Charles A. “Chuck” Donovan

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.

The issue of late-term abortion is among the most agonizing and controversial areas within the larger, contentious debate on the morality and legality of abortion.  To begin with, by the 20th week or fifth month of pregnancy, the fetus is clearly recognizable as a neonate and she is routinely described on professional medical websites in terms that stress her individuality and humanity; in addition, the methods used to terminate fetal life after five months are particularly grim and are often cited by abortion practitioners themselves in ways that indicate their ethical or aesthetic revulsion.

On Monday, December 22, Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) joined with Family Research Council (FRC) as cosignatories on comments filed by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) regarding new federal rules from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Personnel Management on transparency in health insurance coverage of abortion.  The comment covers two separate rulemakings, one of which concerns the general use of federal tax subsidies to purchase health insurance plans on the federal and state insurance exchanges, and another which addresses transparency with respect to certain multi-state plans (MSPs) managed by OPM under the Affordable Care Act.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) used last Friday evening to issue an important rule on abortion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  The rule, moreover, was parceled in a 350-page document that, like other issuances, invited only the most active readers.

Later this week the federal and state exchanges created under Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, will open for their second year of operation.  After last year’s rugged rollout, with extremely expensive web sites that functioned poorly, the Obama Administration has invested millions more in fixing the federal site, healthcare.gov, and is promising better performance.  It is far from clear that this improvement will happen, and in the area of abortion coverage nothing is clear at all.

Liberty can be explained in a handful of words; deprivations of liberty usually require thousands.  That is the case with the latest iteration of the accommodations permitted under the Obama Administration’s preventive services mandate, which was published on Friday, August 22.  The Obama Health and Human Services (HHS) Department issued its latest rulemakings designed to ensure that the employees of the vast majority of religious nonprofits, as well as those of businesses like Hobby Lobby, can obtain zero-cost contraceptives, abortifacients and sterilization via their employers’ insurance plans.

Charlotte Lozier Institute President Chuck Donovan was a recent guest on the Teresa Tomeo show on Ave Maria/EWTN Radio to discuss the Lozier Institute’s newest paper “Improving Joyful Lives: Society’s Response to Difference and Disability.”

On Tuesday of this week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases to decide whether private companies can refuse to comply with a federal mandate to supply health insurance coverage for abortifacient drugs and contraceptives.  The cases, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, will test the strength of religious protections afforded the American people under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.