May 23, 2007

KILLING IS THE POINT:

The Real Planned Parenthood (Tom McClusky, 5/23/2007, American Spectator)

How much have you spent this year on the abortion-oriented services of Planned Parenthood? This question may seem too personal, or out of line with your religious beliefs. But the truth is that if you pay taxes, you support Planned Parenthood.

As the media runs stories of candidates getting into trouble for donating to Planned Parenthood, it's noteworthy to mention how much the controversial organization receives on the public dole. In 2005 Planned Parenthood got $272 million in our taxes, twice the money it made from its 255,000 surgical abortions. Since 1987, Planned Parenthood has taken in $3.2 billion in taxpayer funds for its deadly agenda. So, since 1973 Planned Parenthood has aborted 3.8 million babies with the help of over 3.9 billion tax dollars.

But the buck doesn't stop there. A number of companies also donate large amounts of money to the pro-abortion organization including Walt Disney Co., Bank of America, Johnson and Johnson, Cole, Levi Strauss, Nationwide Insurance, Prudential, Unilever, Wachovia and Whole Foods. Between taxpayer dollars, corporate monies and other donations, Planned Parenthood had over $882 million in total revenue in 2005. [...]

The true story of Planned Parenthood is more easily told by how it treats the young women who come in for "counseling." Two recently controversial cases come from Ohio where girls, one as young as 14, were brought in for abortions. In one case it was the young girl's soccer coach who brought the underage girl in for the abortion. In the other case, it was the victim's own father, who had repeatedly raped and abused her. Despite laws requiring Planned Parenthood officials to report the crimes of statutory rape or incest, the law was not followed. The victims were only sold abortions, paid for by their abusers.

Sadly, Planned Parenthood so routinely gets exposed instructing statutory rapist on how not to get caught, there are videos which can be watched even now at YouTube.

Interestingly, Planned Parenthood opposes true pregnancy care centers where adoption counseling and assistance for mothers can be found as well as medical assistance. A real pregnancy care center offers women a true choice, and such centers clearly explain to women that the choice they are about to make is not between a woman and her doctor, but between a mother and her child.

Because Planned Parenthood is most concerned with "terminating the pregnancy," the organization also fights against issues like parental notice, medical facility standards for abortion clinics, and the release of records of underage abortions, even with names and addresses deleted. This is key because such pregnancies indicate that crimes have been committed against the girls. Planned Parenthood hides under the guise of "patient privacy," as they have in Indiana and Kansas.


MORE:
Adult Approaches (Michael Fumento, 5/22/2007, The American Spectator.)

If you or a loved one is currently ill or planning to be so in the near future, don't bother looking to embryonic stem cell (ESC) research to help. Instead, you need to consult the adult stem cell (ASC) literature whereupon you'll find these little guys currently treat or cure over 70 diseases and conditions even as they're involved in almost 1,300 human clinical trials.

At this point, all that ESCs hold is promise. They are used in no treatments, cures, or human clinical trials. They are used in raising false hopes and hence money. The University of California, Irvine's Hans Keirstead, who claims to have used ESCs to cure paralyzed rats, said last year he would start human clinical trials this year. Problem is, he's been saying "next year" since 2002. Check your calendar. Moreover -- and this is typical of ESC researcher grandstanding -- his rats weren't even paralyzed. Rather, as opposed to what he tells reporters, including the late Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes, the injuries were "moderate in severity [and] sparing some hind limb motor function," as he reported in a medical journal.

ESC lobbyists sniff that ASC research got a big head start. "Researchers began using adult stem cells from bone marrow back in 1960," claims ReligiousTolerance.org on its website. (Note that the very name furthers the ESC lobby's goal of portraying all their opponents as religious fanatics.) "It was only in 1998 that other researchers were able to isolate and cultivate embryo stem cells. Adult stem cell research thus has an almost four decade head start compared to embryo-derived stem cells."

In fact, ASCs and ESCs were both discovered in rodents in the 1950s. But the ASCs -- from marrow -- were readily adaptable for treating leukemia and other human blood disorders. ESCs, conversely, precisely because of their much-touted flexibility, were so hard to work with that it wasn't until 1998, in the lab of the University of Wisconsin's James Thomson, that the first human line of ESCs was created. They remain a real bear to work with, which is why their domain remains primarily the Petri dish.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 23, 2007 12:00 AM
Comments

From reading Science & Nature back at the start of the decade, it became very, very obvious that the passionate defense & selling of ESC is inextricably linked to attacking religious conservatism. Similarly, a lot of people wanted Terri Schiavo to be terminated because otherwise the religious would "win" or at least be perceived to have done so.

Also it is critical to note that as ESC became more prominent, they totally changed the way it is sold. It used to be something along the lines of "We will be able to grow YOU new parts based on your own genetic code." But this absolutely requires the creation & growth of new embryos, so now it's all about "We'll only use extra embryos that will be discarded anyway, so what's the big deal?" Don't believe it for a second. When there is anything at all that they can point to as a concrete positive result (and as far as I know, so far there is nothing), the push for embryo farms will begin and will be unstoppable.

Posted by: b at May 23, 2007 11:01 AM

ESC research is perfectly legal. The only ban is on federally funded research, so why the hysteria? Perhaps because abortion proponents want a guvmint imprimatur that embryos aren't human beings.

Posted by: erp at May 23, 2007 12:56 PM
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