Charles A. “Chuck” Donovan

There is a remarkable coda to our recent story about Cuban pro-life physician and human rights hero Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet.  On Thursday, June 23, in Dallas, former President George W. Bush welcomed Dr. Biscet to the Bush Center and personally presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom

The Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) and Americans United for Life (AUL) recently filed an amicus brief in a major lawsuit over the late-term abortion videotapes collected by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP).  This lawsuit involves a vital public policy question: Can an association of abortion providers like the National Abortion Federation (NAF) successfully block the release of videos that show members of their organization potentially engaged in encouraging, supporting or facilitating the acquisition and/or sale of body parts from the unborn during the abortion process?

Yesterday 75 members of Congress, led by Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, sent a letter to the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration demanding answers to questions about the FDA’s surprise approval of relaxed protocols for the distribution of the abortion-inducing drug regimen known as Mifeprex.

The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) has issued a helpful statement on the Zika virus and the effort by the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights to exploit its spread to promote abortion and repeal of national laws against the practice.  The statement contains a number of useful links regarding what is known about the virus and the recommendations of responsible agencies.

Ever since the summer of 2015 Congress has engaged in sustained debate over federal funds distributed to clinics affiliated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.  In January of this year, Congress passed and sent to President Obama a budget reconciliation bill that would have had the effect of eliminating Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood that range into the hundreds of millions of dollars. 

A great champion of the unborn, Carolyn Gerster, M.D., a founder of both Arizona Right to Life and the National Right to Life Committee, has passed away. Dr. Gerster truly was a woman of valor. She was trained as a cardiac electrophysiologist and she understood with a passion the medical truths about the beginning of human life and its transcendent value.

Of all the Planned Parenthood data being looked at today as a result of release of the agency’s annual report, one of the more significant is the continued decline in its client total for reversible contraceptive methods (excluding services like sterilization and emergency contraceptive kits).

In a radio interview on the Diane Rehm Show on July 30, Terry O’Neill of the National Organization for Women (NOW) made a series of claims regarding Planned Parenthood that deserve a much closer look. O’Neill asserted that, “The claim that we can somehow replace Planned Parenthood overnight – you shut down all the Planned Parenthood’s [sic] clinics and that they could be replaced overnight, is silly and specious.”

What public purpose is served by a free-standing, population-control-driven, eugenically inspired, abortion-merchandising, fetal-tissue-vending family planning distributor that costs taxpayers nearly half a billion dollars a year?  Even back in the early 1970s, when Congress adopted Title X of the Public Health Service Act, advocates of the program, including then Congressman George H. W. Bush, were wary of the wisdom of establishing federally subsidized clinics that would focus solely on dispensing birth control.  It wasn’t so much controversy over these products, or the notoriety of Margaret Sanger’s elite bigotry, that Rep. Bush and others had in mind.  It was the danger of seeing family planning as something operating outside of a whole women’s health concept.