SENATOR JACQUE, REPRESENTATIVE MURPHY CIRCULATE BILL PROHIBITING UW EMPLOYEES FROM PERFORMING ABORTIONS
By Matt Sande, Pro-Life Wisconsin Legislative Director
State Senator André Jacque (R-De Pere) and State Representative Dave Murphy (R-Greenville) are currently circulating a bill that would prohibit both UW System and UW Hospital and Clinics Authority (UWHCA) employees from performing or assisting in the performance of abortions while in the scope of their employment. LRB-1845/1 would effectively end UW medical resident abortion training and UW faculty performance of abortions at the Madison Planned Parenthood abortion facility, a grisly arrangement that stains the reputation of Wisconsin’s public university system and flagship hospital.
In 2010, an open records request by Pro-Life Wisconsin and Alliance Defending Freedom revealed that since 2007, more than $58,000 of UW hospital authority funds had been used for abortion training at the Madison Planned Parenthood. The UW hospital authority paid physician medical residents in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health Ob/Gyn Department for two four-week rotations at Planned Parenthood, where they viewed and performed abortions with the oversight and assistance of department faculty.
In 2011, Governor Walker signed Act 32, the state biennial budget, which amended Wis. Stat. 20.927 to explicitly include the UW hospital authority as a "state agency" prohibited from funding abortions, with certain exceptions. The enactment of this provision was a focused effort to end the UW hospital authority’s continuing payments for medical residents performing abortions at the Madison Planned Parenthood.
However, the contractual agreement between the UW and Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin was renewed in a 2012 memorandum of understanding (MOU) in which payment for abortion services continued to flow from Planned Parenthood to UW. Regardless of who is paying for these abortions, this contractual relationship should be completely severed. LRB-1845/1 accomplishes this goal.
Importantly, the 2012 Planned Parenthood/UW MOU does more than merely pay for UW medical resident abortion training. It goes further by purchasing UW faculty hours to perform routine abortions at the abortion-only Madison Planned Parenthood facility and the now closed Appleton North/Grand Chute abortion facility. Planned Parenthood is paying or, according to the UW, "reimbursing" UW employees to do their abortions at a rate of $150/hour between 16 and 20 hours per week. If this arrangement does not technically violate Wisconsin’s current law abortion funding prohibition (and we believe it does), it most certainly violates the spirit of it.
Regarding the UW’s specious claim that this legislation would strip their Ob/Gyn medical residency program of its ACGME accreditation, federal law is crystal clear on this matter. The Hoekstra-Coats Medical Training Nondiscrimination Act of 1995 (42 U.S.C § 238n) declares that an entity that forces individuals or programs to participate in abortions is discriminatory. Accordingly, the ACGME abortion training mandate has never been enforced (nor can it be).
University of Wisconsin faculty members should not be spending their paid time providing abortions, or any services, at private abortion facilities. And Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin should not be an abortion-training ground for UW medical residents. These residents need to be instructed in how to save, preserve, and respect life, not how to kill preborn children at our state’s number-one abortion provider. Ob/Gyn medical residents can be effectively trained in addressing the complications of abortion without actually performing abortions.
Abortion - the direct, intentional killing of a preborn child - is not health care. And in poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly say they oppose taxpayer-funded abortion. A Knights of Columbus/Marist Poll released on January 27, 2021, showed 77% of respondents opposing the use of tax dollars to pay for abortions overseas and 58% opposing the use of tax dollars to fund abortions in the United States.
Pro-Life Wisconsin thanks Senator Jacque and Representative Murphy for re-introducing legislation that finally and fully ends the scandal of Wisconsin’s public employees doing Planned Parenthood’s dirty work. This has gone on far too long and should never have occurred at all. We strongly encourage state legislators to co-sponsor this critical legislation.