The pending legislation includes AB305/SB 260 which prohibits the sale and use of baby body parts obtained through abortion, AB310/SB237 which will take Title X dollars from Planned Parenthood and will give those dollars to health centers that to do not perform abortions and AB311/SB238 which will prohibit all family planning organizations from overbilling Medicaid.
It was expected by the pro-life community in Wisconsin that this legislation would have been brought for a vote before the holidays. But instead, this legislation stalled out before Thanksgiving. Passage of this legislation should have sailed through both legislative houses without modifications to the various bills. After all, the Republicans control both the assembly and the senate, right? And, the legislators would certainly know that if they passed the bills, our conservative, pro-life Governor Scott Walker would sign the legislation, so it wasn’t like there was a perceived executive branch fight brewing in these matters.
It has been reported that Speaker Robin Vos refused to bring the legislation for a vote, claiming that he did not have enough votes. Think about that. With a majority of Republicans in both houses, we are not talking about having to convince Democrats to hold their noses and cross the aisle to vote “yes” on a pro-life issue. Rather, the Speaker of the Assembly simply declared that there were not enough Republicans to pass the legislation even though they are in the majority.
This situation begs answers to two questions: 1) Who are the Republicans that are refusing to vote for the ban on the research of baby organs obtained through abortions; and 2) Why are they refusing to vote on the bill as it is written? These questions demand answers since the Republican platform is one that clearly boasts that life begins at conception and should be protected.
There is speculation now that Speaker Vos is seeking to have the Baby Body parts bill rewritten so that it will be more palatable to certain members of assembly. That move by the speaker would suggest that some legislators have conflicts of interest with the constituents that elected them. Perhaps Wisconsin research facilities are attempting to protect their interests by applying pressure to legislators. After all, in some research studies, it has been revealed that the National Institute for Health has provided large federal grants for studies involving research where baby body parts obtained through abortions have been used.
MediaTrackers has reported that they have confirmed UW Madison researchers have procured and used baby body parts in their research. (http://mediatracker.org/wisconsin/2015/08/31/university-wisconsin-researchers-harvested-f...)
In a 2014 study by UW Madison researchers, 10 fetal hearts and 10 fetal brains were acquired through elective abortions. The study itself, titled “Differential Changes in Gene Expression in Human Brain During Late First Trimester and Early Second Trimester of Pregnancy,” was led by the same research team that conducted an earlier heart study, but unlike the other study, this report specifically thanked two University of Wisconsin medical experts for their assistance in securing the fetal tissue, according to MediaTrackers.org.
One was Dr. Caryn Dutton who left UW-Madison in 2010 following a failed attempt to establish a joint venture where UW Hospitals and Clinics, Meriter Hospital and Madison Surgery Center would do their own late second trimester abortions. The other doctor thanked in the research paper was Dr. Eliza Bennett. It remains unclear where the baby body parts were procured from, as Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin maintains that they do not provide baby organs for research.
If the multiple Planned Parenthood videos released this past summer and fall by the Center for Medical Progress have accomplished nothing else, they have clearly exposed the dark side of the political process in Wisconsin. If conservatives right now, with complete Republican control, cannot stop the procurement and use of infants butchered in the womb for the express purpose of harvesting the baby body parts for research, then this barbaric practice will become a regular occurrence. There will never be another opportunity to stop this inhumane practice.
In the future, you will be able to expect that organ harvesting from the unborn, will become commonplace among young college women seeking to pay for studies by becoming pregnant for the express purpose of aborting that child later in the pregnancy, in order to supply universities’ researchers with custom ordered baby body parts. Eventually, blood types, racial make-ups and even genetic factors will be custom ordered so that researchers can optimize their selection of desired research livers, hearts, thymuses, lungs, brains and other needed body parts.
So which representatives in the assembly are not really pro-life Republicans? The constituents who put them in office deserve to know. Those constituents who intend to vote in the next election deserve to have accurate information regarding the representatives that they will be electing. That will only happen if Speaker Robin Vos brings these pieces of legislation, especially the Ban on the Sale and Use of Baby Body Parts obtained through abortion to a vote without modification! Then each Assembly person can openly and honestly vote up or down on the proposed legislation. They should, after all, be forced to live with the consequences of their votes rather than being allowed to hide behind watered-down versions of bills that no longer fix the evil that they were originally authored to end.
Take Action:
In these important matters, your help and legwork are urgently needed.
Please go to the Facebook page “Every Life Matters” in order to download a declaration/petition page along with a signature page. Please take copies to your church, social organizations or even walk through your neighborhood next week. Ask as many people as possible to sign the declaration. Ask your pastor if you could collect signatures between church services. You may also want to ask if an announcement could be made during the service regarding your efforts. Another idea would be to ask the church if they would be willing to add the downloadable papers onto their website. Finally, ask as many people as possible to also take pages out to obtain signatures of people at least 18 years of age who agree with all of the statements found in the declaration/petition.
When you have obtained all of the signatures you are able to by February 1, 2016, you should make multiple copies of every page of signatures and send one set of the declaration and signatures to your local assembly person and another set to your senator.
The next very important step is to send a complete set of the declaration and the signatures to Speaker Robin Vos and another complete set to Senator Scott Fitzgerald of the Wisconsin Senate.
Finally, please send a final copy of the signatures to me:
Karen Mueller
P. O. Box 0125
Eau Claire, WI 54702-0125
Karen Mueller is a Christian Attorney who is Founder and General Counsel for both the Amos Center for Justice and the Every Life Matters Educational Center.
