By Tom Strode
Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission
Another Planned Parenthood employee has been caught on video tape trying to cover up alleged child sexual abuse.
The unidentified nurse at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bloomington, Ind., is shown via an undercover video camera telling a girl who identified herself as a 13 year old impregnated by a 31-year-old man that she will not file a report, though it is required by state law. Later on in the video, the nurse informs her how to avoid Indiana’s parental consent law and gives her the name and location of an Illinois abortion clinic where it will be easier to avoid notifying her parents, according to The Washington Times.
The 13 year old, who calls herself “Brianna” on the secretly recorded video, is actually Lila Rose, a 20-year-old student at UCLA and president of the pro-life organization Live Action. In 2007, Rose posed as a minor and gained video footage of a similar cover-up at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Los Angeles.
“I am supposed to report [you] to Child Protective Services,” the nurse says on the video taped in the Bloomington clinic, according to The Times. “I didn’t hear the age. I don’t want to know the age.”
Planned Parenthood of Indiana suspended the nurse Dec. 3 while an investigation is undertaken, The Times reported.
The undercover video was shot during the summer as part of what Live Action has titled The Mona Lisa Project. More undercover video of similar incidents at other clinics will be released in stages, Rose said.
The video demonstrates the “routine lawlessness of abortion providers at Planned Parenthood.” Rose said. “Today’s video release is only a sample from many hours of similarly disturbing footage.”
Live Action called for the elimination of government funding of Planned Parenthood.
Affiliates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the national organization, performed nearly 290,000 abortions in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available. PPFA surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time last year, with more than $336 million of that total coming in grants and contracts from the government.
More than 90 percent of UK babies with Down syndrome still aborted
The Scotsman and other news outlets in the United Kingdom recently reported babies with Down syndrome increasingly are escaping abortion and being born.
The report, however, is flawed, because the percentage of unborn children with Down syndrome being aborted in the U.K. has not fallen, said a physician who writes for another newspaper, The Guardian.
A new survey showed more children are being born with Down syndrome than before prenatal testing for the condition was introduced widely in 1989, The Scotsman reported. Ben Goldacre, the writer of the “Bad Science” column for The Guardian, agreed that claim by the article was true. The number of babies born with the condition dropped from 717, when such screening was introduced, to 594 by the year 2000. Since then, however, births of children with Down syndrome have grown, reaching 749 in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available.
The Scotsman went on to report on what it said was an increase in mothers choosing to give birth to babies who tested positive for Down syndrome and why this trend had developed.
More parents are not choosing life over abortion for their unborn children who test positive for the condition, however, Goldacre said. More than nine of 10 mothers who receive a positive test for their babies still are having abortions, he said.
There has been an increase in births of Down syndrome children from 1989 to 2006, but “there has also been a far greater increase in the number of Down’s syndrome [babies] created in the first place, because people are getting pregnant much later in life,” Goldacre wrote.
While the odds of the birth of a Down syndrome child are 1 in 1,600 for a woman under 25, the chances grow to 1 in 340 at 35 years of age and 1 in 40 at 43, he wrote. In 1989, six percent of pregnant women in the U.K. were older than 35, while 15 percent were in 2006.
Calculations based on this increase in the age of pregnant women show the number of Down syndrome births would reach more than 1,450 if prenatal testing and abortion had been unavailable, according to the National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register, Goldacre wrote. “Except, of course, [prenatal] screening is widely available, it is widely taken up, and contrary to what every newspaper told you this week, it is widely acted upon,” Goldacre wrote in his Nov. 29 column
In the United States, about 90 percent of babies that test positive for Down syndrome are aborted, according to an estimate commonly quoted.
Surprising 35 percent of German doctors favor assisted suicide
A new poll shows 35 percent of German doctors support physician-assisted suicide.
The result is surprising for a country in which doctors helping patients die is stigmatized because of the Nazi eugenics program of the 1930s and 1940s, German broadcasting corporation Deutsche Welle reported.
The survey demonstrates “what a bad handle doctors have on ethical and medical questions,” according to the German hospice association. Many physicians cannot distinguish between “allowing someone to die” and “killing” someone, said Eugen Brysch, the hospice association’s head, according to Deutsche Welle.