Rutherford Institute Urges Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

9/2/10 for immediate release

RICHMOND, Va. - Pointing out that many centers in which first trimester
abortions are performed are treated as regular doctors' offices and are not
subject to even basic licensing requirements, The Rutherford Institute is
urging Governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) to implement more stringent health and
safety regulations for abortion clinics. In a letter to the governor,
Institute president John W. Whitehead calls on McDonnell to use South
Carolina's Code of Regulations § 61-12, which was upheld by the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002, as a model for the Commonwealth to follow
in drafting its own regulations. The Institute's letter, which was copied to
members of the General Assembly, comes on the heels of an official opinion
issued by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in which he concludes that the
Commonwealth can regulate abortion facilities without offending
constitutional principles.

A copy of the Institute's letter to Governor McDonnell is available at
www.rutherford.org.

"As the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized, abortion is inherently different
from any other type of medical procedure, and the Commonwealth of Virginia
has significant interest in ensuring that the termination of pregnancies is
not treated with as little oversight as the routine removal of warts," said
John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "Requiring
abortion centers to comply with the same kinds of regulations as other
outpatient medical centers is really a matter of common sense."

Under Virginia law, outpatient abortion clinics are defined as outpatient
hospitals. However, as Attorney General Cuccinelli recently noted, abortion
facilities that limit their practice to reproductive services often
characterize themselves as "physicians' offices," whereby they are legally
exempt from licensure requirements that apply to other outpatient hospitals.
Taking issue with this exemption, Whitehead insists that the "nature of the
abortion procedure and its inherent risks are reason enough to advocate for
increased regulation of abortion clinics in the Commonwealth." Moreover,
courts have identified a more fundamental reason for regulating these
facilities even more stringently than other outpatient surgical centers. As
the Supreme Court has acknowledged, abortion is different "because no other
procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life." The
Institute's letter concludes by urging Governor McDonnell to advocate the
adoption of common-sense clinic safety regulations for the protection of
women undergoing abortions and the promotion of public health. As Whitehead
points out, "in light of the serious, invasive nature of abortion and the
well-recognized state interest in promoting public health and welfare, the
Commonwealth has both the authority and an obligation to its citizens to
adopt reasonable, common-sense regulations."

Founded in 1982, The Rutherford Institute is a nonprofit civil liberties
organization dedicated to the defense of constitutional and human rights.
The Institute provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose
constitutional rights have been threatened or violated.

"John Whitehead" wrote:

Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

9/2/10 for immediate release

RICHMOND, Va. - Pointing out that many centers in which first trimester
abortions are performed are treated as regular doctors' offices and are not
subject to even basic licensing requirements, The Rutherford Institute is
urging Governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) to implement more stringent health and
safety regulations for abortion clinics. In a letter to the governor,
Institute president John W. Whitehead calls on McDonnell to use South
Carolina's Code of Regulations § 61-12, which was upheld by the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002, as a model for the Commonwealth to follow
in drafting its own regulations. The Institute's letter, which was copied to
members of the General Assembly, comes on the heels of an official opinion
issued by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in which he concludes that the
Commonwealth can regulate abortion facilities without offending
constitutional principles.

A copy of the Institute's letter to Governor McDonnell is available at
www.rutherford.org.

"As the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized, abortion is inherently different
from any other type of medical procedure, and the Commonwealth of Virginia
has significant interest in ensuring that the termination of pregnancies is
not treated with as little oversight as the routine removal of warts," said
John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "Requiring
abortion centers to comply with the same kinds of regulations as other
outpatient medical centers is really a matter of common sense."

Under Virginia law, outpatient abortion clinics are defined as outpatient
hospitals. However, as Attorney General Cuccinelli recently noted, abortion
facilities that limit their practice to reproductive services often
characterize themselves as "physicians' offices," whereby they are legally
exempt from licensure requirements that apply to other outpatient hospitals.
Taking issue with this exemption, Whitehead insists that the "nature of the
abortion procedure and its inherent risks are reason enough to advocate for
increased regulation of abortion clinics in the Commonwealth." Moreover,
courts have identified a more fundamental reason for regulating these
facilities even more stringently than other outpatient surgical centers. As
the Supreme Court has acknowledged, abortion is different "because no other
procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life." The
Institute's letter concludes by urging Governor McDonnell to advocate the
adoption of common-sense clinic safety regulations for the protection of
women undergoing abortions and the promotion of public health. As Whitehead
points out, "in light of the serious, invasive nature of abortion and the
well-recognized state interest in promoting public health and welfare, the
Commonwealth has both the authority and an obligation to its citizens to
adopt reasonable, common-sense regulations."

Founded in 1982, The Rutherford Institute is a nonprofit civil liberties
organization dedicated to the defense of constitutional and human rights.
The Institute provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose
constitutional rights have been threatened or violated.
_____

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_Institute

"...the Rutherford Institute rose to national prominence helping Paula Jones to sue U.S. President
Bill Clinton in 1997."
_____

Make no mistake about it, folks -- this is yet another attempt by the disappointed (because Jesus
didn't reappear on the occasion of Y2K) millenarian Christian right to elevate foetal rights above
those of extant and viable American citizens by making access to a perfectly legal medical
procedure more difficult, and "risks to women" (other than as foetal incubators) have nothing
whatsoever to do with it. The reactionary governor and AG of Virginia will love it of course.

Oh, and John -- when posting something blatantly off-topic on Usenet, common courtesy dictates that
the Subject headers begin with the initials "OT" so that those strictly interested in on-topic
posts can conveniently skip it. Thanks in advance!

"John Whitehead" wrote in message
...
Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

Wow.
A Christian right organization is trying to impede a woman's right to make
her own choices!
And the rightie-nutbag AG of Virginia is going along with it!
Will wonders never cease!

On Sep 2, 4:22*pm, "RichL" wrote:
"John Whitehead" wrote in message

...

Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

Wow.
A Christian right organization is trying to impede a woman's right to make
her own choices!
And the rightie-nutbag AG of Virginia is going along with it!
Will wonders never cease!

Abortion under any any circumstances is murder.

On Sep 2, 6:09*pm, Steve wrote:
On Sep 2, 4:22*pm, "RichL" wrote:

"John Whitehead" wrote in message

...

Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

Wow.
A Christian right organization is trying to impede a woman's right to make
her own choices!
And the rightie-nutbag AG of Virginia is going along with it!
Will wonders never cease!

Abortion under any any circumstances is murder.

Prove it using the actual definition of murder. Keep in mind that in
state laws, abortion is explicitly excluded from being classed as
murder.

To prove your claim, you need to show that a person as defined by the
law (i.e. an individual who is born, alive, and human) is illegally
killed with malice and forethought.

Since voluntary medical or medicinal abortion is legal, it cannot be
its opposite and be illegal. Since the women, who is the only person
there besides the medical staff, walks out alive, no person is even
harmed, much less killed. And medical procedures rarely, if ever,
have any malice attached to them by any party. Therefore, abortion is
not murder since it does not fulfill any of the requirements for
murder, and to be murder it must fulfill all three.

Mark Sebree

Here is something to ponder...

Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?
Harvesting stem cells without tears
Ronald Bailey | December 22, 2004

What are we to think about the fact that Nature (and for believers,
Nature's God) profligately creates and destroys human embryos? John
Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and
gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President's
Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally
conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual
flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The
women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception
has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their
menstrual flows. In fact, according to Opitz, embryologists estimate
that the rate of natural loss for embryos that have developed for
seven days or more is 60 percent. The total rate of natural loss of
human embryos increases to at least 80 percent if one counts from the
moment of conception. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but
half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have
developed into healthy babies.

So millions of viable human embryos each year produced via normal
conception fail to implant and never develop further. Does this mean
America is suffering a veritable holocaust of innocent human life
annihilated? Consider the claim made by right-to-life apologists like
Robert George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a
member of the President's Council on Bioethics, that every embryo is
"already a human being." Does that mean that if we could detect such
unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to
rescue them and try to implant them anyway?

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the
moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be
regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions:
Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause
than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research
combined," declared Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government
professor, also a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

As far as I know, bioconservatives like Robert George do not advocate
the rescue of naturally conceived unimplanted embryos. But why not? In
right-to-life terms, normal unimplanted embryos are the moral
equivalents of a 30-year-old mother of three children.

Of course, culturally we do not mourn the deaths of these millions of
embryos as we would the death of a child—and reasonably so, because we
do in fact know that these embryos are not people. Try this thought
experiment. A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a
choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing
10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

Stepping onto dangerous theological ground, it seems that if human
embryos consisting of one hundred cells or less are the moral
equivalents of a normal adult, then religious believers must accept
that such embryos share all of the attributes of a human being,
including the possession of an immortal soul. So even if we generously
exclude all of the naturally conceived abnormal embryos—presuming, for
the sake of theological argument, that imperfections in their gene
expression have somehow blocked the installation of a soul—that would
still mean that perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were
never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions,
experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.

Yet millions of intelligent people of good will maintain that seven-
day-old embryos have the exact same moral standing as do readers of
this column. Acting on this sincere belief, they are trying to block
biomedical research on human embryonic stem cells that is desired by
millions of their fellow citizens.

But there may be a way out of this politico-theological impasse. The
President's Council on Bioethics held an extraordinarily interesting
session earlier this month in which two different avenues for
obtaining human embryonic stem cells were proposed, in ways that would
skirt right-to-life moral objections.

First, Howard Zucker and Donald Landry, two medical professors at
Columbia University, proposed "a new definition of death for the human
organism, an organism in development, and that is the irreversible
arrest of cell division." They pointed out that a good percentage of
in-vitro fertilized (IVF) embryos consist of a mixture of cells, some
containing the wrong number of chromosomes (aneuploidy), some with the
normal number. Embryos with such cell mixtures often cease development
by cell division and thus cannot develop into fetuses, much less
babies. Zucker and Landry argue that such embryos can be considered
dead, and the normal embryonic cells they contain can be harvested
just as organs can be ethically harvested from brain-dead adults.
(Animal experiments have already shown that cells harvested from
defective embryos will produce normal tissues.) Thus, we get stem
cells from an entity that could not, under any circumstances, have
become a human being.

William Hurlbut, a consulting professor in the Program of Human
Biology at Stanford University and another member of the President's
Council on Bioethics, proposed another way to produce cloned human
embryonic stem cells that right-to-lifers should not find morally
objectionable. Hurlbut cited work by researcher Janet Rossant at Mount
Sinai Hospital in Toronto in which she inactivated the cdx2 gene in
mice. Once the cdx2 gene is inactivated, the mouse embryo cannot form
a trophoblast—the tissues that grow into the placenta. However,
embryonic stem cells do develop, although they cannot form an embryo.
Hurlbut proposed an attempt to find similar genes that could be
inactivated in the nuclei of adult human cells before they are
installed in enucleated human eggs to produce cloned embryonic stem
cells that are a genetic match for the person who donates the adult
nucleus. (Transplanted cells and tissues produced by such therapeutic
cloning would not be rejected by the donor's immune system.) Once the
stem cells have been derived, the inactivated genes could be
reactivated so that the stem cells could be used to produce normal
transplantable cells and tissues.

"This process does not involve the creation of an embryo that is then
altered to transform it into a non-embryonic entity," explained
Hurlbut. "Rather the proposed genetic alteration is accomplished ab
initio, the entity is brought into existence with a genetic structure
insufficient to generate a human embryo."

Will this research reduce the number of embryos populating heaven? Who
knows? But these options offer a possible way around the moral
blockades that impede promising biomedical research on human embryonic
stem cells. Should we halt current human embryonic stem-cell research
while these possible new avenues of research are being explored?
Absolutely not. That would be surrendering to the moral bullying of a
minority that wants to halt promising medical research that could cure
millions on theological grounds that many of their fellow citizens do
not share.

Steve wrote:
On Sep 2, 4:22*pm, "RichL" wrote:
"John Whitehead" wrote in message

...

Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

Wow.
A Christian right organization is trying to impede a woman's right to make
her own choices!
And the rightie-nutbag AG of Virginia is going along with it!
Will wonders never cease!

Abortion under any any circumstances is murder.

And once again we see that a pro-liar really can do nothing but lie.

--
Ray Fischer

In article 2c53b021-af81-496e-a08b-a81824ddfeb6
@l20g2000yqm.googlegroups.com, says...

On Sep 2, 4:22Â*pm, "RichL" wrote:
"John Whitehead" wrote in message

...

Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion Clinics

Wow.
A Christian right organization is trying to impede a woman's right to make
her own choices!
And the rightie-nutbag AG of Virginia is going along with it!
Will wonders never cease!

Abortion under any any circumstances is murder.

Liar.
--
http://folding.stanford.edu
Save lives, visit today!

"Steve" wrote in message

On Sep 2, 4:22 pm, "RichL" wrote:
"John Whitehead" wrote in message

...

Citing Risks to Women, Rutherford Institute Urges Gov. McDonnell to
Implement Stringent Health and Safety Regulations for Abortion
Clinics

Wow.
A Christian right organization is trying to impede a woman's right
to make her own choices!
And the rightie-nutbag AG of Virginia is going along with it!
Will wonders never cease!

Abortion under any any circumstances is murder.


You must be a religious folk or something.
Murder is a word that is only associated with those already born.
That's the accepted definition.

If you want a real crime: - forcing an unmarried school girl to leave school
and have a baby and raise it on her own with no husband/father.
Of course this has probably never actually been executed, which goes to show
that the religious right are just full of a bunch of religious hot air.
They haven't thought things through at all, and they most likely haven't
spoken to even one girl actually having a pregnancy crisis.

"Spender" wrote in message
ews.com
On Fri, 3 Sep 2010 16:34:25 +1000, "The art of critical thinking"
wrote:

"Steve" wrote in message


Abortion under any any circumstances is murder.


You must be a religious folk or something.
Murder is a word that is only associated with those already born.
That's the accepted definition.

The accepted definition of murder is killing that which is alive, not
necessarily born.


Ah, no. That would mean that killing a dog or a tortoise or a banana tree
is also murder.
Have you ever murdered a fly and mosquito?


I know you like your definition better because it
allows you to feel there is nothing at all wrong with partially
delivering a perfectly healthy term baby only so far as to allow you
to get to its head, crush its skull and scramble its brains.


Appeal to emotions noted. (head crushing and brain scrambling).
The religious right must learn that one cannot win arguments by using shock.

Also very few abortions are late term F.Y.I.
And the proper (non emotional) term is fetus. 'Baby' is used by mothers to
be, and its in the future tense, i.e. it will be a baby when its born.
And not all fetuses are 'perfectly healthy'.