In 1994, the Georgia State Planning Agency notified the architect designing Atlanta Women’s Medical Center in Atlanta, Georgia, that plans for its two-story late-term abortion clinic needed to include an elevator.

The clinic’s owner, HUMEDCO Corporation, which runs a chain of three abortion clinics, claimed it would be too expensive to add an elevator and requested a waiver.

The Georgia Department of Human Services granted the waiver, through August 31, 2005. It went on to grant another waiver, through August 31, 2012.

The terms in both cases were that AWMC had to notify prospective patients of the stairs, escort recovering patients down the stairs, and also notify 911 operators that there was no elevator in the event of an emergency.

Meanwhile AWMC raked in the cash, between $3-3.5 MILLION every year from 2008 to 2011.

On October 20, 2011, an ambulance was called to AWMC (for what later turned out to be a perforated uterus)….
 

 … which triggered an unannounced visit from the Georgia Department of Community Health, because ambulance personnel were delayed in helping the patient due to the stairs, plus (click to enlarge)…
 

 Investigators also found incomplete charting and defective sterilization equipment. The clinic administrator told investigators s/he had, in fact, specifically instructed staff not to escort recovering patients “for staff safety after a staff member became involved in a patient-family altercation at discharge.” (Lovely business, abortion.)

In fact, GDCH has received numerous complaints over the years.

Yet, despite the fact AWMC had failed to follow any of the stipulations of its elevator waiver, GDCH did not revoke the waiver and merely instructed the clinic to start doing so.

In addition to violating this waiver, AWMC let a separate waiver lapse in 2010 for a rule requiring a licensed nurse to stay on the premises at all times during two-day abortion procedures.

Now AWMC is applying for another seven year waiver for an elevator. And in three documents filed with the state, it has covered up the October 2011 incident and the findings of the GDCH investigation.

In a July 17 letter to GDCH, AWMC attorney Elizabeth J. Appley (pictured right) either lied outright or passed on a lie she was fed:

… the Atlanta Women’s Medical Center can confirm compliance with each aspect of the waiver conditions, and shows that the health, safety and care of patients has not been compromised and that no adverse consequences have occurred to any patient related to the absence of an elevator….

At least one escort has accompanied each patient down the stairs upon discharge….

Ambulance services used by Atlanta Women’s Medical Center are notified of the Center’s second floor location….

Since our move to this location in May 1994, the Center has not experienced any advserve incidents regarding the waiver and  no compromise in patient care and safety….

The application also lied:

AWMC has met all requirements of the waiver since 1994 years [sic] without any incident or adverse consequences to patient care.

… as did the abortionist, Kenneth M. Twiddy (pictured right), in his July 17 letter to GDCH:

I have not seen a compromise in patient care, nor have any incidents related to stairway access been noted.

ACTION: Click to view a sample letter and email addresses for Brian W. Looby of the Georgia Healthcare Facility Regulation Division, and Sharon Dougherty and Blake Fulenwider of the Georgia Dept. of Community Health, stating an objection to giving yet another waiver to AWMC.

AWMC claims an elevator would cost $1 million. Forcing this dangerous back alley abortion mill to install an elevator and provide proper nursing care to patients will either slow it down or shut it down. Over half its patients are African-American.

[HT: Ichabod via Bryan Kemper of Stand True; photo of Appley via Facebook; photo of Twiddy via Vitals.com]

by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN and Kelli

We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.

• Pro-Life in TN applauds the closing of the Volunteer Women’s Medical Clinic in Knoxville – evidence of the impact of incremental pro-life laws at the state level. The Life Defense Act of 2012, which went into effect in Tennessee on July 1, stipulates that abortionists must have admitting privileges at a local hospital for the safety of patients. Since many abortionists drive or fly in from another state for the day to perform abortions and offer no follow-up with patients, causing them to seek any post-abortion care at an ER.

  The clinic director penned a revealing farewell letter, showing how vital their abortion revenue stream was.

• Secular Pro-Life examines the personhood debate as it relates to viability:
  

  In other words, a fetus gestating in the United States, whose mother has access to advanced medical technologies, may be able to survive outside the womb at an earlier gestational age than if the exact same fetus were gestating in Rwanda.

  If personhood depends on viability, the fetus is a person while in the US, and ceases to be a person if the mother travels to Rwanda…. This makes no sense. No definition of personhood should boil down to geographic location.

• At The Public Discourse, Michael New reviews a book about largely unknown 70’s pro-life pioneer Ellen McCormack (pictured left), a Democrat whose admirable political work has impacted the strategies of today’s pro-life movement.
• John Smeaton links to articles keeping us updated on the push to legalize abortion in Ireland.
• ProWomanProLife comments on an article about the Canadian Medical Association’s vote to protect abortion by saying that “life begins when the baby emerges from it’s mother’s womb.” While this political claim would no doubt be ridiculous to doctors who perform surgery on prenatal patients, the CMA also made statements which appeared to acknowledge that certain contraceptives are actually abortifacients.

• Moral Outcry laments the Salvation Army’s abandonment of their stated Christian principles in embracing the idea that abortion is sometimes acceptable. They reason that rape is considered a weapon of war so aborting the innocent life is an acceptable remedy. We may want to consider this at red kettle collection time.
• Priests for Life’s Alveda King lambasts resistance to the biblical mandate to be fruitful and multiply, stating, “What’s really sad is that when we protect these positions with “misplaced compassion,” and try to call these moral wrongs civil rights, we hurt society and humanity.”
• At The New Feminism, Margaret Sommerville discusses “genetic orphans” resulting from the use of certain types of reproductive technology, and their right to know their biological parents:
  

  The basic questions raised in all cases where all the attributes of parenthood do not reside in the two biological parents are whether all children (except, perhaps, those who are naturally conceived and born into an opposite-sex marriage) have, first, a right to know who their biological parents are, and, second, where possible to have some reasonable contact with them.

  I propose that the response to both questions should be in the affirmative, unless that is clearly contrary to the “best interests” of a particular child, and that to decide otherwise is a breach of children’s fundamental human rights.

[Photo via NY Times]

by LauraLoo

The 700 Club Interactive recently featured three challenging pregnancy scenarios:

1. A teen pregnant with her second child
2. A couple longing to adopt a baby
3. A married woman, pregnant with her second child, is told by her alcoholic husband to abort the baby.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4InIxMPzKZQ[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

People say to us, “How nice of you to adopt and help a child in need.” And we say, “No, you’ve got that backward. We needed her….”

We call her Jackpot Baby, she is everything you could ever wish for: Healthy, gorgeous, calm, sweet [and] loving.

~ Jennifer Aspen (pictured right), actress and star of GCB and Party of Five, gushing over  newly adopted daughter Charlotte Sofia O’Donnell, as quoted by People Magazine, August 16

[Photo via JenniferAspen.com]

by Hans Johnson

Michael Voris hosts the following hour-long talk on “what we are losing individually and what we are losing collectively as a nation” because of abortion:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyvgIM7E9Do[/youtube]

I was camping yesterday morning when a friend alerted me via Twitter on my iPhone there had been a shooting at Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Frightened for my friends, I began scanning Google for news reports. Ten minutes later the first story popped up, stating an FRC security guard had been shot in the arm, and the shooter had been arrested.

A bit relieved, I went ahead with a planned day trip, tuning in to news radio in the truck to keep up with the latest. Nada.

I switched to WLS radio, the Chicago ABC affiliate. More nada.

I thought to myself had this been a shooting at a NARAL or GLAAD headquarters, or at a Planned Parenthood clinic, the journalistic world would have stopped. But because FRC is conservative, a shooting wasn’t so big a deal.

As the day went on, the shooter was identified as Floyd Lee Corkins II, pictured above. ABC reported:

Sources say Corkins walked into the Family Research Council and said “It’s not about you, it’s about the policy,” and then shot the guard….

Corkins had been volunteering for about the past six months at The DC Center for the LGBT Community, said David Mariner, executive director of the community center, which is in Northwest Washington. He usually staffed the center’s front desk on Saturdays, and his most recent shift was about two weeks ago….

The Family Research Council advocates conservative positions on social issues and strongly opposes gay marriage and abortion.

Perkins was an outspoken defender of Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy’s public stand against same-sex marriage, which made the fast-food chain a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. The Cathy family foundation has funded FRC….

The suspect allegedly had Chick-fil-A materials inside a bag he carried into the building during the shooting.

I waited for the mainstream media to connect Corkins to the homosexual activist community.

After all, to this day liberals link Scott Roeder, who killed late-term abortionist George Tiller in 2009, to Operation Rescue because “authorities found a Post-It note with Operation Rescue’s phone number in Roeder’s car,” quoting MSNBC as recently as August 13.

And Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards labeled Tiller’s murder as only one of “violent attacks by anti-choice extremists,” quoting from CNN.

And within hours of the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting last month, ABC falsely linked the killer to the Tea Party.

So if Corkins actually worked at a homosexual organization, and it was during the time when that organization was actively promoting the defamation of Chick-Fil-A, and if on Facebook Corkin listed only two friends, one being David Mariner, executive director of The DC Center (who Mariner quickly defriended), well wow, surely MSM would promote Corkin as a poster child for homosexual violence, right?

Click to enlarge…

And wouldn’t MSM then investigate for deeper connections? Were Corkin and his only male Facebook friend Mariner lovers? Why did Corkin stop working at The DC Center? Did officials at The DC Center notice abnormal behavior, or did Corkin threaten violence against FRC and/or conservatives The DC Center didn’t report to authorities?

No, of course not. Negative profiling by liberals and the media only goes one way.

And will Obama’s FBI charge Corkin with domestic terrorism, or with committing a federal hate crime?

And will Obama and liberals now call on their own, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which currently lists FRC as a “hate group,” to temper their inflammatory language against conservative groups?

Beyond the politics, I’m so thankful for the bravery of FRC guard Leo Johnson, who is being called a hero for thwarting a unimaginable tragedy. And I’m thankful to read he is in stable condition.

UPDATE, 12:30p: One more thought on media bias comes from Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life:

Another thing that occurs to me: if a security guard at Planned Parenthood had been shot, and the police specifically singled him out as a “hero” – which he IS – there would already be wall-to-wall profiles of Leo telling his story and noting how awesome he is. But no. He’s still in the hospital, and they aren’t even giving him a head fake.

Though most of the political squabbling over vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan will concern his controversial fiscal policies, the fact that the Wisconsin congressman is also staunchly pro-life guarantees he’ll be targeted with a secondary narrative about being an anti-choice extremist….

Ryan’s views are consistent, not crazy.

~ Calvin Freiburger, Live Action, August 13

[Image via deafhooddiscourses.com]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• At least one local North Carolina media outlet has picked up on the YouTube video of abortionist Ashutosh Virmani telling members of Operation Save America that they should “adopt one of those ugly black babies.”
• Politico covers the unwillingness of abortion advocates to challenge the majority of fetal pain/late term abortion bans:
  

  Similar fetal pain laws are on the books in seven other states, and a ninth law, in Georgia, takes effect Jan. 1. But unlike the numerous legal challenges to state laws on “partial-birth abortion”, there hasn’t been a massive national mobilization to challenge the fetal-pain laws, which clash head on with Roe v. Wade, the law of the land since 1973….

  Asked if the abortion-rights community would be nervous about the outcome of the case if it were to travel to the Supreme Court, Donna Crane, policy director for NARAL Pro-Choice America, chose her words carefully: “There’s no question that this Supreme Court as remade by George Bush is very hostile to reproductive rights.”

• CBS notes President Obama’s continued push to make abortion an election issue and his campaign’s apparent belief that all women favor legal abortion:
  

  The Obama campaign has seized on that particular issue. Over the weekend, President Obama sent out a set of messages via Twitter, writing, “Make sure the women in your life know: Paul Ryan supports banning all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest.” The Romney campaign says that Ryan does believe some exceptions can be made by families and their doctor when the life of the mother is at risk.