Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Only 3% of What Al-Qaeda Does is Terrorism

Suppose Al-Qaeda tried to broker sympathy by telling you that "only 3%" of what they do is terrorism. The rest is job training, running soup kitchens, community organizing, building roads, and generally trying their best to help down-trodden Muslims the world over.

Well that's exactly the same reasoning Anna Franks, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Central Washington, used in talking to Pasco news reporter Hilary Whittier in response to the huge protest Sunday against her proposed abortion-referral clinic.

Monday, October 26, 2009

North Seattle Late-Term 'Killing Field' Run by Dr. Charlie Browne

You might think that with Planned Parenthood having opened up almost a dozen abortion clinics in Western Washington in the last 10 years, the blood lust of the abortionist 'community' would have been sated.

But at the beginning of January, 2008, late-term Seattle abortionist Dr. Charlie M. Browne seems to have decided to stop sharing his abortion profits with clinic overlords and opened up his own shop in North Seattle, an area that has been free of a free-standing, high-volume abortion clinic for more than a decade.

Dr. Browne used to be the Medical Director for Cedar River Clinics, the largest local chain of late-term abortion clinics. Cedar River does abortions up to "viability", currently deemed to be 24 weeks, just like his new clinic. His work there was reportedly 40 hours a week (according to IRS records obtained by AIW) and earned him more then $200,000 a year, and dates at least back to 2005.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Pasco Residents Show Up En Masse to Say NO to Planned Parenthood


Sunday, Oct 25, 2009 (Pasco) - Almost 700 residents of Pasco turned up this afternoon to send a strong and unequivocal message to the Pasco City Council: Say no to Planned Parenthood.

The council is deliberating an application from Planned Parenthood of Central Washington, an affiliate of the country's largest chain of abortion clinics, and central Washington's largest provider, to open up a new clinic in Pasco, next to Mark Twain Elementary School.

Monday, October 12, 2009

United For Life Conference this Weekend in Vancouver, Washington

Please see the web site for full details.

Below is a list of speakers.

Father Scott Daniels has been an advocate for all human life issues since seminary days. He says, “I have become ever more deeply aware of the need for more people of good faith to come forward and dedicate their lives to saving the unborn,” and “I truly believe that priests are especially invaluable to this ministry.” Father Daniels’s experience, including years of working with high school students, will help him reach younger generations and reverse the effects of moral relativism they've received from our culture. He states, “In my discernment, there is no more important issue facing the Church and humanity today than the life issues and promoting the dignity of every human person from conception to natural death.”

Monsignor Reilly of Helpers of God's Precious Infants Returns to Seattle

Sunday, October 25th and Monday, October 26th
Monsignor Philip J. Reilly


Sunday, October 11, 2009

"There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a 'thump, thump' in my abdomen."

There's almost nothing that can be said to prepare you adequately to read what's on this link. I would urge you to do it anyway. I will introduce it simply by explaining that it is a blog post on a blog called "The Abortioneers". This blog is, apparently, a place where abortionists come together and chat -- rather candidly -- about what it is that they do.

This post is called "Second Trimester Abortion Provision: Breaking the Silence and Changing the Discourse". It contains what at first seem like confessions from a late-term abortionist, with relatively graphic honesty about what happens in such abortions.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your America. Force yourself to read it. Force yourself to confront it.

(Hat tip to Jill Stanek for finding this.)

Monday, October 05, 2009

We Need a 'Pay Czar' to Cap Abortionist Salaries

With all this action these days from the White House to cap "excessive" salaries of CEOs, it's time to look at capping the salaries of abortion industry workers, like doctors, and executives.

It's time to get the money out of the abortion industry. There should never be a financial incentive to perform or sell an abortion. We have heard for years how the abortion industry is driven by profits and financial incentives. We can fix that.

Did you know that Planned Parenthood of Western Washington (PPWW) CEO Chris Charbonneau pulls down almost $260,000 a year. We've documented some of the outrageous salaries being made by abortion industry workers, especially the doctors that do the actual killing, here.

Looking at the most recent figures from Cedar River Clinics, the Western Washington abortion chain which are also the only non-hospital facilities that do horrific abortions right up to the 6th month of pregnancy, that are actually illegal in most Western European countries, we see that Dr. Charlie Browne made $217,175 in 2007.

That's a paltry sum compared to his colleague Dr. Robert Kothenbeutel, who took home almost $305,000. Amazingly, Cedar River also was employing two full-time anesthetists: Douglas L. Raber and Dennis O Johnston. Anesthesia is only used for surgical abortions, and then mostly for the grisly second trimester abortions Cedar River specializes in.

Raber managed to make $190,000, considerably higher than the average for his specialty.

One of the premises of the current obsession with scrutinizing how much money CEOs are making in this country is a recognition of how money can "incentivize" an unethical and aggressive approach to sales of things which should not be aggressively sold.

Everyone -- abortion providers conspicuously notwithstanding -- pays lip service to the idea that reducing the number of abortions is a Good Thing. From this it irresistibly follows that we should never allow there to be a financial incentive to sell abortion.

The way to do that is to cap the salaries abortion providers can make. There are numerous ways this can be done. We suggest that the Washington State Legislature pass a law that says that no doctor can make more than 10% of his income from the provision of abortion services.

The abortion industry can squawk all it wants claiming they're not in it for the money. But if you speak to those who have come out of that industry and blown the whistle, we find out the truth.

Carol Everett used to run a chain of abortion clinics in Texas. She has since gone very public about how the pursuit of profits drove them to sell as many abortions as possible.

A new movie, Blood Money, goes into great detail on this problem.

For the record, in 2007 we spoke with PPWW spokesman Brian Cutler and asked him if Planned Parenthood's doctors would be willing to back up his claim that they were not in this "for the money" by doing abortions "pro bono". Needless to say, he said they had declined.

While some in the medical profession will whine that "this is a legal medical service" and doctors "deserve to get paid for their services", the fact is that countless doctors donate their time and talents both here and abroad.

In many other Western European countries, and Canada, the notion that medicine should be "non-profit" has widespread acceptance. We are not arguing that we should adopt the same notion across all real medicine, just making the point that the government stepping in to a certain, specific area of the economy and eliminating financial incentives to sell something that should never be "sold" has plenty of precedent.

Yes, the time for abortion salary caps is now. The time for a Washington State Abortion Pay Czar is today. This cause should truly bring together Left and Right and unite us on some common ground.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

DSHS Holds Regular Planning Meetings with Abortion Providers, Divulges Names of Citizen Watchdogs

Would you expect that if you file a request with the state government as to how much an organization is receiving in state funds that the government would disclose your name to the organization in question?

Well, if you're dealing with the Take Charge Family Planning program at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), that's apparently what you should expect.

In 2008, we submitted a complaint to the Attorney General's office regarding the late-term abortion clinic chain known as Cedar River Clinics. In the response to that complaint, Cedar River director Beverly Whipple indicated that she knew this writer had requested information from DSHS about payments (tax dollars) to her organization.

There is no way Ms. Whipple should have known this.

We had filed a "Public Disclosure" request with DSHS to find out how much money DSHS had given to Cedar River in previous years in the form of Medicaid insurance payments.

(Cedar River Clinics does abortions up to 24 weeks, and even does secret abortions on teenage girls spirited out of other states without their parents' knowledge.)

While there may not be an absolute legal guarantee of privacy in such cases, most would expect that their name wouldn't be passed along to the organization under scrutiny. At least not without some sort of consequence.

We confronted a DSHS official about this. Her answers were woefully inadequate, and mostly incoherent.

One of her arguments was that it was good for organizations receiving government money to know that there are individuals keeping them accountable. She couldn't explain why that required the citizen's actual name from being disclosed.

She then suggested that the name might have been disclosed inadvertently at one of the "regular meetings" that this official, on behalf of DSHS, holds with the state's "family planning" agencies.

These meetings apparently include the Cedar River Clinic abortion chain, and the Planned Parenthood affiliates of Washington, including PP of Central Washington (which does what amount to coerced abortions), and PP of Spokane (which has been illegally overbilling Medicaid for years), and PP of Western Washington (which is doing 50% more abortions than it was just 3 years ago, while making millions of dollars in profits off emergency contraception).

We didn't know about these meetings, and this certainly didn't qualify as an excuse.

The bottom line was that this official seemed unperturbed by the privacy violation, and while she claimed she would "look into it", there have been no developments from "this investigation". And we don't expect any.

What we have learned is that the government (DSHS) admits to holding regular strategy meetings with the abortion industry to see how they can help each other, and these meetings include chit-chat, with private details, about members of the public who might be getting in their way. Ladies and gentlemen: welcome to the Land of Gregoire.