PPFA, Nurse Practitioners, and a Fatter Bottom Line

Editor's note. PPFA is at it again. Please send me your thoughts at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

It's bad enough--horrible, in fact--that Planned Parenthood is a nearly $1 billion dollar syndicate, making most of its profit off of the destruction of innocent unborn babies. It is worse that everything about PPFA coarsens the culture, including its demented attempts to shanghai Mother's Day for its sick fundraising purposes.

But in some ways almost the worst of all is the Federation's arrogance, its hauteur in going its own way and expecting the rest of society to just change to accommodate whatever it is Planed Parenthood wants to do. Take its current efforts in Arizona.

Nurse practitioners shouldn't be performing abortions. But what's that to the nation's leading chain of abortion "providers"?

According to Capital Media Services, nurse practitioner Mary Andrews, of the Tucson branch of Arizona PPFA, has been performing abortions "for eight years." So what did PPFA do when last year somebody complained?

Apologize? Surely you jest. PPFA used its muscle and influence to convince a panel of the state Board of Nursing that it had done nothing wrong--but just in case to ratify what PPFA had been doing by recommending that "nurse practitioners be allowed to perform first-trimester abortions in Arizona." A vote by the full nursing board will be taken Wednesday.

This is all set against the backdrop, according to Capital Media Services, of the Arizona House having already voted to specifically bar anyone but a physician from performing abortions. The bill-- HB 2269-- "now awaits action by the full Senate." The governor, pro-abortion to the hilt, can no doubt be expected to veto it, should it reach her desk.

Back to the panel. Last week, "Pam Lotke, a doctor and clinical professor at the University of Arizona, testified that what is being done during a first-trimester abortion is not from a technical standpoint a 'surgical abortion' in which body tissues are being cut." (With the rise of chemically-induced abortions, conventional abortions are now often referred to as "surgical abortions.")

Lotke "said the actual procedure used in first-term abortions, which essentially vacuums out the fetus, is considered extremely safe with few complications. She said there is no reason that it cannot be done by a properly trained nurse practitioner."

How about that for a clever three-step? Divide abortions into different categories, surgical and chemical; redefine the most common abortion as not a "surgical abortion" because the abortion technique uses a powerful suction machine to rip the kid's body apart; insist that anyone "properly trained" can do them.

It gets even slipperier. PPFA's attorney said they let Andrews perform "the procedure" because "nothing in Arizona law prohibits nurse practitioners from practicing vacuum abortions." The obvious rebuttal is this gets the situation backwards.

As one pro-lifer wrote the nursing board, "existing laws that regulate abortions in Arizona specifically -- and only -- refer to the procedure being performed by doctors." In other words, nothing in existing state law says nurse practitioners can perform abortions.

A quick but important concluding point. As we have written about extensively in NRL News, PPFA is busy repositioning itself and expanding its deadly reach.

That strategy includes not only building "megaclinics," it also dovetails with efforts to persuade more physicians to put their conscience in deep freeze. How? By convincing them to take the less "objectionable" route of giving women RU486 to kill the baby along with a prostaglandin to induce contractions to expel the baby.

As NRLC Director of Education Dr. Randall K. O'Bannon notes, the new campaign to fatten PPFA's bottom line includes "utilizing less expensive, less trained medical labor to bring abortion to clinics where abortion has not previously been done or was done only occasionally by an expensive once or twice a week fly-in abortion doctor."

Abortion has nothing to do with "helping women." It has everything to do with making huge amounts of money.

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com