Researchers Asked to Hide Scientific Debate over Maternal Deaths

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
Co-authored by Catherine Foster

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) At a meeting on maternal and child health research in Washington last week, United Nations (UN) staff and abortion advocates told scientists they should “harmonize” their findings or discuss them “in a locked room” so that the press could not report maternal death numbers that conflicted with the ones they use to lobby policy makers and major international donors.

Ann Starrs, co-founder and president of the abortion advocacy organization Family Care International (FCI), told a roomful of scientists to “lock all the academics in a black box and have them come out with a consensus set of numbers” or “at least hide that there is disagreement” and “infighting.” FCI is the founder of Women Deliver, which is hosting a massive UN-backed reproductive rights fundraising conference in Washington next week.

The comments were made at a symposium hosted by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and the British medical journal, The Lancet. The journal recently published an IHME study, which refuted the UN-sanctioned but highly controversial figure of 500,000 annual maternal deaths, finding the number to have declined to 342,900 including 60,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS. Abortion advocates and some UN staff have been using the higher figure for two decades to promote a version of maternal and child health policy that includes abortion.

Tessa Wardlow, Chief of Statistics and Monitoring at UNICEF, shared Starrs’ concerns, saying that there is a “system in place for harmonizing estimates for child mortality and I would invite the IHME to participate in that process and contribute to the methodological dialogue.”

Dr. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, pushed back saying researchers should not come to a “consensus” or “harmonize” but rather have a “scientific summary view of what the totality of available evidence should be.” He argued that this should not be centered at the UN, but housed “independently within the scientific community.” Horton responded to Starr’s objection by saying, “Unless we subject numbers to that peer-review process, I think we are accepting second-class data, and that applies wherever the numbers come from.”

When he published the IHME study, Horton told the press that he withstood significant pressure from activists not to release it until after major global funding conferences concluded this year, such as the G8 summit, UN General Assembly, and next week’s Women Deliver conference.

Highlighting the tension in the room between the researchers’ desire for openness and activists call for secrecy, Horton said, “For God’s sake, your country, the United States, was founded on the press! One of the best documents in the history of humankind is the Federalist Papers; if it wasn’t for the press, we wouldn’t have a United States! So learn to love the press.”

The confrontation between the maternal health advocates and researchers may be behind the decision by Women Deliver conference organizers to re-write their schedule to include Dr. Horton in the agenda for next week’s conference.

You can find this online at: http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1641/pub_detail.asp

Smiling girls in background really disturbed me

So today I happened to put on the news right when Mark Sanford, the SC governor, was announcing his whereabouts for the past week, extramarital affair, and a whole host of other problems. It was sad. All I felt for the man was pity, and especially for his family, who has been betrayed and humiliated. But I do admire Sanford's stand-up approach, total humility, and honesty. He knows he screwed up, BIG TIME, and he did seem genuinely sorry. He admitted all of his foibles and sins for the world to see and judge, rather than hide or deny it.

Anyway, throughout the press conference, there were three women/girls (they were really young) who seriously disturbed me. They were grinning all throughout, not the kind of grin you have when you are expecting some thing great, but the sort of evil grin flashed at someone else's demise. Someone else who you do not like. Were these girls super libs? Most likely. Were they extremely unprofessional? Yes. And more than annoy, they disturbed me. Because to be on camera, when someone is baring his soul, listening to him announce how horrible he is and how ashamed he is, basically watching a man's family life and political career go down in flames - and GRIN about it.... what kind of sick women are these? Very sick. Disturbing.

Below is a link to the video. There is a tall, attractive white girl on the left, and right below her is a short dark skinned girl - the worst of the offenders. On the right, at times you will see a chubby black girl. All of them are smiling like they just won the lottery. Disturbing, really. I can't stop thinking about how twisted their minds must be. My only hope is that it is a manifestation of some hebephrenic neurosis... but for all 3 of them to have that? Unlikely. Also, you can tell that the girls on the left eventually figured out they were on camera... the tall white one leaned down to whisper something to the short one, and they tried to be stoic after that. The girl on the right had some cameraman push in front of her.

The Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uSNwjJaPAo

And do try to ignore the YouTube comments... I can't imagine that the conversations of the damned are much different.

Rush Limbaugh's thoughts on the matter, which I pretty much agree with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C40CFAqjLdc

Eyewitness to partial birth abortion

Statement of Brenda Pratt Shafer, R.N.
Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution
Committee on the Judiciary
U.S. House of Representatives
Hearing on The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (HR 1833)
March 21, 1996

Mr. Chairman and honorable members of the Judiciary Committee, I am Brenda Pratt Shafer. I am here before you, at the request of the Committee, to relate to you my experience as an eyewitness to what is now known as the partial-birth abortion procedure.

I am a registered nurse, licensed in the State of Ohio, with 14 years of experience. In 1993, I was employed by Kimberly Quality Care, a nursing agency in Dayton, Ohio. In September, 1993, Kimberly Quality Care asked me to accept assignment at the Women’s Medical Center, which is operated by Dr. Martin Haskell. I readily accepted the assignment because I was at that time very pro-choice. I had even told my teenage daughters that if one of them ever got pregnant at a young age, I would make them get an abortion. They disagreed with me on this, and one of them even wrote an essay for a high school class that mentioned how we differed on the issue. So, because of the strong pro-choice views that I held at that time, I thought this assignment would be no problem for me.

But I was wrong. I stood at a doctor’s side as he performed the partial-birth abortion procedure– and what I saw is branded forever on my mind. I worked as an assistant nurse at Dr. Haskell’s clinic for three days– September 28, 29, and 30, 1993.

On the first day, we assisted in some first-trimester abortions, which is all I’d expected to be involved in. (I remember that one of the patients was a 15-year-old-girl who was having her third abortion.) On the second day, I saw Dr. Haskell do a second-trimester procedure that is called a D & E (dilation and evacuation). He used ultrasound to examine the fetus. Then he used forceps to pull apart the baby inside the uterus, bringing it out piece by piece and piece, throwing the pieces in a pan.Also on the first two days, we inserted laminaria to dilate the cervixes of women who were being prepared for the partial-birth abortions– those who were past the 20 weeks point, or 4 1\2 months. (Dr. Haskell called this procedure “D & X”, for dilation and extraction.) There were six or seven of these women.

On the third day, Dr. Haskell asked me to observe as he performed several of the procedures that are the subject of this hearing. Although I was in that clinic on assignment of the agency, Dr. Haskell was interested in hiring me full time, and I was being given orientation in the entire range of procedures provided at that facility. I was present for three of these partial-birth procedures. It is the first one that I will describe to you in detail. The mother was six months pregnant (26 1/2 weeks). A doctor told her that the baby had Down Syndrome and she decided to have an abortion. She came in the first two days to have the laminaria inserted and changed, and she cried the whole time.

On the third day she came in to receive the partial-birth procedure. Dr. Haskell brought the ultrasound in and hooked it up so that he could see the baby. On the ultrasound screen, I could see the heart beating. As Dr. Haskell watched the baby on the ultrasound screen, the baby’s heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms– everything but the head. The doctor kept the baby’s head just inside the uterus.The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I was really completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost threw up as I watched the doctor do these things.

Mr. Chairman, I read in the paper that President Clinton says that he is going to veto this bill. If President Clinton had been standing where I was standing at that moment, he would not veto this bill. Dr. Haskell delivered the baby’s head. He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw that baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he’d used. I saw the baby move in the pan. I asked another nurse and she said it was just “reflexes.”I have been a nurse for a long time and I have seen a lot of death– people maimed in auto accidents, gunshot wounds, you name it. I have seen surgical procedures of every sort. But in all my professional years, I had never witnessed anything like this.The woman wanted to see her baby, so they cleaned up the baby and put it in a blanket and handed the baby to her. She cried the whole time, and she kept saying, “I’m so sorry, please forgive me!” I was crying too. I couldn’t take it. That baby boy had the most perfect angelic face I have ever seen. [He supposedly had Down Syndrome, remember?]I was present in the room during two more such procedures that day, but I was really in shock. I tried to pretend that I was somewhere else, to not think about what was happening. I just couldn’t wait to get out of there.

After I left that day, I never went back. These last two procedures, by the way, involved healthy mothers with healthy babies. I was very much affected by what I had seen. For a long time, sometimes still, I had nightmares about what I saw in that clinic that day. Mr. Chairman, these people who say I didn’t see what I saw– I wish they were right. I wish I hadn’t seen it. But I did see it, and I will never be able to forget it. That baby boy was only inches, seconds away from being entirely born, when he was killed. What I saw done to that little boy, and to those other babies, should not be allowed in this country.
Thank you.

Source