A group of Wisconsin lawmakers are working to end an agreement between Planned Parenthood and doctors at the University of Wisconsin to perform abortions and other procedures.
The partnership between the publicly-funded university and the abortion chain began in 2008, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. The University of Wisconsin receives about $1 billion in state funding annually.
This week, state Rep. Andre Jacque and Sen. Chris Kapenga began circulating a bill to stop these types of abortion agreements. Fox 47 News reports the bill would prohibit university employees from performing abortions or providing services at abortion facilities; hospitals are the exception. It also would limit medical students’ abortion training to hospitals.
“The university has been acting as a contractor for Planned Parenthood,” Jacque told reporters. “That is not the role of the government.”
The agreement has physicians from the university’s School of Medicine and Public Health working part-time at the Planned Parenthood abortion facility in Madison; medical students also receive abortion training there, according to the report. The university physicians do surgical abortions, disease screening and other family planning services at a rate of $150 per hour, according to the report.
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Here’s more from the report:
Lisa Brunette, a spokeswoman for UW Health, said fewer than 10 faculty members provide services at Planned Parenthood. She said obstetrics-gynecology medical residents receive abortion training at the clinic. National guidelines require the school to offer such training, but residents can opt out.
The school “will vigorously defend its commitment to train medical residents in all specialties, including ob-gyn,” she said.
Previously, Pro-Life Wisconsin Legislative Director Matt Sande told LifeNews more about the partnership.
“In 2010, an open records request by Pro-Life Wisconsin and the Alliance Defense Fund revealed that since 2007, more than $58,000 of UWHCA funds have been used to train future abortionists at the Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin abortion facility in Madison,” Sande said. “The UWHCA pays medical residents in the UW School of Medicine OB/Gyn Department for two four-week rotations at Planned Parenthood, where they view and perform abortions.”
This is not the first time that the university’s ties to the abortion industry have come into the spotlight. In 2015, a report found University of Wisconsin researchers had obtained aborted babies’ body parts for research from Advanced Bioscience Resources, which worked with Planned Parenthood.
A handful of academic publications reveal that Dr. Shannon C. Kenney of UW’s McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research has used human fetal livers and thymus tissue from Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) for some of her latest research and experiments.
Dr. Shannon Kenney and a team made up of mostly UW researchers published a report in 2012 outlining the results of multiple experiments in which human liver and thymus tissue obtained from fetuses between 17 weeks and 20 weeks old were implanted into mice.
Back in 2009, the Authority Board of the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics also approved a plan to create a second-trimester abortion facility. However, an outcry from the public prompted the board to cancel the plans.
