Washington, D.C.: Judie Brown, president of American Life League, issued the following statement in reaction to Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards’ commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine:
The NEJM commentary entitled “Protecting and Expanding Access to Birth Control” by Planned Parenthood Federation president Cecile Richards says two things about this once prestigious journal.
First, the pages of the journal are for the purpose of spreading propaganda that has no basis in fact from a purely clinical point of view.
Second, NEJM has delivered itself into the hands of political leftists who are all in for promoting every manner of culture of death positions, from the assisted suicide posture it took in the year 2000 to today’s presentation of a diatribe by Richards that fails on every count to reflect sound medical findings and scientific facts.
Women’s health equates with protecting them from dangerous chemicals that harm their bodies and can kill their preborn babies. Planned Parenthood is synonymous with marketing birth control, abortion on demand, and sterilization to an ignorant public, but now it has stepped up its game by redefining what it means to be published in an important medical journal.
Hopefully, many in the medical profession will find this action by the editors of NEJM to be the last straw, and cancel their subscriptions while exposing the truth. Medicine is not a political movement; it is founded on the ethics of the Hippocratic Oath, of which the most current version states,
“I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”
Physicians should therefore never align themselves or their publications with arrogant attitudes that have no compunction when it comes to playing God and killing preborn children for profit. Shame on the NEJM!
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