Big Medicine Promotes Abortion-on-Demand

Kermit Gosnell Prison AP
Dr. Susan Berry

The United State’s most prominent association of gynecologists and obstetricians announced its full support for abortion-on-demand.

“Abortion is health care,” says the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).

“It’s a medical procedure that is essential for the health and well-being of women across the country. Targeting and restricting any medical procedures in this way is simply bad medicine,” the group claimed.

The organization also opposes abortion safety legislation that requires abortionists to hold hospital privileges and laws that require abortion clinics to meet the same safety and health standards as other outpatient surgical facilities.

“[D]ecisions about reproductive health, including abortion care, are best made by a woman in honest, open, truthful consultation with the people she trusts, including her obstetrician-gynecologist – not a politician,” ACOG continues. “Abortion is safe and legal – and it is safe because it is legal.”

Texas passed its abortion safety law in 2013, in the wake of the Kermit Gosnell case. Gosnell – who was convicted of murder for severing the spinal cords of babies born alive during abortions – also was found guilty in the death of one of his patients due to an anesthesia overdose. Despite complaints about the abuses occurring in Gosnell’s abortion clinic, both the abortion industry and the state of Pennsylvania failed to intervene in his “house of horrors” for nearly two decades.

Following the Gosnell conviction, both ACOG and the American Medical Association (AMA) filed an amicus brief in support of Planned Parenthood against the state of Texas. ACOG said:

It imposes government regulation on abortion care that jeopardizes the health of women in Texas and denies them access to the safest and most effective evidence-based protocols for medical abortions. Abortion is a very safe procedure, and complications requiring hospital admission are extremely rare. There is no medical basis to require abortion providers to have local hospital admitting privileges.

In the tweet below, ACOG Action even provides a link to a study featured in leftwing Vox that supports teens’ relationship with Planned Parenthood:

Live Action News says ACOG’s statement on the safety of abortion is “not rooted in reality.”

“Abortion’s legality most certainly does not automatically make it safe – not when the abortion lobby fights laws regulating the abortion industry, and not when reams of evidence have shown otherwise,” the pro-life site observes. “Women like Jennifer Morbelli, Tonya Reaves, Christin Gilbert, Lakisha Wilson, and hundreds more, have died from legal abortion.”

Dr. Donna Harrison, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), told Breitbart News that ACOG “has been deeply entwined with the leadership of Planned Parenthood Federation of America for years.”

“Not surprisingly, ACOG has long lobbied for extreme pro-abortion measures and against reasonable restrictions like waiting periods and parental consent for minors,” she explains. “ACOG ignores both the fact that life begins at conception and the scientific evidence demonstrating serious long-term risks to women who have abortions.”

With Planned Parenthood on the defensive following the recent series of undercover videos exposing the abortion business’s apparent practice of selling the body parts of babies it aborts, Big Medicine is coming to its assistance.

This month, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) granted space to Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards in its pages to hawk greater access to birth control and complain about recent attempts to eliminate taxpayer funding to her organization.

Richards’ column in NEJM comes as the medical research organization describes itself as “dedicated to bringing physicians the best research and key information at the intersection of biomedical science and clinical practice…”

NEJM continues:

A career companion for physicians, NEJM keeps practicing physicians informed on developments that are important to their patients and keeps them connected to both clinical science and the values of being a good physician.

NEJM employs a highly rigorous peer-review and editing process to evaluate manuscripts for scientific accuracy, novelty, and importance. The editors have set policies to ensure that authors disclose all relevant financial associations and that those financial associations do not influence published content. These factors contribute to NEJM’s reputation as the “gold standard” for quality biomedical research and for the best practices in clinical medicine.

NEJM is the most widely read, cited, and influential general medical periodical in the world. As it evolves to meet the changing needs of its readers in the 21st century, it is committed to maintaining that reputation and integrity, while using innovative formats and technologies for new features and faster delivery and access.

Richards writes in her column:

Birth control has dramatically improved the ability of all women to participate actively and with dignity in the U.S. economy. And researchers have attributed the historic 40-year low in the teen pregnancy rate to the increase in access, especially to highly effective methods of birth control… Now, political attacks against women’s health care are threatening access to critical services that allow women to choose and readily obtain the birth control methods that are best for them. It is essential that we protect and continue to expand access to all forms of birth control…

Like many other women’s health care providers, we work to ensure that all forms of birth control are available to women and advocate for innovative ways to expand access…

The inclusion of birth control as a preventive service increased access — at no cost to the patient — to the full range of birth-control methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Thanks to this benefit, more than 55 million women now have access to birth control without copayments, which has saved them an estimated $1.4 billion in the first year alone…

Unfortunately, politicized attacks against women’s health care are threatening to undermine the progress achieved to date. We have seen an unprecedented number of federal and state attacks on women’s health in the past year, including nine congressional votes to cease reimbursing Planned Parenthood for care provided to patients who depend on public health programs…

Politicians with extreme views on reproductive health are trying to cut public funding for family-planning services through programs such as Medicaid and Title X, which have been critical in reducing costs and expanding access for low-income women to the birth-control method of their choice.

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) tells Breitbart News that Richards “has a cramped and demeaning view of women and their health.”

Orient comments on Richards’ expressed concern for women’s “health:”

What those long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) do is to allow women to be available at all times for sex with minimal risk of pregnancy. Is “participating in the economy” her idea of the key to success and happiness? And is availability for sex her idea of dignity?

Exceptional women have the ability to excel in almost any field of endeavor. But almost all women have the ability to do something no man can do: give birth to a baby. A woman need not be an interchangeable “participant” in a huge economy. She can create and be the heart and soul of a whole unique family. But to Planned Parenthood, babies are to be delayed, prevented altogether, or at least “spaced.”

Planned Parenthood’s amoral “comprehensive sex education” and contraception have led to a hook-up culture with a corrosive effect on family building. Sexually transmitted diseases are becoming a rite of passage, and can stealthily destroy fertility. We will soon be finding out the long-term effects of hormonal contraceptives taken continuously starting very young. The World Health Organization classifies them as class-1 carcinogens.

According to Orient, the culture of Planned Parenthood is difficult to associate with the notion of “health.”

“Promiscuous but not pregnant is not the same as healthy,” she asserts. “Dispensing contraceptives (and abortions, which Richards does not mention) may make Planned Parenthood a ‘healthcare provider’ by today’s definition, but the long-term effects on spiritual, emotional, and physical health may be tragic. Planned Parenthood neither acknowledges nor offers any help for these.”

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