California prosecutors have charged two anti-abortion activists who made undercover videos of themselves trying to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood with 15 felonies, saying they invaded the privacy of medical providers by filming without consent.
State attorney general Xavier Becerra announced the charges on Tuesday against David Daleiden of Davis, California, and Sandra Merritt of San Jose. The two operate the Irvine-based Center for Medical Progress.
The allegations say the pair filmed 14 people without permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person. The 15th was for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.
Becerra says they used a fictitious bioresearch company to meet with women’s healthcare providers and covertly record them.
Daleiden, in an email to the Associated Press, said the “bogus” charges were coming from “Planned Parenthood’s political cronies”.
“The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners,” Daleiden said.
Planned Parenthood – which has previously said the videos were “heavily edited to deceive the public” – welcomed the charges, saying they sent “a clear message: you can’t target women and healthcare providers without consequences”.
Planned Parenthood (@PPact)
CA Attorney General filing criminal charges sends a clear message — you can’t target women & health care providers without consequences. https://t.co/dFT42uZUyq
March 29, 2017
In April of last year, Daleiden said in a Facebook post that California department of justice agents had raided his home, seizing all of his video footage along with personal information.
Since then, the case had gone largely quiet, with virtually no revelations about the investigation and no indication that the charges were coming before they were filed on Tuesday in San Francisco superior court.
The prosecution got a new leader this year in Becerra, a longtime Congressional Democrat, who took over for Kamala Harris when she became a US senator.
Daleiden and Merritt had previously been indicted in Texas on similar charges in January 2016, but all of the charges were eventually dropped by July as prosecutors said a grand jury had overstepped its authority. The grand jury had originally been convened to investigate Planned Parenthood, but after finding no wrongdoing indicted Daleiden and Merritt instead.
Billions of dollars in US aid to groups combating diseases worldwide could be at risk from Donald’s Trump’s “unprecedented and far-reaching” reversal of abortion-related policy, campaigners warned on Tuesday.
Trump signed an executive order on Monday reinstating the “global gag rule”, which bans funding for groups that offer abortions or abortion advocacy, even if they use their own funds to do so.
Campaigners fear the move could affect a wide range of groups providing life-saving treatment, such as those working to combat HIV and Zika, as well as those helping prevent child and maternal deaths and unwanted pregnancies worldwide.
What is the ‘global gag rule’, and why does Trump support it?
The policy has been repealed and reinstated several times in the past, but women’s reproductive rights groups said Trump had signed the “most extreme” and sweeping order of its kind.
The policy has been expanded to affect “all global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies”, according to a White House statement published on Monday.
The US is the most generous bilateral donor to reproductive rights causes worldwide – with current funding at $ 575m. What is still unclear is to what extent the gag rule will affect the US’s wider global health funding, which the reproductive rights campaigners PAI estimate to be more than $ 9bn.
Groups are still unpicking what funding “global health assistance” refers to. For example, humanitarian assistance may be exempt because it is funded in a different way.
Suzanne Ehlers, president and CEO of PAI, described the expanded version of the law as “irrational and backward”.
“Our preliminary analysis,” Ehlers said, “based on the presidential memorandum yesterday, is that [the global gag rule] is not only more severe and sweeping, but it’s more expansive than that introduced by previous presidents.
“Family planning assistance funding by USAid is a budget of around $ 610m. But if our reading of this memorandum is accurate, it will cover all global health assistance. That is in the ball park of $ 9.4bn.”
The global gag rule, also called the Mexico City policy, denies foreign organisations US family planning funding if they provide abortion information, referrals or services, or if they engage in any abortion rights advocacy with their own funds.
Projects on the ground are faced with a stark choice – to refuse US funding or to take the funding and end abortion advice. First introduced by the Reagan administration, the measure was repealed by Bill Clinton, reinstated by George W Bush and repealed again by Barack Obama.
But Monday’s White House memorandum suggests the rule will apply not just to family planning funding but to “all global health assistance”.
Ehlers said: “We are talking about work on HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, public and child health.
“So let’s say I’m a US organisation involved in global health assistance in Malawi worth $ 1m. I’m working with 12 or 15 different NGO partners in a malaria programme. All of those partners have to sign a Mexico City policy to say they are not doing anything at all with any of their own private funds to do with abortion.
“What business is it of the US government to determine what groups across the world, working in what might very well be legal in their own countries, do with their own money?
“This is not a pro-life policy,” said Ehlers. “There is already no US-taxpayer assistance going to pay for abortion. This is a policy denying women life-saving services. It will cut off funding for groups providing HIV testing kits to teenagers, it will cut malaria programmes. We are imperilling and endangering global health programmes.”
A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood said: “This is the most extreme executive order that we have ever seen, in the global health space, under any Republican administration.
“It will not just affect family planning services, but organisations that are working to combat Zika, to combat HIV/Aids. We at Planned Parenthood are very concerned and astonished, coming after a weekend when one in 10 Americans took to the streets in a historic show of strength, that this administration would target the world’s most vulnerable women in this way.”
Caroline Crosbie, acting CEO of Pathfinder, a health programme which works globally, said the policy “risks the lives of millions of people around the world”.
“This vastly expanded gag rule jeopardises millions of lives, and will only serve to undercut decades of American global health leadership.
“While we examine what the precise negative effects the expanded policy will have on our partners in the countries where we work, we do know that it will do more than silence organisations from talking about abortion – it will mean these organisations will not be able to provide HIV prevention, care and treatment services, integrated maternal health care and contraceptive services or counselling on the potential risks of Zika infection, among others, if they intend to receive US government funds.”
Amanda Klasing, a senior researcher in women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, said the expanded rule introduced by the Trump administration would have a chilling impact on freedom of speech and would “dramatically increase” the number of groups affected.
“One of our concerns is that it is a dramatic expansion of the US trying to govern free speech abroad,” said Klasing. “What they are trying to do is hold funding captive.”
Klasing said the effect of the rule would be that organisations that operate in countries that restrict women’s rights and women’s access to services, if in receipt of US funding, would no longer be able to speak out.
“They can’t advocate around loosening those restrictions if they want to continue to receive US funding. How far does this go? Can the groups participate in harm reduction models?”
Anu Kumar, chief strategist of Ipas, an organisation working to combat deaths from unsafe abortion, said: “We are not entirely certain what pot of money will be affected. But it if is global, then even HIV funding could be jeopardised.
“We already know is the gag rule results in cuts to services and clinics are forced to close. Every day there are 840 women who die from pregnancy related cases. We know there are 225 million women in developing countries who don’t want to be pregnant.
“The scale of the problem is enormous.”
Analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that last year’s US aid budget for family planning gave 27 million women and couples access to contraceptives, prevented more than 2m unsafe abortions and 6 million unintended pregnancies, and helped prevent 11,000 maternal deaths worldwide.
A member of the pro-existence group Operation Rescue holds indicators reading through ‘Abortion is Murder’ in the course of a protest outdoors an abortion clinic in Buffalo, 1992. Photograph: Corbis
It really is not but seven o’clock on a Saturday morning in New York and I’m confronted by a group of individuals standing in front of a nondescript doorway, waving 4-foot high placards and shouting: “They murder babies here!” There are previously a dozen anti-abortion protesters outside the clinic and the day has barely started out.
Here to act as an “escort” – making certain sufferers, regardless of whether they are getting abortions or not, enter the clinic safely – I already come to feel intimidated. So, think about that you happen to be a female who has miscarried and a person shouts at you: “Carrying infants in your uterus is a present from God” or picture basically going to the medical doctor and becoming advised you happen to be “going to hell”. Think about becoming an African-American girl on your way to a women’s health clinic and currently being surrounded by folks screaming: “They want to kill black babies.”Can you think about how upsetting and emotionally traumatising that is for patients?
To aid these girls, volunteer organisations have sprung up in the US to provide help. When I’m inside the Selections Women’s Medical Center in Queens, Mary Lou Greenberg, the volunteer clinic escort director, gives me guidelines about privacy (for security, no one refers to anybody else by name) instructions on how to escort (strategy patients, gently inform them you happen to be with the clinic and that you happen to be there to guidebook them within) and warnings about proximity (never stand in front of, or block, a patient’s path by no means have get in touch with with a protester protect the patient by acting as a buffer). I am then handed a white health care coat (so as to be plainly noticeable to sufferers) and a big badge with “Alternatives Clinic Escort” on it. I come to feel like a strolling target – I am in the US, they have guns here. What if an anti-abortionist decided to allow off a handful of rounds?
Eliza, another escort, reinforces my be concerned. “I am aware that there has been poor violence outside other clinics, that folks have come in with guns, that individuals have died … They say: ‘The people in the white coats – they are butchers,’ so if some man is walking by and gets truly angry, we’re the ones who are going to get it.”
I am aware that my dread is practically nothing in contrast to the ladies who have, in a lot of instances, travelled excellent distances to attend the clinic and whose safety and safety we have a duty to defend. When we go outdoors, we escorts – a mixture of ladies and men between twenty and 60 many years previous, from a selection of backgrounds and professions – are outnumbered by protesters. The clinic regularly faces more than forty protesters a day.
Until now, my only knowledge with anti-abortionists had been with the (fairly) quiet protesters outside the Marie Stopes clinic in London’s Bloomsbury, who mostly pray and hand out objectionable leaflets right here, it is quite distinct. “You happen to be murdering youngsters!” shout the (primarily male) protesters as we wait, silently. But it is when a woman walks in the direction of the clinic that all hell breaks loose: she is quickly surrounded and screamed at.
Numerous instances I noticed patients crying as they had been shouted at. I could only try to get shut and offer you soothing words, but that doesn’t safeguard them from the abuse and aggression.
Eliza tells me: “Someone was coming in for a stick to-up, as she had had an abortion the week ahead of, and she advised a protester, ‘My infant didn’t have a heartbeat, so we had to abort,’ and the protester responded by saying: ‘Oh, they lied to you. Your baby did have a heartbeat. It was alive and you killed your baby.’ The degree of hatred that is directed at these women – a good deal of whom aren’t even receiving abortions – is unconscionable. If you’ve not escorted, you don’t know how undesirable the intimidation can be.”
Another clinic escort, Cathy, adds, “It really is extremely nerve-racking. I’ve been bumped close to by them a great deal since I am trying to shield individuals. You always know there is a bit of a bodily risk – the possibility that they are going to break the rules 1st – and that is scary.”
Every person I spoke with was shocked at how bad anti-abortion harassment has grow to be and typically didn’t realise it was happening in a main city like New York, as opposed to the Bible belt in the deep south. Could the sort of harassment experienced in liberal cities this kind of as New York spread to the United kingdom?
“We have not reached a level in the United kingdom in which clinic escorts are essential however, although that isn’t going to suggest protesters will not trigger some females significant distress,” says Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Services. “The number of protesters involved is fairly little, and inside the anti-selection motion itself there are a lot of who do not feel standing outdoors clinics targeting pregnant women is a moral or productive way to proceed. But numerous people are shocked this is happening here at all – we are a pro-option country and the fact a single girl must have a poster waved in her encounter and a leaflet thrust in her hand as she helps make her own decision to accessibility a legal healthcare support brings about concern.”
Furedi concedes that the United kingdom may well be heading in the direction of a lot more aggressive anti-abortion protesting. “The anti-option motion is more and more borrowing techniques from the US, whether it’s in the type of abortion clinic protests, demands for new laws on how clinics function, or calls for the prosecution of physicians – not for failing to care for ladies appropriately, but for failing to fill in paperwork accurately. So far they have been largely unsuccessful, but we require to be ever vigilant.”
Even though there aren’t but strategies in location to have escorts at British abortion clinics, additional protection of individuals is feasible. Kate Smurthwaite, comedian, activist and vice chair of Abortion Rights Uk tells me that the campaign’s “policy on all professional-selection exercise is guided by the wishes of clinic staff. If clinics do want help – counter-protests, clinic escorts – they can get in touch. We have a nationwide network of supporters and regional pro-choice groups that can be mobilised even at quick observe to assistance staff and services customers in whatever way is proper.”
Is being reactive, rather than proactive, the way forward? Greenberg at Options suggests that women’s rights have been undermined simply because “folks in the women’s motion who consider themselves professional-decision have not taken it on … General, the climate is such that it encourages these protesters to come out. This is element of a greater political battle … a war on women.”
The document was published by PHE alongside recommendations by the Government’s scientific advisors for people to halve their sugar consumption, following similar advice by the World Health Organisation.
Experts in Brussels said the decision to lift quotas had been made without a proper review of the potential impact of the move on public health. They want the current scheme to remain in place until officials have reviewed whether removing the limits could end up worsening diseases such as obesity.
The EU’s reform to sugar quotas has been backed by food and drink firms. Tate & Lyle, which refines cane sugar from tropical countries, says the existing system threatens its operation in the UK because it favours beet sugar from the EU.
Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London, said the decision to lift the sugar production quotas in 2017 should be “reviewed” in light of the advice by British scientists and the WHO.
Dorota Fienkiewicz of the European Public Health Alliance, a Brussels-based coalition of health groups including the Royal College of Nursing, added: “There was never actually a proper health impact assessment. In the end the industry has an upper hand, putting on the table the economic argument, especially in a time of crisis.
“The price of sugar will go down because everyone can produce as much as they want.
“That would mean that food and drink producers can just put it into their products and people buy it cheaply and consume it more – then we would have more problems related to non-communicable diseases.”
The warning comes amid growing scrutiny of sugar levels in food and drink. Campaigners warn that high consumption of the ingredient is causing diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
However, the food and drink industry insists the causes of obesity are “far wider” than sugar.
A spokesman for the European Commission said the UK Government wanted the quotas lifted even earlier than 2017, having argued that they distort markets, drive prices of supermarket products and “artificially increase some producers’ profits while damaging other businesses.”
The document was published by PHE alongside recommendations by the Government’s scientific advisors for people to halve their sugar consumption, following similar advice by the World Health Organisation.
Experts in Brussels said the decision to lift quotas had been made without a proper review of the potential impact of the move on public health. They want the current scheme to remain in place until officials have reviewed whether removing the limits could end up worsening diseases such as obesity.
The EU’s reform to sugar quotas has been backed by food and drink firms. Tate & Lyle, which refines cane sugar from tropical countries, says the existing system threatens its operation in the UK because it favours beet sugar from the EU.
Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London, said the decision to lift the sugar production quotas in 2017 should be “reviewed” in light of the advice by British scientists and the WHO.
Dorota Fienkiewicz of the European Public Health Alliance, a Brussels-based coalition of health groups including the Royal College of Nursing, added: “There was never actually a proper health impact assessment. In the end the industry has an upper hand, putting on the table the economic argument, especially in a time of crisis.
“The price of sugar will go down because everyone can produce as much as they want.
“That would mean that food and drink producers can just put it into their products and people buy it cheaply and consume it more – then we would have more problems related to non-communicable diseases.”
The warning comes amid growing scrutiny of sugar levels in food and drink. Campaigners warn that high consumption of the ingredient is causing diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
However, the food and drink industry insists the causes of obesity are “far wider” than sugar.
A spokesman for the European Commission said the UK Government wanted the quotas lifted even earlier than 2017, having argued that they distort markets, drive prices of supermarket products and “artificially increase some producers’ profits while damaging other businesses.”
As the Genetic Literacy Project reports, in an endorsement of the co-existence of genetically modified and natural farming, the Western Australian Supreme Court today rejected claims by a farmer who contended that his natural licensed farm was “contaminated” by a neighboring farmer growing GM canola.
“I am not pleased that in 2010 Mr. Baxter breached any (lesser) duty of reasonable care,” Justice Kenneth Martin wrote in his judgment.
Natural farmer Steve Marsh had sued his neighbor and former buddy, Michael Baxter, claiming that GM canola from Baxter’s land had drifted onto his organic oats, rye and sheep farm in Kojonup, Western Australia. The Nationwide Association of Sustainable Agriculture Australia (NASAA) temporarily suspended Marsh’s natural certification on about 70 % of his house in late 2010. Marsh sought monetary compensation of $ 85,000 (AU) from Baxter, as effectively as a long lasting court injunction banning Baxter from planting GM crops.
In contrast to the United States, the European Union and Japan, which let trace amounts of GMO crops in natural meals in acknowledgement of cross pollination by wind or pollen transfer, Australia maintains a zero threshold.
Anti-GMO groups have gotten a great deal of traction by branding cross pollination as “contamination.” Cross pollination occurs naturally but is regarded unacceptable to organic purists, who want natural crops to be entirely cost-free of pollen from GM crops and want individuals demands incorporated into legislation.
Just lately, voters in two southern Oregon counties accepted measures to ban the cultivation of GM crops based on “contamination” issues. The Marsh versus Baxter case has attracted global consideration as it sheds light on how “contamination” claims by organic farmers may be received in other courts.
In the 150-webpage judgment summary, Justice Martin wrote there had been no unreasonable interference with Marsh’s crops. He found that the determination to withdraw natural certification was produced by the Australian organic certifying bodies NASAA/NCO and it was that decision and not natural cross pollination that price Marsh about $ 85,000 (AU) in decreased cash flow.
“Mr. Baxter was not to be held accountable as a broadacre farmer merely for expanding a lawful GM crop and deciding on to adopt a harvest methodology (swathing), which was completely orthodox in its implementation,” he wrote. “Nor could Mr. Baxter be held responsible, in law, for the reactions to the incursion of the Marshes’ organic certification entire body, NCO, which in the conditions presented to be an unjustifiable response to what occurred.” Martin added there was “a really strong physique of proof in this trial to suggest that there was no reputable contractual basis for NCO to decertify” Marsh’s farm.
Natural tolerance requirements challenged
In the course of the eleven-day hearing in February, scientists also testified that Roundup Ready canola swathes have been harmless to animals, people and land even if consumed.
The court case has highlighted contradictions in recent Australian farming and natural certifying regulations. Professor Rick Roush from Melbourne University’s College of Land and Atmosphere stated he believes the situation is exclusive to Australia, simply because the Australian organics industry has a zero tolerance to the presence of any GM materials in certified organic merchandise.
“In other nations, there is a tolerance for quite little levels of legally accepted seeds, or pollen, or no matter what, to be found in a crop, even in organics,” he mentioned. “In the United States, for instance, there are broad-scale examples of GM and natural crops being grown in near proximity. In fact, in some farming operations in the United States the very same farmer will be using both GM and organic production.”
The Australian court ruling has no direct impact upon U.S. law. While related issues and fears of “GMO contamination” are also widespread amid organic farmers in the US, there has been no case in which an organic farmer has misplaced natural certification because of cross pollination. Even so, typical growers have had grain rejected for shipment simply because of the presence of GMO seeds.
The US Department of Agriculture says there is no threshold for the sum of acceptable cross pollination, and handles the concern as such:
As opposed to several pesticides, there aren’t distinct tolerance levels in the USDA organic regulations for GMOs. As this kind of, National Organic Program policy states that trace amounts of GMOs don’t immediately indicate the farm is in violation of the USDA natural regulations. In these instances, the certifying agent will investigate how the inadvertent presence occurred and advocate how it can be much better prevented in the long term.
Decision fallout
Throughout a major overview in 2011-twelve, the USDA Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture (AC21) endorsed coexistence in between farmers expanding typical, natural and genetically modified crops and rejected calls by natural activists for “zero tolerance”:
Numerous commenters recommended that we set up a “threshold” for the unintended or adventitious presence of items of excluded strategies in natural products. Some commenters argued that a threshold is required because, with no the necessary labeling of biotechnology-derived items, organic operations and certifying agents could not be assured that items of excluded approaches had been not getting utilised. Other folks argued that, without having an established threshold, the laws would constitute a “zero tolerance” for items of excluded techniques, which would be extremely hard to attain.
