Digging around on the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) website, I found a press release from 2009 announcing NAF’s first medical textbook on abortion training. I hadn’t heard of it and I checked with a few other pro-lifers who are in-the-know and they hadn’t heard of it either.
Now, it may not seem like a big deal at first glance—abortion group plus how-to-do-abortions book—it comes with the territory. It’s to be expected and nothing really to get worked up over, right?
Wrong.
An internal report by the National Abortion Federation in the early 90’s outlined how abortion groups could prevent the ever-increasing loss of abortion providers. One way was to require abortion training in medical schools. NAF’s mission for the last two decades has been to increase the number of abortionists by forcing residents into abortion training in their Ob/Gyn rotations.
NAF’s philosophy is that once a physician has done an abortion, any personal qualms or moral arguments against doing them are shot to pieces and it’s easier to get that physician to do them in his or her practice later. The Bible, in I Timothy, talks about the behavior of people who have turned away from their faith and as a result they have had “their conscience seared with a hot iron.” When I think of NAF’s goal of forcing abortion training on medical students, I am reminded of this verse. It’s the idea that someone can become so desensitized to evil that they can no longer differentiate between right and wrong. NAF’s goal is to catch students early, abuse their consciences so much that these same students are willing to believe that performing abortions is a good thing!
It’s taken NAF some time but they are accomplishing their goal. Some medical schools are requiring the training but NAF’s intention is to have all medical schools require the training—not just a few. But it’s hard to convince medical schools to include abortion training if there isn’t a medical textbook on abortion. So NAF set out to create the first (to my knowledge) official medical textbook strictly on abortion. And it’s available from the publisher for only $141.95 (college textbooks aren’t cheap these days, you know).
The textbook title even sounds self-important: Management of Unintended and Abnormal Pregnancy: Comprehensive Abortion Care and contains the following revealing chapters (note the authors, you may recognize some because they are well-known abortionists or abortion activists):
Section I
Abortion in perspective.
Chapter 1
Abortion and medicine: A sociopolitical history (Carole Joffe PhD).
Chapter 2
Unsafe abortion: The global public health challenge (Iqbal H. Shah PhD, and Elisabeth Ahman MA)
Chapter 3
Unintended pregnancy and abortion in the USA: Epidemiology and public health impact (Stanley K. Henshaw PhD)
Chapter 4
Abortion law and policy in the USA (Bonnie Scott Jones JD, and Jennifer Dalven JD).
Section II
Pre-procedure care.
Chapter 5
Informed consent, patient education, and counseling (Anne Baker MA, and Terry Beresford BA)
Chapter 6
Clinical assessment and ultrasound in early pregnancy (Steven R. Goldstein MD, and Matthew F. Reeves MD, MPH).
Chapter 7
Medical evaluation and management (Anne Davis MD, MPH, and Thomas Easterling MD).
Chapter 8
Pain management (Mark Nichols MD, Glenna Halvorson-Boyd PhD, RN, Robert Goldstein MD, Clifford Gevirtz MD, MPH and David Healow MD).
Section III
Abortion methods and techniques.
Chapter 9
Medical abortion in early pregnancy (Mitchell D. Creinin MD, and Kristina Gemzell Danielsson MD, PhD).
Chapter 10
First-trimester aspiration abortion (Karen Meckstroth MD, MPH, and Maureen Paul MD, MPH).
Chapter 11
Dilation and evacuation (Cassing Hammond MD, and Stephen Chasen MD).
Chapter 12
Medical methods to induce abortion in the second trimester (Nathalie Kapp MD, MPH, and Helena von Hertzen MD, DDS).
Chapter 13
The challenging abortion (Lynn Borgatta MD, MPH, and Phillip G. Stubblefield MD).
Section IV
Post-procedure care.
Chapter 14
Contraception and surgical abortion aftercare (Eve Espey MD, MPH, and Laura MacIsaac MD, MPH).
Chapter 15
Surgical complications: Prevention and management (E. Steve Lichtenberg MD, MPH, and David A. Grimes MD).
Chapter 16
Answering questions about long-term outcomes (Carol J. Rowland Hogue PhD, MPH, Lori A. Boardman MD, and Nada Stotland MD, MSc, MPH).
Section V
Management of abnormal pregnancies.
Chapter 17
Pregnancy loss (Alisa B. Goldberg MD, MPH, Daniela Carusi MD, MSc, and Carolyn Westhoff MD).
Chapter 18
Ectopic pregnancy (Jennifer L. Kulp MD, and Kurt T. Barnhart MD, MSCE).
Chapter 19
Gestational trophoblastic disease (Neil J. Sebire MD, and Michael J. Seckl MD, PhD).
Chapter 20
Abortion for fetal abnormalities or maternal conditions (Jeffrey S. Dungan MD, and Lee P. Shulman MD).
Chapter 21
Multifetal pregnancy reduction and selective termination (Mark I. Evans MD, and David W. Britt PhD).
Section VI
Abortion service delivery.
Chapter 22
Providing abortion in low-resource settings (Laura Castleman MD, MPH, MBA, Beverly Winikoff MD, MPH, and Paul Blumenthal MD, MPH).
Chapter 23
Ensuring quality care in abortion services (Beth Kruse MS, CNM, ARNP, and Carla Eckhardt CPHQ).
There is even an Appendix with “resources for abortion providers.”
This, of course, is the same group that allegedly found Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic so alarmingly filthy and lacking in quality that they wouldn’t allow him as a member. But then they failed to report his facility as being in violation of state laws regulating medical care. Groups like NAF, Planned Parenthood and NARAL have, over the decades, successfully worked to turn the law on its head. For them, it’s a violation of rights to regulate abortion clinics or require the most basic and routine inspections by outside inspectors. It’s a violation of rights, the Constitution, federal or state law, etc., etc. to demand that they abide by the rules of any regulatory agency. They “police their own” they will say. Or they will repeat, as their slogan and mantra, the lie that abortion is very safe.
All the while, even the major news media can’t ignore Gosnell, who has been charged with several counts of murder for taking the life of one woman and the lives of several babies after they were born alive. Nor can the media continue to ignore the alarming video recordings showing Planned Parenthood employees’ alleged willingness to be complicit in sex-trafficking.
But what can we expect from such individuals and groups who, “having their conscience seared,” think it is okay to take the life of a living unborn child, even up to the moment of birth?
They wrap up the horror, hypocrisy and lies, cover it in hardback air-brushed with pastel graphics and give it an authoritative-sounding title but none of these things change the purpose of such a book: to train doctors in the wholesale destruction of innocent human life.
LifeNews.com Note: Laura Echevarria is a LifeNews.com opinion columnist. She is the former Director of Media Relations and a spokesperson for the National Right to Life Committee and has been a radio announcer, freelance writer active in local politics.
