Friday, September 22, 2017

HBI Ordered by CA’s BRN to Stop Teaching How to ‘Reverse’ Abortion


If there was any doubt about California’s status as the nation’s standard-bearer for abortion, a letter sent September 5 by the state’s Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) should clear that up.  Acting at the behest of abortion activists in the state legislature and online media, BRN reversed its decision from just a month prior, sending Heartbeat International (HBI) a letter to demand that the pro-life pregnancy help network “cease and desist” offering nurses continuing education units (CEUs) for Abortion Pill Reversal classes.

Nationally, over 350-physicians have joined the Abortion Pill Reversal network; while some 300-mothers have successfully rescued their children from abortion through this medical intervention which introduces an emergency and ongoing progesterone treatment to counteract the first of two pills in the chemical abortion (RU-486) process.

The BRN’s sudden reversal seems a direct effort to deny a woman access to her own choice during an unexpected pregnancy, said HBI President Jor-El Godsey.  “This is a naked political assault on a procedure that is the very essence of choice,” Godsey said. “To oppose Abortion Pill Reversal is not only to deny the science and reality that there are children living today because of it, but it’s to materially keep a woman from even so much as knowing she has the option to potentially stop a chemical abortion once it has begun. This is the abortion lobby taking choices away from women.”

The letter, postmarked September 5 and received September 11, gives HBI 5-days from receipt of the letter to remove CEU credit from its online courses … offered online through the Heartbeat Academy.  It also marks a 180-degree shift from a letter the same BRN sent HBI and sister pro-life network, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), approving both organizations’ status as a continuing education providers.

The original letter, sent July 28, 2017, followed a 17-month period where the BRN reviewed hundreds of pages of submitted documentation starting in February 2016.  No subsequent paperwork or filing of any kind was requested prior to or cited in the most recent letter.

The BRN had originally questioned HBI’s inclusion of Abortion Pill Reversal courses during the audit process, but then agreed to reinstate the courses after HBI responded with a multi-point statement demonstrating the courses’ relevance to nursing practices.

While HBI is complying with the letter’s demand to remove CEU credit from its online Abortion Pill Reversal courses, the courses will still be activated while the organization appeals the BRN’s latest decree.  “How the Board of Nursing can play politics with the lives of women and children is beyond me,” Godsey said.  “If there were any hint of noncompliance on our part, it’s clear a 17-month audit would have uncovered it.  What could possibly have changed in one month’s time?  Meanwhile, nurses across California and the nation could be presented with patients who want to reverse their abortion decision before it is too late, and this new mandate prevents nurses from being prepared to serve their own patients.”

Meanwhile, radically pro-abortion media source Rewire.com reported September 8 — 3-days before HBI received the letter — that the letter had been sent.  The site had originally influenced San Francisco Bay Area Democrat State Senator Jerry Hill to call for the audit of HBI and others in early 2016.  After pushing the BRN to audit HBI — a nonprofit that serves 2,200 affiliates worldwide and operates a 24-7 pregnancy helpline, Option Line — Hill then proposed legislation that was eventually adopted by the state and signed into law in 2016 by Democrat Governor Jerry Brown that beefed up the requirements for nursing CEU providers.  That law, however — which mandated that courses rely only on “generally accepted scientific principles” — was insufficient to wield against the Abortion Pill Reversal courses.  Instead, the BRN cited California Code of Regulations (CCR) Section 1456 in its demand letter to HBI. 

Curiously, the section cited by the BRN pertains only to the need for courses to be “relevant to the practice of nursing,” differentiating between courses that deal with patient care (direct and indirect) and those which, “deal with self-improvement, changes in attitude, financial gain, and those courses designed for lay people … ”  Fitting that definition, HBI only offers CEU credit to nurses for Abortion Pill Reversal courses it offers online and at its annual conference.

HBI has been a California approved CEU provider since 2012, opting to go through California because the state’s CEUs are generally accepted throughout the U.S.  Since 2015, HBI has issued nursing CEUs to well over 400 nurses.

The BRN’s flip-flop fits into a larger pattern of the State of California’s targeting of political opponents who pose an alternative to abortion or otherwise threaten the abortion industry’s marketplace stranglehold.

In addition to pursuing charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt in response to their 3-year undercover work of exposing Planned Parenthood and others’ complicity in the trafficking of body parts harvested from aborted babies, the State of California also launched an assault on community funded pro-life pregnancy centers and medical clinics with a 2015 law that could be challenged at the U.S. Supreme Court in the near future.

Earlier this month, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by several California churches that are challenging the state’s Department of Managed Health Care requirement that all insurance companies cover the cost of their employees’ abortions.

“At this point, it’s hard to say we’re surprised by any effort to prop up the failing abortion industry,” Godsey said.  “But this is a direct effort to steal a mother’s choice right out from under her.  Women and men become nurses to help and serve others, but politically driven moves like this keep them from accomplishing their compassionate, God-given mission.”

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel

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