"Facts of Life" Email: June 27, 2003

Facts of Life—June 27, 2003

[Don’t forget to check out the News section at www.californiaprolife.org]

Diana Lopez, 25, mother of two other children, died after an abortion at 18 - 20 weeks performed by Mark Maltzer at the Planned Parenthood on East Kingston Avenue in East Los Angeles on February 28, 2002.  The family is suing PP and the abortionist for wrongful death after the Department of Health services cited them for numerous violations.  Maltzer plies his trade at a number of PP facilities in southern California, but he is the medical director of the Pregnancy Consultation Center in Sacramento. According to the coroner’s office, Lopez died of "a hemorrhage due to traumatic anterior cervical perforation due to dilation and evacuation for elective termination of pregnancy at 18 weeks," in other words she bled to death due to a perforation of the cervix.  http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/california/v-print/story/6880845p-7830693c.html.  For more on this story and this largely unregulated industry see http://www.lifenews.com/state15.html.

There is still time to contact your state Senators.  Pro-life budget amendments were expected to be taken up this week, but when the proposed budget bill failed on Tuesday in the state Senate, action was delayed on the accompanying trailer bills.  The pro-life amendments would have been taken up on AB 1762.  The last word was that trailer bills would not be taken up until a budget passes the Senate.  That could be any day—or weeks away.  So you still have time to contact your Senators to ask them to support amendments that would limit or prevent tax-funded abortions.  If you don’t know who your representative is you can go to http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html and type in your zip code. There you will find phone and fax numbers for your state legislators. If you want to contact them through e-mail go to http://www.sen.ca.gov/~newsen/senators/senemail.htp.

Yet another poll, this one sponsored by the pro-abortion Center for the Advancement of Women, found that a majority—51 percent of women, are opposed to abortion.  17 percent believe it should be illegal, 34 percent said abortions should only be available in cases where the life of the mother is endangered or in cases of rape and incest.  The Center for the Advancement of Women is headed by Faye Wattleton, former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.  See this article by Steven Ertelt of LifeNews.com.  http://www.lifenews.com/nat13.html.

NRLC’s Jennifer Mihok reported that “The American Medical Association House of Delegates, at its June 2003 annual meeting in Chicago, failed to adopt a resolution proposed by the Wisconsin Medical Association that would have effectively reversed its longstanding position that assisting suicide is not a legitimate medical practice.  Instead, the committee to which the resolution was referred offered a substitute resolution focusing on protecting physicians who appropriately prescribe pain management, without any mention of policy on assisting suicide and the House of Delegates adopted the substitute resolution.  The AMA has long opposed legalizing euthanasia.  Its formal policy states, ‘Physician assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.’’  At the same meeting of the AMA in Chicago the nation’s largest medical organization approved a policy of cloning human embryos for research and destruction. 

Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff Jane Roe, used by the ACLU in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision making abortion on demand legal filed a suit in a federal district court in Dallas,Texas to overturn the ruling she had long ago repudiated.  The motion was quickly rejected by a federal judge.  The motion was filed on her behalf by the Texas Justice Foundation, which argued in a lengthy brief that relevant factual changes in medical knowledge about the unborn child and the incalculable harm to women subsequent to Roe demanded that this tragic opinion be reversed.  Judge David Godbey said that the motion was not made “within a reasonable time,” and "[w]hether or not the Supreme Court was infallible, its Roe decision was certainly final in this litigation. It is simply too late now, thirty years after the fact, for McCorvey to revisit that judgment." McCorvey is nonetheless expected to pursue her case, eventually to the U. S. Supreme Court.  http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33188,  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/17/national/printable559102.shtml

California ProLife Council (CPLC) (www.californiaprolife.org )is the largest statewide organization in California solely dedicated to pro-life issues. CPLC is a non-sectarian, non-partisan, non-profit grassroots organization of pro-life groups and individuals in California dedicated to protecting and fostering the most basic value of our society-respect for LIFE itself.  We seek to educate our community in regard to abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide, to identify and organize the pro-life population of the state into an effective team, and to restore respect for human life to public policy.  California ProLife Council is the California affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee, Inc. (www.nrlc.org)