News Notes

Oregon "health care" may pay for sex changes, assisted suicide

The plan covers about 350,000 Oregonians with incomes below the poverty line, and the Oregon Health Service Commission is now deciding what services it will ask the 1999 Legislature to provide them.
Commission chair Alan Bates says he hopes the debate will not be about how much the controversial services cost, but on the ethical issues involved.

French pro-lifer seeks refuge at Vatican Embassy

Paris, FRANCE -- On December 10, a leading French anti-abortionist militant facing court proceedings took refuge at the Vatican embassy in Paris and asked for political asylum.
Radio France-Info said Doctor Xavier Dor had said he would leave the embassy only on orders from Pope John Paul. Pope John Paul visited France last August, paying a controversial visit to the grave of his geneticist friend Jerome Lejeune who inspired his hardline stance against abortion. No comment was immediately available from the embassy.
But only one day after taking refuge, Dor left the Vatican embassy in Paris.
A spokesman for the French Bishop's Conference said Doctor Xavier Dor, who campaigns against France's two-decade-old legalization of abortion, left of his own volition.
Chief Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a statement, "In this case, there were no elements to invoke the right to political asylum. It was, rather, a typical case of conscientious objection."
The embassy said Dor left at 9:15 a.m. (0815 GMT) after spending the night there.
A court is due to rule later on a prosecutor's request to jail Dor for eight months for occupying a hospital near Paris earlier this year to try and disrupt abortions. The prosecutor has also asked that Dor be made to serve previous suspended terms for similar protests.

Peru accused of sterilizing women

Huaycan, PERU -- Angelica Condori was sterilized seven months ago by state doctors at her shantytown's health clinic. An illiterate housewife living in Huaycan, a community of straw and cardboard hovels east of Lima, Condori was pregnant with her third child but did not have the $50 needed to pay for a doctor and medicine.
She says health officials offered her free medical services for the birth if she agreed to a tubal ligation. No one told her that the operation was irreversible, she says.
Women's groups charge that thousands of poor women like Condori are being tricked or pressured into being surgically sterilized by state health officials as part of a campaign to control Peru's high birth rate.
"I agreed to be sterilized because it was the only way to get a doctor when I gave birth and they were insistent that I should accept,'' she said.
Activists allege that the health ministry has set sterilization quotas for state doctors in poor areas and these doctors are taking advantage of the women to meet the quotas.
The government denies that it is carrying out a campaign to sterilize the poor. It says the operations are done with the woman's consent. State doctors performed 110,000 sterilizations in 1997, which will result in 26,000 fewer births in 1998, Health Ministry officials say.
A just-completed study by Flora Tristan Women's Center, Peru's largest women's group, found that poor pregnant women are regularly offered free birth services in exchange for agreeing to tubal ligations.
"They often agree to be sterilized solely out of economic desperation,'' said Ivonne Macassi, Flora Tristan's director.
The study also found that many doctors deceive the women about the surgery's risks and provide no follow-up medical care.
Condori says the operation has left her with stabbing pains in her stomach. She walks slightly bent over. She says she received no doctors visits after the operation and does not have enough money to pay for a check up.
The study found five women who had died because of botched tubal ligations, dozens who suffer post-operative health problems, several cases where women were sterilized without their consent during Caesarian sections and permanent sterilizations of women as young as 20. News reports have cited cases of women in areas with high malnutrition being offered bags of food in exchange for agreeing to a tubal ligation.
"We found that the doctors often humiliate the women, calling them ignorant and saying they won't be treated at the state health post next time if they don't accept the surgery,'' said Guilia Tamayo, a lawyer for Flora Tristan.
Members of the conservative opposition Renovation party have collected more than 1,000 complaints from women who say they were either injured by tubal ligations or were pressured into agreeing to the operation. The findings have ignited a bitter scandal pitting an odd alliance of feminist and Catholic groups against the government of President Alberto Fujimori.
"Poor women are not cattle to be sterilized by the thousands without telling them what is being done. This never happens to wealthy women,'' said Nela Julcarine, who works in a health care cooperative in Huaycan.

Pro-aborts want "frequent flier" miles

New York, NY -- A women's advocacy group is trying to freeze anti-abortion activist Randall Terry's frequent flier miles in the hope that it will prompt him to pay court-ordered penalties.
"It's about time that Terry and Operation Rescue had their wings clipped," said attorney Martha Davis, legal director of the National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The New York-based fund has asked 13 airlines to freeze any mileage earned by the founder of Operation Rescue, who is now running for Congress in upstate New York. If the airlines refuse, the fund said it may file a motion in federal court seeking compliance. The fund would like to transfer any miles Terry might have to its attorneys and their clients.
Davis said at a news conference that Terry and his associates have not paid millions of dollars in fines for actions against abortion clinics in the past decade. The fund obtained only $6,000 in 1993 by freezing Terry's bank account.
Reached by telephone in Washington, where he was helping to prepare an anti-abortion march, Terry said he owed "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in court fines but did not know the exact amount.
"We will fight this through the courts to the end," Terry, 38, said. "These people are baby killers and they are grandstanding."
U.S. Airways, one of the airlines named by the fund, said it had no comment on the fund's request.
"Frequent flier programs are private, between us and the member," said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the airline.
Other airlines named by the fund include United, Delta, American Airlines, TWA, Tower Air, Continental and Northwest -- all of which Terry, who is from Binghamton, New York, can use to travel in the Northeast. He would not say which airlines he uses.
Terry, who entered the anti-abortion movement in the late 1980s and built Operation Rescue into a national force, spent five months in prison in 1992 for contempt after an Operation Rescue member defied a court order and presented then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton with an aborted fetus at the Democratic National Convention in New York.
The NOW fund is trying to collect $42,000 levied by a Maryland judge in a case filed in 1989 to keep Operation Rescue from obstructing access to Washington-area clinics.
Terry and Operation Rescue owe at least another half a million dollars in court-ordered fines in connection with two 1989 lawsuits brought by the fund in Washington and New York. The fines would go to the clinics and help pay legal costs.
Legal precedents for transferring frequent flier miles include a half dozen cases in which a person was awarded a spouse's mileage as part of a divorce settlement, Davis said.
"Let them use my frequent-flier miles on their train ride to Hades," said Terry.

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