During the 2013 legislative session, the Missouri House and Senate passed House Bill 400 (HB 400), a bill sponsored by Jeanie Riddle (R-Mokane) that would ban telemedicine abortions in Missouri. It is now on the Governor's desk. Ask him to sign the bill!

Let's stop the spread of abortion through telemedicine!

by Planned Parenthood and at other facilities that perform non-surgical, or chemical, abortions. It acts by blocking the uterus's reception of progesterone, the hormone needed to support the development of the uterus and thus the unborn child in the womb.

In Iowa, RU-486 is being offered to pregnant women for non-surgical abortions through "telemedicine". These women speak with a physician via video-conferencing, and RU-486 is dispensed automatically out of the drawer of a machine at the remote location in which the woman finds herself.

HB 400 will prevent Planned Parenthood and others from setting up clinics in remote portions of Missouri to perform telemedicine abortions. During a hearing on HB 400 earlier this year, a former Planned Parenthood employee from Iowa testified that Planned Parenthood of Iowa added clinics after starting a telemedicine abortion practice there, increasing the number of Planned Parenthood clinics in Iowa from five to 17.  

HB 400 requires that a physician be present to administer RU-486, thereby preventing Planned Parenthood and others from setting up and performing telemedicine abortions in Missouri.

The Missouri House passed HB 400 by a vote of 115 to 39; the Missouri Senate passed it by a vote of 23 to 7. These votes constitute veto-proof majorities. If the governor were to veto the bill, his veto could easily be overridden. Let's encourage him to sign the bill into law, now so that Missouri does not become a state in which the evil of abortion is spread through the use of technology.

While modern technological advances have provided us with many blessings, it unfortunately has also made abortion available through the use of chemical drugs, ostensibly with the goal of making the process of having an abortion less invasive and expensive. The Internet and video- conferencing also make abortion more accessible in some states, presumably for the sake of convenience. Needless to say, this practice should be vigorously resisted.

In speaking against such modern developments, Pope John Paul II lamented the spread of what he termed a "conspiracy against life," stating:

"In order to facilitate the spread of abortion, enormous sums of money have been invested and continue to be invested in the production of pharmaceutical products, which make it possible to kill the fetus in the mother's womb without recourse to medical assistance. On this point, scientific research itself seems almost exclusively preoccupied with developing products which are ever more simple and effective in suppressing life and which at the same time are capable of removing abortion from any kind of control or social responsibility." (Evangelium Vitae, No.13)  

The common good demands that we avoid falling into the trap of spreading the evil of abortion at all, much less through the misappropriation of modern technology.