Imagine that you are a patient needing routine surgery at an outpatient facility. At the Madison Surgery Center, you receive treatment to enhance your health, while in the next room or down the hall a fully formed 19 to 22 week unborn baby is being dismembered, experiencing significant pain from the abortion procedure.
The UW Hospital and Clinics, Meriter Hospital, and the Madison Surgery Center recently approved such a venture. The second trimester abortion program was discussed for months, shrouded in secrecy. Since becoming public knowledge, information from facilities’ officials has been incredibly inconsistent and filled with public relations puffery.
Used in research?
In a January 7, 2009, Wisconsin State Journal article, UW Hospital spokesperson Lisa Brunette indicated that tissue from the aborted babies could be used by UW-Madison researchers but only after review by a faculty committee.
Now, hospital officials have reversed course. Even if one believes the reversal, there is nothing to prevent future research use of aborted babies.
A January 30 Associated Press story revealed that a detailed power point presentation prepared by Caryn Dutton (the abortionist) and Laurel Rice (chair of the UW OB-GYN Department) listed “increased departmental revenue” at the top of the “benefits” slide for the program. Brunette adroitly backtracked, claiming that particular slide was never used in Wisconsin.
Confidence in abortions ‘low’
E-mails between Dutton, Rice, and other officials at UW and Meriter document their belief that the abortions should be moved to the Madison Surgery Center because permission was needed from Planned Parenthood’s (PP) national organization for Dutton to perform second trimester abortions beyond 19 weeks at PP’s freestanding Madison abortion clinic.
Dutton stated in a November 20, 2008, e-mail to Fredrik Broekhuizen, PP’s Milwaukee abortionist, that “. . . and most importantly the support/approvals needed through PPFA at a time when the confidence in our ab[ortion] service provision was very LOW. . .”
In other words, even national PP doesn’t have confidence in Dutton’s own abortion practice up to 19 weeks to expand it to 22.
Political motivation
The political motivation was deftly explained in a November 22, 2008, e-mail from Broekhuizen to Dutton where he said “It is my very strong feeling that we need to safeguard hospital base abortion practices . . .”
“I really think that the Madison physician community should step up to the plate as advocates. . .” and that “If Madisonians consider themselves so progressive and that’s how they often talk, why can’t they do this walk?”
While stressing publicly that these abortions are “needed” for medical reasons, the e-mail correspondence indicates that 75 percent of late-term abortions are for elective reasons.
Staff reactions
There is little concern in internal communications about staff at the Madison Surgery Center, from receptionists to nurses to anesthesiologists. Dutton states in her November 22 e-mail that “. . . other specialties and departments are terrified of having abortion happening in their ‘space.'”
Proponents soothingly reassure that “only” 125 to 130 dismemberment abortions will be performed annually at the Madison Surgery Center. If medical people dismembered 125 to 130 of any other member of the human family, they would rightly be prosecuted.
Same old rhetoric
Whether promoting late-term abortions, partial-birth abortions, or any abortions, the rhetoric from abortion proponents is same-old, same-old — it’s a needed “service.”
In his November 22 e-mail, Broekhuizen laments that “out patient free standing clinic based care after 20-24 weeks for medically indicated terminations is far from optimal.” Why stop at 24 weeks when abortions are legal for the full nine months of pregnancy?
We live in a morally sick society when our supposedly “finest” medical professionals promote, rationalize, and carry out the destruction of our young. What a disservice we do to women when the solution we offer is to destroy their children.
Barbara Lyons is executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, based in Milwaukee.