the cancer group removed the erroneous web page earlier this month.

Most Change Their Minds About Assisted Suicide
Source: Reuters; July 2, 2002
Portland, OR -- Nearly 90 percent of people who ask their doctors to help them kill themselves later change their minds, researchers reported on Tuesday. Researchers said their findings show that most seriously ill people who ask about assisted suicide are actually afraid of pain or other issues and need to be reassured. "People usually change their minds," Dr. Susan Tolle, director of the Center for Ethics in Health Care at Oregon Health & Science University, said in a telephone interview. "The doctors are never taught in medical school what to do, what to say, how to help people with their fears that led to their request," said Tolle, who lead the study.
Tolle and colleagues studied the effects of the 1997 Oregon "Death with Dignity Act," which made Oregon the only state with legalized assisted suicide. It has been controversial, with patients' rights groups saying it should be copied across the nation, but others saying it cheapens life and could end up making the disabled and seriously ill "disposable." Tolle's team did not look at the legitimacy of the legislation, but instead examined why patients sought a doctor's help in dying. They cited surveys that suggest about 1 percent of patients request assisted suicide, and one in 10 of those patients receive and take the lethal prescription.
"Ultimately, less than one in a thousand Oregonians takes a lethal prescription. In other words, while legal, the option is not commonly used in this state," Dr. Paul Bascom, a professor of medicine who worked on the study, said in a statement. The researchers said nationwide an estimated 25,000 terminally ill people ask their doctors for lethal prescriptions each year. "Twenty-one percent of primary care physicians said they had a request in the prior year," Tolle said.
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Tolle's team looked at the case study of a 47-year-old man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. It is an incurable and inevitably fatal disease that progressively leaves a patient paralyzed and, eventually, unable to breathe. The patient, identified only as "Mr. G." to protect his privacy, asked his doctor about assisted suicide. The doctor did not approve and did not know what to do. "When the patient made a request, he walked away. He did not explore the reason behind the request," said Tolle, who listened to recorded transcripts of Mr. G's meeting with his doctor. The patient did not want to die quickly, but was afraid. "It turns out he was scared to death to die like his father, who died of colon cancer," she said. "He died in the hospital a truly horrible death with inadequate medication, on a lot of machines in a great deal of pain."
Mr. G. did not know that ALS does not cause a painful death. "So he was not even given adequate information. He was not given information about what could be done for him. He feared a painful death more than anything else," Tolle said. "Once he was sure he could be comfortable, he was happy enough to have his death occur from natural causes without pursuing physician-assisted suicide. But this was nearly a missed opportunity to reduce this man's terrible suffering." Patients also incorrectly believe that assisted suicide involves a lethal injection, she said.
"It's not legal in Oregon, let alone anywhere in the United States," she said. They are given a prescription and told an overdose will kill them, then allowed to decide what to do. "What a doctor needs to do is take a deep breath and say 'Why do you ask?' rather than indicating either that you are willing to participate or that you are unwilling to participate," Tolle said. "The doctor should ask, 'What are you afraid of? What are you worried about?"' she advised.

China Increases One-Child Rule Violation Fines
Source: London Telegraph; July 30, 2002
Beijing, China -- A Chinese province that has carried out forced abortions under the draconian one-child policy has raised fines for second children to eight times an offending couple's annual income. Rising incomes in Guangdong, one of the country's richest provinces, have allowed more couples to have unauthorized pregnancies and legitimatize the births by paying a fine to register the child. Reforms that will take effect in September give officials new powers in the fight against pregnancy. The penalty for couples who have a second child without permission will rise from twice combined income to eight times, while poor residents with extra children will be subject to an annual social levy.
Attempts to limit family size in Guangdong have been embroiled in controversy in recent years. Visitors to the province report families of four or more are common away from the big cities. Villagers say family planning officials operate by terror in many counties, forcing women to have abortions and imposing penalties on families, most commonly demolishing their homes.
President Bush last week withdrew $34 million of funding for the United Nations Population Fund partly in response to reports that forced abortions were common in Sihui county in Guangdong. China and the UN rejected charges that Population Fund officials directly colluded in forced abortions. But the claim was backed by a State Department fact-finding team that visited Sihui in May, and Secretary of State Colin Powell said that China's use of fines to force women to terminate pregnancies was also a key factor in the decision. Beijing rejects accusations that coercion and the use of quotas are widespread, pointing to UN estimates that less than three percent of women of childbearing age undergo abortions, roughly the same as in the U.S.
However, brutality and corruption plague attempts to portray a system becoming more humane over time. In the worst cases, saline solution is injected into the womb to induce a stillborn child as late as eight-and-a-half months into the pregnancy. The Communist authorities are proud that 330 million births have been prevented since the early 1980s. The Chinese Family Planning Agency is attempting to transform its role into a modern provider of advice and information but it still remains responsible for administering an uncompromising drive to limit the population to 1.6 billion by 2050.
**China's one-child policy is a product of discredited 1970s ideology. Already, the policy has caused immense damage to China's future population growth and economic prospects by producing a surplus of 120 million boys. Fully 97% of all abortions -- ordered by Orwellian "Birth Control Committees" -- are of girls.**From an editorial column published in the National Post, a prominent Canadian newspaper.

Washington, DC --An FDA decision to alter warning labels for the drug Cytotec may pave the way for abortion advocates to claim the dangerous abortion drug RU 486 is safe for women.
Obstetricians who use Cytotec to induce labor in pregnant patients say that recent label changes for the drug approved by the FDA "may ease safety concerns" among patients and physicians about the drug's use during labor. The label for Cytotec, which is known generically as misoprostol and was originally approved by the FDA to treat stomach ulcers, had stated that pregnant women should not take the drug under any circumstances because of the drug's ability to induce uterine contractions.
The FDA agreed to remove that warning in April, and the new label will instead state that women who are taking Cytotec to treat ulcers should not become pregnant. The change was made to reflect the fact that the drug is widely used by doctors to induce labor. The drug is also part of the FDA-approved regimen for inducing medical abortion in conjunction with mifepristone, known as RU 486.
However, Searle, a unit of Pharmacia Corp. sent a letter to doctors last year warning that misoprostol has been approved only to prevent ulcers caused by aspirin and similar drugs, not to help induce abortion. They warned women would face severe medical problems if the drug was misused as a part of the RU 486 chemical abortion process. It is legal, however, for doctors to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for unapproved uses -- so called "off label" use.
The Searle letter noted: "Serious adverse events reported following off-label use of Cytotec in pregnant women include maternal or fetal death; uterine hyperstimulation, rupture or perforation requiring uterine surgical repair, hysterectomy or salpingo-oophorectomy; amniotic fluid embolism; severe vaginal bleeding, retained placenta, shock, fetal bradycardia and pelvic pain." The new FDA label includes information about these risks.
Although Cytotec is still not formally approved by the FDA for obstetric use, some physicians say that the recent label change is "just a few steps shy of formal approval." Studies involving the use of the drug in more than 6,000 pregnant patients have yielded "very good results," and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has endorsed the use of Cytotec in women with no previous uterine surgeries or caesarean sections.
Still, some physicians say that the drug is "dangerous" and the negative outcomes associated with the use of Cytotec to induce labor have been "vastly underestimate[d]."

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