Maryland House of Delegates Speaker Adrienne A. Jones, a Democrat, at a MD Dems Women’s Diversity Leadership Council event, Dec. 4, 2019. / Edward Kimmel via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Annapolis, Md., Apr 11, 2022 / 17:00 pm (CNA).
A Maryland law set to take effect July 1 will allow non-physicans to perform abortions, and allot $3.5 million per year for “abortion care” training in the state.
“By enacting this law, Democrat lawmakers have now de-medicalized abortion and removed abortion from the spectrum of health care,” Laura Bogley, the director of legislation for Maryland Right to Life, told CNA. “As a result, many more women will be injured or killed by substandard abortion practices without any protection under Maryland law.”
Maryland House and Senate members, the majority of whom are Democrats, voted April 9 to override Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto of House Bill 937, the Abortion Care Access Act.
Among other things, the act establishes an “Abortion Care Clinical Training Program” to “protect access to abortion care by ensuring that there are a sufficient number of health professionals to provide abortion care.”
Maryland’s Department of Health, the bill reads, will contract with a nonprofit coordinating organization to administer the program and grants for “abortion care training programs” at at least two community-based provider sites.
This organization will support “abortion care clinicial training” to “qualified providers” — providers who are broadly defined as any physician, nurse practitioner, nurse-midwife, licensed certified midwife, physician assistant, or any other individual who is “licensed, certified, or authorwise authorized by law to practice in the state” and “for whom the performance of an abortion is within the scope of the individuals’ license or certification.”
Each fiscal year, the act reads, the governor must allot $3.5 million in the state’s budget to this program.
The legislation comes as the Supreme Court prepares to issue a ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that directly challenges Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. If Roe is overturned, abortion law could be left up to each state.
“Abortion activists in the Maryland Democrat Caucuses are no longer pretending that they want abortion to be safe, legal and rare. They only care that abortion is legal and lucrative,” Bogley told CNA, before later adding, “So the question for Maryland voters is why should we be forced to pay for abortions under Medicaid or through higher health insurance premiums?”
Abortion insurance coverage
The act instructs insurers, nonprofit health service plans, and health maintanence organizations providing labor and delivery coverage under state policies or contracts to cover “abortion care services” without “a deductible, co-insurance, co-payment, or any other cost-sharing requirement.”
Abortion for minors
The act states that a “qualified provider” may not perform an abortion on an unmarried minor unless the provider gives notice to the parent or guardian, with broad exceptions. The provider is not required to give notice if the minor does not live with the parent or guardian, or if “a reasonable effort to give notice to a parent or guardian is unsuccessful.”
A qualified provider may also refrain from giving notice if it might lead to physical or emotional abuse of the minor, if the minor is “mature and and capable of giving informed consent to an abortion,” or if such notice would “not be in the best interest of the minor.”
Unborn viability
The act defines “viable” as “that stage when, in the best clinic judgment of the qualified provider . . . there is a reasonable likelihood” that an unborn baby could survive outside the womb.
The state cannot prohibit a woman from obtaining an abortion before her unborn baby reaches viability, or at any point in pregnancy if it is necesary for her life or health or if her baby “is affected by genetic defect or serious deformity or abnormality,” the act says.
How many states are doing this?
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive research organization once associated with Planned Parenthood, 36 states currently require abortion to be performed by a licensed pysician.
That includes four states where abortion must be performed by a licensed physician, but only for surgical abortion (versus abortion by pill): New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Rhode Island. In Mississippi, the law limits abortion provision to OB/GYNs.
The group listed Washington, D.C. and 14 states as not requiring a licensed physician: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.
Beginning in July, that list will include Maryland.
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And there are no suspects?? At the risk of sounding like a broken record I will say again: Security cameras and alarms are needed at all Catholic churches. I am aware that some churches simply dont want to spend the money in this way, but to fail to take action makes these pastors derelict in their responsibilities. The fact is a security camera system is well cheaper than attempting to rebuild a church which has been burned to the ground. Wake up. This is not 1940 and the criminal haters who commit these types of crimes no longer fear God or the reaction of neighbors. I dare say some would expect plaudits from certain quarters for their actions. Disgusting.
Our church used to be open 24/7. Then some (probably drunks) went in one night and peed on the carpet by the confessional and did some other minor damage, so it is locked most of the time.
It is located near a major expressway (less than two miles either way for an exit). As a greeting usher (a dwindling number in our parish), I stay in the back waiting for the late arrivals and often wonder what to do if a gunperson arrives. Some parishes lock down unchecked walkin shortly after mass starts, requiring someone to open the door from the inside and some don’t.
Your comment that security cameras will prevent attacks is not necessarily correct, as many will disguise themselves. Resurrection in Lansing MI was nastily vandalized from the outside and they have the hooded pro abortion/anti Christians on tape but who are they? If they are on someone’s payroll they will likely be well heeled in their deviant disguises, paint and efficient tools.
Nowall. I did not say a camera would prevent ALL crimes. But most criminals are not interested in getting caught,and criminals who know there is a camera or alarm system will often do their vandalism elsewhere. Its a known thing in the home alarm business that sometimes even putting up a sign saying your house is alarmed, when in fact it is not, will prompt a criminal to walk away rather than risk detection. And the camera may at least help catch the person who perpetrated the crime.Will it deter 100% of criminals? No, sadly it wont. But it is most certainly worth a try. Your church must be in a rough part of a city for you to worry about armed assailants. Those churches which need the doors locked after services start must be in very sad situations. On the plus side their members must make it a point to arrive at church on time!!! (a bad joke), The “solution” to crime, all crime, quite frankly is that criminals, no matter their color, MUST pay a penalty for their crimes. Failure to deliver consequences for anti social and hate behaviors almost guarantees they will commit the crime again.Society can only tolerate that for so long before we devolve into violent chaos.
“Lucifer is right,” “Devil, take me with you,” “Thank you, Satan”.
Rebellion against divine order exemplified by Lucifer echoes in the words. Freedom, the equivalent of licentiousness, is and always the result, occurring in France, which has a longer legacy of philosophical, intellectual leaning, underway as well in the US. Scandal within the Church gives the moral anarchist greater sense of justification.
Evil manifest here assumes a theological focus. Perhaps premonition of what lies ahead of us. It’s difficult not to entertain this thought with what’s occurring in our Church. We’ve taken leaps of impossible corruption of Christ’s revealed truth in so short a time. Error pouring out of clergy from low to high rank abounds. And yet there’s remarkable light effusing from pockets of faith that say that if things are not well, there remains, though better said, a grace inspired strengthening, hope giving, enlivening.
That the Blessed Sacrament is exposed shows the diabolical origins of these messages and those who wrote them!
Hearts that are searching for God…but in all the wrong places. These are the fruits of a misplaced, misdirected search for God. Hearts in need of conversion.
Amen, Deacon Edward.
I honestly don’t know what’s worse: Attacks like this from the outside, or attacks from heretical and schismatic prelates from the inside.