Essure, manufactured by Bayer, is called a “permanent birth control” device that blocks sperm from meeting egg.

A pair of small, flexible metal coils are nonsurgically  inserted into a woman’s fallopian tubes, after which tissue grows around the coils, creating a “natural” barrier, according to the maker.

Essure has now been implanted in over 600,000 women since the FDA approved it in 2002 and is considered 99.83% effective. It is nonreversible, so I’m not sure why it’s not called a “permanent sterilization” device. Sounds like verbal gerrymandering.

But after more and more reports of adverse effects of Essure began surfacing, famed consumer advocate Erin Brockovich took notice. According to NewsChannel5.com on July 24:

Brockovich explained, “I got involved because so many women were coming to me that had problems with Essure.”

Brockovich recently started a website for women like Noss and says she’s been overwhelmed by the response. She said that she’s already heard from more than a thousand women who’ve shared similar stories of continuing and debilitating pain, headaches, and heavy bleeding they believe is caused by Essure.

According to her website, Brockovich’s goal is to “create a movement to get this product off the market and find a remedy for those who have been harmed.”

The latter at this point may be a problem. Back to NewsChannel5.com:

What really frustrates Brockovich is that when the FDA approved Essure, it gave it what’s known as pre-emption status meaning women who feel they’ve suffered because of Essure can’t sue the company that makes it.

“This is a law that will protect the company and if the product’s defective, the people who’ve been harmed by it basically have no recourse. That’s not fair,” Brockovich told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.

Brockovich now hopes to collect 5,000 signatures from women who’ve had problems with Essure. They want lawmakers in Washington to take another look at the pre-emption law and the FDA to take another look at Essure.

That sounds fishy to me, as if Big Pharma and/or feminists had a hand in giving Essure “pre-emption status.” And no surprise, Planned Parenthood is a marketer of Essure:

LADIES! Is your family complete? Get info on Essure, a permanent birth control method for women. http://t.co/eItwLGEaJb

— Planned Parenthood Great Rivers (@ppgreatrivers) July 25, 2013

According to Dr. Amanda Yunker, a gynecologist at Vanderbilt, 4% of Essure users she studied had adverse effects. As Brockovich noted, “That’s a lot of women, isn’t it?” So where are the feminists now?

There are a couple Twitter feeds to follow: @StopEssure and @EssureNightmare; and also a couple Facebook pages: Essure Uncensored and Essure Problems.

[HT: Susie Allen]

After applying the condom gloves, Beck proceeded to have a little white pill taped to his nostril.  He called it a “birth control nose ring.”

“I’m with her, I’m with her.  [Melissa Harris-Perry is] wearing tampon earrings, I’m wearing condom gloves,” Beck said, the sarcasm clear in his voice. “I just want to make the point that abortion is murder, and if you’re looking to control reproductive organs, there are other things you can do…”

And that’s not even including the “crazy” abstinence road or adoption, he added, waving around his hand.

“Melissa, you don’t look like an idiot,” Beck concluded solemnly.  “Nor do I.  Melissa, you look as credible as I do…”

~ Talk radio host Glenn Beck mocking MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris Perry’s tampon earrings protest, The Blaze, July 22, where you can see the video

[Click photo to enlarge]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• The Washington Post discovers that most people (including the majority of Democrats) would prefer abortions to be restricted after 20 weeks. The poll also found that only 1% of people volunteered the opinion that abortion should be “always legal” compared to 8% who volunteered “never legal.”
• Michael J. New has encouraging news about the rate of sexual activity among teens, as well as information regarding public support of 20-week abortion bans.
• A Green Bay, Wisconsin clinic which performed abortions will no longer do so after being bought. The abortionist, Robert DeMott, agreed to no longer perform abortions after selling his Ob/Gyn Associates clinic to Bellin Health System. His clinic was the only abortion provider in Green Bay:
  

  In the declaration by DeMott, he acknowledges the sale to Bellin, indicates he will become an employee of Bellin, and as a condition of employment with Bellin he says, “I may not provide abortion services to any patient.”

• In light of the J.J. Redick abortion contract, New York Magazine’s Kat Stoeffel writes that the idea has “practical potential”:
  

  Abortion can be kind of heavy, so abortion contracts should be lighthearted and verbal — along the lines of “our objective is not procreation, pinky swear” — and definitely precoital. When they are hashed out after the fact, abortion contracts can become contentious, expensive, and even a little supernatural, as it did for abortion-contract pioneer and NBA player J.J. Redick.

by Hans Johnson

Father Robert Barron, founder of Word On Fire, comments on the ethical minefield that is “selective reduction,” as reported by Ruth Padawer in the New York Times Magazine. He sums up the mindset of this practice as “My choice trumps everything.”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/fmvoc8LFdY4[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Susie Allen]

There was no easy road for J. J. Redick to take following revelations this week of an abortion contract he and his handlers concocted in 2007 for pregnant girlfriend Vanessa Lopez.

But there was a high road. Alas, Redick chose the low road.  From his Twitter account last night…

To be sure, unless Lopez had the DNA of her aborted baby tested, there is now no way to ever prove or refute Redick’s claims. The evidence has been destroyed.

But the fact remains Redick and his handlers devised a contract stipulating Lopez had to kill her 16/17-wk-old baby to fulfill it – dangling money and a continued relationship as carrots.

Redick’s attorney, Greg McNeill, followed up by breathing down Lopez’s neck the very day she had her second-trimester abortion to get the medical records (and per the contract, she also had to be willing to “submit[ ] to a post-pregnancy examination by a doctor of REDICK’s choice to confirm both the prior pregnancy and its termination”). Redick really, really wanted to be sure that baby was dead.

Objectively speaking, one scenario would be Redick knew he wasn’t the baby’s father but loved Lopez and couldn’t stand the thought of her carrying another man’s child. It appears even she wasn’t sure who the father was. Why then offer her $25,000 if the relationship pursuant to the abortion fizzled?

On the flip side, if Lopez were attempting to extort Redick, and he was so confident the baby wasn’t his, why not wait for the baby’s birth to confirm paternity?

There’s another email I didn’t post yesterday, dated two weeks after the abortion, indicating Redick and McNeill were apparently hacking into Lopez’s email account, not exactly ethical. (Actually, it appears to be illegal.) Click to enlarge…

I know relationships can get incredibly messy. And when they do there is plenty of blame to go around. The fact is Lopez agreed to kill her baby, no matter who the father was. The real victim here is that murdered baby.

Nevertheless, the high road for Redick would now be, without even admitting paternity, to say something as simple as, “I’m sorry for any pain I’ve caused Vanessa Lopez.”

But, no.

A few months ago Redick admitted that during his Duke years he “was sort of a pr***.”

Um…

The word many in our society use when speaking about a baby in the womb changes according to whether that baby will be carried to term and born, or whether that baby will be murdered along the way. A lexicon with double standards has emerged….

WebMD uses the term “baby” to describe an 8-week old fetus. A caption for one of the developmental pictures… reads:

Development at 8 Weeks: The baby is now a little over half an inch in size. Eyelids and ears are forming, and you can see the tip of the nose. The arms and legs are well formed. The fingers and toes grow longer and more distinct.

… Now contrast th[at] WebMD language… to their… section on surgical abortion, [where] they write:

A surgical abortion ends a pregnancy by surgically removing the contents of the uterus.

There is no longer a “baby” in the uterus. It has become “contents” to be removed. In this way, the language is manipulated to distance the woman and those who work in the abortion industry from the reality of what abortion means….

Then there is the degenerate language used in the abortion industry. Dr. Leroy Carhart is documented in an undercover video referring to the dead baby in the womb prior to having labor induced as “meat in a Crock Pot.”…

Is this really what women had in mind when they envisioned “liberation?” To sit across the desk from a doctor who refers to their developing baby as “meat in a Crock Pot” and not to worry because, if need be, he can “take it out in pieces?”

You’ve come a very long way, baby. And gone too far.

~ Carol Brown, American Thinker, July 23

[Photo via saskprolife.com]

Last week I hypothesized that Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s announcement that it was closing three clinics in Texas had nothing to do with new pro-life Republican laws and funding cuts, as it claimed.

Rather, I wrote, ”was this really an attempt to erase dots between the shutdowns and PPGC’s problem with Medicaid fraud?”

https://twitter.com/chrisgast/status/360129927040860160

Thanks, Chris!

So as it turns out, according to a press release today by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott:

After a whistleblower lawsuit was filed alleging improper billing practices by Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, an investigation was opened by the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s Office of Inspector General. The State’s investigation revealed that PPGC improperly billed the Texas Medicaid program for products and services that were never actually rendered, not medically necessary, and were not covered by the Medicaid program – and were therefore not eligible for reimbursement. For example, state investigators determined that Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast falsified material information in patients’ medical records in order to support fraudulent reimbursement claims to the Medicaid program.

Under the agreement announced today, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast must pay $1.4 million to resolve the Medicaid fraud enforcement action.

PPGC is denying everything. According to DallasNews.com:

The allegations in this complaint are baseless and we are ending this case as a practical matter. Continuing this litigation in the hostile environment for women’s health would have ensured a lengthy and costly process that would have distracted our energies and required us to share the private medical information of thousands of women. We are ending this lawsuit in order to devote all of our time and energy to delivering high-quality, affordable health care.

Sure.

PPGC didn’t suddenly decide to settle the litigation. It knew last week when it floated its ruse that this was all coming down. Will MSM circle back to connect the dots? Betting not.

Now it makes more sense that PPGC would close its almost new $1.5 million Lufkin clinic – just about what it needs to repay the government.

[HT: LifeNews.com, Saynsumthn’s Blog; graphic via ketknbc.com]

Yesterday, MediaTakeOut.com released an abortion contract dating back to 2007 between NBA player J. J. Redick and then-girlfriend Vanessa Lopez.

I’ve had this and other documents related to that abortion for the better part of two weeks but out of concern for Vanessa wanted to make contact with her before going public.

This morning I spoke to a knowledgeable source close to Vanessa, to whom she gave permission to speak to me. Neither Redick’s attorney, agent, or wealth manager have immediately responded to my request for comment.

The contract between Redick and Vanessa is bizarre, outlining an agreement for Lopez to receive $25,000 in return for aborting a baby Redick denied was his if Redick broke off the relationship after her abortion. In addition, once Lopez showed proof she had gotten the abortion, Redick agreed to “maintain a social and/or dating relationship” with her for one year – unless either he or she decided to break it off. Like I said, bizarre.

At the time Redick was 23 years old and a rookie with the Orlando Magic. He now plays for the Los Angeles Clippers. Lopez was 28 and a model.

The contract was signed the morning of September 13, 2007, mere hours before Lopez got her abortion at All Women’s Health Center in Orlando, Florida. In fact, her source told me she had already taken her pre-op Valium when she signed it. I have all the abortion documents, which out of respect for Vanessa I will not post, except this section (click all images to enlarge):

Despite the fact Lopez felt “forced into” the abortion, abortionist Harry Perper, infamous in the pro-life community, went through with it. Lopez was estimated to be between 16-17 weeks along, and since the abortion was started and finished the same day, the second trimester procedure was a D&E. It cost $1,150.

Redick, his attorney, Gregory McNeil, and his wealth manager, Jeff Silverman, knew the contract was a “charade,” and they were crass and sexist about it, particularly given the subject. Emails between them the afternoon before Lopez’s abortion:

The afternoon the abortion was completed, McNeill pushed to get confirmation from Lopez, showing her no regard….

It was at this point things soured. Vanessa never tried to collect the $25,000, and she never heard from Redick again.

Why did Lopez get the abortion? My source: “She got the abortion to save the relationship. She was fairly young, fairly immature, and clearly in love. I do believe she was manipulated by Redick. She told me she wanted to have this baby but he was adamant in his opposition.  She thought if she did what he wanted her to do, he would continue the relationship with her. What self-respecting person would sign such a document? My sense is she was simply operating in an emotional state that precluded her from acting rationally. She had no attorney. She hoped somehow, some way that doing what he wanted her to do would benefit her in the long run.”

Sadly, that did not come to pass. Vanessa began to experience symptoms of post-abortion stress syndrome. She sought professional help. From a September 2008 letter to the court (more on that below) from her doctor:

How I came by these documents takes us a bit into the weeds.

Before she started dating Redick, Lopez had an affair with another NBA player, Shaquille O’Neal, while he was married, in 2004.

Long story short, after that relationship deteriorated, Lopez filed a lawsuit against O’Neal for harassment. His attorneys proceeded to portray Lopez as a serial athlete chaser and gold digger who lacked credibility. Part of that strategy was to introduce evidence of past interactions Vanessa had with other athletes, including Redick. They said she lied about her pregnancy to exploit her relationship with Redick.

Lopez’s legal team admitted sealed abortion documents into evidence to prove that she wasn’t lying. Someone either leaked the information, or a court clerk inadvertently released it to TMZ, and perhaps others. I got the documents from a pro-life source in Florida.

There is more to the O’Neal story involving attorney Gloria Allred, but it takes us too far off topic.

“There is no question she has made unwise choices in her life and that she has been opportunistic to some degree and quite selfish in her decision making,” her source honestly told me. “Having said that, I have reached the conclusion that every statement she has made regarding her complaint about O’Neal is factual.”

Lopez never intended for the abortion episode to go public. “Vanessa’s principle desire is to put this in the past,” concluded her source. “To that end I know she would appreciate acknowledgement from Redick and his camp for their cruel treatment of her at a vulnerable time and an apology.”

In conclusion, I’ll once again say: Abortion exploits and hurts women.