LIFE DIGEST: Senate aids Planned Parenthood in war funding bill
- May 28, 2008 - comment
The country’s leading abortion provider will benefit from a bill to provide funds for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, if the U.S. Senate gets its way.
The Senate voted 75-22 in a May 21 roll call for an amendment that included the reinstitution of government subsidies for Planned Parenthood clinics and university and community health centers, according to Congressional Quarterly. The Senate passed the next day the war spending bill to which the amendment was attached.
If enacted, the measure would mean Planned Parenthood, which recorded nearly 290,000 abortions at its affiliates in 2006, would be able to purchase contraceptives from manufacturers at discounted prices. The drugs would include Plan B, the “morning-after pill” that has abortifacient qualities, according to pro-life organizations.
Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council, said in his online “Washington Update” the vote shows Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and his allies “are more concerned about funding the war against the unborn than the war in Iraq. Reid’s personal political agenda is exposing our active-duty troops to new risks as they wait on Congress to duke out the abortion provisions.”
The Senate-approved war funding bill has gone to the House of Representatives for consideration.
If enacted, the drug subsidies would benefit an abortion rights organization that surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time last year. More than $336 million of that total for Planned Parenthood came in government grants and contracts.
Plan B, which is basically a heavier dose of birth control pills, works to restrict ovulation in a woman, but it also can act after conception, thereby causing an abortion. This mechanism of the drug blocks implantation of a tiny embryo in the uterine wall.
Chinese officials permit exemption after earthquake
Parents whose only child was killed or severely injured in the May 12 earthquake in China will be able to have another baby as an exemption from the one-child policy.
The Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee in Sichuan Province issued the ruling in the wake of the devastating earthquake, which resulted in an estimated 10,000 children dying in collapsed school buildings, the International Herald Tribune reported, based on an Associated Press account.
In addition to enabling a mother to give birth to another child, the exemption would relieve parents of fines for a second, illegal child who either died in the earthquake or who survived.
Provincial officials have enforced China’s coercive, one-child rule with heavy fines for more than one child. Forced abortions and sterilizations also have been widely reported under the mandate.
Some mothers may be unable to benefit from the exemption, however. They may either be too old to produce a child or have been sterilized, said Zhongxin Sun, a sociology professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, according to the International Herald Tribume.
The population control policy, instituted in 1979, limits couples in urban areas to one child and those in rural areas to two, if the first is a girl. Other exceptions have been made in some provinces, and enforcement of the policy has varied among regions.
Fourth Circuit strikes down Virginia abortion ban
The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down for the second time Virginia’s ban on partial-birth abortion even after the U.S. Supreme Court directed the lower court to reconsider its original ruling in light of the justices’ support for a similar, federal law.
The 2-1 opinion by a Fourth Circuit panel said the state law prohibiting “partial birth infanticide” went beyond the federal law and unconstitutionally restricted the right to abortion. The ruling, announced May 20 by the Richmond, Va.-based court, came only 13 months after the Supreme Court affirmed the Partial-birth Abortion Ban Act, a 2003 federal measure that prohibits an abortion technique that involves the killing of a nearly totally delivered baby usually in at least the fifth month of pregnancy.
A partial-birth abortion, as typically performed, involves the feet-first delivery of an intact baby until only the head is left in the birth canal. The doctor pierces the base of the infant’s skull with surgical scissors before inserting a catheter into the opening and suctioning out the brain, killing the baby. The technique provides for easier removal of the baby’s head.
After its 5-4 ruling in April 2007, the Supreme Court returned the case from the Fourth Circuit to the appeals court for reconsideration in light of its opinion regarding the federal ban.
In his opinion in Richmond Medical Center v. Herring, Fourth Circuit judge M. Blane Michael said the Virginia ban contains a major difference from the federal one that rendered it unconstitutional. The federal law requires that the doctor intend to perform a partial-birth procedure, or “intact dilation and extraction” (D&E), as the appeals court referred to it. The state ban does not, however.
Judge Paul Niemeyer dissented, saying the majority’s opinion “is based on a glaring misreading” of the state law and the high court’s Gonzales v. Carhart decision. The Virginia law “criminalizes precisely the same conduct” as the federal measure, he said.
The Fourth Circuit consists of federal courts in the states of Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
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