Planned Parenthood Continues Targeting Hospitals That Don’t Do Abortions 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 14, 2005
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Planned Parenthood and abortion advocates have long been trying to require all hospitals, including religious ones, to perform abortions. They’re particularly upset when a Catholic hospital, for example, merges or purchases a secular hospital that performs abortions and revokes that policy.
The abortion business has relaunched its campaign to make hospitals perform abortions. Planned Parenthood says women are in danger of losing their "right" to abortion even though abortion businesses are set up across the nation.
Kiera McCaffrey, Director of Communications for the Catholic League, told Family News in Focus, "Planned Parenthood isn’t content with getting all the abortions they want in secular hospitals, now they want to demand that religious hospitals perform abortions as well."
"They want to take us down with them and make everybody violate their morals and their religion in this quest for abortion and contraception on demand everywhere," she added.
In 2003, the ACLU of New Jersey tried to block a Catholic hospital from merging with another health care provider unless it built an abortion facility. In Alaska, abortion advocates fought to force a public hospital to perform abortions against the desire of its board of directors.
Congress has approved a law that protects hospitals, health insurance companies and medical professionals who don’t want to pay for or perform abortions. In December 2004, President Bush signed into law the Hyde-Weldon measure that prohibits agencies that receive federal dollars from discriminating against medical personnel or agencies that don’t want to be involved in abortions.
Deirdre McQuade with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, explained that religious hospitals offer much to their communities.
“The services that they provide in their whole integrity, they care for the person not only as a physical body, but as a whole person," she told FNIF.
McQuade pointed to surveys showing 86 percent of hospitals in the United States do not perform abortions and those that do only perform a handful each year.
