The Colorado gunman who shot and killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs is reported to have said “no more baby parts.”
The distorted flap about Planned Parenthood “selling baby parts” continues. On December 3 the Senate ( Republican-led) voted to strip Planned Parenthood (PP) of government funding. President Obama (a Democrat) will veto it if it reaches his desk. (I’m not suggesting that this is a political issue, of course) Planned Parenthood received $528 million from the U.S. government in 2014 to help support 700 clinics providing health services to mostly poor women. Why so much money? Basically because PP is providing subsidized women’s health services that in every other developed country except ours is provided by the government. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if Congress were to succeed in blocking Medicaid patients from obtaining care at PP health centers 390,000 women would lose access to preventative health care in the first year alone. (1)
Who wants “baby parts”?
In 2014 NIH funded 164 research projects using fetal tissue with about 0.27% of its total grant money. (2) These projects were researching HIV/AIDS (39%) , eye development and disease (32%), Hepatitis C and other infections, (13%), diabetes (8%), and miscellaneous others including Alzeihmer’s and Parkinson’s. “Fetal tissue is a flexible, less-differentiated tissue … and it is a tool for research that can’t be replicated with adult tissue.” (3) It is different from stem cells, a medical tissue that came under attack back in W. Bush’s administration.
Use of fetal tissue has been legal since 1993 when Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act which permits the tissue from any type of abortion to be used for fetal tissue research. The law requires complete and detailed informed consent from the woman to donate tissue from the abortion after she has made the decision to have an abortion. The law allows clinics to recover “reasonable payments” ($45-60 per specimen at PP) for providing the tissue to biological-research supply companies. The companies process the tissue and provide it to the researcher for about $800 per specimen. (I wonder if any Republicans have stock in some of those companies).
An estimated 5.8 Billion (yes, a “B”) people have received vaccines made with the two cell lines derived from fetal tissue. (Oh, NO, another red flag! “VACCINES”, “Guns”, “abortions” – all mentioned in the same blog! It’s almost enough to make you believe that there is a government conspiracy to enslave us all.)
“People are talking about fetal tissue, but really what the discussion is about is abortion.” (4) ( Duh!!) 3% of PP services are abortions, done in 1% of the clinics, and in just 2 states. (5) Planned Parenthood leaders have now instructed any PP clinic providing fetal tissue NOT to accept the measly 60 bucks.
Planned Parenthood has experienced 15 smear campaigns in 10 years according to its medical director (5). The current campaign has included:
1) six votes in Congress to restrict woman’s health care,
2) five Congressional committees currently investigating PP,
3) submission of 25,000 pages of documents by PP, and
4) 5 hours of testimony to one committee by its president.
Abortion politics appear to be as complex and almost as emotionally provocative as Presidential election politics, but the outcome of election politics will immediately affect only two women, not hundreds of thousands.
A HOLIDAY DIVIDEND:
Another learned cardiologist has reaffirmed the Hubslist axiom: “Just pick your parents right .” Dr. Lee Goldman, Dean of Columbia School of Medicine, explains that obesity is due to our genes in his new book, “Too Much of a Good Thing: How Four Key Survival Traits Are Now Killing Us.” He thinks that our overreaction to stress and our cravings for sweet, fatty, and salty foods all served us well in the cave man years when we had a life-span of 30 years, but that these “survivor genes” are now mismatched with our environment as we live into the 80’s. Of course, being a modern scientist he knows it is too late to “pick your parents”, so he is placing his hopes on future drug therapies that will turn off or block specific genes. Dr. Goldman says, “Gaining weight doesn’t mean that you are a terrible, non-virtuous person. This is the way you were built.” (6)
So, my holiday (includes New Year’s eve, of course) mantra for me and you is:
“Merry Christmas. Don’t beat yourself up. YOU are NOT in control.”
References:
1. CBO cost estimate on H.R. 3134, Defunding Planned Parenthood, September 16, 2015
2. Nature Magazine, Dec. 9, 2015, Meredith Wadman
3. Carrie Wolinetz, Associate Director for Science Policy, NIH
4. Shari Gelbar, MD. Weill-Cornell Medical College
5. Tearing Down the Fetal Tissue Smokescreen, NEJM, December 10, 2015, p.2376, Reagan McDonald-Mosley, M.D., M.P.H.
6. Boston Globe December 14, 2015 , B11
HUB's LIST of medical fun facts 