Murphy, the Congressman from Planned Parenthood

President of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards announced recently her intention to campaign for President Barack Obama FULL TIME, and no wonder.

Planned Parenthood -- the largest abortion provider on the planet, with the possible exception of China’s pro-abortion fascist state controlled facilities – is big business. Every single day, Planned Parenthood receives more than $1.34 million public tax dollars. Abortion procedures account for 46% of all Planned Parenthood clinic revenue. Ms. Richards last year pulled in a sumptuous $400,000 paycheck as her business systematically aborted over 320,000 children each year.

Here in Connecticut, the Democratic Party from Chicago has managed to tag as “extremists” politicians and potential politicians whose views on abortion fall short of those of Planned Parenthood.

Congressman Chris Murphy, who this year appears to be running on the Planned Parenthood ticket for the U.S. Senate, has successfully managed to paint his Republican opponent Linda McMahon as an “extremist” who, once in office, will struggle mightily to dismantle Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that opened the abortion Pandora's box in 1973.

Along with its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the court found in the aura of rights surrounding the U.S. Constitution a constitutional right of privacy mitigated by two legitimate interests vested in the states: The individual states, the court ruled, could regulate abortion to protect prenatal life and women’s health. Both interests, the court said, become more compelling as the course of the pregnancy progresses, which is why the court tied state regulation of abortion to pregnancy trimesters.

Though many jurists have found fault with the high court’s reasoning – deducing a constitutional right from the aura of rights surrounding the constitution strikes some court critics as a jurisprudential séance – it would be nearly impossible, as a political matter, to overthrow the practical results that have issued over time from the court’s ruling. The bugaboo that Republican “extremists” could in any real sense abolish all legal abortions, however, continues to be a useful tool for Democratic demagogues courting what they suppose to be the“woman’s vote” in elections. The national Democratic Party, during its convention this year, elevated what had been an art into a science.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling, various states did create statutes regulating abortion, especially in the case of minors. The Court upheld the basic right to abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. At the same time, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a semi-autonomous division of Planned Parenthood, “the court expanded the ability of the states to enact all but the most extreme restrictions on women's access to abortion.”

Note should be taken here of Guttmacher’s use of the word“extreme.” The “most common” restrictions -- parental notification, consent requirements for minors, state-sponsored counseling, waiting periods and limitations on public funding – are not considered extreme, except by special interests such as Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider whose business bottom line is reduced by any legal and reasonable exception individual states choose to adopt in accordance with Roe v. Wade and other rulings by the Supreme Court.

Along with forty other states,Connecticut statutes specifically prohibit abortion after viability unless an abortion is necessary to preserve a woman’s life or health; ten states lack such a provision in their laws. Connecticut, among four other states, affirmatively protects a woman’s right to an abortion. Along with thirty other states, Connecticut laws require women to receive state-mandated information and materials concerning fetal development, prenatal care, and other related information. Minors are prohibited from obtaining abortions without parental consent or notice in thirty-nine states, and while Connecticut is not among them, the state does require minors seeking abortions to receive counseling that includes a discussion of the possibility of consulting her parents.

Statutory laws regulating abortion throughout the United States effectively mark the boundaries of “extremism” with respect to abortion. Connecticut statutes are mildly restrictive. Planned Parenthood opposes all and every restriction on abortion, however mild -- an extreme position. To the extent that Mr. Murphy’s position on abortion restrictions patterns that of Planned Parenthood, his positions will also be extreme, as are those of Mr. Obama.

Mrs. McMahon’s views on reasonable abortion restrictions are inscrutable.

Last week, one reporter asked high officials in the Obama administration to cite one non-extreme restriction on abortion opposed by Ms. Richards that the president might consider adopting. We’ll get back to you, said Mr. Obama’s Chicago operation. Much to his relief, Mr. Murphy has been spared the same question.

One should not expect from Connecticut’s left of center media probing questions directed at members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, who hold the same extreme views on abortion as those of Ms. Richards – all of whom, including Mr. Murphy, have received a 100% rating from the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) -- for the state’s media have bought the Democratic propaganda peddled by such as Mr. Murphy: Any restriction on abortion is extreme that restricts any abortion in any state, at any time, for any reason.

Also extreme, in Mr. Murphy’s view, are politicians and obstructionists who impede his path to the U.S. Senate.

The Committed Catholic

U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro began her epistle in the New York Post with the following howler: “As both a committed Catholic and a strong advocate of women’s health, I want to applaud the recently released guidelines for preventive health coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The guidelines Mrs. DeLauro approved have since been redrafted.

Mrs. DeLauro approves birth control, she said, because “We know that improved access to birth control is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality and helps to reduce unintended pregnancies.” No kidding. The kind of “birth control” commended by Mrs. DeLauro and Planned Parenthood would, of course, include contraceptives, abortion and other means of fetal destruction in the Planned Parenthood medicine cabinet. Birth preventatives prevent births, and the decline in birth rates leads to reductions in “unintended pregnancies’ and “infant mortality.” If you employ means that cause pre-birth mortality, you will have less infant mortality because you will have fewer infants.

The Catholic Church to which Mrs. DeLauro is committed is also concerned with women’s health and infant mortality, which is why the church runs hospitals.

Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford was founded in 1897 and opened formally the same year under the direction of Mother Ann Valencia, a French nun of indefatigable energy and faith. The founding and early history of the growth of the hospital was celebrated – the word is here used deliberately – in an historical novel written by the late Father John Bond titled “So Falls The Elm Tree.” The early history of the hospital is inseparable from the history and motivations of its hands on founder, Mother Valencia.

Because she was French, Mother Valencia knew very well what a hospital should be. The word itself is derived from the Old French “hospital” a shelter for the needy. The original meaning of the word is preserved in the English spinoff “hospitable.” At first, the word signified a “guest house,” later a house where then poor were cared for. The word did not become associated with our understanding of a modern hospital, a place where the sick are treated, until much later in the 16th century.

From the founding of Saint Francis Hospital to 1908, when Ellen O'Flaherty, M.D., became the first woman to be named to Saint Francis staff, Mother Valencia, in her halting English, established a school of nursing and facilitated the chartering of Saint Francis by the State of Connecticut (1899), witnessed the blessing of the cornerstone on Collins Street (1900), oversaw the construction of a new building that provided an additional 52 beds (1901), marshaled the Sisters of Saint Francis in fighting a deadly scarlet fever epidemic in Hartford (1903), oversaw the construction of yet another building that provided 120 more beds (1904) and welcomed the first baby born in the hospital’s newly established obstetrical service (1906). Mother Valencia died in 1937 after having overseen every significant development in the life of Saint Francis Hospital.

If Hollywood were truly interested in making films celebrating the life of heroic women, it could not do better than to fashion Father Bonn’s inspiring book into a film that might go far in explaining how and why Mrs. DeLauro’s Roman Catholic Church founded hospitals. Hint: It was not to facilitate abortions or to provide “Morning after pills” to desperately confused women.

Catholic hospitals and other outreach institutions of the church, such as soup kitchens and Catholic Schools, are part of the religious mission of the church. The entire Church, lay and cleric, is called upon to care for the poor and wretched. The distinction between the clerical church and the larger Catholic Church of lay people who are, no less than clerics, called upon by their faith to love their neighbors and care for those who cannot fend for themselves is a false distinction. Religion is a matter of the head and heart, not a matter of brick, stone and clerical administration. The real Catholic Church is the communion of the faithful, living and dead. Why should anyone suppose that a Catholic nurse working in a Catholic or non-Catholic hospital is less Catholic than her local priest?

The Orwellian titled “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” as interpreted by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and heartily approved by Mrs. DeLauro, a committed Catholic, forced Catholic Hospitals such as Saint Francis to provide its employees with “health services” that include the dispensing of “morning after” pills and fetal killing medicines that Planned Parenthood itself regards as abortion inducing chemicals.

Meeting a wall of opposition to what was regarded by many American voters — some Christians, some Jews, some Muslims, some ornery constitutionalists – as an attack on what might be called the historic American consensus on religion and government, the Obama administration regrouped around a proposition that may all along have been its default position: The administration now intends to press insurance companies to provide for “free” payment for health services that some Christians, Jews and Muslims find offensively irreligious. Just as war is diplomacy by other means, so Mr. Obama’s readjusted attack on religious ethics, by the expedient of laundering objectionable payments through insurance companies – itself a dubious constitutional process -- is a continuation by other means of a long simmering secular war on primary religious institutions.

The moral – the reader will please excuse the language – of what appears be an unremitting assault on religious institutions in the United States might be summed up in two propositions: If at first you don’t succeed in destroying the historic balance between church and state in this the home of religious freedom, try, try again; the way to breach the impassable wall of Troy is through a destructive Trojan Horse, a seeming gift, in the belly of which are secreted opposition forces that, gaining entry by hook and crook, will open the gates to the besiegers. Some so-called Catholics, passionately committed to the destruction of their church, may most quickly be found leading the charge from the horse’s rear end.

Murphy’s Line In The Sand

Appearing on “Face the State” with Dennis House, U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, who has announced his candidacy for Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat, passionately defended an administrative edict that would require members of some religious faiths to commit what boilerplate secularists and practical atheists winkingly call “sin.”

“We need to draw a line in the sand,” Mr. Murphy told Mr. House. “Enough is enough, a women, where ever she works, has a right to a full range of reproductive health care; that should be the law of the land.”

It may have escaped Mr. Murphy’s notice that the edict promulgated by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius forcing religious affiliated institutions, hospitals and schools among them, to dispense contraceptives, some of which are abortifacients, and to offer sterilization under the so called "Affordable Care Act” is not a LAW in the strict sense. Congress has not written a bill that when signed by the president becomes a law compelling orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims to choose between their religious obligations and their duties as citizens. As a plus for legislators, Government by edict spares vote conscious politicians the embarrassing necessity of putting their fingerprints on bills that may induce a “no” vote during election season.

President Obama’s administrative edict does not go quite so far as Mr. Murphy’s “line in the sand” non-negotiable demand.

Nuns, for instance, are women who associate with churches, and yet the administrative edict does not require their employers to supply them with birth control pills, contraceptives and morning after abortifacients. Under Mr. Murphy’s line in the sand rule, even nuns would have a right to the full range of options supplied by Planned Parenthood, and employers who balked at providing them with such “health services” would be subject to crippling fines. Mr. Obama’s administrative edict imposes obligations, the news media continually tells us, not on “churches” as such but on religious people working in businesses associated with religious institutions. The opposition to the administrative edict from Catholic hospitals, for instance, has been very insistent, and those who argue that constitutionally protected religious rights inhere in people rather than administrative instruments such as churches do after all have a point.

Mr. Murphy perhaps will agree that drawn lines, must pass constitutional muster. And then too there is that little impediment in the First Amendment preventing congress from passing laws that infringe upon “the exercise of religion.” Mr. Murphy is familiar with this clause because he has passionately invoked it in the past on other occasions.

When Lowes home goods stores pulled their ads from a TV program called “All American Muslim,” Mr. Murphy took to the well of the House to condemn Lowes’ anti-religious bias:

“Murphy: This is a major American company rubberstamping basic foundational bigotry against a major American religious group. This nation was founded on the premise of religious freedom, and this body should never remain silent when a group of people is marginalized just because they worship a different God. And though we certainly have got more important things to worry about -- like the economy – it’s traditionally during bad economic times that this kind of social marginalization has been at its worst, because people don’t speak up against it.”



Mr. Murphy also opened a rhetorical front on (Keith) Olbermann’s program,

“Olberman: How important is this issue to freedom of expression in this country?

“Murphy: Well listen, there’s nothing more basic to the founding of America than that you can come here and practice whatever religion you choose. And the fact is that this latest action [the withdrawal of a Lowes ad from the television program “All American Muslim”] is part of a really troubling pattern of running mosques out of town, of stopping people from teaching the history of Islamic nations in schools. You know, we used to celebrate the fact that you could practice any religion that you wanted in this country. It is a complete re-write of the strongest part of American history to allow this kind of garbage to continue. Look, Lowes is a good American company. Umm… this is way out of step with their commitment to the community we live in, and that’s why I still have maybe this unrepentant optimism that they’re gonna change their mind.”



Mr. Murphy’s is a fulsome defense of the historic posture of federal and state governments towards religion in the United States that even a Catholic Bishop might endorse. It is true the Catholic Church has more theological skin in this political game than other faiths, but it would be a fatal mistake should other religious faiths assume that an edict dismantling Catholic theology would leave them untouched. Jews, Protestants and Muslims, a sometimes scorned profession hotly defended by Mr. Murphy numerous times on constitutional grounds, also provide educational and social services.

Yet one would wrongly suppose that a fervid First Amendment supporting Non-Denominational Christian such as Mr. Murphy would readily understand that an administrative rule, possibly unconstitutional and certainly hostile to the American consensus on religion, that attacks one faith is an assault on all faiths. Ardently supporting the Obama administration’s rule, Mr. Murphy patronizingly claims, “I certainly have a lot of sympathy for the church's argument, but if you're talking about Catholic hospitals and universities, these are institutions that are integrated into the community and [have] public funding streams ... [they] have already crossed the firm boundary between church and state.''

The Politics Of Abortion

A Connecticut political commentator noted on his blog that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave a trifling gift of $250,000 to Planned Parenthood in the wake of its jihad to force the Susan G. Komen Foundation to reconsider its momentary pledge to cut its own grants to the nation’s premier abortion provider.

Not to be too obvious, but Mr. Bloomberg is multimillionaire Democratic POLITICIAN, and supporting Planned Parenthood is advantageous politics for liberals and progressives.

Planned Parenthood is not new to politics. The commentator pointed out that the politically muscular abortion provider “jumped into the 2010 Connecticut U.S. Senate campaign against pro-choice Republican Linda McMahon. Democratic candidate Richard Blumenthal’s press staff member Marcy Stech sent an October 22, 2010 email to seven others seeking ‘mysoginistic photos of women and WWE. Planned Parenthood wants to hit LM hard on it. What do we got?’ Stech was doing the bidding of Democratic consultant Andrew Grossman who appears to have had information from inside non-profit Planned Parenthood.”

During her campaign against present U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, Mrs. McMahon staked out what she considered to be a moderately reasonable position on abortion. “I am pro-choice,” she said, “however, I oppose partial-birth abortion and federal funding of abortions unless the life of the mother is at stake. I'm in favor of parental notification/parental consent legislation.” Polls consistently show that her position aligns with majority opinion in the United States.

Mr. Blumenthal’s views on abortion were more encompassing and very much in line with that of Planned Parenthood, which is why the “non-politicized” organization threw its backing to Mr. Blumenthal in his successful journey from his position in Connecticut as attorney general to the U.S. Senate:

“I will fight to protect a woman's right to choose and ensure that abortion remains safe, legal and rare. I have strongly and consistently opposed measures infringing upon women's reproductive rights.

While abortion in the United States certainly is legal, it is not rare. The number of abortions performed per year in the United States as of 1996 were 1.37 million. Black women were more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women were roughly 2 times as likely.

During his campaign, Mr. Blumenthal boasted, “I brought the first lawsuit to enforce the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which makes it a crime for demonstrators to use force or block access to reproductive health facilities. I obtained a permanent injunction against protestors who refused to comply with a court order to keep away from clinic entrances in Connecticut… I filed suit to halt enforcement of the so-called Provider Conscience Rule. When Walmart announced that it would ban "Plan B" emergency contraceptives in its stores, I worked to ensure that no Connecticut retailer could refuse to stock emergency contraception.”

The “emergency contraception” to which Mr. Blumenthal refers is Plan B, Plan B One Step, Next Choice and Ella “morning after” pills. The controversy over whether
“emergency contraceptives” may in some circumstances act as abortifacients continues to rage across the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea. Those who argue that “emergency contraceptives” may be aborifacients point out that fertilization – the union of a female ovum or egg and male sperm, considered by most scientists as the beginning of human life – occurs in the fallopian tube. If emergency contraception chemicals are ingested after fertilization has occurred, the lining of the uterus is altered in such a way as to cause the woman’s body to reject the living human embryo, implantation is prevented, the birth cycle is fatally interrupted, and natural development of the embryo is aborted.

The discussion may seem to some academic if the prospective mother chooses to avail herself of the services of Planned Parenthood, because the premiere abortion provider in the country utilizes other means to prevent even late term birth.

Mrs. McMahon was not alone in objecting to a procedure characterized by the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as “virtual infanticide.” Fully 70 percent of Americans consistently disapprove of a “health service” that would treat a nearly born infant as if it were the remains of a meal to be ground up in a waste disposal unit. A ban on partial birth abortion was signed into law by President George Bush in 2003, over the hearty objections of former President Bill Clinton and President Obama when Mr. Obama was an Illinois state Representative.

As an Illinois state Representative, Mr. Obama voted “present” on seven votes concerning issues relating to abortion. A “present” vote effectively functions as a “no” vote in Illinois because legislative rules specify that only “yes” votes count towards the passage of a bill. Voting “present” therefore is a backdoor, cowardly way of voting since “present” votes make it difficult for opponents to use such votes against candidates in campaign advertisements.

Here is a full list of Obama's seven 'present' or “No” votes on issues related to abortion, as reported by the Washington Post:

“In 1997:

“SB 230 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. Senate approved bill 44-7, with five senators voting present, including Obama.

“HB 382 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. House version, passed Illinois State Senate, adopted as law. Under the bill, doctors who perform partial-birth abortions could be sent to prison for one to three years. The woman would not be held liable.

“In 200: HB 1900 Parental Notice of Abortion Act. Bill passed 38-10, with nine present votes, including Obama.

“SB 562 Parental Notice of Abortion Act. Bill passed Senate 39-7, with 11 present votes, including Obama.

SB 1093 Law to protect Liveborn children. Bill passed 34-6, with 12 present, including Obama.

“SB 1094 Bill to protect children born as result of induced labor abortion. Bill passed 33-6, with 13 present, including Obama.

“SB 1095 Bill defining ‘born alive’ defines ‘born-alive infant’ to include infant ‘born alive at any stage of development.’ Bill passed 34-5, with nine present, including Obama.”

As attorney general, Mr. Blumenthal has been spared the indignity of voting for or against bills that would require infants born alive during “botched” abortions to be allowed to die from medical neglect. Mr. Blumenthal has not yet covered himself in ignominy by voting on such measures; his likely votes on similar bills can only be deduced from his fulsome support of Planned Parenthood’s agenda.

Most political watchers would be very surprised if Mr. Blumenthal drifted very far Mr. Obama’s thus far successful attempt by executive fiat to impose on observant religious laypeople Planned Parenthood measures that most certainly will cause faithful believers to choose between intolerable “health care” dictats and their own religious obligations. A number of Mr. Blumenthal’s comrades in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation fully support the president; though, lucky for them, it will not be necessary to effectuate an executive department dictat through the usual democratic legislative process.

Neither Mr. Blumenthal nor any of the Democrats in Connecticut single party congressional delegation are clamoring to vote up or down on the measure, because they do not wish to put their fingerprints on such a divisive ruling so close to an election. What a pity these timid legislators have not been allowed to vote “present.”