Posted on 04/16/2002 8:08:56 PM PDT by Notwithstanding
I would not, however, support cutting off government funding for PP and similar organizations, while government continues to force all of us to pay the costs of raising other people's children. The current cost to taxpayers of raising some crackhead whore's 3 or 4 or 5 brain damaged children, who will only grow up to be welfare users, drug addicts, gang members, and prison inmates, who produce yet more of the same, is staggering. As long as I'm being forced to pay for that, I'm certainly not going to advocate cutting off funding to a group which mitigates the problem substantially. But I'd be wholeheartedly in favor of cutting off both -- the welfare state generates the irresponsibility which in turn generates a huge number of unwanted and/or irresponsible pregnancies.
"Planned parenthood" my a$$! Death for the unborn in order to PREVENT parenthood is much more accurate!
That hits the nail on the head, doesn't it?
LMBO!!!
You are a fool.
Most of the people who work for Planned Parenthood are motivated by altruism and genuine political convictions, just as most of the people employed by pro-life organizations are. Neither is exactly a high-paying industry. As strongly pro-choice as I am, I'd have to have a heck a lot more altruism than I do to quit my current job and go work for PP. The CEO of PP Federation of America made only $324,000 in 2000 -- a pittance compared to the normal compensation of New York City-based executives of large companies (most of whom don't have to deal with constant harassment and death threats in connection with their jobs). As a non-profit, PP cannot provide the lucrative stock options that private employers provide to even mid-level employees, nor can employees own stock and benefit financially when its market price rises. Check out the pay scales for the various specialties that doctors can go into, and then tell me they're doing abortions to make money. If anyone at any level in almost any industry told me they were going to apply for a job at PP because they wanted to make more money I'd laugh in their face.
As for your claim that they suppress research data, etc, I assume that is a reference to the alleged abortion-breast cancer link -- utterly unproven, and if it ever is proven, it will clearly be a very slight risk. There are believers in junk science on both sides of the abortion issue, and I have no respect for them regardless of which side they're on. On the single occasion in my life that I availed myself of PP's services (over 20 years ago, when I was 20, to get a prescription for the pill), I was lying in the stirrups having a pelvic exam when the bouncy young assistant noticed on the medical history form I'd filled out, that my mother had taken DES (an anti-miscarriage drug) while pregnant with me. Back then, the PP crowd, egged on by third rate researchers hoping to make a name for themselves, were convinced that DES caused cancer in the reproductive tracts of women who had been exposed to it in utero. The evidence was similarly shaky to the abortion-breast cancer evidence, and further research eventually concluded that DES created no cancer risk whatsoever. But the little dingbat was absolutely convinced that those evil capitalist misogynist drug companies were getting rich peddling drugs to women that they KNEW caused cancer, and was so enthused about getting even with them that she tried right then and there (addressing my exposed vagina!) to persuade me to sign up as a plaintiff in a class action suit against the manufacturer. What a crock! The abortion-breast cancer cheerleaders of today are just a re-run of the same silly show -- it makes no difference that they're cheering for the other side.
If PP was really motivated to make money, they'd go ahead and tell all their abortion clients that there's some research out there suggesting a link between abortion and breast cancer. Virtually all of them would have the abortions anyway and, having scared them into thinking they were now at high risk for breast cancer, PP would go into the mammogram business and get them coming back year after year, shelling out money for annual mammograms even in their teens and 20s.
If you really care about this issue, take the time to really learn about it. It's not likely to change your position on abortion, but you'll be more effective at making a case for your position and promoting changes which will really reduce the number of abortions, if you understand what's really going on -- financially, scientifically, politically, psychologically. Having activists on both sides parroting false and misleading attention-getting claims just creates a lot of hostility and polarization. It's a lot of wasted energy which would be better spent honestly addressing the disintegration of civilized society which underlies a large portion of unwanted pregnancies.
Perhaps a better set of statistics would be the ratio of adoptions compared to the numbers of abortion and referrals to PP. Or, look up the money that PP spends supporting "Medical Students for Choice."
On the other hand, there's a small organization, Physicians Life Alliance , that supports "Medical Students for Life." We recieve no government funds.
You sound like a potential member of Libertarians for Life
Beverly Nuckols
You can do your own Medline research at Emergency Medicine at NCEMI , if you wish. Enter DES and cancer, hit "Search Medline" then browse the abstracts.
Here's an abstract of one article:
Nurse Pract 1988 Nov;13(11):15-6, 19-20, 22 passim
Related Articles, Books, LinkOut
Identification and management of DES-exposed women.
Vieiralves-Wiltgen C, Engle VF. Llanfair Retirement Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen compound, was prescribed to many women with history of miscarriage between the years 1940 and 1971. As a result of prolonged use of DES in gynecological practice, an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million women were exposed prenatally, resulting in multiple upper and lower genital tract abnormalities. These anomalies may affect reproductive function and place women at greater risk for developing clear cell adenocarcinoma (peak incidence at age 19) and squamous cell carcinoma of the vagina and cervix (peak incidence at ages 35 to 40). Emphasis has been placed on screening for clear cell adenocarcinoma rather than squamous cell carcinoma and reproductive alterations. Despite the previous emphasis during the 1970s and a subsequent decline in public and practitioner awareness, women are at risk for the known effects of DES exposure until the year 2010. Greater effort must be made by practitioners to identify and screen for DES exposure in their practices, as well as to educate the public regarding the health risks posed by DES exposure so that affected women may be reached and receive care.
PMID: 3231355 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
No, but representing revenues as profits is pretty far over the edge. Even a proprietor of a little one-person business knows that "making money" is figured by netting expenses against revenues -- one doesn't need to be a CPA to grasp that.
Perhaps a better set of statistics would be the ratio of adoptions compared to the numbers of abortion and referrals to PP.
I'd love to see all the energy that's poured into the anti-abortion movement redirected towards fixing the insane adoption laws in this country. Endless cases of infant adoptions being reversed years after the fact, endless meddling by child "welfare" agencies after the adoption of older children (nearly all of whom are required to patronize touchy-feely agency-approved counselors for as long as the counselors claim they're needed), last minute cancellation of adoptions by wonderful families over technicalities (did you see the ABC News expose on child welfare agencies? one toddler was yanked from his home of a couple years, days before his adoption was final, because the parents took him to Sea World -- that was in the next county over, and taking him out of the county violated the rules -- end of adoption process -- the parents sued and lost).
I've been afraid to even look into the question of prospective adoptive and foster families being rejected for things like home-schooling, guns in the home, strict religious beliefs, disbelief in repressed memory therapy, belief in mild spankings, etc. Tens of thousands of kids "age out" of state foster care every year, after spending years in the system without being adopted. Meanwhile, thousands of good parents are being driven away from adoption, either directly, or indirectly after hearing all the horror stories and deciding not to get involved.
It all makes a cruel joke out of the pro-life mantra "adoption, not abortion". I don't blame PP for a minute for not promoting adoption (and with all the adoption groups advertising, women inclined toward that route probably don't stop at PP first). Most of their clientele is low income, and thus disproportionately black and other dark-skinned "minorities". The sad fact is that there's an endless supply of these kids, and few decent adoptive homes for them. Telling a pregnant black woman to "put your baby up for adoption" is simply lying to them -- the reality will almost always be a life of bouncing around from one foster care facility to another, most of them institutional rather than actual homes. If that kid gets a home, it will only be by preventing another kid from getting a home. But if they tell the mothers the truth, often the mother will decide to keep the child herself -- even if she's an adolescent and/or already on welfare and/or addicted to drugs and/or is living with an abusive boyfriend. Then the kid gets badly damaged before being yanked by the child welfare agency, and dropped in foster care -- it's hard enough placing healthy black newborns; damaged black toddlers barely have any chance of adoption. The agencies that try to place these kids are already overwhelmed, and now they've got black activist leaders of the Sharpton-Jackson ilk suing them for charging lower fees for placing black babies.
Or, look up the money that PP spends supporting "Medical Students for Choice."
I'm very much in favor of promoting a pro-choice stance among medical students. I had a lovely boarder a few years ago who was preparing for medical school, which she had chosen solely out of concern over the growing lack of abortion availability (contrary to the rabble-rousers' claims, money was the last thing on her mind; she was working nearly full-time for barely minimum wage at an independent abortion clinic, while carrying a heavy load of pre-med courses). I don't know anything about the group you mentioned, though, and if it's a heavily PP-funded thing, it's probably as interested in promoting a general leftist political agenda as in making sure doctors get abortion-related training.
You sound like a potential member of Libertarians for Life
Probably not, as I'm strongly pro-choice. But I would certainly like to see the government get out of the issue, both financially and legally. Government always promotes dependency on government, and that's always a bad thing. Somehow, in spite of all the government funding for contraception and abortion and related educational programs, the government-dependent segment of our population keeps multiplying geometrically -- clearly the government's approach is only working for the government.
Haven't seen you around since the stem cell debates. I'm STILL waiting for someone to show me why cells can be removed from a blastocyst for genetic testing without harming the development of the fetus, but can't be removed for stem cell research without causing such harm. How does the blastocyst know what the departed cell is being used for?
1) What successful businessperson is going to continue to sell a product that they lose money on? Please tell me how Planned Parenthood can keep their doors open if they are spending more money than they are taking in? Handouts from the government aren't enough to keep them afloat. They have to be making money.
2)Do you think Planned Parenthood is going to fully disclose their finances to whomever asks? You've got to be kidding. Anyone investigating them most likely will piece together information from several sources and take their best guess. The only people who know the truth are their administrators and accountants. A non-profit director who makes 324,000 is making damn good money. That's just the amount on paper. I've seen that woman make the rounds on the New York party circuit. She's not hurting for cash. Most non-profit directors around the country make well under 100,000.
3)Please tell me what in your educational background qualifies you to dismiss dozens of sound, accepted medical studies performed by researchers all over the world from different cultures, religious persuasions and political ideologies over the span of 40 years? You must know something that the top scientists in the world don't. I've seen you on the threads discussing the abortion-breast cancer link. You've had access to the links and the information. Did you bother to read any of it? As for personal agendas, one of the researchers, Dr. Janet Dahling, is a committed pro-choicer. If she went into her study with any kind of bias it would have been to disprove a link. What she found shocked her. Not only did she find a link but among women who had a family history of breast cancer and also had an abortion, ALL of them developed breast cancer by the age of 45. ALL OF THEM. Do you get this? One of my best friends was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 27. She had a positive family history. She had an abortion. She fit Dr. Dahling's profile perfectly. She died at the age of 32. Another friend was diagnosed at the age of 39. She had an abortion at the age of 16. She is lucky to be alive right now. Are you getting this yet?
4)I've also been inside a Planned Parenthood clinic. No, I haven't had an abortion nor was I there for birth control. I was there for an HIV test. I am an RN and I was working in a county hospital when I got stuck by a needle left in bedding. At the time, the hospital refused to test the patient and I wanted to get the test done anonymously. The test was free. I offered to pay them but they refused. Gee, they sure give away a lot of free stuff. See item #1. If you want me to coo about what a kind and wonderful experience it was, it wasn't. It was a very sad experience. The staff there looked like walking corpses. No one smiled and people just walked around looking like zombies.
5)Finally, if you think that a woman who has been told that a medical procedure may cause breast cancer is going to happily go ahead and have the procedure anyway, well, I don't know what to say to you. To believe that requires an incredible amount of denial, lack of logic and lack of insight into human nature. If you believe that you'll believe anything.
Because, the purpose of the technician harvesting stem cells, as opposed to the one testing the embryo, is to harvest as many stem cells as possible, without any plans for implantation or preservation of the life of the embryo. The result of the harvest, the death of the embryo, is a given.
Also, it could be argued that the testing of the embryo is for the benefit of the embryo (a stretch, if the plan is to only preserve "good" human embryos), while the harvesting of stem cells from embryos is for the benefit of others. Ethically, human life shouldn't be endangered - much less purposefully ended - for the benefit of others by "medical procedures" without consent of the one endangered.
Even if you don't want to join the L4L, you will find some of the answers to your questions (such as this one) in the Library, there. http://www.l4l.org/library/index.html
The most recent study I found via your link (Hatch, et al) was dated 2001 and carried the disclaimer "although a role for more intensive screening among DES-exposed women in the production of this excess could not be completely ruled out". I read a newspaper summary of another study around the same time which specifically addressed this issue, and concluded that the slightly increased incidence was indeed attributable to the more intensive screening.
What I haven't ever seen addressed is the question of whether the underlying condition which resulted in women being prescribed DES might itself be associated with any increased cancer risk in their daughters -- all the studies seem to compare women whose mothers took DES with women whose mothers didn't, but there's never any mention of a control group for the mothers (i.e. women with a history of early miscarriage who took DES vs. women with the same history who didn't). They're always comparing the daughters of mothers with a known reproductive problem vs. daughters of a random group of mothers. It's almost surprising that there aren't some clear differences in the daughters' reproductive tract health (besides the structural abnormalities, which have been shown to be directly caused by DES), but maybe they're only really looking for cancer, since that angle was so heavily hyped back in the seventies.
Oddly, the stuff seems to have been found useful as a TREATMENT for some kinds of prostate cancer and breast cancer.
I resulted from the only one of my mother's 4 known pregnancies that didn't end in miscarriage, and it was also the only pregnancy during which she took DES. I sure ain't suing anybody for giving it to her. I don't even have any of the structural abnormalities.
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