California Assembly Committee Hearing on ‘Attack’ on Women’s ‘Reproductive Health’

“With Trump in the White House and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, politicians are emboldened to regulate women’s bodies.”

The California Assembly Select Committee on Women’s Reproductive Health, a newly formed committee, held an investigative hearing in recent weeks to discuss the effects and outcome of the Title X “gag rule” by the Trump administration, that prohibits participants from referring patients to abortion providers.

“I want to start by being very clear that comprehensive reproductive health care is under attack across the country,” said Committee Chairwoman Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan at the outset of the hearing. “There’s no doubt that this administration in Washington has waged a war on reproductive freedom. Abortion is health care, and access to it is a human right,” Bauer-Kahan said.

This week, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, announced that she has donated $1 million to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, to help the abortion provider fight “draconian laws” in certain pro-life states like Georgia and Alabama. “I think this is a very urgent moment where the rights and the choices and the basic health of the most vulnerable women, the women who have been marginalized, often women of color, are at stake,” Sandberg told HuffPost. “Planned Parenthood is going to fight back in the courts, in Congress, in the state houses, in the streets, for women’s health and rights.”

At the hearing, Assemblywoman Bauer-Kahan said that in the 2019-20 California State Budget, a $100 million “investment has been budgeted for reproductive health.”

“Fifteen states have banned abortions in five months,” Bauer Kahan said. “With Trump in the White House and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, politicians are emboldened to regulate women’s bodies.”

“On February 26, the Trump administration posted its final rule imposing sweeping and destructive changes to the Title X national family planning program to the Federal Register, four days after the text was initially released on the Office of Population Affairs’ website,” the Guttmacher Institute reported. “Often referred to as the Title X gag rule, the administration’s changes threaten the integrity of the program, the qualified providers it supports and the well-being of people who rely on Title X–supported care.”

The Guttmacher Institute was founded in 1968 by Alan F. Guttmacher, former Planned Parenthood president and former vice president of the American Eugenics Society.

California does not keep statistics on how many abortions are performed each year. Nor does the state report abortion statistics to the Center for Disease Control, as 48 other states do. So claims of a reduction in abortion access are questionable.

The Title X Family Planning Program, known as “Population Research and Voluntary Family Planning Programs,” was enacted under President Richard Nixon in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act. “Title X is the only federal grant program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services. Title X also covers the needs of low-income families and uninsured people, including those not eligible for Medicaid, at reduced or no cost. The overall purpose is to allow women to decide the number and spacing of their children.”

Back at the hearing on Women’s Reproductive Health, Assemblywoman Bauer-Kahan said she invited Republican Assemblywomen and men to the hearing, “but they declined.” 

Bauer-Kahan said because of President Trump, “all of our reproductive rights are under attack.”

Representatives from NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, were on the panel discussing the attack on “women’s reproductive rights.”

However, in 2015 Undercover videos surfaced in 2015 showing Planned Parenthood officials openly discussing buying and selling the body parts and organs from aborted babies for research. Rather than opening an investigation into Planned Parenthood for trafficking in human body parts, California’s then-Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat, filed charges against the undercover investigators, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress. Harris ordered Daleiden’s home  raided, and using 11 agents, confiscated video research and evidence, in an attempt to prevent millions of people from seeing what actually goes on inside Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood Mar Monte has history in California with the undercover investigation involving StemExpress and the aborted baby parts selling operations. Medical Director, Dr. Ronald Berman, is an abortion doctor for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, and was caught up in the illegal selling of aborted baby body parts. 

The undercover operation of the Center for Medical Progress revealed Planned Parenthood’s government subsidized abortion and political business also been raised funds by harvesting and selling fetal body parts. Nothing was off the table – brain matter, eyes, hands, livers, hearts, lungs, and assorted tissue from aborted infants in various stages of development.

The accompanying videos showed Planned Parenthood abortion doctors talking about their work as if its just another day at the office, and they are negotiating bulk sales of wheat instead of the prices for baby body parts.

This isn’t Planned Parenthood’s first dance. The 1982 discovery of more than 16,000 aborted fetuses in a storage container in Los Angeles horrified Americans. Of the nearly 17,000 aborted babies, 193 were over 20 weeks’ gestation, with the oldest almost 30 weeks.

More recently, the 2015 10+ videos in the ongoing scandal of Planned Parenthood’s controversial sale of aborted fetal body parts showed the CEO of StemExpress, a major buyer of fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood, admitting the company gets “a lot” of intact fetuses, suggesting “another 50 livers a week” would not be enough, and agreeing abortion clinics should profit from the sale.

Harris’s successor, appointed California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, also a Democrat, egregiously brought 15 felony charges against Daleiden and co-investigator Sandra Merritt for making public “confidential communications” and “invasion of privacy,” even though the videos were filmed in public places, the Independent Journal Review reported. However not long ago, a California court ruled that 14 of the 15 counts against Daleiden and Merritt were legally insufficient, and dismissed all but one of the criminal charges against them.

In an editorial, even the Los Angeles Times noted: “Never in the history of California has anyone been charged with a crime for an undercover investigation. There was a recent similar case of animal abuse being outed by undercover videos. No charges were brought in that case.”

However, hypocrisy is not a crime. It wasn’t that long ago that animal rights activists staged protests, decrying the tortured chickens at Foster Farms in Modesto, CA, all while Planned Parenthood was selling aborted baby organs and tissue to the highest bio-tech bidders.

At the recent hearing by the Committee on Women’s Reproductive Health, the “Reproductive Justice Movement” representatives discussed the importance of protecting a “safe environment” for “reproductive autonomy.” 

“Reproductive health care needs to be considered health care, not as a different type of health care,” said a doctor from the University of California, San Francisco. The discussion moved on to discuss the importance of allowing 12 and 13-year old girls to be able to “speak to a doctor alone” and how they can “access health care outside of the family.”

“Reproductive health care” is now used as the accepted language for abortion, despite that the goal is the death of an unwanted, unborn baby.

StemExpress eventually cut all ties to Planned Parenthood after a sixth video was released featuring a former employee who unsuspectingly took a job as a “procurement technician” at StemExpress divulging how Planned Parenthood worked with Stem Express to procure fetal body parts, and pressured patients into “donating” their aborted babies to research, but many times Planned Parenthood employees harvested aborted babies’ organs without their patients consent.