Theodore Shulman, the man who sent death threats to me and several other pro-life leaders, has entered a guilty plea in Federal Court to an incident involving threats to Father Frank Pavone and Princeton Professor Robert George. He faces up to 51 months in prison. According to the New York Daily news:

The plea deal includes an agreement that prosecutors would not charge Shulman for possession of cyanide and two other deadly substances at the time of his arrest.

Read the rest here.

The cyanide and other deadly substances are worrisome, especially since Shulman has evidently had graduate training in either medicine or biology. He is a highly intelligent man who represented the proaborts very, very well when not engaging in threats. Of course, his obsession with promoting abortion led him to explain away the scientific literature that showed the link between abortion and breast cancer. His intelligence and talents as a scientist have been tragically squandered in the service of the greatest evil to grip this nation since slavery.

Shulman’s mother is the celebrated feminist author, Alix Kates Shulman who authored Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, a feminist manifesto. Shulman’s mother aborted four of his siblings. Two before him and two after him. That’s a terrible family legacy to grow up within.

In what I have read by his mother, she mentions his sister but not Theodore.

There is no celebration or joy in my home today. A relatively short sentence for a man who has sent threats to many and who has been found in possession of three deadly substances is a disquieting reality. Equally disquieting is the thought that this brilliant man has destroyed himself, gripped as he has been by a terrible evil; perhaps too, by the emptiness wrought by four missing siblings.

Theodore needs our prayers, and plenty of them. Absent a solid spiritual and ethical formation, the power of our medical and scientific technology will twist, distort, and destroy those entrusted with it’s secrets and protocols. Shulman is living proof.

If tonight many of us are breathing a little easier, I feel nothing but emptiness and sorrow for a fellow scientist my age, whose mother butchered four of his siblings. I can’t imagine such a horrific absence of love, such cold and callous evil and how that factors into a human being’s development.

Pray for Theodore, for his mother, for their conversion and healing. It’s all so very, very sad.

About a year ago I met Reggie Littlejohn, Founder and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. Reggie, an attorney, has been actively and doggedly engaged in efforts to stop forced abortions and forced sterilizations in China, making frequent trips to meet with our elected representatives in Washington, D.C.

The pro-life blogosphere and wider community have embraced Reggie and aided her in getting out the word on what has been going on in China. It has been Reggie who has made known to Americans the plight of blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who has been persecuted by his government for his efforts to stop the forced abortions and sterilizations of women in China. Consequently, Chen’s name and story have been made well known by Reggie here in the States for some time now.

Perhaps the mainstream media will get the credit for breaking the story, but here at Coming Home all due credit goes to my friend Reggie, who inspires me with her courage, her faith, and her love for the oppressed.

Bravo, Reggie!

Reggie’s work requires the generous support of the pro-life community. She has sacrificed in every imaginable way to press home her authentic feminist support of our sisters in China, and I can think of no greater victory for Reggie than the widespread telling of the story whose groundwork was laid by this solitary and indefatigable warrior. Please consider visiting her site and supporting her work with whatever means, no matter how small, you may be able to share.

God Bless You, Reggie. God has honored the work for which you and Chen have sacrificed so much.

Note: Blogging has been nonexistent here for almost two months. Critical illness. in in my best friend has required my full time and attention for several months. Pro-life begins at home. By God’s grace, things for Fr. Clark have stabilized and begun to improve. My heartfelt thanks for all who have written out of concern. It’s good to be back. Now, back to work.

Dr. Elard Koch is a fellow biologist and epidemiologist from Chile with whom I am collaborating on a major research study involving oral contraceptives. Dr. Koch has just released a study refuting pro-abort claims that abortions are safer than childbirth. Here is Dr. Koch’s press release. I have not yet read the study, but hope to within the week, after which I shall lead a guided tour through it for all who are interested. Here now is Dr. Koch:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

EMBARGO TIME: May 4th, 2012 at 5 pm EST

CONTACT:

Reporters UCSC: Carolina Astudillo, Phone 56 (41) 2345587; castudillo@ucsc.cl

Researchers: Dr Elard Koch, by e-mail ekoch@ucsc.cl; ekoch@ug.uchile.cl

Dr John Thorp, by e-mail john_thorp@med.unc.edu

Dr. Sebastian Gatica, by e-mail sgatica@ucsc.cl

Chile Outperforms U.S. and Dramatically Reduces Maternal Deaths by Increasing Women’s Educational Level

Concepción, Chile, May 5 – A scientific analysis of 50 years of maternal mortality data from Chile has found that the most important factor in reducing maternal mortality is the educational level of women. “Educating women enhances women’s ability to access existing health care resources, including skilled attendants for childbirth, and directly leads to a reduction in her risk of dying during pregnancy and childbirth,” according to Dr Elard Koch, epidemiologist and leading author of the study.

The research entitled “Women’s Education Level, Maternal Health Facilities, Abortion Legislation and Maternal Deaths: a Natural Experiment in Chile from 1957 to 2007” was conducted on behalf of the Chilean Maternal Mortality Research Initiative (CMMRI) and published in the Friday, May 4 issue of PLoS ONE. (http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/

journal.pone.0036613).
Using 50 years of official data from Chile’s National Institute of Statistics (1957-2007), the authors looked at factors likely to affect maternal mortality, such as years of education, per capita income, total fertility rate, birth order, clean water supply, sanitary sewer, and childbirth delivery by skilled attendants. They also analyze the effect of historical educational and maternal health policies, including legislation that has prohibited abortion in Chile since 1989, on maternal mortality.

During the fifty-year study period, the overall Maternal Mortality Ratio or MMR (the number of maternal deaths related to childbearing divided by the number of live births) dramatically declined by 93.8%, from 270.7 to 18.2 deaths per 100,000 live births between 1957 and 2007, making Chile a paragon for maternal health in other countries. “In fact, during 2008, the overall MMR declined again, to 16.5 per 100,000 live births, positioning Chile as the country with the second lowest MMR in the American continent after Canada and with at least two points lower MMR than United States” said Koch.

One of the most significant findings is that, contrary to widely-held assumptions, making abortion illegal in Chile did not result in an increase in maternal mortality. In fact, after abortion was made illegal in 1989, the MMR continued to decrease from 41.3 to 12.7 per 100,000 live births (69.2% reduction). “Definitively, the legal prohibition of abortion is unrelated to overall maternal mortality rates” emphasized Koch.

The variables affecting this decrease included the predictable factors of delivery by skilled attendants, complementary nutrition for pregnant women and their children in the primary care clinics and schools, clean facilities, and fertility. But the most important factor and the one which increased the effect of all others was the educational level of women. For every additional year of maternal education there was a corresponding decrease in the MMR of 29.3 per 100,000 live births.

The picture for Chile includes a transition of leading causes of death along with an accelerated decline of fertility and delayed motherhood. Koch explained that direct causes –those directly attributable to pregnancy condition– were the rule before 1990, but from then, indirect causes –i.e. non-obstetric chronic conditions such as hypertension and diabetes among others– rise as the most prevalent, hindering the decline on maternal mortality.

“This study uncovers an ongoing ‘fertility paradox’ in maternal health: education is the major modulator that has helped Chile to reach one of the safest motherhood in the world, but also contributes to decrease fertility, excessively delaying motherhood and puts mothers on risk because of their older age.” Thus, an emerging problem nowadays “is not a question of how many children a mother has, but a question of when a mother has her children, specially the first of them” concluded Koch.

UCSC

The following is a story by Michael P. Farris, Esq., the founder and chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. It isn’t a story about home schooling. It’s about the metastatic cancer that has crept into obstetric medicine. When OB/Gyn’s perform abortions with routine, they need to callous themselves in order to preserve themselves. Somewhere along the way a piece of their humanity gets lost. The same for the rest of the medical staff. In the end, they begin to hold parents in contempt. It is the arrogance of those who abuse their ability to control who lives, and who dies; the seductive and insatiable thirst for power and control.

This story, by Farris, is bone-chilling. That an entire medical staff could behave this way suggests that they have done so in the past with impunity. Here’s Farris:

Newborn Seized in Hospital by Police, Social Worker

Michael P. Farris, Esq.
HSLDA Chairman

I am not content to sit on the sidelines while the government gradually usurps the very essence of parental rights. I hope you share my determination. We need to stand with people like Scott and Jodi Ferris (obviously no relation to someone named Farris). Here’s their story:

Jodi went into labor a bit earlier than she had expected—and the baby was coming rapidly. Given their location and other factors, the midwife they had hoped would deliver the baby at their home encouraged them to get in an ambulance and head to the hospital.

Their baby, whom I will call “Annie,” was born in the ambulance in the parking lot of the Hershey Medical Center—a government hospital in Pennsylvania. Hospital personnel arrived very quickly and took charge of both baby and mom.

As any mother would do, Jodi immediately began to ask the nurses and attendants how her baby was doing. The hospital staff was utterly unresponsive. When they started to give Jodi an injection, she asked what it was and what it was for. They gave her vague answers like, “It’s just to help.” Only after giving her the injection of oxytocin did they tell her what it was and then asked, “You aren’t allergic to that are you?”

Jodi persisted in asking about Annie. No one would tell her anything other than “she’s in good hands and you’ll be able to see her soon.”

Eventually a doctor told her that Annie scored a 9 on a physical exam applied to newborns known as the APGAR test. A score of 8 or higher is considered healthy. (It is unclear when the score was given since she was in the ambulance at birth.) But shortly after this a different doctor told Jodi that Annie was “very sick” and would need to stay in the hospital. This doctor’s comments were accompanied by an explanation of his disdain for midwives saying, “Too many people think they know what they’re doing.”

About an hour later, another hospital staffer finally brought Annie to Jodi and said, “The baby is doing good. She will be able to go home in no time.”

Legal Requirements?

However, several hours later yet another staffer told Scott and Jodi that Annie would have to stay in the hospital for 48 to 72 hours for observation. Even though they persisted in asking why Annie would need to stay, his only answer was that “the law requires us to keep the baby for 48 hours.” When they asked for a reference to this supposed law, he answered, “you’ll have to get that from risk management.” (By the way, there is no such law in Pennsylvania.)

The risk management staffer eventually told them that even though they saw nothing wrong with the baby, they just like “to keep babies like this” for 48–72 hours. The Ferrises were told that Annie would not be released for this period since it was “unsafe for her to leave the hospital.”

Eventually, a risk management staffer admitted that the risk that was being managed was not the health of Annie but the risk that the hospital might get sued if something went wrong after she was discharged.

Ultimately, risk management said that they would be satisfied with a 24-hour stay and that Jodi and Scott could remain with the baby overnight.

You have been Accused

Late in the afternoon, a government social worker named Angelica Lopez-Heagy came into Jodi’s room announcing that she was there to conduct an investigation. Jodi asked to know the allegations. The social worker claimed that it would be against the law for her to show Jodi the allegations.

Jodi replied that she would not be comfortable answering the questions if she couldn’t know the allegations. Immediately the social worker proclaimed, “Since you’re not going to cooperate, I’ll just go and call the police and we can take custody of the baby.”

Fearing that the social worker would carry out her threat, Jodi replied that she was willing to cooperate.

The social worker soon intimated that the issue was Jodi’s refusal to consent to medical treatment for the baby. Jodi replied that she had no idea why anyone would say that. The social worker claimed that she had refused to allow a Vitamin K shot for Annie. Jodi replied that no one had asked her about such a shot. Moreover, she had overheard hospital staffers saying that they had already given Annie such a shot.

Neither the social worker nor any hospital staffer ever gave Jodi or Scott any example of any medically necessary treatment that they had refused for Annie.

At this point, Scott left the hospital to tend to their older children who were staying with friends.

Ordering Tests

Shortly after this, the hospital asked to check Annie’s white blood cell count and to perform a strep test. Jodi agreed to the testing.

Then the hospital demanded that they give Annie shot for Hepatitis B. Jodi said that she would agree only if they tested her or Annie to see if either of them were positive. If so, then she was quite willing to have the shot for Annie. The hospital claimed that they had forgotten about this earlier when it was still possible to test that day, and that they needed to give the shot anyway without any testing.

When the social worker pressed her to make an immediate decision about this shot, Jodi asked her if they could simply wait until Scott got back before they decided.

Put yourself in Jodi’s shoes at this moment. You gave birth that morning in an ambulance. The hospital has made wild and conflicting claims about your baby’s health all day long. You are exhausted. You are in pain. Your husband has gone to check on your children. And a social worker who has threatened to take your baby into police custody is standing in your hospital room demanding that you make an immediate decision.

Jodi simply said, “Please can’t this wait until my husband gets back.”

The social worker renewed her threat. If Jodi would not answer her question right then, she would call the police. And then the social worker started adding conditions. She and Scott would have to agree to sign a safety plan before she could conclude her investigation.

Jodi said that she wanted her husband and an attorney to look at the plan. She felt she was in no position to read such a document and really understand what she was being pressured to sign.

Thrown Out

And then the story turns ugly.

The social worker left the room and called the police. Without a court order they took custody of Annie, immediately claiming that she was suffering from illness or injury—a patently false claim.

The social worker consented to the administration of the Hepatitis B shot even though no blood test had been done.

The police made Jodi Ferris get up out of her hospital bed and escorted her to the entrance—they were expelling her from the hospital because she had not signed the “safety plan.”

Scott met her at the entrance to the hospital. The police escorted them both off of the grounds of the hospital.

Jodi was told that she would be allowed to return every three hours to nurse the baby through the night.

Jodi and Scott were forced to spend the night that she had given birth in their car in the parking lot of a nearby Wal-Mart. You read that right. They kicked this mother out of the hospital, and in order to be close enough to feed her child, she had to sleep in the car.

To add insult to injury, Jodi was given access to Annie only sporadically and not every three hours.

Get the rest here.

Molotov’s response was to make a video that tore into me with some pretty vicious ad hominem attacks. It can be seen here:

People were incensed at Molotov’s video rebuttal. I just took it in stride and decided to wait and see if the trailer accomplished what trailers are meant to do: Present the arc of the movie. Well, it seems that the movie is out and the reviews are coming in. I present here Jill Stanek’s review, which as well contains that of my colleague, Ryan Bombereger.

Here now, is Jill Stanek:

The movie Gates of Hell has been controversial among pro-lifers since its trailer was posted almost a year ago. In February the film was released on DVD “in honor of black history month.”

Set in 2016, Gates of Hell is a fictional documentary that follows a band of black domestic terrorists known as the Zulu 9 who literally set their sites on abortionists and abortion workers after learning blacks have been purposefully targeted for abortion for generations.

Gates of Hell was written and directed by Molotov Mitchell, a gifted pro-life filmmaker who went terribly astray this time.

Things got personal when Mitchell took apart friend and site moderator Gerard Nadal for coming out against the film after watching the trailer. Mitchell mocked Gerard for basing his review on just the teaser, promising there was more to the movie.

There wasn’t. I really wanted to like this film but have watched it twice now and have been deeply disturbed each time. I’m a provocative pro-lifer who likes to push the envelope, but Gates of Hell goes too far.

The film is quite simply about black terrorists who murder any and all abortion workers they can find – an abortionist leaving his house, an abortionist sitting at an outdoor cafe, etc., etc.

The most disturbing scene is when the Zulu 9 burst into a Planned Parenthood, indiscriminately picking off staff in their offices. I could only think of Columbine.

Ryan Bomberger has written a review of Gates of Hell from a black perspective:

I actually had to hit pause several times throughout this obvious shockumentary, because I was repulsed by what I was seeing and so angry that this creation could even be considered “pro-life”. One of my colleagues, and pivotal figures in the fight against the epidemic of abortion in New York City, Dr. Gerard Nadal, was excoriated by Molotov for daring to react to the trailer. Nadal was attacked for somehow misinterpreting the contents of a trailer that accurately reflect the entire movie.

How would I describe the film in a single word? Detrimental.

The glorification of violence, as a means toward an end, makes the film’s primary message appalling. Molotov, starring in his own film as himself, was the only person in this story who was not a fictional character. He cannot claim a fictional nature for the film, but instead one of seeming advocacy with a deeply disturbing and highly suggestive solution to a cause.

Watching the entire movie not only reinforced my own negative reaction to the trailer but also strengthened the argument that the film does not consider the overall racism that it, too, conveys.

I get that Molotov was trying in the most attention-getting way possible to spotlight the atrocity of black abortion genocide. But that is not what people will be talking about.

Molotov owes Gerard an apology.

I give Gates of Hell one star, only for its display of Molotov’s unique story-telling talent. I look forward to the day Molotov channels his creative energies into a project of value to the movement. This one wasn’t.

Recently, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius dropped her guard and gave the American people a good insight into how it is that Obamacare will ultimately stay solvent: The nonexistence of patients who, not being alive, cannot make claims upon the system.

From CNSNews.com

During the subcommittee hearing, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) said that contraception provided by insurance companies to people employed by religious organizations under the future form of the rule Sebelius described would not be was not free.

“Who pays for it? There’s no such thing as a free service,” Murphy asked.

Sebelius responded that that is not the case with insurance.

“The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for cost of contraception,” Sebelius answered.

Murphy expressed surprise by the answer.

“So you are saying, by not having babies born, we are going to save money on health care?” Murphy asked.

Sebelius replied, “Providing contraception is a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children.”

Murphy again sought clarification.

“Not having babies born is a critical benefit. This is absolutely amazing to me. I yield back,” he said.

Sebelius responded, “Family planning is a critical health benefit in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine.”

See and hear Sebelius in her own words:

Now this week comes word that the Congessional Budget Office estimates Obamacare will cost twice its originally promised cost. News also comes of the return of what Sarah Palin dubbed, “Death Panels” for healthcare rationing. Far from right wing flights of fancy, these realities already exist in chilling bureaucratic routine across the nation in hospital committees who decide when patients have used too many resources, and in Oregon’s health care system where the government decides when a patient’s remaining quality of life justifies the expense of keeping them alive.

Here is the ABC News article about one such patient, Barbara Wagner. It is a portal into the national future.

Adding fuel to the fire is the issue of states increasingly strained by the growing number of civil service pensioners who do their 20 years and retire on full pensions.

Add to that the Social Security insolvency.

It becomes clear that Sebelius has not so much committed a gaffe as she has revealed the solution her fellow travelers see to our insolvency issues: decreasing the number of claimants on the system decreases the system’s expenditures. Nonexistence of humans on the front end of the life spectrum will fund the cost of the HHS contraception mandate through the offsetting of the non-conceived human’s non-claims on the system. Applying the same thinking on the other end of the life spectrum will realize a bumper crop of savings for local, state, and the federal government when civil service pensioners are denied life-saving services, or have them delayed long enough in rationing lines in the hopes that the patient will be overtaken by the disease while waiting.

Being a Pacific Northwestern Governor, Sarah Palin looked to one of her closest neighbors, Oregon, and saw clearly the future of the pro-abortion, anti-life, rabidly eugenic left wing. It is far easier to cull the herd than grow the economy, especially in a political party that is opposed to all known and practical sources of energy; to a political party that has made a central plank of their platform the reduction of the world’s population.

We are a nation in serious, serious trouble.

To only blame the Obama administration or the Democrat Party is to miss the fact that sufficient numbers of Americans agree with these people. Far too many uphold the right for someone else to slaughter their child, even though they are personally opposed to doing so.

So many uphold he right of others to force doctors to perform manslaughter through physician-assisted suicide, even if it violates the doctor’s conscience.

So many uphold the forcing of all medical students to perform abortions against their consciences.

So many uphold the forcing of religious institutions and private businesses to purchase contraceptives against their consciences.

90% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted, with costs to the parents and the ‘system’ cited by physicians and genetic counselors in a coercive campaign to rid the world of these “defectives”.

Far too many in this nation support the coercion of physicians and private citizens to do the government’s bidding when doing so violates consciences formed by thousands of years of civilized precepts. Now we have established that private and institutional conscience is the property of the state, the state is taking full advantage of the opportunity to advance its agenda.

Hitler never could have accomplished his malignant agenda without the support of the German people in sufficient numbers. It takes more than a village, it takes a nation to be good or evil. Today, our nation balances on a razor’s edge.

It will take more than the November elections to turn things around. It’s going to take the realization of what is at stake. It’s no longer someone else’s ox getting gored.

We’re all in peril.

In my youth, the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States were made abundantly clear to us. We had the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and they didn’t. Teens at drive-thru fast food restaurants were iconic of American freedom.

The freedom to recreate our culture through music, food, mobility.

Our fathers fought despotism in World War II and Korea and told us of the communist menace, always juxtaposed with the freedoms for which they fought. We could only imagine the deprivations endured by our peers who were trapped behind the iron curtain. We’d heard of the Soviet commissars with the red stars on their sleeves, whose job it was to enforce all of the myriad dictates of the state in what was a dreary existence. The human spirit withers in the absence of authentic freedom. I thanked God for being an American.

Now after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the flowering of freedom in the former Soviet-bloc nations; we have decided that since we beat them, we should emulate their former system of government.

The America of my middle years increasingly resembles the former Soviet Union, especially as regards the all-out war on religion. More on religion in a moment.

Under our Dear Leader in the White House, we now have Soviet-style commissars who are paid agents of the state, enforcing Department of Health and Human Services food guidelines in preschool by inspecting lunchboxes from home, and seizing the offending food items, supplanting them with state-approved food and billing the family. The following story from Sara Burrows at Carolina Journal Online is chilling:

“A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

“The girl’s mother – who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation – said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a ‘healthy lunch’ would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.”

Read the rest here.

That’s not an isolated incident. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has decided that trans fats should be outlawed, and so they were. Sales of trans fats in any food in New York is prohibited, even in Twinkies and Devil Dogs! Grannie Bloomberg has also decided that cigarettes are bad for one’s health and raised the price of a pack to $14.50 with new taxes. He has also decreed that all eating establishments, from the finest restaurants to Dunkin’ Donuts, must list the caloric content of each menu item right next to the item on the menu. Soda (pop) machines have been taken from schools, and increased punitive taxation (similar to cigarettes) was proposed for all soda (pop) in New York City. Bloomberg might have gotten away with it, but for the hordes of New Yorkers ready to tar and feather him.

At least soda is safe, for now.

Another New York Moment occurred a few years back when some City employee decided that New Yorkers seeking to escape our 8 1/4% sales tax by shopping in New Jersey (no sales tax on clothes) should have our license plates photographed at New Jersey malls by government commissars, and then some sort of fine be mailed to the offending party. No word on the career of said bureaucrat after that lead balloon crashed.

Then, in California, there was this recent gem:

“One sun-drenched August morning, armed officers wearing sunglasses and bullet-proof vests descended on a market in Venice, Calif., searching for illegally sold goods. It marked the end of a year-long investigation where undercover agents posed as customers.

Their target: raw, unpasteurized milk.

Federal regulators say it’s a dangerous and unnecessary public threat, pointing to 143 cases of contamination linked to still births, miscarriages and kidney failure since 1987, the latest involving five California children. Grassroots, back-to-nature consumers say the product strengthens the immune system by keeping intact good bacteria that’s killed in pasteurized milk. The choice should be theirs, the activists say.“These guns are being drawn on basically aging hippies, all because of illegal milk,” said Ajna Sharma-Wilson, a Los Angeles lawyer for the Venice market owner, in an interview. “This is a waste of taxpayer money.”

Get the rest here, from Bloomberg News!

Enter the HHS mandate and the Catholic Church.

There is actually no better metaphor for Obama’s brand of government in relationship to the Church than what happened to that little girl. The government seized a healthy turkey and cheese sandwich, potato chips, banana, and apple juice and handed the child a plate of chicken nuggets.

When government is permitted to legislate what we may or may not eat, tries to make it a crime to shop where we wish, demands that we be confronted with the caloric content of our food every time we eat out, the Catholic Bishops have an uphill battle on their hands. It isn’t only Obama whom they are fighting.

It is a nation that has quit on itself, a people who have grown weary of freedom and personal responsibility and who are increasingly trading freedom for the meager rations that come with enslavement. We’ve quit the game. The America of my middle years barely resembles the America of my youth. The Greatest Generation, tempered by war and the Great Depression spawned the Me Generation, softened by excess. With the Greatest Generation all but gone, the Me Generation is in charge. My grandmother used to say of the Boomers in our youth, “I’m glad I’ll be dead when they’re in charge.”

I’m beginning to understand why.

We’ve settled for the chicken nuggets.

Narcissism and hedonism breed their own enslavement, and there will never be a shortage of political opportunists who will seize on the desire for freedom without responsibility, ready to stand guard over the prison of our own making. Our clergy, silent for far too long, now fight a two-front war. On the one hand, they must resist the efforts of the government to dictate every facet of life, lest the people not have the requisite freedom to make moral decisions. On the other hand, they must somehow shake people from their narcissistic torpor and instill in them a renewed appreciation for evil and its effects.

Before the bishops can convince the enslaved of the evil of losing their freedom, they need to convince them of their beauty.

We deserve better than chicken nuggets.

When I was a seminarian, Msgr. William Smith would tell us in moral theology class that the freedom of choice would one day become a mandate. We’re seeing that now with the aggressive eugenics in maternal-fetal medicine with extreme pressure to abort being made on mothers of handicapped babies.

The freedom to use contraception will become a mandate once the government is picking up the tab. There is a hidden mandate within the HHS mandate. Our bodies, our families are increasingly becoming the property of the state.

This November we will either begin walking this abuse back, or a new iron curtain will descend.

How ironic that we, the victors of the Cold War, will have done this to ourselves.

The graph tells the story, and comes from Chris Kahlenborn, MD. Dr. Kahlenborn is the founder of the Polycarp Research Institute, which has some excellent materials on the link between oral contraceptives and breast cancer, as well as abortion and breast cancer. Dr. Kahlenborn’s excellent book, Breast Cancer : Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill was written ten years ago and is a perfect source book for non-scientists. It was Dr. Kahlenborn’s stellar book that drew my interest in this subject and took me from DEEP skeptic to a properly educated and enlightened scientist through his presentation of all the scientific literature. Order it here.

This contraceptive fight is going to be a definitive issue in this presidential election. Dr. Kahlenborn, Dr. Lanfranchi, Dr. Brind, Ms. Karen Malec and others have written extensively on these issues, and a thorough and sustained reading of their work is going to be necessary if we are not going to be written off as religious zealots by those in the middle. The place to begin is with Kahlenborn’s book and his website. It’s an easy read for the layperson.

The individuals just mentioned, and myself, are out here doing the education, but now we need voices. Many more voices.

Perhaps many here have used oral contraceptives in the past, or are using them now. It’s never too late to learn what science and medicine are telling us, and to change our lifestyles; if not by the light of faith, then by the light of empiric evidence.

Our women are being ravaged by breast cancer, and while OC use and abortion don’t account for it all, they account for plenty.

I’m here to educate and answer questions. Let’s get going.

See also, World Health Organization Data on Birth Control Pill and Estrogen Replacement Carcinogenicity

The Saint Gianna Physician’s Guild has begun a petition drive calling for the Obama Administration to reverse course on the HHS mandate. This is a great organization, with more about them in a minute.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has issued the following statement:

I wholeheartedly express my solidarity with the Stop The Birth Control Mandate petition promoted by St. Gianna Physician’s Guild protesting the recent decree by the Department of Health and Human Services of our federal government. I encourage Catholics to sign the petition and thus unite their support of Holy Mother Church by protesting the most grievous violation of the right to religious liberty for Catholics in the United States.

~Raymond Cardinal Burke
Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION

At this writing there are 19,311 signatures. Please send this link to all of your friends and family and encourage them to sign the petition.

Now, a little about this wonderful physician’s guild from their website:

Saint Gianna Physicians Guild was founded by a Catholic layman who saw a need for physicians and other health care workers to bring their Faith into their lives and medical practices in a more pronounced way.

St. Gianna died in 1962 at the age of 39. She sacrificed her life for that of her unborn daughter when confronted with complications caused by a tumor that developed during her pregnancy. St. Gianna was canonized by Pope John Paul II on May 16, 2004.

AGAIN, PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION

Of the many incongruities arising from last week’s savaging of the Susan G. Komen Foundation by Planned Parenthood and its minions, the greatest single seeming incongruity is the disproportionate attack on Komen in light of the paltry sum of money involved.

Planned Parenthood is a $1 Billion per year organization who stood to lose $600,000 in Komen grant money. Organizations routinely loose that much money, and more when grants are not renewed, and they are organizations for whom $600,000 is the difference between life and death for the organization.

For Planned Parenthood, the loss of Komen funding represented 6/10 of 1/1000 of their budget. So what’s going on here?

It wasn’t the money at issue, it’s what Komen’s support means for the organization. Planned Parenthood makes their money performing abortions, mostly on young people. Former Planned Parenthood clinic director, Abby Johnson, tells of how the corporate model at PP was built around abortions.

The charade of concern for women’s breast health is the only socially acceptable vestige left for the organization’s bruised and tatttered reputation. Planned Parenthood performed manual breast exams and referred women to mammogram centers. In some instances, it appears that they paid for the mammograms.

However, Planned Parenthood lied about performing mammograms, and Lila Rose caught them in that lie.

Subsequently, Komen decided that their money would be better spent on paying directly for mammograms, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Planned Parenthood has an odd way of demonstrating its concern for women’s breast health. They target teenagers with low-dose birth control pills which will fail in their contraceptive effect if not taken precisely on schedule, setting up a lucrative abortion. What the oral contraceptives will not fail in doing is increasing the risk of the deadliest and most aggressive form of breast cancer, triple negative breast cancer.

How much risk?

According to Dr. Louise Brinton of the National Cancer Institute in a 2009 paper, women whose age of first use is below 18 years old have a 540% increased risk. Is that statistic in any of Planned Parenthood’s literature?

The link between oral contraceptives and breast cancer has been known for decades, yet Planned Parenthood dispenses these dangerous drugs to children with reckless abandon.

PP are the lepers of the medical community. They have been caught:

Lying about performing mammograms.

Aiding in child sex trafficking.

Repeatedly showing willingness to violate mandatory reporting laws for statutory rape.

Violating informed consent by giving women medically inaccurate and fabricated information to coerce them into having an abortion.

Enthusiastically accepting money earmarked for aborting Black babies.

This is an organization that makes no distinction between a ten year-old and a twenty-four year-old regarding sex, contraception, and education. In their own words from page 10 of their booklet, Stand and Deliver:

The World Health Organization defines young people as those from 10 to 24 years of age, including adolescents (10–19 years) and youth (15–24 years). IPPF uses the terms young people, youth and adolescents interchangeably to refer to people who are between 10 and 24 years.

This is an organization that tells children in their booklet, Healthy, Happy, and Hot, that disclosure of their HIV status to a sex partner is not mandatory and just another ‘choice’:

You have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose your HIV status.

There are many reasons that people do not share their HIV status. They may not want people to know they are living with HIV because of stigma and discrimination within their community. They may worry that people will find out something else they have kept secret, like they are using injecting drugs, having sex outside of a marriage or having sex with people of the same gender. People in long-term relationships who find out they are living with HIV sometimes fear that their partner will react violently or end the relationship.

Were all of that not enough, Planned Parenthood has outdone themselves in their latest document, Exclaim!, calling for the abolition of parental consent laws and calling for the sexual rights of ALL persons under the age of 18.

This is the face of a social parasite, of the destroyer of children, of the enormous parasitic organism who preys upon our sons and daughters. All they have left is women’s breast health as the last vestige of credibility, and without Komen, they are sunk.

It wasn’t the 6/10 of 1/1000 of their annual budget that was the threat, it was the loss of the borrowed credibility from Komen that threatened them.

As symbiotic relationships go, this one between PP and Komen is a textbook definition of parasitism. Not only does Komen not need the relationship with PP, but the association is an occasion for PP to engage in a blood meal, feeding off of Komen’s enormous reserves of credibility and good will in the community.

Brinker needs to point out the ugly reality of PP and cut the ties. It would also help if she gave the link between abortion and breast cancer, and the link between the pill and breast cancer their proper recognition.

As the head of the world’s premeir breast cancer foundation, she has an obligation to report the whole truth. If she doesn’t, she isn’t acting in women’s best interests. Unlike PP and the abortion industry, Brinker should tell women the whole truth, and then trust them to make their choices.

Choices that are fully informed.

Planned Parenthood doesn’t trust women, or children. That’s why they savaged Brinker for attempting to withdraw the protective cover of Komen’s good name.

The first paper I ever wrote in graduate school was a review of the literature on Leprosy. It is a disease transmitted by contact that we now know to be caused by a close first cousin of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and can be cured using the same antibiotics that we use against TB. This miracle of 20th Century medicine has emptied the leper colonies, arresting and eliminating the disease in its earliest stages before it maims and disfigures its victims.

Sunlight seems to be having the same salutary effect on the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and they have elected to leave the leper colony, as Planned Parenthood languishes with the increasing ravages of their disfigurement, unwilling to take the medicine that would end the insideous effects of their disease. It’s actually too late for Planned Parenthood, but for Komen, there is yet hope.

The sunlight began to pierce the darkness back in 2007, when Dorinda Bordlee, Vice President and Senior Counsel of the Bioethics Defense Fund met Eve Sanchez Silver who told her about her about the Komen-Planned Parenthood funding link. Silver, a breast cancer survivor and charter member of Komen’s Hispanic/Latina Advisory Council, resigned from Komen, stating,

As a Christian and life affirming citizen I can not reconcile the Foundation’s decision to affirm life with one hand and support its destruction with the other.

Bordlee began to research Komen’s grant database to confirm Silver’s claims. The most recent data available to her back then were the 2005 numbers which showed over $700,000 in grants made by certain Komen state affiliates to their local Planned Parenthood clinics. Subsequent grant totals can be read here at BDF’s site. BDF’s initial findings were picked up and pursued by a great many who then launched their own investigations.

It was discovered that Komen Founder, Nancy Brinker (Susan Komen’s sister), sat on the board of Planned Parenthood in North Texas. Jill Stanek wrote two great articles about the links between Komen and PP.

At the heart of the matter lies three essential issues regarding the deplorable decision by Komen to fund PP:

1. The causal link between breast cancer and abortion (ABC link).
2. The causal link between breast cancer and oral contraceptives.
3. The fact that Planned Parenthood does NOT do mammograms.

Yes the ABC link is hotly disputed, and only because radical proabort researchers have lied through their teeth about the literature. I’ve written 56 articles dealing with this link, which can be read here. Placing that contentious issue to the side, along with PP’s complicity in placing women at risk for breast cancer through their abortion services, we need to look at the role of PP in dispensing oral contraceptives, which have been well established causes of breast cancer.

In 2009, the same Dr. Louise Brinton who is Branch Chief in Epidemiology at the National Cancer Institute, and who chaired the sham 2003 workshop denying the ABC link, coauthored a 2009 paper in which she listed abortion and oral contraceptives under known or suspected risk factors for breast cancer. The reference for the paper follows at the end of the article.

In their paper, the authors list in Table 4. Multivariate adjusted case-control odds ratios for all breast cancer cases, triple-negative
and non-triple-negative cases, in relation to oral contraceptive risk factors, stratified by age at diagnosis under age 40 and
41-45 y, the following devastating information.

The risks for acquiring the deadliest, most aggressive and difficult to treat form of breast cancer, Triple Negative Breast Cancer based on age of first use of oral contraceptives is:

Age 22+: 250%
Age 18-22: 270%
Age Under 18: 540%

These numbers, from some of the finest minds in science, beg the question:

What would possess an organization such as Komen to ever fund an organization that dispenses birth control pills like candy? Could it be the claim that PP does life-saving breast screenings?

Certainly, Senator Barbara Boxer has been quite vocal about PP’s “mammograms”, as reported here.

In truth, PP does NOT perform mammograms. When one hears the term, “breast screening” or “breast cancer screening”, one tends to envision a mammogram. Instead, PP’s screening is a palpation of the breast, checking for detectable lumps. So, yes, if a lump is detected, and if the lump is cancerous, that could be lifesaving. But if no lump is detected? Is the woman given a referral for a mammogram?

It is the mammogram that is essential.

A woman’s best chances at beating her cancer are when the cancer is found through mammography before it is large enough to be palpated, or found through mammography in women whose breast density make it difficult to detect by palpation. By funding PP, Komen funded the abortions that lead to increased risk of breast cancer, the distribution of oral contraceptives which are well known to cause breast cancer, and the lie that women were receiving mammograms.

In an era where less than 10% of research grants are receiving federal money, there is no dearth of scientists in desperate need of funding for legitimate research purposes. One can barely walk the corridors of a university without bumping into them, so Komen should have no difficulty at all in finding and funding worthy Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s who simply cannot access the ever-dwindling supply of federal research dollars.

As far as funding prevention efforts, the neglect of the Dolle and Brinton study, or the many other papers showing oral contraception’s role in breast cancer is tantamount to a crime.

Komen is to be applauded for getting out of the leper colony and breaking its funding ties with one of the largest purveyors of death on the planet. The great work of antisepsis begun by Eve Silver and Dorinda Bordlee that was picked up and furthered by thousands will help Komen more fully achieve Nancy Brinker’s deathbed promise to her sister to do all she could to find a cure. Now that Komen is out of funding causality and lies, they may see a more robust financial future, which we all pray may help speed the end of this scourge which afflicts so many of our wives, mothers, sisters, friends, and other loved ones.

As for Planned Parenthood the mask has been ripped away, in no small measure by Lila Rose and her associates, revealing the true face of the leprosy lurking under the guise of women’s healthcare.

Reference:

Risk Factors for Triple-Negative Breast Cancer in Women
Under the Age of 45 Years

Jessica M. Dolle,1 Janet R. Daling,1 Emily White,1,3 Louise A. Brinton,4 David R. Doody,1
Peggy L. Porter,2 and Kathleen E. Malone1,3
Divisions of 1Public Health Sciences and 2Human Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; 3Department of Epidemiology, University of
Washington, Seattle, Washington; and 4Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, Maryland

Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2009;18(4). April 2009

“Trust Women”

That was the admonishment of the deceased late-term abortionist, Dr. George Tiller. It’s also the admonishment of the rest of the pro-choice crowd. Too bad they really don’t mean it.

Trust women.

Pregnancy resource centers are filled with women who are being coerced to abort their babies, who are desperate for someone, anyone to throw them a lifeline. They’re the lucky ones who find the help and hope. The women entering abortion clinics are not so fortunate. I listened to quite a few of them at the Supreme Court steps this past Monday.

Most spoke of coercion from their boyfriends, other friends, family, and abortion clinic staff. Coercion manifests in a host of ways.

Trust women.

Boyfriends threaten an end to the relationship unless the woman aborts. They become petulant and emotionally distant. In the end, they move on anyway.

Trust women.

Parents use shame and guilt, again the threat of loss of love, of standing, of belonging.

Trust women.

Friends will do pretty much the same. Along with boyfriends and family, they will remind the woman of the education and/or career that she stands to lose by having the baby.

Trust women.

Abortion clinic staff will tell the woman that “It’s just a blob of tissue, just a clump of cells,” for babies at 4,6,8,12, 16 weeks of gestation. They lie about the link between abortion and breast cancer. They withhold vital data on the psychological and gynecological post-abortion sequelae.

Trust women.

Ob/Gyn’s and genetic counselors will use the most base coercive pressures on women whose tests show even the possibility of genetic anomaly or defect. They offer up such sagacity as, “Why would you make your child suffer for the rest of its life?”

Trust women.

Gone in such practitioners is any trace of human compassion. Even for the mother who wishes to keep and love her less-than-perfect child, she is pressured to contract for the murder of that child. Whether or not she aborts, the message from such physicians and genetic counselors is clear and unambiguous:

You did this to your child. This is all your fault.

That’s a nice little burden to pile on the backs of parents.

The etiology matters little, if at all, compared to the opportunity for encountering and growing in love and integrity presented by the special needs of the most vulnerable among us.

Medicine is beset by a metastatic malignancy within its ranks. It’s a perverse and ironic timing for that malignancy, as medicine now has the means to heal, or at least attenuate the worst effects of many genetic conditions. Add to that the daily miracles being wrought by Speech, Physical, and Occupational Therapists, as well as Special Education teachers.

All of this begs the question:

Who are the people that authentically trust women?

The answer is simple:

Those who tell women the truth, offer hope and healing, and respect their autonomy.

Trust women.

I wish the other side would.

Late last Spring I became increasingly convinced that a major area not tackled by the pro-life movement in any coordinated fashion is the new eugenics movement in fetal medicine. Specifically, increasing numbers of physicians are advising, demanding, and even coercing women to abort babies diagnosed with what have become known collectively as “Poor Prenatal Diagnoses.” Such conditions as Down Syndrome, Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Anencephaly, Spina Bifida, etc… constitute this constellation.

Over the past two years, I have heard dozens of women tell me their personal horror stories, many of whom refusing to abort and then going on to have a perfectly normal child. We hear of countries in Europe who are boasting that they will have eradicated Down Syndrome in a few short years, not by eliminating the ongoing occurrence of trisomy 21, but by a 100% abortion rate as the diagnoses come in.

Why not tell women of all that can be done to help these babies?

I contacted Chris Gacek of the Family Research Council, who put me in touch with Jeanne Monahan, the Director of FRC’s Center for Human Dignity. Together with Jeanne, and with the advice of Peg Kolm of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, and my good friend Leticia Velasquez who co-founded KIDS (Keep Infants with Down Syndrome), a working group formed around the idea of having a full day medical conference for medical professionals and the public alike. What emerged from this group is the Council on Poor Prenatal Diagnoses and Therapeutic Interventions.

And here we are. A wonderful collaborative project with others including the Lejeunne Foundation on therapeutics from the womb and throughout the individual’s life.

The conference on Saturday will be live webcast from FRC Headquarters in Washington, and is free to sign up and watch. Just follow this link to register. (We’re pretty near our limit for in-person attendance)

Conference main speakers will address the tidal wave of therapeutic interventions available for these children. They include:

John Bruchalski, M.D.
Byron Calhoun, M.D.
Alberto Costa, M.D., Ph.D.
Jeanne Monahan, M.A.
Gerard Nadal, Ph.D.
David Prentice, Ph.D.
Laura Toso, M.D.

In addition, we’ll be hearing the witness of Samuel Armas, the little baby who had fetal surgery for Spina Bifida, and whose hand was photographed reaching out from the womb and holding the finger of his surgeon. He’ll be there with his mother, Julie.

We’re also going to have a panel discussion and presentations by people who have founded organizations to support these children and their parents:

Melinda Delahoyde, Care Net
Leticia Velasquez, Kids
Christopher Bell, Good Counsel Homes
Nancy Mayer Whittington, Isaiah’s Promise
Mary Kellett, Prenatal Partners for Life

Kristan Hawkins, Students for Life

Paper Presentations by medical students.

Documentary preview and discussion by In Altum Productions Filmmakers
Jordan Allott and Daniel Allott.

The conference begins at 8:30 A.M. and ends at 5:00 P.M.

The good news is that there is a group of physicians here in New York who have been thinking along the same lines, as well as pro-life medical professionals around the country who have all come up with the same concern and the same resolve to effect a change. It’s the leading of the Holy Spirit, and just in time. Many medical school professors encourage eugenic abortion and don’t teach the therapeutics. This conference will pierce the encroaching shroud of silence and shine the light on all that medicine has to offer its tiniest patients.

So, starting this coming Saturday, The Council on Poor Prenatal Diagnoses and Therapeutic Interventions is kicking off A Year of Hope and Healing, which will see more conferences and coordinated activity in bringing to the fore the many support and advocacy groups, more physicians, scientists, and ethicists.

Please join us this coming Saturday for the live webcast, and spread the good word!

Again, it’s free to attend on-line. Just register at this link.

http://www.frc.org/player.swf

Word today from LifeNews.com that the NAACP is opposed to the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011, which criminalizes abortion on the grounds of race or sex.

Incredible.

With Planned Parenthood operating 78% of their “clinics” in inner-city neighborhoods, and African Americans constituting 12% of the nation but having 37% of the abortions, this is not only racial suicide, but fratricide as well. When the NAACP objects to a bill that would not only outlaw sex-selective abortions, but race-based abortions as well, that’s fratricide. One may only speculate as to why.

Perhaps the NAACP believes that culling the excess of unplanned pregnancies among their daughters is the answer to poverty. That’s genuinely understandable (so long as one sets aside the ten commandments, human instinct, and human decency), and as with most evil and mental confusion, it does have its own internal logic. Vacuuming African American wombs frees girls to pursue their education and vocational advancement.

The problem with the argument is that by any measure, 19 million dead African Americans later, African American neighborhoods are more violent, more economically blighted, more beset by illiteracy, unemployment, incarcerations, drug and alcohol addictions, violent crimes and murder than at any time before. It says something when Juan Williams, a liberal black journalist at NPR, authors a book entitled:

Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It.

The book is a must-read. The problem for Williams, Bill Cosby, and any other black man or woman who dares to cross the NAACP is that they are accused of being sell-outs to whites. It seems that black folk are the only demographic not entitled to a plurality of opinions, political philosophy, and political affiliations. That’s self-imposed by the NAACP membership. It’s a philosophy and leadership that the subtitle to Williams’ book accurately describes.

The Bill in question will make it illegal to target babies for abortion based on gender or race, and admittedly raises a problem for Planned Parenthood. Under the Bill, abortionists can be imprisoned for not determining if the race or gender of the baby was a determinative factor in aborting.

In practical terms, it’s doubtful that at the individual level this would affect many African American abortions, as the mothers aren’t aborting because of their child’s race. It does, however, have implications at the macro-level when an organization such as Planned Parenthood operates 78% of their centers in inner-city neighborhoods.

That said, why would any civil rights organization (and there are 45 others opposed to this Bill, including the National Council of Jewish Women) object to the Bill’s language or intent? Supposedly, the opposition is to the names of the two great leaders on the Bill, and therein resides a hornets nest of gender and racial politics, of political correctness. So, let’s lance the boil.

The towering abolitionists of history do not belong exclusively to those groups whose oppression they fought, and whose rights they championed. They belong to all human beings of good will, of decency and honor. They belong to all of us precisely because they spoke to the universal human nature and human dignity, both of which were denied in the oppression of women and blacks. We have every right to lay claim to their names and legacies, regardless of our race or gender. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that women and blacks are a class apart from the rest of humanity. It is to suggest that Douglas and Anthony fought for something other than equality.

The truth of the matter is that Douglas and Anthony belong to all of us, including those of us who fight in the modern abolitionist movement. How women and blacks could oppose this Bill is galling. They better than anyone know the sting of a stigmatized history, and the acrid taste of its toxic residue. Females are being targeted for death, and the resultant gender imbalances in countries like China and India are fueling a booming sex slavery industry to satisfy the tens of millions of men with no prospects for marriage. But that doesn’t seem to move the elitist radicals who are also committed to population reduction, seemingly at any cost.

That the NAACP could be moved to outrage by the 3,446 black lynchings since the 1800′s, recorded by the Tuskegee Institute, and be so obtuse to the butchering of almost 20 million blacks since 1973 simply beggars the imagination.

During the Civil War, General McClellan wouldn’t take the Grand Army of the Potomac out to fight. An exasperated President Lincoln, relieving McClellan of command wrote to him:

“My dear McClellan: If you don’t want to use the Army I should like to borrow it for a while.”

The failure to lead, as McClellan learned, is ultimately a self-abdication of the leadership position.

NAACP’s opposition to a common-decency Bill such as this indicates that they have broken ranks with the core principles of the giants for whom it is named. Since they have broken faith with the honor those names have come to personify, we shall carry on the names of Douglas and Anthony, and their legacies of championing equal human rights for all persons.

That starts with the right to live one’s entire life unmolested by predatory members of the species.

One would think that women and blacks would retain some collective memory where that is concerned. If not, the abortion stats for blacks are pointing toward endgame.

The recent overruling of the FDA decision to sell Plan B over the counter (OTC) to children as young as eleven years of age has engendered no small amount of outrage by proponents of the FDA plan, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has come in for severe criticism from women’s health and advocacy groups. Setting aside for a moment the undercurrent of abortion and the distrust between warring parties over the issue, this decision by Secretary Sebelius is a victory for the very children the FDA purports to serve and protect.

According to FDA labeling on Plan B:

“Ectopic pregnancies account for approximately 2% of all reported pregnancies. Up to 10% of pregnancies reported in clinical studies of routine use of progestin-only contraceptives are ectopic.”

That represents a five-fold increase in the incidence of a potentially fatal side effect of the drug’s usage in those taking the drug. The very issue proponents of OTC Plan B sale cite for selling to young adolescents, their fear of parental knowledge and involvement in their sex lives, heightens the risk of fatality in the very young.

Aiding and abetting the young in skirting parental involvement fosters a do-it-yourself gynecology where side-effects such as cramping, nausea, vomiting, and bleeding can serve to reinforce and heighten the fear and distrust that led to the child’s self-medication in the first place. Plan B taken by a child with an existing and untreated endometriosis can lead the child into thinking that the lower abdominal pain and heavy bleeding of a resulting ectopic pregnancy may well be her monthly norm. Such a mistake can be fatal, but what is an already fearful and distrustful child to do? It is entirely unreasonable to expect children, who are notoriously ignorant of their changing physiology, to engage in self-differential diagnosis and admit their clandestine activities to the parents they fear and distrust.

In research conducted by Family Health International (FHI), January, 2003.

“… the sine qua non of an OTC-switch is that patients should be capable of self-medicating by reading the drug’s package insert. The above label comprehension tests for Plan B indicate that safe self-medication is not possible for a significant segment of the population. For example, only 75% of all respondents answered correctly that Plan B should not be taken in the presence of unexplained vaginal bleeding. Among the low-level literacy group that figure declined to 69%. Furthermore, only 67% of all respondents understood that Plan B is designed to serve as a backup for regular contraception methods, not a replacement. Among those of low-literacy this figure dropped to 46%; whereas for women of high literacy the figure was 78%. Obviously, many patients do not understand much of the drug’s package insert, which argues against FDA approval of EC OTC.”

If there are any doubts about the ability of children and teens to self-prescribe such medication and act responsibly, NPR published a story about the work of Harvard’s Dr. Frances Jensen that shows how the child and adolescent brain is underdeveloped in the areas responsible for critical and prudent decision making:

She learned that that it’s not so much what teens are thinking — it’s how.

Jensen says scientists used to think human brain development was pretty complete by age 10. Or as she puts it, that “a teenage brain is just an adult brain with fewer miles on it.”

But it’s not. To begin with, she says, a crucial part of the brain — the frontal lobes — are not fully connected. Really.

“It’s the part of the brain that says: ‘Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?’ ” Jensen says. “It’s not that they don’t have a frontal lobe. And they can use it. But they’re going to access it more slowly.”

Do-it-yourself gynecology is bad medicine for the young, and our daughters deserve better than such callous disregard for their lack of knowledge of their bodies, lack of impulse control, and lack of sufficient neurological development to enable them to make reasonable and informed decisions. For those who lack trust in the experience and wisdom of the adults who know them best, it is all the more imperative that we ensure they don’t fall victim to pharmaceutical merchants and their allies who would exploit the callowness of their youth.

For the women’s groups howling with rage at Sebelius, I remember a time when feminism demanded medicine’s best for women, not do-it-yourself gynecology for our teenage and pre-teen daughters.