Hollywood’s Hysterical “Cancer Screening” Lie for Obama

The Hollywood Women for Obama Club wants you to vote with your “lady parts.” I want the women of America to vote with their lady smarts. The latest ad from a trio of Tinsel Town actresses spreads one of the stupidest lies about Mitt Romney this election cycle. Fantasyland needs a fact check.

 

According to starlets Scarlett Johansson, Eva Longoria and Kerry Washington, the GOP presidential ticket wants to “end” funding for “cancer screenings.” If you and your reproductive organs don’t vote for Obama, the doe-eyed celebrities ominously imply, people will DIE, DIE, DIE!

This scare-mongering falsehood has been repeated endlessly by Planned Parenthood and the Obama campaign itself. An official Obama for America ad released in August accuses Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, of backing measures to “allow employers to deny women access to cancer screenings.” It also is being used by demagogic Democrats in key Senate races (in Montana, for example).

This much is true: Romney and Ryan do indeed support ending all federal taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood’s billion-dollar empire. One-third of the budget of the nation’s largest abortion provider, which masquerades as a comprehensive health care provider, comes from government.

But here’s what the famous femmes don’t tell you: Planned Parenthood does not provide women with mammograms. PP’s “women’s health” mantle is a sham. An undercover investigation of 30 Planned Parenthood clinics in 27 different states, conducted by pro-life group Live Action, confirmed that the abortion provider does not perform breast cancer screenings. “We don’t provide those services whatsoever,” a staffer at Planned Parenthood of Arizona admitted. Planned Parenthood’s Comprehensive Health Center clinic in Overland Park, Kan., acknowledged: “We actually don’t have a, um, mammogram machine, at our clinics.”

But don’t just take Live Action’s word for it. In June 2012, the Obama Health and Human Services Department responded to a request for information about how many Planned Parenthood clinics were certified to operate mammogram facilities. “Our search did not find any documents pertinent to your request,” HHS told the Alliance Defense Fund.

Got that? Fraudulent Hollywood harridans and their hero in the White House have been deliberately deceiving women into thinking that eliminating Planned Parenthood subsidies would mean a catastrophic end to affordable cancer screening services. But the abortion provider’s purported “referral services” to outside mammogram facilities are negligible — especially given the widespread availability of free and low-cost breast and cervical cancer screening services across the country supported by both private and public grants.

Wait, that’s not all. In the real world, it’s the Obama administration, not Republicans, who have actively presided over and promoted a drop in cancer screenings for both men and women over the past four years. You can thank Democratic crusaders for health care rationing in the White House. They want all the glory of championing socialized medicine, but cut and run from the consequences at election time.

Under Obamacare, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) will be empowered to determine which health care services are “medically appropriate.” For nearly three decades, the federal panel of primary care physicians and epidemiologists has issued nonbinding guidelines and A-F ratings of recommended medical procedures. But as Forbes columnist Dr. Paul Hsieh explains:

“ObamaCare links insurance coverage of preventive medical services to their USPSTF rating. … (U)nder ObamaCare, Medicare payment decisions will become increasingly controlled by the new Independent Payment Advisory Board, explicitly created to reduce Medicare spending. … To reduce costs, many private insurers will likely drop coverage for “C” and “D” rated services. Hence under ObamaCare, the USPSTF guidelines will likely become the de facto standards for both government and private health insurance coverage.”

And that means dropping coverage for the very services Scar-Jo and her femme friends are accusing the GOP of threatening.

Note: The USPSTF is the same review panel that advised cutting back on routine ovarian cancer screenings last month, recommended fewer prostate cancer screening tests in May 2012, and proposed mammogram restrictions for women over age 50 in 2009.

In fact, the Mayo Clinic reported this summer that mammogram screenings for women in their 40s have declined nearly 6 percent since the Obama panel announced its decision in 2009. “Comparing mammography rates before and after publication of the new guidelines,” the Mayo Clinic wrote, “researchers found that the recommendations were associated with a 5.72 percent decrease in the mammography rate for women ages 40-49. Over a year, nearly 54,000 fewer mammograms were performed in this age group.”

It’s no surprise the Hollywood “cancer screening” horror ad script was written by left-wing actor/director Rob Reiner of “All in the Family” and Archie Bunker fame. These Obama-promoting meatheads and their hysterical handmaidens inhabit a manufactured world impervious to facts and fiscal realities.

Michelle Malkin

Michelle Malkin is the author of “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies” (Regnery 2010).

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2012/10/17/hollywoods_hysterical_cancer_screening_lie_for_obama/page/full/

Why Is Obama Offering All Women Free Sterilization?

No previous president ever promoted a giveaway more peculiar than Barack Obama’s mandate that all health care plans must offer free sterilizations to all women — but not all men — capable of breeding.

 

This mandate is Obama’s defining act as president — just as his adamant opposition to a bill that would have defined a born baby as a “person” was his defining act as an Illinois state senator.

Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services proposed the mandate last August and finalized it in January. It takes effect Aug. 1.

The mandate says health care plans must provide without cost-sharing “all Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.”

So, what does sterilization do to a woman? And why does Obama want all women “with reproductive capacity” to be offered one for free?

Specifically, sterilization mutilates part of a woman’s body so it can no longer carry out its natural and healthy function.

By analogy, if a doctor severed a woman’s optic nerve her eyes would no longer see. Here, a doctor severs a woman’s fallopian tubes so her womb can no longer conceive a child.

Obama manifestly believes offering this particular mutilation free of charge to all women — but not men — is good. But why?

Human beings often sterilize dogs and cats, presumably because they do not believe canines and felines can develop disciplined reproductive habits and they see the proliferation of puppies and kittens as bad. But when human beings fix dogs and cats, they do not focus exclusively on one gender. Male dogs and cats are at least as likely as females to get their reproductive organs short-circuited.

Does the Obama administration look at women — but not men — as creatures akin to dog and cats? Does it believe women lack the hearts and minds and souls to fully control the destiny of their own families? Do they see the proliferation of human babies as bad?

After Obama signed Obamacare, his Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a federally funded committee at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to recommend a “preventive services” regulation for women.

In its subsequent report, this committee explained its recommendation for what became the sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate in an eight-page section titled, “Preventing Unintended Pregnancy and Promoting Healthy Birth Spacing.”

It takes an elitist — if not eugenic — perspective on the human race

Here, in part, is how the committee defined the problem needing to be solved: “Although one in 20 American women has an unintended pregnancy each year, unintended pregnancy is more likely among women who are aged 18 to 24 years and unmarried, who have a low income, who are not high school graduates, and who are members of a racial or ethnic minority.”

Here, in part, is how it defined what puts women at risk. “The risk factors for unintended pregnancy are female gender and reproductive capacity.” (Now, we know why they think women — not men — are the problem: Women become mothers, bearing children in their wombs.)

Here, in part, is how the committee defined the solution: “In a study of the cost-effectiveness of specific contraceptive methods, all contraceptive methods were found to be more cost-effective than no method, and the most effective methods were long-acting contraceptives that do not rely on user compliance. The most common contraceptive methods used in the United States are the oral contraceptive pill and female sterilization.”

Then, it pointed to a complication: “Cost barriers to use of the most effective contraceptive methods are important because long-acting, reversible contraceptive methods and sterilization have high up-front costs.”

Then the committee delivered its punch line: “The elimination of cost sharing for contraception therefore could greatly increase its use, including the use of the more effective long-acting methods, especially among poor and low-income women more at risk for unintended pregnancy.”

Obama’s HHS adopted without change the committee’s recommendation to require health care plans to offer free contraception and sterilization to all women of “reproductive capacity.” The committee defined “reproductive capacity” as being “from the time of menarche to menopause.”

Why didn’t the administration adjust the sterilization mandate to limit its reach only to women who had attained the age of, say, 21 or 35, or who had already borne two or three or even four children?

The Catholic Church has famously objected to this regulation pointing out that it forces Catholics and Catholic institutions to pay for sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortions — all of which the church teaches are intrinsically wrong.

Why didn’t the administration adjust the regulation to exempt people who would be forced to act against their religion and their conscience if they obeyed it?

Yes, insisting that a born baby was not a person defined Barack Obama as a state senator, and this sterilization mandate will define Obama as a man, a president and a historical figure.

Terry Jeffrey

Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of CNSNews

http://townhall.com/columnists/terryjeffrey/2012/07/11/why_is_obama_offering_all_women_free_sterilization/page/full/

First Abortion Pills For All, Now Surgical Abortions, Too? by Alan Sears

When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, i.e., ObamaCare, was being debated in public and in Congress during 2010, Americans who supported life were told again and again that the legislation would not cover abortion.  But like so many other aspects of Obama’s healthcare overhaul, what was promised and what was received turned out to be two different things – especially considering that many legislators read the bill only after they signed it into law.

For example, the Obama administration has now made it clear that the individual mandate in ObamaCare will contain a charge—an “abortion premium mandate”—to forcibly collect monies from millions of Americans who participate in state-administered “insurance exchanges” to pay for elective abortions. And nothing in the final rule that the Department of Health and Human Services issued March 12 concerning the establishment of exchanges required by ObamaCare alters that in the least.

The administration’s plan is to “collect a $1 abortion surcharge from each premium payer” once ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. Or to put it another way, Americans enrolled in federally-subsidized ObamaCare plans will pay $1 a month to subsidize the abortion industry whether they are pro-life or pro-death, religiously opposed to abortion or religiously indifferent, morally outraged by killing children in the womb or morally obtuse on the matter.

This means President Obama’s war on rights of conscience continues apace.

But since Americans should not be compelled to pay for other people’s elective abortions, the Alliance Defense Fund joined the Bioethics Defense Fund in filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of numerous pro-life medical groups on Feb. 13.

The brief lays out the case by highlighting the “inescapable requirements upon all individuals who are, even unwittingly, enrolled in a health plan–either on their own or by their employer–that happens to include elective abortion coverage.” These “enrollees are compelled by the Act to pay a separate premium from their own pocket to the insurer’s actuarial fund designated solely for the purpose of paying for other people’s elective abortions.” Moreover, the requirement denies “enrollees the ability to decline abortion coverage based on religious or moral objections.”

Sadly, it appears that just as Congress passed ObamaCare under the cover of night in March 2010, the aspects of the legislation tied to the abortion mandate were done in an underhanded fashion as well:

Due to the public uproar [over]…elective abortion coverage, the drafters [of the Act] devised a scheme to avoid the direct federal funding of abortion. This goal of avoiding the use of tax-payer subsidies for abortion coverage was unfortunately achieved by a means that violates the First Amendment; namely, by compelling the taxpayer to personally pay a separate abortion premium.

 

There is too much at stake for Americans to simply look the other way on this particular issue. The same president who issued a mandate in February to force most employers, including religious ones, to provide insurance that covers contraceptives and abortifacients for their employees—whether the employer has a faith-based objection or not—is also telling Americans they will fund the elective, surgical abortions of other Americans.

The First Amendment and our rights of conscience are at stake.  No less than freedom itself is threatened by this mandate.

http://townhall.com/columnists/alansears/2012/03/15/first_abortion_pills_for_all_now_surgical_abortions_too/page/full/

The Secular Media Vs. Religious Liberty

Townhall Columnists Brent Bozell

 

The Obama administration is waging war on Christianity. Somehow, the networks haven’t seen this as newsworthy.

On Jan. 20, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced its perverse attempt to force Catholic schools, hospitals and other charitable agencies to finance sterilization, abortifacients and contraceptives in their insurance plans starting in 2013. Speaking for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy Dolan roared like a lion in a press statement: “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.” He asserted, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable.”

In its first online dispatch on Jan. 20, The New York Times loaded up quotes from liberals and only carried a six-word quote from the bishops lamenting the “unprecedented attack on religious liberty.”

The bishops have protested with an outrage louder than this Catholic has ever heard. For weeks now, the Catholic faithful have heard priests and their bishops pronounce from the pulpit that the Obama administration cannot be obeyed on this intrusive mandate. “We cannot — and will not — comply with this unjust law,” protested Virginia bishops Paul Loverde and Francis DiLorenzo in a letter read in churches on Feb. 5. The Catholic Church is under attack, and it’s sounding like it’s ready for civil disobedience.

Why was everyone so late to this protest? Fox News was the first sign of life we saw on TV, when they mentioned the contraceptive controversy in their March for Life story — for just one sentence — on the Jan. 23 “Special Report.”

It took CBS 10 days to air its first brief news story on the controversy on “CBS This Morning” on Jan. 30, after the bishops’ letters were read in church. CNN arrived on the story that day.

On Jan. 31, Fox News correspondent Ed Henry raised the issue with Obama spokesman Jay Carney, who spewed nonsense about how their policy “strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious beliefs and increasing access to important preventive services.” After the exchange, anchor Megyn Kelly summarized, “This is turning into a big deal.” But the big three networks were asleep for 15 days.

Team Obama’s hostility went even further. On Feb. 3, it was revealed the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains sent an email to senior Army chaplains advising them not to read Archbishop Timothy Broglio’s hard-hitting letter from the pulpit. In the letter, Broglio insisted, “It is a blow to a freedom that you have fought to defend and for which you have seen your buddies fall in battle.”

John McHugh, Obama’s secretary of the army, agreed before Sunday masses that it was a mistake to stop the reading of the Archbishop’s letter, but the line “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law” was removed at McHugh’s suggestion.

Network coverage of this outrage? Zero. But at this point, the networks were all leading their newscasts with the non-story that Planned Parenthood might be denied less than a million dollars for breast cancer screenings.

Journalists claim to be zealots for the First Amendment. But when it comes to the state ordering around the Catholic Church — from banning the reading of bishops’ letters and then compromising by censoring sentences — it sounds like they’d be comfortable with some kind of Potemkin Catholic Church akin to the one in communist China, an official church that bows to the state.

The issue finally broke out on the Sunday morning interview programs on Feb. 5, but only because Newt Gingrich forced the issue onto the agenda in his CBS and NBC appearances. ABC, CNN and Fox asked about it.

The Obama administration’s hostility to religious liberty isn’t limited to Catholics. Last fall, the Department of Justice filed a brief at the Supreme Court against a Lutheran school’s attempt to fire a teacher. Cheryl Perich had sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church said Perich violated church tenets by bringing her grievance to the federal government rather than appealing to the church to win reinstatement.

Ed Whelan of National Review declared the DOJs position was “even more hostile” to the Lutherans “than the amicus brief filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the ACLU.”

On Jan. 11, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of the Lutherans. In a short stand-up report, NBCs Pete Williams described it as “easily the most important decision on religious freedom in decades.” But wait — that’s all he said? If it was this historic, was it not worth mentioning the extreme position of the Obama forces?

ABC and CBS aired nothing on that high court decision. These networks don’t have sympathy for, or even an interest in, religious Americans — unless, of course, someone’s protesting a mosque at ground zero.

 

 

 

Tags: Media and Culture , Christianity , contraception , Catholic Church

 

Brent Bozell

Founder and President of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell runs the largest media watchdog organization in America.
 
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 http://townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/2012/02/09/the_secular_media_vs_religious_liberty/page/full/