States continue Radical christianist assault on Women’s Health

In an appalling attack on women’s right to abortion and basic health services for poor women, Republicans in many states have injected personal religious agendas into budgets and laws.  It was just announced that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has defunded the state’s Planned Parenthood clinics as a result of budget deficits created by excessive tax cuts.  Planned Parenthood Clinics in Wisconsin provide preventative services.  Loss of these services will undoubtedly cost women their lives and the state much larger bills in the long run.  This is clearly nothing but a religionist agenda and an attempt to coerce state law into compliance with radical christianist concerns.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed a budget Sunday that cuts education and health clinics — including Planned Parenthood clinics — to plug a $3 billion shortfall without raising taxes, AP reported.

The two-year, $66 billion budget passed in the state legislature without a single Democratic vote.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America denounced the budget, which eliminated state and federal funding for the organization’s clinics.

Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin says it has 27 health centers across the state, which provide birth control, cancer screenings, annual exams, and sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment to 73,000 patients every year.

Wisconsin is the fourth state to target Planned Parenthood because of conservative-led objections to the group’s abortion services — even though they are funded separately and make up a small fraction of the services Planned Parenthood provides.

“If organizations want to do that, we’re not saying they don’t have the right to do that under the law. While we disagree with abortions entirely, they do have that right,” Wisconsin’s Channel3000.com quotes Julaine Appling of Wisconsin Family Action as saying. “We don’t have to use taxpayer money to do that.”

The budget eliminates state and federal funding to nine Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin health centers in small communities and cuts off 12,000 women who do not have health insurance from getting preventive health care, the group said in a statement.

“The budget also threatens Wisconsin’s BadgerCare family planning program, which currently helps more than 53,000 women and men get preventive health care at providers throughout the state, including Planned Parenthood. According to the Department of Health’s own estimations, the BadgerCare family planning program saves Wisconsin nearly $140 million per year,” Planned Parenthood said.

Radical christianists are also driving a number of laws with no medical or scientific basis outlawing abortion procedures after 20 weeks on the ridiculous and unproven notion that nonviable fetus can ‘feel’ pain.  Again, this is clearly driven by an attempt to impose radical christianist law on our country.

Last fall, Danielle and Robb Deaver of Grand Island, Neb., found that their state’s new law intruded in a wrenching personal decision. Ms. Deaver, 35, a registered nurse, was pregnant with a daughter in a wanted pregnancy, she said. She and her husband were devastated when her water broke at 22 weeks and her amniotic fluid did not rebuild.

Her doctors said that the lung and limb development of the fetus had stopped, that it had a remote chance of being born alive or able to breathe, and that she faced a chance of serious infection.

In what might have been a routine if painful choice in the past, Ms. Deaver and her husband decided to seek induced labor rather than wait for the fetus to die or emerge. But inducing labor, if it is not to save the life of the fetus, is legally defined as abortion, and doctors and hospital lawyers concluded that the procedure would be illegal under Nebraska’s new law.

After 10 days of frustration and anguish, Ms. Deaver went into labor naturally; the baby died within 15 minutes and Ms. Deaver had to be treated with intravenous antibiotics for an infection that developed.

Ms. Deaver said she got angry only after the grief had settled. “This should have been a private decision, made between me, my husband and my doctor,” she said in a telephone interview.

Based on current knowledge, medical organizations generally reject the notion that a fetus can feel pain before 24 weeks. “The suggestion that a fetus at 20 weeks can feel pain is inconsistent with the biological evidence,” said Dr. David A. Grimes, a prominent researcher and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “To suggest that pain can be perceived without a cerebral cortex is also inconsistent with the definition of pain.”

In one recent review, in March 2010, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Britain said of the brain development of fetuses: “Connections from the periphery to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks of gestation and, as most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception, it can be concluded that the fetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation.”

Observations of physical recoiling and hormonal responses of younger fetuses to needle touches are reflexive and do not indicate “pain awareness,” the report said.

Six states have no passed some form of these laws.  It is crucial that women realize that these laws are based on radical religious views and not science.  The doors to these laws was opened by none other than Supreme Court Justice Kennedy who has no background in medical science but has been drug into considering religious positions instead of law by several supreme court justices that allegedly have connections to the religious cult Opus Dei.