Photo caption: “Hunter College adjunct Professor Shellyne Rodriguez held a machete to a Post reporter’s neck Tuesday outside her Bronx apartment door”
Photo caption: “Hunter College adjunct Professor Shellyne Rodriguez held a machete to a Post reporter’s neck Tuesday outside her Bronx apartment door”
The reporter had gone to the professor’s home to ask her questions after the professor had been previously filmed in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOCK11VZlks
Knocking on someone’s door is not a crime, so the professor cannot claim that her action was self defense. I hope she gets prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Source for photo and article: https://nypost.com/2023/05/23/nyc-college-professor-shellyne-rodriguez-holds-machete-to-post-reporters-neck/
Unhinged NYC college professor who cursed out anti-abortion students holds machete to Post reporter’s neck
May 23, 2023
The unhinged Manhattan college professor who went viral for cursing out anti-abortion students shockingly held a machete to a Post reporter’s neck Tuesday — and made wild threats that she was going to “chop” him up.
Shellyne Rodriguez spewed the menacing remarks when The Post knocked on the door of her Bronx apartment Tuesday morning — a day after she made headlines for flipping out on pro-life students at Hunter College.
“Get the f–k away from my door, or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” the manic adjunct art professor shouted from behind her closed door just moments after veteran reporter Reuven Fenton identified himself.
Seconds later, Rodriguez barged out and alarmingly put the blade to the reporter’s neck.
“Get the f–k away from my door! Get the f–k away from my door!” she raged before retreating back into her apartment and slamming the door.
The Post reporter and photographer immediately left the apartment building, but an armed Rodriguez quickly followed and accosted them outside.
“If I see you on this block one more f–king time, you’re gonna …,” Rodriguez said, while still wielding the implement.
“Get the f–k off the block! Get the f–k out of here, yo!”
The professor briefly chased The Post’s photographer down the street to his car before coming back to kick the reporter in the shins.
She finally retreated into her building just moments later.
Vince DiMiceli, a spokesman for Hunter College, told The Post the school was “outraged” by the footage of Rodriguez wielding the machete.
“We will take swift and appropriate action,” he said without elaborating.
The terrifying ordeal unfolded after footage surfaced online that showed Rodriguez unleashing a profanity-laden attack on anti-abortion students who’d set up an information table at Hunter College earlier this month.
“You’re not educating s–t. This is f–king propaganda,” the art professor hissed to the students in the May 2 incident. “What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next?”
A male student behind the table was filmed telling her, “I mean, no, we’re talking about abortion” and that he was sorry about “triggering” her students.
Rodriguez fired back, telling the male student he couldn’t be sorry “because you can’t even have a f–king baby.”
The video, which was posted to Twitter by Students for Life of America, then showed the professor tossing the students’ pamphlets.
It wasn’t immediately clear what unfolded between Rodriguez and the pro-life students before the camera started rolling.
A rep for Hunter College, a public school that is part of the city’s CUNY program, previously said the school is aware of the caught-on-camera altercation and is “taking this matter very seriously.”
“The provost has opened an investigation into the professor’s actions,” the representative said.
WATCH: Jane Fonda Proposes MURDERING Pro-Lifers As ‘The View’ Hosts SCRAMBLE To Laugh It Off
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUMHUKK2KJM
Hypocrite pro-life Republican Herschel Walker paid for his girlfriend’s abortion
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pro-life-herschel-walker-paid-for-girlfriends-abortion-georgia-senate
‘Pro-Life’ Herschel Walker Paid for Girlfriend’s Abortion
The woman has receipts—and a “get well” card she says the football star, now a Senate candidate, sent her.
October 3, 2022
Herschel Walker, the football legend now running for Senate in Georgia, says he wants to completely ban abortion, likening it to murder and claiming there should be “no exception” for rape, incest, or the life of the mother.
But the Republican candidate has supported at least one exception – for himself.
A woman who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns told The Daily Beast that after she and Walker conceived a child while they were dating in 2009 he urged her to get an abortion. The woman said she had the procedure and that Walker reimbursed her for it.
She supported these claims with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a “get well” card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt that included an image of a signed $700 personal check from Walker.
The woman said there was a $125 difference because she “ball-parked” the cost of an abortion after Googling the procedure and added on expenses such as travel and recovery costs.
Additionally, The Daily Beast independently corroborated details of the woman’s claims with a close friend she told at the time and who, according to the woman and the friend, took care of her in the days after the procedure.
The woman said Walker, who was not married at the time, told her it would be more convenient to terminate the pregnancy, saying it was “not the right time” for him to have a child. It was a feeling she shared, but what she didn’t know was that Walker had an out-of-wedlock child with another woman earlier that same year.
Asked if Walker ever expressed regret for the decision, the woman said Walker never had. Asked why she came forward, the woman pointed to Walker’s hardline anti-abortion position.
“I just can’t with the hypocrisy anymore,” she said. “We all deserve better.”
The Women Who Leave Anti-Abortion Picket Lines to Get Abortions
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-women-who-leave-anti-abortion-picket-lines-to-get-abortions
The Women Who Leave Anti-Abortion Picket Lines to Get Abortions
DO AS I SAY
The rank and file of the so-called pro-life movement is full of people who need reproductive care – even if it means literally leaving a protest outside a clinic to ask for it.
By Patrick Adams
July 2, 2022
A few days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, a woman who described herself as an anti-abortion activist showed up in the waiting room of Dr. Marissa Lapedis, a family-medicine doctor who performs the procedure in Atlanta.
But she wasn’t there to protest—she had an appointment.
“She talked about being in marches, and said she had spent a lot of time volunteering in crisis pregnancy centers—you know, showing patients the ultrasound image and explaining what happens,” Lapedis, a fellow with the group Physicians for Reproductive Health, told The Daily Beast. “She said she had been anti-abortion her whole life, and that her whole family was like her—and yet she was so appreciative of the care she received from us. She literally was like, ‘I’m so grateful that I’m able to make this choice for myself.’”
Lapedis’ experience is remarkable in part because she resides in a state with a looming ban on the procedure after six weeks—though the law has so far been held up in court.
“You sometimes have anti people who are like, ‘Promise me no one’s going to find out, my boss cannot know,’ [because] they work in the Republican legislature or something. Which has happened—but this patient was so appreciative.”
Abortion providers across the country are reeling from the fall of Roe, and some face the prospect of legal reprisal from law enforcement in their own state or even other states where patients need help. Almost inevitably, they are reflecting on the many patients they’ve seen who came in for a service they claimed to fervently oppose—and in some cases actively protested against.
“All of us who do abortions see patients quite regularly who tell us, ‘I’m not pro-choice, but I just can’t continue this pregnancy,’” said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington. “We’ve even seen people coming into the clinic off the protester lines to get their abortion, then return to protesting outside the clinic.” And to be clear, she added, “These are not people who turn anti-choice after having an abortion, but who simply access this essential service when they need it in spite of their personal beliefs about abortion in general.”
According to Prager, the phenomenon is so common that abortion providers have a name for it: the Me Exception.
“We in the movement often say people believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape, incest and ‘me,’ meaning whatever reason is relevant for that person,” she said. And yet, she noted, of the many surveys describing how Americans view abortion, virtually none reflect that reality.
“Anti-choice people have no incentive to be honest about whether or not they’ve had an abortion, and we as physicians would never leak a story about a patient,” she continued. Doing so is prohibited under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, the federal law that protects confidential health information.
Still, health professionals are permitted to discuss cases in general terms, and when asked about patients with anti-choice views this past week, abortion providers had no shortage of sometimes incredible tales about activists deeming themselves an exception to the rule.
Dr. Portia Jones, a family-medicine physician in Washington, recalled the time a woman “whose sister-in-law was the president of a big right-to-life organization” had asked to be “snuck in the back door” of the clinic where she was working in Philadelphia. Then there was “the picketer who brought her daughter in for a procedure and was back on the picket line the next week,” she recalled. On another occasion, a woman came in “and declared to a full waiting room that they were all sinners and should leave immediately,” she said.
“When I drew her aside, I found out she was there for an abortion, too,” Jones told The Daily Beast.
Jones and other abortion providers attributed many such instances to a sense of exceptionalism on the part of patients who decide their situation entitles them to do what they believe other women should—legally—be unable to. “I’ve done a lot of options counseling with patients who had to do some pretty creative moral jujitsu to justify their behavior to themselves,” she added. “But our role is to give people information, to create a space for them where they can make decisions, and to support them in that process.”
While 13 states with so-called trigger laws are poised to be the first to effectively prohibit almost all abortions, roughly two dozen states in total have laws on the books that could be used to sharply restrict the procedure, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. The laws are, of course, the product of decades of far-right organizing against reproductive rights, with actions ranging from peaceful protest to the election of anti-choice officials to violent attacks.
But providers said the hypocrisy among the rank and file powering the so-called pro-life movement was glaring.
“I’d say about a third of my patients would reveal in their counseling or during the procedure, you know, ‘I want you to know I’m pro-life, but you understand why this has to be,’” said Dr. Nicholas Gideonse, recalling his work as an abortion provider in rural Oregon. “I think in almost all of those cases, they were making that choice in order to be the best parent that they could be.”
There were certainly those pro-life patients who “stridently insisted that their circumstances were particular and special,” Gideonse added. But there were cases, too, of pro-life patients who came to him seeking compassion.
“I’m remembering a soft-spoken younger woman who felt that I, because I had delivered her other unplanned pregnancy, understood how pro-life she really was and that for this reason I was the person who could perform the procedure she needed now,” he said.
Rather than a one-off, stories about anti-choice activists literally coming off the protest line to seek care were rife. That phenomenon may fade in states where clinics are shutting in the face of legal threats, but providers were confident hardcore activists will continue to seek their care.
Several years ago, Dr. Meera Shah, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic in New York, provided abortion care to one of the protesters regularly outside of her clinic.
“I treated her with compassion and kindness just like I do everyone, knowing that people come to us with their own lived experiences,” she said. “I don’t know what this person was exposed to, or what her community is like—it may be unsafe for folks to express an alternative view [about] abortion in their communities or their families. But I do know that nobody anticipates this. Nobody thinks they’re going to be in that situation. You can have these fixed beliefs around something that you think will never impact you, and then when you’re in the moment, your thoughts around it can change, and that’s very much the case with abortion. We see it all the time.”
In her book, You’re the Only One I’ve Ever Told, Shah explored the everyday reality of abortion care that mainstream political dialogue mostly fails to capture.
“I think that the anti-abortion movement comes at it with very strong preconceived notions,” she said. “Their lived experience has taught them that abortion is bad, so they just run with that. But what they fail to do is keep an open mind and express empathy for those who are going through it. And that’s what got us here.”
Attention Los Angeles Times! This article that you recently published is not a good argument for abortion. Instead, it’s a good argument against having casual, unprotected sex with irresponsible men.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
May 7, 2022
The Los Angeles Times recently published this article, which the paper seemed to think was a good argument in favor of abortion.
But I read the entire article, and I don’t think it’s a good argument in favor of abortion. Instead, I think it’s a good argument against having casual, unprotected sex with irresponsible men.
Another thing that I dislike about this article is that it makes no mention whatsoever of the father(s) of the three children that this single woman had already given birth to before aborting her fourth child.
So this unmarried woman has three children out of wedlock.
Then she has unprotected sex, with an irresponsible man whom she considers to be the exact opposite of father material, gets pregnant, and has an abortion.
Nothing in this article is a good argument for abortion.
Instead, the article is a good argument against having casual, unprotected sex with irresponsible men.
A Texas woman needed an abortion. Here’s how far California went to help her
By Anita Chabria
May 6, 2022
The first sign of Stephanie’s pregnancy was nausea, as it so often is — that particular debilitating queasiness that knocked her off her feet, sometimes all day, days at a time.
It kept Stephanie, who asked me not to use her real name for all the obvious reasons, from working. She runs her own business in Austin, Texas, braiding hair, a skill she learned as a teenager.
“Men, women, children,” she told me with a Lone Star twang. “Yes, ma’am,” she does them all and loves it, loves making her customers feel beautiful.
When Stephanie took a pregnancy test and it came back positive, she was shocked at first, then dismayed. Then things got worse.
Though she hadn’t thought much about it, Texas had just passed its law banning abortions after a heartbeat is found. California, the Golden State of both sunshine and liberty, has of course doubled down on access to reproductive health, also something Stephanie wasn’t yet thinking about.
Stephanie had been dating a man who had been a friend for a few years. They met at a restaurant during a Sunday lunch, and in retrospect, Stephanie wishes she’d kept him “in the friend zone.” As soon as she knew she was pregnant, she also knew he wasn’t someone she wanted to be in a long-term relationship with. He was never going to be the kind of partner she could count on, and she didn’t need more of that.
“Dealing with him, that would have brought a lot of negative problems in my life,” she said.
She has three children, ages 14, 6 and 5. She’s a single mom with all the hard work that comes with it, but “my kids are my main priority,” she says.
The youngest is a “dancing machine” who will start kindergarten soon, a little girl with a big personality. Her 6-year-old is the comedian, a clown, she says, with a helpful side.
Her teenage daughter dreams of being a nurse who works with babies. The young girl thinks being a RN will give her a life of luxury, Stephanie says.
That may not work out quite how the teen thinks, but Stephanie is proud of her drive. “She’s a go-getter, very mature,” she says.
Stephanie, 33, prayed about the pregnancy. She ran through her savings being off work. She thought about the bills a baby would bring, what it would mean for her kids, and for her own future. Then she decided to have an abortion.
“Where I am at in my life, I am on a journey where I am still trying to find myself, trying to be the best mother I can be,” she said. “And I feel like it’s hard enough already and I don’t want to bring another child into this world.”
This is of course none of our business, and requires no justification, no back story to make us understand a choice that is hers alone. But Stephanie shared her story with me both to help explain what it really means for California to be a sanctuary state for abortion, how urgent it is that this state keep the promises its politicians are making, and to let others in need of an abortion know that there is help in these dark and frightening days.
What Planned Parenthood Los Angeles did to help Stephanie, the lengths it went to, surprised me. It made me proud to be in a state that isn’t backing down from this ugly fight, and it made me realize that we are far beyond putting on pink hats and protesting at a statehouse where the governor and legislators already have doubled down on making California a sanctuary for reproductive care.
This is no longer just a culture war between those with political and ideological differences, if it ever was. This is a crisis of identity that will determine the future of this country for decades to come, a dividing line between inclusive democracy and a white Christian nationalism that is seeking, successfully for now, to domino our rights one by one in a vicious fight to keep power for a few at the expense of equality and equity for most. It is racist, sexist, hate-filled and un-American.
I asked Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s pre-eminent constitutional scholars and a professor at UC Berkeley, where we are headed if the leaked Roe decision becomes law. His assessment was bleak.
“Justice Alito’s opinion, assuming it becomes the final decision, will put many rights in danger,” he said.
“The right to custody of one’s children, the right to keep the family together, the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children, the right to purchase and use contraceptives, the right of consenting adults to engage in same-sex sexual activity, the right of competent adults to refuse medical treatment,” all those will be vulnerable, he warned.
He predicts that if Roe is overruled, states will “adopt laws prohibiting contraceptives that act after conception, like the IUD, the morning after pill, some birth control pills. They will outlaw IVF where embryos are not implanted. They will prohibit women from leaving a state for an abortion and more.”
Stephanie knows exactly what that oppression feels like.
After the positive test, she went to a Texas clinic. She was only about six weeks pregnant, but they found a heartbeat and that was that. Suddenly the Texas law was about her, and her future narrowed down to panic and fear.
“Before I went though this situation, I really didn’t care,” she said of the Texas law. “But then when it affected me, it was like, ‘Oh, s—.’ ”
She said the clinic basically kicked her out. She was crying, and she went back inside to ask if they knew anyone who could help her. The answer was a hard no. Luckily, a friend persuaded her to call Planned Parenthood in Texas that day, and that clinic got her in touch with the Los Angeles office. She said she was thinking there was no way she could get to California, but her friend told her to make the call anyway, a last-ditch hope.
“Immediately they were so helpful,” Stephanie said. “They were concerned. They made me feel good in that moment. Everybody down here just turns up their nose.”
The coordinator who handled her call got to work, Stephanie said. Planned Parenthood booked her flights between Texas and L.A. — 1,242 miles each way — and paid for them. They arranged transportation and a hotel — and paid for those, too. They even gave her money to pay for incidentals such as food.
But it was the way they made her feel that she remembers most, “like it wasn’t an embarrassment or a shame,” she said.
She was at the lowest point in her life and she found “love from strangers,” she said.
She flew in on a Monday and had the procedure on a Tuesday, then headed home to her kids the next day. No complications, no drama.
“I didn’t expect all this,” she said. And that’s why she’s willing to talk about it. She thinks the Texas law is “trash” but California welcomes those in need.
“I want people to know that in this life you cannot judge anyone,” she said. “I also want people to know there is help and support out there. Don’t feel alone, don’t feel embarrassed, do what’s best for you.”
She — a smart, resourceful adult — barely figured out how to get access to the reproductive care she needed. She thinks about a 14-year-old girl too scared to tell her mom she’s knocked up, or a mom who just can’t figure out where to go for help when that daughter does come to her.
It doesn’t have to be rape or incest. We don’t need the horror stories or worst-case scenarios. Thousands of women, girls and transgender people find out they are pregnant every day, with thousands of back stories that are none of our business.
But the fact that they no longer have choices in states such as Texas and Oklahoma — or even know where to go for help — should be everyone’s business.
Sue Dunlap, the head of Planned Parenthood L.A., told me they see about 100 people a month from out of the state for reproductive care. Across California, clinics are gearing up to help many more than that, possibly several hundred per week at the bigger facilities.
The state Legislature is working to increase access to reproductive care by allowing more types of medical professionals to handle abortions, and by creating state funds that would help cover costs. Organizations like Planned Parenthood are collecting money and marshaling resources.
Dunlap didn’t want to call it an underground railroad for reproductive care, maybe for all the harsh history that term holds, but I’ll call it that. That’s how far backward the current moment is, and how steeped in past racism it is — because a lack of access to abortion hits Black and brown people the most, and hurts those who are poor and marginalized with greater brutality.
If you do nothing else, I hope you will share Stephanie’s story far and wide, so that others in need of reproductive care know the help here is real.
Even Stephanie still can’t quite believe what California did for her, and her family.
“I didn’t expect all this,” she said.
None of us did, but here we are. And while fighting to help individuals such as Stephanie is critical, we have to be real about how much is at stake. California might prefer to focus on its own needs, but as a leader of civil rights, it is being thrust into a national role of protecting the vulnerable — whoever they may be.
It pains me to end a reproductive rights column with a quote from someone without a uterus. But credit where credit it due.
“Pay attention, America, ” Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week, speaking outside Planned Parenthood Los Angeles. “They’re coming after you next.”
ACLU changes abortion quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg to make it gender-neutral
In 2018, Time magazine published the following quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The bolding is mine:
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
Original source: https://time.com/5354490/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade/
Archived source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180803070425/https://time.com/5354490/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade/
In 2021, now that Ginsburg is dead, the American Civil Liberties Union has taken it upon itself to change her words in order to make the quote gender-neutral. This is the gender-neutral version that was tweeted by the ACLU. The bolding mine:
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”
Original source: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610
Archived source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210920003532/https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610
Here’s a screenshot of the ACLU’s tweet of the gender-neutral version of Ginsburg’s quote:
This is exactly the kind of thing that George Orwell warned us about in his novel 1984.
I never thought that the American Civil Liberties Union would do something like this. On the contrary, those of us who truly support civil liberties tend to be very much opposed to this kind of thing.
Shame on the ACLU.
Because of the abortion controversy, the mainstream media can’t reach a consensus over how many people were killed in a recent shooting in Indianapolis
These two news headlines are both about the same recent shooting incident in Indianapolis.
This New York Times article is called
“5 Killed in Indianapolis Shooting That Mayor Condemns as ‘Mass Murder’”
Meanwhile, this CNN article is called
“Indianapolis teen charged with six counts of murder for allegedly shooting pregnant woman and his family members”
So they can’t agree on how many people were killed.
I propose that DNA tests be given to each and every living being that was killed, in order to find out if they were human.
In Washington D.C., left wing protestors can burn, vandalize, and loot without getting arrested. Meanwhile, right wing protestors were arrested for writing on a public sidewalk with chalk.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
August 3, 2020
According to this article from the Washington Post, this is what left wing protestors did in Washington D.C. without getting arrested:
Night of destruction across D.C.
June 1, 2020
American flags and parked cars and buildings were lit ablaze — including St. John’s Church, a historic landmark opened in 1816 and attended by every president since James Madison. Firefighters quickly extinguished the basement fire, which police said was intentionally set…
Downtown, baseball bats bashed through windows at coffee shops, banks and one office building after another. Vandals and looters roamed throughout the city, scrawling graffiti and targeting dozens of businesses…
Some hit a liquor store near Foggy Bottom, where young men, both white and black, snatched handles of alcohol and took swigs while others ran off with all they could carry. In Shaw, a Giant grocery store — with employees still inside — was broken into, as was a Sephora in Gallery Place. On H Street NE, looters ransacked a CVS. In Georgetown, the Nike store’s boarded-up doors were broken down and its merchandise plundered. In Friendship Heights and Tenleytown, five miles from the White House, other groups hit a Target and smashed open Rodman’s, a beloved drugstore, specialty grocer and housewares shop — all in one.
Near 15th and H streets, another group set fire to a sandwich shop… The smell of fire hung heavy in the air, and shattered glass speckled the pavement. Gone were the windows of the Lafayette Building, home to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Next door, all the outdoor umbrellas at the Opaline Bar and Brasserie were warped and charred. As police and firefighters showed up to investigate, the destruction continued around them, the looters uncaring.
Meanwhile, according to this other article from the Washington Post, in the same city, right wing protestors were arrested for writing on a public sidewalk with chalk:
Two protesters arrested while chalking ‘Black Pre-Born Lives Matter’ on sidewalk
August 1, 2020
Two protesters outside a Planned Parenthood facility were arrested and charged with defacing public or private property early Saturday, according to D.C. police and video footage.
Erica Caporaletti, a 22-year-old student at Towson University, and Warner DePriest, a 29-year-old D.C. resident, were writing “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” with chalk on the sidewalk when police arrested them.
Sidewalk chalk does not cause any permanent damage. It easily washes off when it rains. They sell sidewalk chalk at the supermarket where I buy my groceries (the Giant Eagle in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, PA). Children regularly use sidewalk chalk without getting arrested. This incident is the first time that I have ever, ever heard of anyone ever getting arrested for writing on the sidewalk with sidewalk chalk.
Totalitarian Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf just forced my dental hygienist to cancel my 6 month teeth cleaning!
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
May 18, 2020
I’m 49 years old. I’ve lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my entire life. I’ve been getting my teeth cleaned at the same dental practice ever since I was a little kid in the 1970s.
My 6 month teeth cleaning had been scheduled for tomorrow.
But they just called to tell me that it has been canceled, because they are “not allowed” to do teeth cleaning at this point in time.
There are really only four people who should have any role in the decision making for this: my dentist, the dental hygienist who cleans my teeth, the receptionist who answers the phone and schedules appointments, and myself.
I don’t even have or want dental insurance. I pay out of my own pocket, and I prefer it that way, because I don’t want an insurance company telling me what I can or can’t do wit my teeth, or deciding which dental practice I can or can’t go to.
This is the United States of America.
This is supposed to be a free country.
The government is not supposed to be deciding when I can or can’t get my teeth cleaned.
It’s my body and my teeth, and getting my teeth cleaned should be my own choice.
I’m a libertarian. I think abortion should be legal. (I know that a lot of my Republican readers will disagree with me on this issue, and that’s fine.)
Although I do think abortion should be legal, I am very, very glad that my own mother did not abort me.
Furthermore, I do not see how a healthy woman aborting a healthy baby constitutes “health care.”
Also, I think it’s extremely hypocritical that when Governor Wolf banned elective medical procedures, he gave an exemption to abortion.
Democrats who always say, “My body, my choice,” only make that claim when it comes to abortion.
Democrats think the rest of a person’s body should be controlled by the government.
These hypocrite Democrats won’t let me get my teeth cleaned.
But they will let me buy lottery tickets (which I never do, because I understand math).
And they will also let me buy cigarettes (which I also never do, because I think it’s gross and disgusting, and also because I don’t want to get lung cancer).
So these hypocrite Democrats will let me get my teeth all dirty and messed up with cigarettes, but they will not let me to go the dentist to have all that dirt and grime and filth removed from my teeth. What kind of logic is this?
Governor Wolf’s original lockdown order was for two weeks.
The alleged purpose of the lockdown was to flatten the curve, so that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed.
The curve has been flattened.
The hospitals have not been overwhelmed.
As of May 6, 2020, only 7% of Pennsylvania’s hospital beds were being used to treat COVID-19 patients.
However, Governor Wolf continues with the lockdown anyway.
This proves that the lockdown is a scam.
This lockdown has exposed who the true fascists are.
Members of Antifa are perfectly willing to prevent innocent, peaceful, law abiding conservatives from speaking on college campuses.
But when the real fascists (such as Governor Wolf, and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer) come along, the Antifa protesters are nowhere to be found, heard, or seen.
If you want to read more examples of why the lockdown sucks, I encourage you to read this other blog post that I wrote: Here are 65 reasons why I’m against the COVID-19 lockdowns
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Note from Daniel Alman: I’d like to recommend that you visit Whatfinger News. It’s a really awesome website.
I have three questions: 1) Why did huge numbers of hospitals across the country lay off huge numbers of health care workers? 2) Why did most governors ban elective medical procedures? 3) Why did several of those governors give an exemption to abortion?
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
May 1, 2020
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
All across the country, huge numbers of hospitals have laid off huge numbers of health care workers. Here are some news headlines about this:
Coronavirus financial losses prompt Boston Medical Center to furlough 700 employees, 10% of hospital’s workforce
https://www.kentucky.com/news/coronavirus/article241565211.html
Kentucky hospital chain furloughs about 500 employees as coronavirus saps business
https://www.sungazette.com/news/top-news/2020/04/a-mounting-casualty-crisis-health-care-jobs/
A mounting casualty crisis: Health care jobs
Four West Virginia hospitals lay off hundreds because of coronavirus-related shrinking revenues
Thousands of US medical workers furloughed, laid off as routine patient visits drop during coronavirus pandemic
I Can’t Get My Hip Surgery Because Of Coronavirus Even Though Nobody Is In Our Hospital
MUSC Health lays off 900 due to COVID-19 financial strain
Oklahoma City hospital closed amid coronavirus spread
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/coronavirus-victim-americas-largest-health-systems/story?id=70317683
Even nation’s largest health systems laying off health care workers amid COVID pandemic
https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/were-destroying-hospitals-in-the-name-of-fighting-the-coronavirus/
We’re destroying hospitals in the name of fighting the coronavirus
https://www.foxnews.com/science/mayo-clinic-furlough-or-cut-pay-employees
Mayo Clinic to furlough or cut pay of 30,000 employees
Coronavirus testing company Quest Diagnostics furloughs workers
Meanwhile, the governors in more than 30 states have banned elective medical procedures.
The word “elective” refers to any medical procedure that is scheduled in advance.
Examples of elective medical procedures that have been postponed or canceled include cancer treatment, organ transplants, and hip surgery.
However, some of the governors that have banned elective medical procedures have given an exemption to abortion.
For example, Politico reported:
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy was one of a handful of Democratic leaders to explicitly carve out an exception for “the full range of family planning services and procedures, including terminations of pregnancies” from his executive order that suspends elective surgeries.
As another example, the Lansing State Journal reported:
Reproductive health clinics in Michigan are still providing abortion services, citing an exemption for “pregnancy-related visits and procedures” in Gov. Whitmer’s executive order restricting non-essential medical services.
Likewise, the New Boston Post reported:
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has exempted elective abortions from the statewide ban on elective surgery during the coronavirus precautionary restrictions.
Furthermore, Virginia’s official government website reported:
Governor Ralph Northam and State Health Commissioner M. Norman Oliver, MD, MA today directed all hospitals to stop performing elective surgeries or procedures…
The public health emergency order does not apply to… family planning services
Also, the Washington Free Beacon reported:
Pennsylvania Allows Planned Parenthood to Perform Abortions Despite Elective Surgery Ban
So I have three questions about all of this:
1) Why did huge numbers of hospitals across the country lay off huge numbers of health care workers?
2) Why did most governors ban elective medical procedures?
3) Why did several of those governors give an exemption to abortion?
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Pennsylvania Allows Planned Parenthood to Perform Abortions Despite Elective Surgery Ban
I’m a libertarian. I think abortion should be legal.
I’m against banning any elective procedures.
What I don’t like here is the hypocrisy:
Pennsylvania Allows Planned Parenthood to Perform Abortions Despite Elective Surgery Ban
Planned Parenthood Keystone has shut down all services except abortion
March 31, 2020
Planned Parenthood clinics in Pennsylvania have eliminated all services except for abortion in the wake of a statewide ban on elective surgeries meant to preserve scarce medical resources amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Democratic governor Tom Wolf issued a directive ordering the shut down of all businesses “that are not life sustaining” on March 20, and a guidance from the state government prohibits elective procedures performed by health care services and hospitals. Despite these directives, Planned Parenthood Keystone, which serves central and eastern Pennsylvania, announced it would remain open “for abortion services only” while shutting down its other operations.
Hospitals are facing shortages of medical supplies necessary to deal with the pandemic as the number of coronavirus patients drastically increases across the state and country. The abortion clinics also requested donations of personal protective equipment, including “hand sanitizer, home-sewn masks, shoe covers, and surgical hats,” so they could continue to perform abortions.
The order, issued on March 20, came after the state’s health secretary urged doctors and patients to consider postponing noncritical surgeries. The state’s largest abortion provider has ignored the directive and continued to proceed with abortions, even as it stopped providing routine exams and other services. Planned Parenthood did not respond to a request for comment.
“The paradox is just striking, here we’re making an exception for life-sustaining procedures and yet an exception to that is this one medical procedure that’s life-ending,” Tom Brejcha, president and chief legal counsel for the Thomas More Society, told the Washington Free Beacon.
Pennsylvania had 31,260 abortions in 2017, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion think tank. More than 19,000 of those procedures likely required in-clinic services, as medication abortions accounted for 39 percent of all abortions in the United States in 2017, the most recent numbers made available by the institute.
Wolf has been an outspoken ally of abortion supporters while in office. In October 2019, he stated his intention to veto any pro-life legislation that came across his desk after Republicans in the state legislature introduced a “heartbeat bill” banning abortions after six weeks. Planned Parenthood has contributed $27,500 to Wolf’s campaign coffers since 2014, according to state campaign finance records.
Wolf’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Pennsylvania is not the only state dealing with issues surrounding abortion providers in the midst of the pandemic. Texas included abortion clinics in a statewide order postponing surgeries and nonessential medical procedures. A federal judge blocked the order on Monday, saying it prevented women “from exercising what the Supreme Court has declared is their fundamental constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy before a fetus is viable.”
Pro-life groups ripped Wolf for failing to take action against abortion clinics when hospitals and other facilities are struggling to deal with the pandemic.
“It is unconscionable that Governor Wolf has allowed elective abortions to proceed during this crisis when all resources are needed for essential medical procedures,” said Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement.
An open letter from the Pennsylvania Family Institute called on Wolf to specifically address continued abortion procedures.
“Abortion is an elective procedure that should not be permitted at the peak of the coronavirus crisis,” the letter states. “With abortions there is always the risk that some women will have complications from the procedure that will need emergency hospital care, which will only further drain our overstretched health care system.”
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said lawmakers should apply the ban on elective procedures across the board, rather than protecting the interests of abortion clinics.
“Killing unborn children isn’t health care and certainly doesn’t provide necessary medical help or assistance for coronavirus,” Mancini said. “At a time when medical staff and resources are spread thin, it is very disappointing to see politicians use this vulnerable moment in our country’s history to play politics and advocate for abortion.”
Several counties in Pennsylvania are under stay-at-home orders as the number of coronavirus cases in the state passed 4,000.
Consumer Reports said the condoms given out by Planned Parenthood are defective
According to Consumer Reports, the condoms given out by Planned Parenthood are defective.
Below is a screenshot from Consumer Reports. (You can see a bigger version of the image by clicking on it twice.)
Both of the two condoms at the very bottom of the ratings are from Planned Parenthood. Both had a score of “poor” (the worst possible score) in the category called “strength.” One of them also scored “poor” in the category called “reliability.”
For an organization that makes money by selling abortions, it’s a very clever business strategy for Planned Parenthood to be giving out defective condoms.
Source of screenshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20071110183030/https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/health-fitness/health-care/condoms-and-contraception-205/ratings/
Rebecca Watson: Facebook Deletes Science Fact Check at Ted Cruz’s Request
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gwinZO8J0I
The way that Planned Parenthood treats its pregnant employees is cruel, illegal, and extremely hypocritical
The New York Times just published this article, which is titled, “Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees.”
The article cites numerous examples of how Planned Parenthood has given absolutely horrible treatment to its pregnant employees.
Not only are these actions on the part of Planned Parenthood cruel, some of them are also illegal, and all of them are extremely hypocritical.
If there’s any one organization that should treat its pregnant employees with kindness and respect, as well as obeying the laws regarding pregnant employees, it’s Planned Parenthood.
Here are some excerpts from the article, along with my own comments:
Ms. Hairston told the human-resources department for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in White Plains, N.Y., that her high blood pressure was threatening her pregnancy. She sent the department multiple notes from her nurse recommending that she take frequent breaks.
Managers ignored the notes. They rarely gave her time to rest or to take a lunch break, Ms. Hairston said.
“I had to hold back tears talking to pregnant women, telling them to take care of their pregnancies when I couldn’t take care of mine,” she said. “It made me jealous.”
That is just downright plain mean.
Planned Parenthood… has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
In interviews and legal documents, women at Planned Parenthood… described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor.
These are the exact same kinds of illegal treatment of employees that left wing feminists have always claimed to be against. The fact that Planned Parenthood did this to its own pregnant employees is inexcusable, illegal, and terribly hypocritical.
… at Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Most Planned Parenthood offices do not provide paid maternity leave
How many zillions of times have left wing feminists said they were in favor of paid maternity leave? And can anyone name an organization that is more left wing feminist than Planned Parenthood? I dare say that these pregnant employees would have been treated far better if they had been working at one of the conservative, right wing, for-profit corporations that left wing feminists are always accusing of being “sexist” and “misogynist.”
A dozen lawsuits filed against Planned Parenthood clinics in federal and state courts since 2013 accused managers of denying workers rest periods, lunch breaks or overtime pay, or retaliating against them for taking medical leave.
Managers have discriminated against pregnant women and new mothers, according to interviews with the current and former Planned Parenthood employees and with organizers from the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents some Planned Parenthood workers.
In Miami, one current and two former employees said that women at a Planned Parenthood office were scared to tell managers they were pregnant. One of them said that, in conversations with supervisors, colleagues would often volunteer that they were not planning on having children or were gay or single.
“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” said Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Miami office until 2012. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”
Apparently, Planned Parenthood would rather spend money fighting lawsuits than treat its pregnant employees with respect. Absolutely disgusting.
A former hiring manager at a Planned Parenthood in California said that when internal promotions came up, supervisors openly debated whether candidates were likely to get pregnant in the near future and preferred those who were not. They declined to hire one pregnant woman and to promote one new mother, the employee said. (Under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it is illegal to consider whether a job candidate is or will become pregnant.)
The former manager said her colleagues felt they couldn’t afford to promote someone only to lose them for several weeks.
Completely despicable. It was left wing feminists who fought so hard to pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in the first place. How dare they violate the very same law that they expect everyone else to obey.
49 of Planned Parenthood’s 55 regional offices — which each manage a set of local clinics — do not provide paid maternity leave
89% of Planned Parenthood’s regional offices do not give paid maternity leave to their employees. So why do they even call themselves “Planned Parenthood” in the first place?
Tracy Webber, the former director of clinical services in White Plains, sued the organization for pregnancy discrimination in 2009, saying she had been fired four weeks after giving birth. Planned Parenthood settled for undisclosed terms.
Planned Parenthood fired an employee because she became a parent? That’s mean, and it’s illegal, and especially, it’s the height of hypocrisy.
A woman who worked at Planned Parenthood’s New Rochelle, N.Y., clinic and who declined to be named said in an interview that, when she got pregnant last year, managers ignored her doctor’s note recommending frequent breaks. Her manager asked her to delay her maternity leave and, after she gave birth, pressed her to return early.
The fact that Planned Parenthood ignored a doctor’s note from one of its own pregnant employees makes me wonder about the quality of the medical care and advice that Planned Parenthood gives to its own clients.
A medical assistant at the same clinic was fired in May 2018, the day she returned from maternity leave, according to a former human resources manager who oversaw the clinic. Jonas Urba, the woman’s lawyer, said she reached a confidential resolution with Planned Parenthood.
Once again, Planned Parenthood fired one of its employees because she became a parent. This kind of behavior by Planned Parenthood is extraordinarily hypocritical.
When Ms. Hairston asked for regular breaks, including 30 minutes for lunch, her supervisors brushed her off. Ms. Hairston said she sent multiple notes from her nurse at Full Circle Women’s Health to the regional office’s human resources department, stating that the extra breaks were medically necessary. No one responded, and nothing changed, according to Ms. Hairston and the former human resources manager.
Ms. Hairston’s hands and feet swelled; the clinic’s plastic gloves no longer fit. Her blood pressure got so high that her doctor put her on bed rest when she was seven months pregnant.
She returned to work on strict orders to not work more than six hours a day and to take regular breaks. One day in March, she worked a much longer shift. She soon became so sick that her doctor told her to go back on bed rest. A few days later, on March 23, she went to the hospital. Doctors performed an emergency C-section. She was 34 weeks pregnant.
When she had been on maternity leave for eight of the 12 weeks guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, Planned Parenthood’s human resources department called her multiple times and urged her to return to work early, Ms. Hairston said. She emailed the department and said she felt “discriminated against.” She resigned in June.
So this is how Planned Parenthood treats pregnant women. This is astoundingly horrendous. Shame on Planned Parenthood for treating women the exact opposite of the way Planned Parenthood tries to depict itself in its publicity material.
So, there you have it. Planned Parenthood is mean to its pregnant employees, it breaks the very laws that it claims to support, and it apparently has no interest in helping its female employees who “plan” to become “parents,” despite that being the organization’s very name.
New York Times: Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees
Not only are these actions on the part of Planned Parenthood cruel, some of them are also illegal, and all of them are extremely hypocritical.
If there’s any one organization that should treat pregnant employees with kindness and respect, as well as obeying the laws regarding pregnant employees, it’s Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees
Employers that champion women face accusations of discriminating against their pregnant workers, showing how widespread the problem is in American workplaces.
December 20, 2018
As a medical assistant at Planned Parenthood, Ta’Lisa Hairston urged pregnant women to take rest breaks at work, stay hydrated and, please, eat regular meals.
Then she got pregnant and couldn’t follow her own advice.
Last winter, Ms. Hairston told the human-resources department for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in White Plains, N.Y., that her high blood pressure was threatening her pregnancy. She sent the department multiple notes from her nurse recommending that she take frequent breaks.
Managers ignored the notes. They rarely gave her time to rest or to take a lunch break, Ms. Hairston said.
“I had to hold back tears talking to pregnant women, telling them to take care of their pregnancies when I couldn’t take care of mine,” she said. “It made me jealous.”
Discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers remains widespread in the American workplace. It is so pervasive that even organizations that define themselves as champions of women are struggling with the problem.
That includes Planned Parenthood, which has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
In interviews and legal documents, women at Planned Parenthood and other organizations with a feminist bent described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor.
In other cases, the bias was more subtle. Many women said they were afraid to announce a pregnancy at work, sensing they would be seen as abandoning their colleagues.
Some of those employers saw accommodating expecting mothers as expensive and inconvenient. Others were unsympathetic to workers seeking special treatment.
At Natera, which sells genetic tests for pregnant women, two former employees, Melissa Blain Johnson and Judit Rigo, said they were demoted while on maternity leave. Ms. Johnson, who has sued Natera, also said that she was left feeling like a “guinea pig” when her boss suggested that she and another pregnant employee pose as patients and get genetically tested by a rival company.
“Ms. Johnson’s employment at Natera was not influenced inappropriately by her pregnancy or subsequent maternity leave,” said Anna Czene, a Natera spokeswoman. “The same was true for Ms. Rigo.”
At Avon, which calls itself “the company for women,” two employees in a cosmetics-testing lab have sued for being forced to handle toxic chemicals while pregnant. A marketing executive, Caroline Ruiz, also said she was fired four days after announcing her pregnancy.
Paige Cali, a spokeswoman for Avon, said the company “strongly denies claims of discrimination.”
At Mehri & Skalet, a progressive law firm suing Walmart for pregnancy discrimination, three lawyers have accused a founding partner, Cyrus Mehri, of mistreatment. Heidi Burakiewicz said Mr. Mehri pressured her to return early from maternity leave. Sandi Farrell was told to participate in a performance review during her leave, and when she asked to postpone it she was fired. Taryn Wilgus Null said Mr. Mehri questioned her child care arrangements in a performance review after she returned from leave.
Mr. Mehri said he strongly denied the accusations and that no one was mistreated after giving birth. He said that Ms. Burakiewicz’s allegation “is a lie, plain and simple,” that Ms. Farrell had performance problems and that Ms. Null, now a lawyer at the Justice Department, misinterpreted his comments.
And at Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Most Planned Parenthood offices do not provide paid maternity leave, though many let new mothers take partially paid disability leave.
“I believe we must do better than we are now,” Leana Wen, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “It’s our obligation to do better, for our staff, for their families and for our patients.”
Ms. Wen said the organization was investigating the allegations of pregnancy discrimination reported by The New York Times. The organization also is conducting a review to determine the cost of providing paid maternity leave to nearly 12,000 employees nationwide.
Vincent Russell, the regional chief executive who oversees the office where Ms. Hairston worked, denied her accusations.
While Planned Parenthood’s clinics and regional offices brought in about $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2016 — half from private donations and half from the government, to reimburse treatment provided to Medicaid patients — conservative lawmakers routinely threaten to kill its taxpayer funding. With their finances precarious, the clinics pay modest salaries to the employees who provide health care — abortions, cancer screenings, prenatal care, disease testing — to 2.4 million mostly low-income patients every year.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has its headquarters in Manhattan. The clinics that serve women are run by 55 regional affiliates with their own chief executives and human resources policies. They receive some money and support from headquarters.
Tight budgets sometimes created punishing workplace conditions, employees said. A dozen lawsuits filed against Planned Parenthood clinics in federal and state courts since 2013 accused managers of denying workers rest periods, lunch breaks or overtime pay, or retaliating against them for taking medical leave.
Managers have discriminated against pregnant women and new mothers, according to interviews with the current and former Planned Parenthood employees and with organizers from the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents some Planned Parenthood workers.
In Miami, one current and two former employees said that women at a Planned Parenthood office were scared to tell managers they were pregnant. One of them said that, in conversations with supervisors, colleagues would often volunteer that they were not planning on having children or were gay or single.
“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” said Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Miami office until 2012. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”
Dannette Hill, Planned Parenthood’s head of human resources, said that most parents who work in the Miami office have been promoted after returning from leave.
A former hiring manager at a Planned Parenthood in California said that when internal promotions came up, supervisors openly debated whether candidates were likely to get pregnant in the near future and preferred those who were not. They declined to hire one pregnant woman and to promote one new mother, the employee said. (Under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it is illegal to consider whether a job candidate is or will become pregnant.)
The former manager said her colleagues felt they couldn’t afford to promote someone only to lose them for several weeks.
Financial pressures also explain why 49 of Planned Parenthood’s 55 regional offices — which each manage a set of local clinics — do not provide paid maternity leave. Employees in about 20 of those regions can use short-term disability to earn a portion of their salaries while on leave. The New York headquarters provides six weeks of paid parental leave.
Last year, Christine Charbonneau, who runs the regional office in Seattle, asked her human resources department to find out how much it would cost to cover maternity leave for the region. The estimate: $2 million a year. That is the entire annual budget of some clinics.
Ms. Charbonneau’s office, which oversees 27 clinics in the Northwest, generates $77 million a year in revenue. But states like Washington and Idaho have cut government funding in recent years. Paying for maternity leave, Ms. Charbonneau said, could force her to close clinics.
“It is easy to accuse someone of hypocrisy if you’re not the one trying to find $2 million out of thin air,” she said. “You try to be the Planned Parenthood that donors expect, and yet it is unattainable.”
Planned Parenthood’s policies, though, can make it hard for employees to scrape by after giving birth.
In August, Marissa Hamilton, an employee at Planned Parenthood in Colorado, gave birth to a baby boy. He was eight weeks premature, weighed less than four pounds and spent weeks in neonatal intensive care. The office doesn’t provide paid maternity leave.
In September, she started a fund-raiser on GoFundMe. On the appeals page, Ms. Hamilton wrote that she was under financial strain because “On top of medical bills I cannot work.” She set the goal at $15,000. So far she has raised $1,995.
Multiple Planned Parenthood executives said in interviews that they were eager for The Times to publish an article about the lack of paid maternity leave because they hoped it would lead to changes in the organization’s policies.
Ms. Hairston, the former medical assistant, took the job in 2015 because she believed in the group’s mission. “Planned Parenthood helped me give women a voice to do what they wanted with their bodies,” she said.
Ms. Hairston, 27, counseled women who wanted abortions and checked up on those carrying to term. She said she rarely took lunch and often spent 10-hour shifts on her feet.
She figured that there would be no better place to work while pregnant than a clinic that dealt with expecting mothers every day.
But Planned Parenthood’s Westchester County clinics, overseen by a regional office in Hawthorne, N.Y., had a history of issues with pregnant employees.
Tracy Webber, the former director of clinical services in White Plains, sued the organization for pregnancy discrimination in 2009, saying she had been fired four weeks after giving birth. Planned Parenthood settled for undisclosed terms.
A woman who worked at Planned Parenthood’s New Rochelle, N.Y., clinic and who declined to be named said in an interview that, when she got pregnant last year, managers ignored her doctor’s note recommending frequent breaks. Her manager asked her to delay her maternity leave and, after she gave birth, pressed her to return early.
A medical assistant at the same clinic was fired in May 2018, the day she returned from maternity leave, according to a former human resources manager who oversaw the clinic. Jonas Urba, the woman’s lawyer, said she reached a confidential resolution with Planned Parenthood.
The former human resources manager, who requested anonymity, said that executives assumed that when a pregnant worker brought in a doctor’s note, it was an excuse to work less. People who took sick days were perceived as lacking commitment.
“All the individuals identified in the article were treated fairly and equitably, free of any discrimination,” said Mr. Russell, the head of Planned Parenthood’s Hawthorne office.
When Ms. Hairston asked for regular breaks, including 30 minutes for lunch, her supervisors brushed her off. Ms. Hairston said she sent multiple notes from her nurse at Full Circle Women’s Health to the regional office’s human resources department, stating that the extra breaks were medically necessary. No one responded, and nothing changed, according to Ms. Hairston and the former human resources manager.
Ms. Hairston’s hands and feet swelled; the clinic’s plastic gloves no longer fit. Her blood pressure got so high that her doctor put her on bed rest when she was seven months pregnant.
She returned to work on strict orders to not work more than six hours a day and to take regular breaks. One day in March, she worked a much longer shift. She soon became so sick that her doctor told her to go back on bed rest. A few days later, on March 23, she went to the hospital. Doctors performed an emergency C-section. She was 34 weeks pregnant.
When she had been on maternity leave for eight of the 12 weeks guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, Planned Parenthood’s human resources department called her multiple times and urged her to return to work early, Ms. Hairston said. She emailed the department and said she felt “discriminated against.” She resigned in June.
“I didn’t get into the medical field to be treated like this,” she said.
The last she heard from Planned Parenthood was a letter asking her to donate money. She threw it in the trash.
Pro-life hypocrite Republican Tim Murphy asked his mistress to have an abortion
Rep. Tim Murphy, popular with pro-life movement, urged abortion in affair, texts suggest
October 3, 2017
A text message sent in January to U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy by a woman with whom he had an extra-marital relationship took him to task for an anti-abortion statement posted on Facebook from his office’s public account.
“And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,” Shannon Edwards, a forensic psychologist in Pittsburgh with whom the congressman admitted last month to having a relationship, wrote to Mr. Murphy on Jan. 25, in the midst of an unfounded pregnancy scare.
On Wednesday, Murphy released a statement in which he says he will not seek re-election.
The congressman has been lauded by the Family Research Council, for his stance on abortion, as well as for family values, generally. He also has been endorsed by LifePAC, which opposes abortion rights, and is a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus, an affiliation that is often cited by his office.
What happens when Texas blocks Planned Parenthood? Abortions rise.
What Happens When Texas Blocks Planned Parenthood? Abortions Rise.
July 12, 2017
With the goal of eliminating abortion, Texas Republicans have stripped Planned Parenthood of funding and steadily obstructed patient access to care over the past few years. Turns out, their ideological, anti-choice crusade is having the opposite effect. A new study shows abortion rates have jumped since Planned Parenthood was blocked.
While at Texas A&M University, economics professor Analisa Packham found that when the Texas Legislature cut family planning funding by two-thirds, or $76 million, in 2011 and simultaneously defunded Planned Parenthood, teen abortions increased 3.1% in the following three years while teen births spiked by 3.4% in the following four years.
(more…)
Consumer Reports gave Planned Parenthood’s condoms the worst possible score for both “strength” and “durability”
Consumer Reports’ ratings use a scale one to five.
In the February 2005 print issue, they tested condoms for two different categories: “strength” and “durability.”
The condoms called “Planned Parenthood Honeydew” received the worst possible score in both of these categories.
The text of the article can be read here.
The ratings for the different brands of condoms can be seen here.
Washington Examiner: “To meet abortion quotas, Planned Parenthood offered employees free pizza and time off”
I’m pro-choice, but I think this is disgusting and reprehensible if it is actually true.
I hope the New York Times and Washington Post will investigate this claim, and either confirm it or debunk it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkxUAR3a_Jc
To meet abortion quotas, Planned Parenthood offered employees free pizza and time off
February 7, 2017
Turns out, selling abortion isn’t all that different from hawking used cars. Whether it’s moving a four-door sedan off the lot or removing a four-pound baby girl from the womb, the ABCs of sales don’t change.
New testimony shows how the Planned Parenthood’s sales strategy relies on incentives, goals and quotas, explicitly prioritizing the company’s bottom line over the well-being of women. Ultimately, Planned Parenthood officials know to Always Be Closing.
That’s a sharp contrast with Cecile Richard’s talking points. The Planned Parenthood president is fond of telling lawmakers that abortion makes up just 3 percent of the company’s services. But while that makes for good testimony, Sue Thayer understands it’s a lousy sales pitch for women who find themselves in a crisis pregnancy.
Thayer’s a former Planned Parenthood manager from Storm Lake, Iowa, and she knows the importance of motivating and training a sales team. “I trained my staff the way that I was trained,” Thayer explains in a new Live Action video, “which was to really encourage women to choose abortion; to have it at Planned Parenthood, because it counts towards our goal.”
To make that happen, her clinic relied on a simple pitch. When a mother walked in the door, Thayer worked to create a sense of urgency to drive demand and ultimately close the sale. So while the company’s market strategy emphasizes affordable healthcare for women, Thayer deliberately focuses on cost, pushing pregnant mothers to pay up front for services:
“If they’d say, ‘I’m not able to pay [my bill] today,’ then we would say something like, ‘Well, if you can’t pay $10 today, how are you going to take care of a baby? Have you priced diapers? Do you know how much it costs to buy a car seat? Where would you go for help? There’s no place in Storm Lake (or whatever town they were in), you know, where you can get help as a pregnant mom. So really, don’t you think your smartest choice is termination?'”
But either sales data for mammograms, STD tests, and routine checkups weren’t kept or they just didn’t matter. The only figure of significance was the number of abortions scheduled. “If we hit our goal, our line was green. If it we were five percent under, it was yellow,” Thayer explains, “and if we were 10 percent under, it was red and when we needed to have a corrective action.” For making rate, Thayer says employees could expect rewards like paid time off or even free pizza.
And it worked. In 2015 alone, Planned Parenthood performed more than 300,000 abortions. But the business model could soon face new challenges. Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, they plan on pulling federal funding of the abortion giant. If they lose taxpayer funding, the company will have to rely entirely on their sales team.
France banned this TV commercial that shows smiling children with Down Syndrome, so here it is for you to watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju-q4OnBtNU
The Sensitivity Police Strike Again
The court has ruled that the video is — wait for it — “inappropriate” for French television.
December 3, 2016
The word “inappropriate” is increasingly used inappropriately. It is useful to describe departures from good manners or other social norms, such as wearing white after Labor Day or using the salad fork with the entree. But the adjective has become a splatter of verbal fudge, a weasel word falsely suggesting measured seriousness. Its misty imprecision does not disguise, it advertises, the user’s moral obtuseness.
A French court has demonstrated how “inappropriate” can be an all-purpose device of intellectual evasion and moral cowardice. The court said it is inappropriate to do something that might disturb people who killed their unborn babies for reasons that were, shall we say, inappropriate.
Prenatal genetic testing enables pregnant women to be apprised of a variety of problems with their unborn babies, including Down syndrome. It is a congenital condition resulting from a chromosomal defect that causes varying degrees of mental disability and some physical abnormalities, such as low muscle tone, small stature, flatness of the back of the head and an upward slant to the eyes. Within living memory, Down syndrome people were called Mongoloids.
Now they are included in the category called “special needs” people. What they most need is nothing special. It is for people to understand their aptitudes, and to therefore quit killing them in utero.
Down syndrome, although not common, is among the most common congenital anomalies at 49.7 per 100,000 births. In approximately 90 percent of instances when prenatal genetic testing reveals Down syndrome, the baby is aborted. Cleft lips or palates, which occur in 72.6 per 100,000 births, also can be diagnosed in utero and sometimes are the reason a baby is aborted.
In 2014, in conjunction with World Down Syndrome Day (March 21), the Global Down Syndrome Foundation prepared a two-minute video titled “Dear Future Mom” to assuage the anxieties of pregnant women who have learned that they are carrying a Down syndrome baby. More than 7 million people have seen the video online in which one such woman says, “I’m scared: what kind of life will my child have?” Down syndrome children from many nations tell the woman that her child will hug, speak, go to school, tell you he loves you and “can be happy, just like I am — and you’ll be happy, too.”
The French state is not happy about this. The court has ruled that the video is — wait for it — “inappropriate” for French television. The court upheld a ruling in which the French Broadcasting Council banned the video as a commercial. The court said the video’s depiction of happy Down syndrome children is “likely to disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices.”
So, what happens on campuses does not stay on campuses. There, in many nations, sensitivity bureaucracies have been enforcing the relatively new entitlement to be shielded from whatever might disturb, even inappropriate jokes. And now this rapidly metastasizing right has come to this: A video that accurately communicates a truthful proposition — that Down syndrome people can be happy and give happiness — should be suppressed because some people might become ambivalent, or morally queasy, about having chosen to extinguish such lives because . . .
This is why the video giving facts about Down syndrome people is so subversive of the flaccid consensus among those who say aborting a baby is of no more moral significance than removing a tumor from a stomach. Pictures persuade. Today’s improved prenatal sonograms make graphic the fact that the moving fingers and beating heart are not mere “fetal material.” They are a baby. Toymaker Fisher-Price, children’s apparel manufacturer OshKosh, McDonald’s, and Target have featured Down syndrome children in ads that the French court would probably ban from television.
The court has said, in effect, that the lives of Down syndrome people — and by inescapable implication, the lives of many other disabled people — matter less than the serenity of people who have acted on one or more of three vicious principles: That the lives of the disabled are not worth living. Or that the lives of the disabled are of negligible value next to the desire of parents to have a child who has no special — meaning inconvenient – needs. Or that government should suppress the voices of Down syndrome children in order to guarantee other people’s right not to be disturbed by reminders that they have made lethal choices on the basis of one or both of the first two inappropriate principles.
Violent pro-abortion protestor falsely claims that a 12 week old fetus does not have hands
This video has been getting a lot of attention recently. The thing that I find most interesting is that the woman in the video seems to genuinely believe that a 12-week old fetus does not have hands. She says:
“That is not what a fetus looks like. It’s a clump of cells at 12 weeks. It does not look like that. It’s a clump of cells. No hands are showing at that time.”
Meanwhile, the National Institttue of Health says:
“Week 8: Hands and feet begin to form and look like little paddles.”
I think it’s also interesting that she accuses the pro-life people of being “racist” and benefiting from “white privilege.” Time magazine reported:
The abortion rates in 2004 were 50 abortions per 1,000 black women and 28 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women, compared with 11 out of every 1,000 white women.
Furthermore, 79% of Planned Barrenhood’s abortion clinics are located in black or hispanic neighborhoods.
Of course if “white privilege” means that white people are far less likely to be aborted, then I agree with her on that one point.
She has been charged with assault and destruction of property.
Meanwhile, the pro-life people whom she assaulted are praying for her.
Video contains R-rated language:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g67z_xBe07Q
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 