Tag Archives: Zika virus

What The Gridlock In Congress Is Really About

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Unions and corporations make donations to Congressional candidates. Some groups that take money from the government also lobby Congress and make campaign contributions. That’s not really the way it should be, but that is the way it is. One of the largest contributors to Democratic campaign coffers is Planned Parenthood. They generally get their money’s worth. This has become very obvious in the debate over funding the battle against the Zika virus.

Yesterday Life News posted an article about the battle over Zika virus funding.

The article reports:

Pro-abortion Democrats are still holding up aid funding for the Zika virus with demands that more taxpayer dollars go to the abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

Democrats both in the U.S. House and Senate have been blocking aid bills to combat the virus for months because it doesn’t include funding for a few Planned Parenthood facilities in Puerto Rico.

On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said they would continue to block the aid funding unless the abortion chain gets more funding. The pro-abortion Democrat said she is willing to compromise with Republicans on other issues but not on the Planned Parenthood funding, The Hill reports.

Abortion has become a major issue related to the Zika virus because of a possible link to birth defects. New research suggests the virus may not be to blame for the uptick in birth defects in some areas affected by the virus. Still, abortion advocates have been using the virus as an excuse to push for more abortions on babies with disabilities. Some pro-abortion groups even have been scaring women into aborting their unborn babies without knowing if they have Zika or if their unborn baby has a disability.

Senate Democrats blocked the latest version of the aid bill on Tuesday because it prohibited funding from going to the abortion giant. Pro-abortion legislators claim that the abortion giant is essential in the fight against the Zika virus because it provides contraception and other health services to women.

Planned Parenthood’s main mission is not to provide health services to women–it may do that, but it is not how the organization makes its money.

In September 2015, the Heritage Foundation reported:

Although Planned Parenthood Federation of America reportedly requires all affiliates to have at least one clinic that performs abortions,[4] Planned Parenthood’s annual report does not identify the number of affiliated clinics that provide abortion services or how much of Planned Parenthood’s total revenue results from abortions. Instead, the report claims that abortions account for only 3 percent of the medical services Planned Parenthood affiliates provide.[5]

How does the Planned Parenthood annual report arrive at the 3 percent figure? The calculation counts each “discrete clinical interaction” as a separate “medical service,” meaning simple tests or routine provision of birth control are given the same weight as surgical or chemical abortions.[6] For example, if a woman in the course of a year receives a free condom, a pregnancy test, a sexually transmitted infection (STI) test, and an abortion, Planned Parenthood would say abortion was only 25 percent of the services provided.

Even with Planned Parenthood’s broad definition of “medical service,” data reported in the organization’s annual report suggest that roughly 12 percent of people who received a service from Planned Parenthood affiliates received an abortion during the reporting year.[7]

Despite a nearly 20 percent decline in the number of abortions in the country between 2000 and 2011,[8] the number of abortions Planned Parenthood performed during that time increased from 197,070 to 333,964, thereby more than doubling its share of the abortion market from 15 percent in 2000 to 32 percent in 2011,[9] the latest year for which national data are available.

Planned Parenthood affiliates perform about 20 abortions for every prenatal care visit and about 200 abortions for every adoption referral based on the approximately 300,000 abortions they perform each year.[10]

Follow the link above to the Heritage Foundation article to review the references.

This is another ‘follow the money’ story about Washington, D.C. As a voter, you are responsible for putting the current Congress in office. If you don’t like what they are doing, get involved and vote them out.

The Zika virus may not get the funding to stop it because the Democrats want to reward one of their major campaign donors. If that bothers you, it’s time to get involved.

 

Can Anyone Stop This Runaway Train?

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Actually, there are two runaway trains–one is federal spending and the other is overreach by President Obama. Yesterday The Daily Signal posted an article that illustrates both of them. The article was written by Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma.

The article reports:

Last week, the Senate passed legislation to address and prevent the spread of the Zika virus. However, the Senate failed to pay for it, and instead approved a $1.1 billion “emergency” spending supplemental bill that is not subject to the budgetary caps that were agreed to last year.

While congressional inattention to the budget crisis is inexcusable, it is even more disturbing that the Obama administration already has the authority to pay for a Zika response from existing agency budgets, but chose not to.

…But an international medical emergency has now become a U.S. budget emergency, a major debt crisis that will impact our children as well.

If there was a way to both respond to Zika and prevent new debt spending, wouldn’t it be reasonable to do that? The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of State, and International Assistance Programs currently have about $80 billion in unobligated funds.

A small fraction of this could be reprogrammed and redirected to respond to the Zika emergency and not add any additional debt to our nation’s children. This is exactly the type of authority the Obama administration asked for in 2009 during the height of the H1N1 virus scare.

…In a floor speech last week, I also shed light on the fact that Congress last December provided the Obama administration with authority to pull money from bilateral economic assistance to foreign countries.

They can use those funds to combat infectious diseases, if the administration believed there is an infectious disease emergency. In the middle of the Zika epidemic, the administration did use their authority to pull money from foreign aid and spend it, but they didn’t use it for Zika.

You might ask—so what did the administration spend the infectious disease money on earlier this year?

You guessed it… climate change.

It gets worse.:

In March, President Obama gave the United Nations $500 million out of an account under bilateral economic assistance to fund the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.

Congress refused to allocate funding for the U.N. Climate Change Fund last year, so the president used this account designated for international infectious diseases to pay for his priority.

While I understand that intelligent people can disagree on the human effects on the global climate, it is hard to imagine a reason why the administration would prioritize the U.N. Green Climate Fund over protecting the American people, especially pregnant women, from the Zika virus.

The U.N. Green Climate Fund is connected to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which recently accepted the “State of Palestine” as a signatory. There is currently in place a U.S. funding prohibition that forbids any taxpayer dollars to fund international organizations that recognize “Palestine” as a sovereign state. Evidently the Obama Administration chose to ignore that prohibition and also to create more debt that our children and grandchildren will have to deal with. Someone needs to stop this runaway train.

We Need A Solution For The Spreading Zika Virus

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Yesterday The Tampa Tribune posted a story about the spreading Zika virus.

The article states:

Warrior greenies, get out of the way. You’ve done enormous hurt in this world, you appear prepared to keep it up, and it’s time to allow people their health, their lives and a chance to fight back more effectively against mosquitoes that have been having at us from ancient times to right this minute.

Those insects are presently doing their egregious harm in a new, emphatic way in Brazil and more than 20 other Latin American countries and territories. They are biting people and infecting them with a pathogen called Zika. The virus has been around for decades but for the first time is believed to be causing a birth defect shrinking the skulls and damaging the brains of babies. It may also cause a syndrome that paralyzes people and it has even sneaked into the United States. The reported estimate is that 4 million people could be hit with Zika by the time we get to 2017.

This is a serious problem–the mosquitoes carrying the virus are moving north into America. Some people in the scientific community are wondering if it is time to bring back DDT.

The article reports:

It’s true that some other heedful countries have had less success with DDT, sometimes because of inadequate funding, and have had good success with other techniques. It’s true, too, that more potential ill effects of DDT have been noted, although there is still not the slightest hint of anything anywhere comparable to what malaria does. What’s clear is that DDT is now needed in South America. As noted in The New York Times, one person who favors such weaponry against Zika is Dr. Lyle Petersen, not exactly someone in the uninformed sector of the population. He is the director of vector-borne diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We need to get back to the concept of balance. If DDT can help stop this epidemic and save lives, we need to use it on a limited basis to kill the mosquitoes carrying the disease. I realize that we don’t want to spoil the environment, but I do believe that we need to save lives if we can.