Would Women Be OK Without Planned Parenthood?

Will women have access to the health services they need if the government defunds Planned Parenthood?

That depends on whom you ask.

“Absolutely,” said Jay Hobbs, communications director for Heartbeat International, a pro-life organization that assists with pregnancies.

“If Planned Parenthood were gone tomorrow, the nation’s 2,500 pregnancy help centers, medical clinics, maternity homes and non-profit adoption agencies would continue to offer true choice, true empowerment to every mother who is facing an unexpected pregnancy.

Kathleen Eaton Bravo, founder of a pro-life network of medical clinics calledObria Foundation, has a different response.

“No,” she said bluntly.

Are we ready in the pro-life community to meet the needs of those women? No. I’m sorry to say, after 40 years, no.

Two decades ago, Bravo quit her job as a successful businesswoman to challenge organizations like Planned Parenthood in California, where in 2011, more than 1 million abortions were performed.

She has since opened five pro-life clinics and one mobile unit, which have helped save “thousands” of babies from being aborted. (Bravo said her organization has a “conversion rate” of about 80 percent, saving more than 6,000 babies.)

But if Congress defunds Planned Parenthood, Bravo believes that the pro-life community isn’t ready to handle the number of women they would need to serve.

“We are reactive in the pro-life movement. We are not proactive,” Bravo said. “The issue is, if we defund Planned Parenthood … we don’t have a competitive medical model under a branded name to compete.”

Out With the Old, In With the New

Planned Parenthood Federation for America President Cecile Richards has said stripping the organization of its federal funding would restrict “millions” of women from access to fundamental health care services.

Besides providing abortions, the organization offers breast and cervical cancer screenings, birth control, STI testing and treatment and well-woman exams.

Planned Parenthood claims that millions of low- and middle-income women across the country rely on these services.

Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on health care policy, believes that these services are not exclusive to Planned Parenthood. If the organization were defunded tomorrow, she said, “women would still have access to services.”

Via: Daily SIgnal

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Charlie Daniels on PP: ‘It’s High Time to Stop Funding the Butchering and Exploitation of the Unborn’ by Charlie Daniels

Planned Parenthood supporter holds sign that reads, "I Stand With Planned Parenthood." (AP File Photo)

A small quiz:

Who do you think made the following statement about blacks, immigrants and indigents?

"Human weeds … spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

Who said that they should enlist black ministers to sell black women on the prospect of abortion and the use of contraceptives in what was dubbed “The Negro Project”?

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Who said, “The eugenists wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from less children for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back off that and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared the most important and greatest step towards race betterment”?

Was it Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin or some rabid white supremacist bent on purification and perfecting a “master race”?

Actually, it was Margaret Sanger, a woman, hailed as a hero in the ranks of feminism, who has coveted awards named after her, is revered by many prominent people in Washington and who founded the nation's largest abortion mill, Planned Parenthood.

Margaret Sanger's views on the controlled birth of children bordered on Nazism, and her views on religion and marital fidelity were akin to hedonism.

She made this statement: “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” And she was a closet advocate of black genocide.

Via: CNS News

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Supreme Court Weighs New Health Law Dispute

President Barack Obama's health care law is headed for a new Supreme Court showdown over companies' religious objections to the law's birth-control mandate.

Amid the troubled rollout of the health law, and 17 months after the justices upheld it, the Obama administration is defending a provision that requires most employers that offer health insurance to their workers to provide a range of preventive health benefits, including contraception.

Roughly 40 for-profit companies have sued, arguing they should not be forced to cover some or all forms of birth control because doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

Both sides want the justices to settle an issue that has divided lower courts. The high court could announce its decision whether to take up the topic as early as Tuesday, following its closed-door meeting.

Arguments probably would take place in late March with a decision expected in late June.

The key issue is whether profit-making corporations can assert religious beliefs under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Nearly four years ago, the justices expanded the concept of corporate "personhood," saying in the Citizens United case that corporations have the right to participate in the political process the same way that individuals do.

Via: AP

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Birth control for free with Obamacare? Most women didn't know

A majority of women are unaware that birth control is available for free from health insurance plans under Obamacare—even as the Supreme Court is likely to soon consider legal fights over that law.

And while lack of awareness about the so-called "contraception mandate" might reflect overall, widespread confusion about Obamacare's details, an expert who has been following the issue said it also reflects the fact that pharmaceutical companies aren't advertising that their contraceptives could be effectively obtained free by many women.

Kristen McNeill has tracked women's knowledge of the contraception mandate for more than a year for her company, Phoenix Marketing International, which has a health-care division.

Three separate surveys by Phoenix this year found that fewer than 50 percent of women 18 to 45 knew that the Affordable Care Act requires health insurance plans to provide free contraceptives to women for birth control methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The percentage of women who knew contraception such as birth-control pills, diaphragms, IUDs, vaginal rings and progestin injections would be free was 44 percent in the first three months of 2013, and 45 percent in April to June—a statistically insignificant difference, McNeill noted. Each survey questioned more than 3,000 women.

Via: Today Money

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Court strikes down mandate for birth control in ObamaCare

A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the birth control mandate in ObamaCare, concluding the requirement trammels religious freedom.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — the second most influential bench in the land behind the Supreme Court — ruled 2-1 in favor of business owners who are fighting the requirement that they provide their employees with health insurance that covers birth control.

Requiring companies to cover their employees’ contraception, the court ruled, is unduly burdensome for business owners who oppose birth control on religious grounds, even if they are not purchasing the contraception directly.

“The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase; instead, it occurs when a company’s owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote on behalf of the court.

Legal analysts expect the Supreme Court to ultimately pick up an appeal on the birth-control requirement and make a final decision on its constitutionality.

In the meantime, Republicans in Congress have pushed for a conscience clause that would allow employers to opt out of providing contraception coverage for moral or religious reasons.

The measure emerged most recently during negotiations to fund the federal government. Some House Republicans wanted to include the conscience clause in a legislative package ending the government shutdown.

The split ruling against the government on Friday was the latest in a string of court cases challenging the healthcare law’s mandate.

Friday’s ruling centered on two Catholic brothers, Francis and Philip Gilardi, who own a 400-person produce company based in Ohio.

Via: The Hill

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