Sunday, December 16, 2012

A Completely New Idea to Transform the Abortion Debate

Since abortion was forced onto national agendas in countries around the world, it has been debated and promoted as part of "health care", or medicine. This has never been questioned anywhere that we have found in any literature.

We are comfortable here at AIW being the first in the world to put forward new ideas. Here is one.

What if we decided one day simply to stop going along with this Leftist Canard which says that abortion is "health care"? The fact is that every honest person knows that abortion does not cure any disease, or make anyone healthier. It is not health care. It is not medicine. Yes, it tends to be done by medical experts, and yes it is usually done with medical equipment, in medical settings, but there's no reason why that has to be the case.

You see, what is interesting about this is that we could extricate abortion from the world of health care and (true) medicine without ever touching the debate over legalization. It is perfectly possible to remove abortion from the realm of medical licensing, health insurance, medical privacy, etc., without making it any less legal than it is today. People have always assumed that one involves the other. But the arguments for legalization (privacy, etc.) are quite separate in reality from the question of who does them and where they are done and how they are paid for.

What would this look like in practice? First, abortion would not be done in hospitals. They would be done in dedicated abortion clinics that could not be passed off as medical facilities. This, of course, isn't too far from where we are today. One great benefit, however, would be that when you see a hospital or visit a doctor, you wouldn't be wondering in the back of your mind if they are involved with killing babies. The Hippocratic Oath could be honoured once again, and hospitals would look like hospitals again, instead of whole wings that look like Sandy Hook Elementary classrooms.

Second, abortion would not be done by doctors, but by dedicated hired killers. Abortionists would not be able to parade around with MD's after their names and benefit from the prestige that goes with being a doctor. They would stand before society exactly as they are, hired legal baby killers. And the society that tolerates them can stop pretending they are anything but that. If society isn't comfortable with legal, professional dedicated baby killers, it can choose to stop it.

Third, abortion training wouldn't be done in medical schools. It would be done by dedicated abortion training institutes. Or maybe it would be completely deregulated. Maybe anyone should be able to do an abortion. After all, Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Cantwell-Murray-Inslee keep telling us that the government shouldn't come between a woman and her abortionist. Why should the government decide who should be an abortionist? Oh wait, you haven't heard CNN come back with that follow-up question? Think about it. If they really mean what they say, then the state has no business deciding who is qualified to perform an abortion.

If you start to think about it for a little while, and envision what the true ramifications of Roe v Wade are, if abortion was extricated from health care, why shouldn't anyone with a syringe from PATH and a lab coat from a party supply store hang out a shingle and start doing abortions? Kermit Gosnell anyone? Let's see NARAL and Planned Parenthood stand up an get behind that.

Also, medical privacy laws would not apply. Today, women (and the man who in many cases force them into it, get to hide the shame of having an abortion under "medical privacy". This may be the single greatest obstacle to de-medicalizing abortion. But arguments for legalized abortion are completely unconnected to arguments for keeping your abortion secret. Just because we admit to everyone what is going on doesn't make it any less legal or accessible. The right to do x, y, or z does not entail to keep conceal the fact that you did x, y, or z. By severing abortion from its medical facade, those wanting to argue for abortion secrecy would be forced to do so outright. We could have an open debate about why women should be ashamed of something that is supposedly constitutional, legal, safe, positive, and empowering. Bring. It. On.

Finally, abortion would not be presumptively covered by health insurance, private or public, because it's not health care. Any organizations wanting to help pay for it would still be 100% permitted to do so, but they wouldn't be able to hide it under nice-sounding health insurance facades.

All the standard leftist pro-abort claptrap arguments abortion keeping abortion legal would be irrelevant to these changes. None of these changes would make abortion any less legal. All we are doing here is telling the truth. Abortion is legal killing by hired killers. Let's see if the abortion industry and its lackies can handle the truth.

Sunday, December 02, 2012

A New Approach to Pregnancy Medical Clinics Leads to Abortion Clinc Shutdown in Yakima

In February 2010, Lenette Lindemann asked God how to pray against the late-term abortion chain that had been started in Yakima 30 years earlier. Mrs. Lindemann was running the Life Choices Pregnancy Medical Clinic in the same city. "God told me to pray for 'the whirlwind'," she told AIW in a recent interview.

Lenette Lindemann, Yakima
Mrs. Lindemann did a study of the Bible for references to 'whirlwind' and prayed Proverbs 10:25 daily around Cedar River Clinic, run by Beverly Whipple. Cedar River had 3 locations then: Yakima, Tacoma, and Renton. Now they have two. The Yakima clinic closed 9 months to the day after Lindemann had that conversation with God. November 15, 2010, was the last day babies were killed at Cedar River Yakima.

But prayer wasn't the only ingredient in the closing of Yakima's most infamous and oldest abortion mill. Ms. Lindemann also went on a mission to save babies from death at Ms. Whipple's hand with more earthly (though not secular) measures. One of the biggest single changes she made was to take the fledgling ultrasound capabilities and expand them aggressively. Research has shown that up to 75-85% of pregnant mothers, even those who are intent on abortion, end up choosing life for their babies after seeing them on an ultrasound. This has prompted many pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) to upgrade themselves into Pregnancy Medical Clinics (PMCs). This requires a medical director, a nurse trained in ultrasound, and of course ultrasound equipment.

Mrs Lindemann told us that Life Choices was doing just 50 ultrasounds a year, and the volunteer nurse was 'working from home', waiting to be called in if she was needed. This wasn't acceptable to Mrs. Lindemann. She was on a mission. First, she led a move to hire nurses to perform the ultrasounds.  She found that retired nurses made excellent candidates, wanting to work part-time to supplement their retirement and were willing to work for less than the standard hourly nursing rate.  She eventually developed a staff of four nurses with three of them certified in ultrasonography.  "Volunteers are wonderful resources, serving in so many capacities ... but when life is on the line I wanted to know that my staff was going to be there when that abortion vulnerable woman came through our doors."

She actually served as a volunteer executive director and used her salary to pay the nurses. And she trusted God to provide the rest.

Having more trained staff and having them on site during work hours meant ultrasounds could be offered to more pregnant clients immediately, more days a week. Even then they were not open full time, but the number of ultrasounds went up to 250 a year from 50. She thinks this was a critical factor in putting Cedar River out of business.

When it was reported by the local newspaper that the Cedar River Yakima clinic was closing, their CEO Bev Whipple implied that she felt it was because of competition from the local Planned Parenthood. She failed to mention a large lawsuit that had been filed against her organization seeking millions of dollars in damages over a botched abortion. She also made no mention of the additional pressure from a faithful group of individuals who prayed outside the clinic weekly for years. "The fact is that Cedar River Yakima is one of the few abortion clinic closings in the state, and shows what God can do," noted Mrs. Lindemann.

She's not resting. She believes just as God shut down Cedar River, He can shut down the Planned Parenthood abortion giant also. "God wants to show us he can do big things." Mrs. Lindemann has now moved onto mobile ultrasounds and has started up a dedicated company, ImagePoint Mobile Medical Services, to go right where women are. She knows that the abortion industry is doing everything it can to fasttrack women from pregnancy test to dead baby as quickly as possible so they don't have the time to research, breathe, and consider what they're doing. Mobile ultrasound units will let her reach more women with life-saving, scientifically accurate and factual information that Planned Parenthood doesn't want them to have.