A session during an international pro-abortion conference identified the existence of the Roman Catholic Church as one of the major obstacles to making elective abortion available globally, said the former executive director of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG).
During an interview with cardiologist Peter McCullough, M.D. for his Courageous Discourse Substack’s “Profiles in Valor,” board-certified OB/GYN Donna Harrison, M.D. said she once had an opportunity to attend “incognito” the first world-wide pro-abortion conference.
“And what I learned there was a little bit astounding,” she shared regarding one of the conference’s breakout sessions:
They were talking about what are the obstacles to making elective abortion available worldwide … And what they said was that there’s four obstacles: number one, conscientious objection by Hippocratic healthcare physicians; number two, the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, and Protestant missionaries in healthcare; number three, ultrasound, which unfortunately turns the mind of the mother toward the humanity of her fetus; and number four, the people don’t want elective abortion, but we’re gonna give it to them anyway – through the legal system.
“I was astounded,” Harrison said. “What an elitist view, and having nothing to do with, and actually directly opposed to the Hippocratic Oath,” in which physicians make a commitment to “do no harm.”
Harrison said that, since that conference, pro-abortion activists have been waging war against conscientious objection and the Hippocratic Oath.
The former AAPLOG CEO delivered an address titled “Restoring the Oath of Hippocrates as a Foundation of American Medicine” in late October at the annual conference of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). Harrison is currently AAPLOG’s director of research.
McCullough delivered the keynote address at the AAPS conference. Noting the topic of Harrison’s talk, he observed “how in the last few years, it’s been obvious that doctors have walked directly away from the Hippocratic Oath.”
Harrison further explained: “Part of my talk was to explain that the state actors that want control of medicine see physicians as agents of the state.” The argument that since physicians are licensed by the state they should also be agents of the state is “terrifying,” she asserted.
“We’ve done this experiment in history and it does not turn out well,” she observed. “Look at Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany. Now it’s China, Cuba – you look at places where the state controls the doctors. They’re the most dangerous people on the planet.”
“That’s a stunning set of revelations,” responded McCullough, who has denounced the COVID vaccines and championed early treatment for the virus.
Harrison noted Hippocrates’ assertion that “there’s something different about medicine”:
There’s something about caring for the patient, no matter what. No matter whether that patient is rich or poor, no matter where they’re from, that we value human life and this particular profession: Hippocratic medical practices dedicated to the life of their patient. That’s the Hippocratic doctors’ primary fiduciary is the life of their patients – not the third party payer, not the state. It’s not public health. It’s a doctor-patient relationship and a solemn promise of never doing you harm.
McCullough asked Harrison to discuss the “drivers” of the “age-old” abortion debate.
In the United States, she observed, most doctors abided by the Hippocratic Oath until the 1940s and 50s. Prior to that era, the early 20th century was beginning to see a frenzy among certain sectors of society that “we had too many people on the planet, and we had to get rid of the bad people and allow for the good people, and that was the start of the eugenics movement at that time.”
Harrison explained that, during the 1930s, the Rockefeller Foundation established the Office of Population at Princeton University:
And that was to do research on population issues, with the understanding of population control. In the 1950s, John D. Rockefeller III called together very elitist funders, as well as conservationists and other people, and formed what’s called a Population Council, which was to fund research and to do research on how to control the population, which they considered to be out of control – too many poor people reproducing. So, they were going to look at ways of controlling the population. This wouldn’t have meant much except that it also became an idea that took hold in the U.S. government.
She provided the example that the Population Council obtained grants to explore funding a drug that would “cause early pregnancy to die.”
“Well, that reality came about in the 1980s,” she said. “And that research was funded by USAID and the National Center for Child Health and Human Development. That’s federal funding of the current drug that is used for abortions – Mifeprex is the trade name, mifepristone is the generic name.”
“But we have such a committed interest in population control that it became a top-down and post policy,” Harrison said.
The pro-life physician said the practice of medicine has gone through a structural change, with medical schools today having “walked away” from the Hippocratic Oath.
“Usually, it’s the money and usually it’s the political pressure,” she said, explaining that with the move away from direct patient care to third-party insurance payers in medicine, “what you saw was, somebody else is intruding in that doctor-patient relationship. Somebody else is coming between the physician and the patient, making it very difficult to focus the primary fiduciary on the patient.”
Insurance companies, Harrison said, now call the shots on what should be decisions made between doctors and patients.
“And this is in direct contrast actually to the Hippocratic Oath,” she asserted.
