Media reports regarding the proposed constitution in Kenya, which goes before the country for a vote on Wednesday, continue to misrepresent the proposed document’s impact on the country’s abortion policy.

“Many in the media are falsely reporting that the new constitution would not allow abortion except ‘where the life of the mother is in danger,’” explained Jeanne E. Head, R.N., National Right to Life Vice President for International Affairs and United Nations Representative.  “The truth is actually the opposite.”

The language in the proposed constitution does not contain any meaningful restrictions on abortion, despite recognition of the right to life from conception. Section 26 contains language which allows abortion when in the “opinion of a trained health professional, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law.” Read more…

National Right to Life Reacts to Appointment of Donald Berwick to Head HHS’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

WASHINGTON — Today, President Obama used the power of the recess appointment to install Donald Berwick as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in an attempt to avoid examination, through the pending confirmation process, of Berwick’s well-documented support for rationing health care.

“The Obama recess appointment of rationing advocate Donald Berwick to head the key government agency that will apply the new health care law is disastrous news for the vulnerable, especially the elderly and the sickest of American patients,” said Burke Balch, J.D., director of National Right to Life’s Powell Center for Medical Ethics.

Confirmation of Berwick would have faced strong opposition from pro-life Republican senators appalled by his open advocacy of government-imposed rationing of medical treatment. In a June 2009 interview with the journal Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

In an article in the May/June 2008 issue of Health Affairs, he called for “rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest” so as to “reduce per capita costs.” Lamenting that “[t]oday’s individual health care processes are designed to respond to the acute needs of individual patients,” Berwick wrote that instead government should “approach new technologies and capital investments with skepticism and require that a strong burden of proof of value lie with the proponent.”

Berwick’s advocacy of the decimation of American health care is long-standing. In a 1994 Journal of the American Medical Association article, he wrote, “Most metropolitan areas in the United States should reduce the number of centers engaging in cardiac surgery, high-risk obstetrics, neonatal intensive care, organ transplantation, tertiary cancer care, high-level trauma care, and high-technology imaging.”

“Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel,” said David N. O’Steen, Ph.D., National Right to Life executive director. “While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama’s rationing czar.”

Berwick is also an enthusiastic supporter of Britain’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the agency charged with determining which medical advances will – and which will not – be made available to the British public. Berwick claims NICE has “developed very good and very disciplined . . . models for the evaluation of medical treatment from which we ought to learn.” England’s five-year cancer survival rate for men is only 45%, compared with 66% in the U.S. That for women is 53%, compared to 63% in the U.S. (See: Arduiono Verdecchia and others, “Recent Cancer Survival: a 2000-02 period analysis of EUROCARE-4 data,” Lancet Oncology, 2007, no. 8, pages
784-796.)

The difference can in large measure be attributed to the refusal of NICE to authorized British use of pioneering cancer drugs routinely available in the United States. That is to say – currently routinely available in the United States – an availability Berwick will soon be using the power of government to curtail.

“President Obama’s appointment of this open advocate of rationing to implement his health care law underlines the need for repeal before untold numbers of vulnerable Americans suffer death from denial of life-saving treatment,” O’Steen added. “The Obama health care rationing law much be repealed and voters need to remember its deadly provisions in November.”

Today West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin (D) signed the Ultrasound Option Bill (SB 597) into law in a signing ceremony in Charleston.  The bill passed both the West Virginia House of Delegates and Senate by overwhelming margins earlier this spring.  West Virginia becomes the 20th state to enact some form of provision giving women the opportunity to view an ultrasound before an abortion.
“Abortion is one of the most common, yet under regulated procedures performed in the United States,” said National Right to Life Director of State Legislation Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D. “Accurate information empowers us to make informed decisions. We would never expect a person to undergo any procedure without having all possible information at their disposal before consenting.  Abortion is no different.  Women deserve to have all of the facts at their disposal before making the life and death decision that will affect themselves and their unborn children.”
The state’s Women’s Right to Know Law provides women and girls seeking an abortion, 24 hours prior to the procedure, scientifically accurate information about fetal development, abortion alternatives and potential risks of the abortion procedure.  The Ultrasound Option Bill adds information to those materials provided informing women that if an ultrasound is conducted with the abortion, she may view or decline to view the real-time ultrasound image.

The full text of the Ultrasound Option Bill is available online here:

http://www.legis.state.wv.us/Bill_Text_HTML/2010_SESSIONS/RS/Bills/SB597%20SUB2%20enr.htm

“Common sense laws which further regulate the abortion industry, like West Virginia’s Ultrasound Option Bill, enjoy the support of a large number of Americans.  We will continue to work with other states to pass laws which protect mothers and their unborn children,”Balch added.

WASHINGTON – In his address to a joint session of Congress tonight, President Obama said, “One more misunderstanding I want to clear up — under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.”

Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, commented: “Barack Obama needs to learn that the mere repetition of a verbal formula does not change reality. The reality is that the Obama-backed House bill would explicitly authorize the federal government insurance plan to pay for elective abortions and would explicitly authorize subsidies for private abortion insurance — and all with federal dollars, which are the only kind of dollars that the federal government can spend.”

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) last week released definitive memoranda that demonstrate that (1) the “Hyde Amendment” would not apply to the new programs that would be created by the Obama-backed health bill, H.R. 3200, and (2) that all of the funds that would be spent on elective abortions under the bill, and all of the funds that would be spent to subsidize private insurance plans that cover abortion, would be “federal funds” in both the legal sense and in the sense in which those terms are used throughout the government.

“The claim that a federal agency would be spending private funds on abortion, not federal funds, is absurd on its face, a political hoax,” Johnson said.

To read a September 8 NRLC media advisory that summarizes these issues,
click here. The advisory contains links to the detailed memoranda that disprove the “Hyde Amendment myth” and the “government will spend private funds on abortions myth.”