Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards will not talk about medical science or anything else important to public health. She will, however, feature lots of science-corrupting ideology.
By James Studnicki
Editor’s note. The following excerpt comes from a post at The Federalist.
Nearly 50 years ago, as a new doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, I had my first meeting with my faculty adviser: Dr. Ernest Lyman Stebbins, dean of the school and a luminary in international public health. The school wing where we met was already named after him!
“Stebbie” turned out to be approachable and supportive. This great and wise man, even at our initial meeting, treated me as a colleague. He also offered advice that has guided my career: “The passion of advocacy can be an important influence on social change. But science must always lead. Advocacy which denies or distorts science is a fraudulent exercise which undermines both the society and the conduct of science.” I could never have imagined how relevant his remarks would prove a half-century later.
This weekend in Denver, science and advocacy will joust over one of the most contentious issues: induced abortion. The keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA) will be Cecile Richards, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood. Her selection demonstrates the strong advocacy position organized public health takes regarding legal abortion.
As noted above, you can read the full post here. If you think you don’t have the time, here are a few highlights to whet your appetite.
——————–
PPFA’s Cecille Richards
Dr. Studnicki, who most recently was the Irwin Belk Endowed Chair in Health Services Research in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte, reminds us what Ms. Richards won’t talk about: What happens to the unborn child and the core scientific fact that human life begins at conception.
The bulk of his opinion piece addresses a topic that does get the attention it merits. Ask yourself, what is the leading cause of death in the United States? It’s abortion which, as Dr. Studnicki observes, “dwarfs other causes, with immense racial and ethnic disparities.” However in the U.S. vital statistics, abortion is not reported as a cause of death.
In a paper Dr. Studnicki co-authored with, Sharon J. MacKinnon, and John W. Fisher and published June 2016 in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine, “The researchers also calculated the ‘years of potential life lost,’ assuming an average lifespan of 75 years,” as Paul Stark explained. “In 2009, the study found, abortion resulted in 68.4 million years of potential life lost. That’s 77.1 percent of all years lost in 2009. The second leading offender, cancer, cost 4.4 million years, which is just 4.9 percent of the total.”
Stark added, “But it’s not just the sheer scale of abortion that separates it from other causes of death. Abortion, unlike natural or accidental death, is intentional killing. Cancer and heart disease are tragic and should be fought with compassion, but they are not injustices. Abortion is an injustice. It is a violation of the right of all human beings to life (the right not to be intentionally killed).”
Getting back to Cecile Richards’s status as the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of American Public Health Association, it is simple amazing that the APHA is so closely aligned with the leading provider of abortion in the world.
Fostering “public health”? Only in Cecile Richards’ imagination and whomever at the APHA it was who invited her.