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Contents © 1998
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

July/August 1998

How prolific an abortionist is Allred? He owns 21 abortion clinics in California and two in Chicago....Early in his 30-year medical career, Allred boasted that he worked from 6 a.m. to midnight performing abortions on "planeloads" of women, trying not to spend more than five minutes with each patient. "We've been pioneers in so many ways," he once told a reporter. "We streamlined, we made efficiencies, we employed the suction technique better than anyone, and we eliminated needless patient-physician contact."

In 1980, he claimed to have personally aborted 250,000 fetuses during the previous 12 years. The number of abortions Allred has conducted in the past 18 years is not known. "I don't discuss numbers anymore," the doctor recently told the Weekly....

Abortion has been very good to Allred. After a two-year stint as an Army doctor, he began his private practice in 1967 with a "negative net worth." Today he owns several exclusive mansions, a fleet of expensive cars and jets, Rolling A Ranches in Nevada, and New Mexico's prestigious Ruidoso Downs racecourse, where slot-machine gambling is legal. To protect himself from anti-abortion zealots in the past, he reportedly has traveled with a 16-member security force. In 1989, Allred parlayed his fortune into partial ownership of the $47 million Los Alamitos Race Course in Cypress. This February, the quarter-horse aficionado (he stables more than 400 of them) announced that he had bought out his last major partner to become sole owner of the lucrative racetrack, which takes in more than $1 million in bets daily....

Through his numerous business entities and associates, he has given at least $436,050 to the Republican Party, its California candidates and causes. Most of the contributions were made during the past four election cycles. Beneficiaries include such Republican officials as Pete Wilson; Congressman Dana Rohrabacher; state treasurer and current U.S. Senate candidate Matt Fong; state Senators John Lewis and Ross Johnson; and Assembly members Curt Pringle (who is running for state treasurer) and Scott Baugh. Except for Wilson, each is a self-described "anti-abortion" Republican who enjoys staunch support from such religious-fundamentalist groups as the Christian Coalition, the California Pro-Life Council, the Pro-Life Political Action Committee of Orange County, and the Reverend Lou Sheldon's Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition....

Allred's contributions and interest-free loans to Baugh, Johnson and Pringle graphically illustrate the abortion doctor's influence in Orange County GOP circles. Baugh -- a lifelong Baptist and graduate of the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia -- has not yet served a full term in Sacramento, but Allred-controlled businesses and organizations have already contributed at least $39,000 to his campaign and legal-defense funds....

Pringle was no less eager for Allred's money. The onetime Assembly speaker from Garden Grove took $3,000 on March 9, 1996; $11,000 on Nov. 2; $5,000 on Dec. 30; $250 on June 2, 1997; $2,000 on June 18; and $5,000 on March 17, 1998. Cathleen Monji, one of Allred's medical administrative assistants, gave Pringle another $1,000 on Nov. 2, 1996, and $2,000 on June 24, 1997.

Allred supported veteran Newport Beach politician Johnson with $15,000 on Oct. 16, 1996, and 72 days later, another $2,000....Bob Dornan has taken no money from the doctor, whom he has publicly called a "baby destroyer" and a "greedy abortionist...just raking in the dollars." Such sentiment is not shared by Attorney General Dan Lungren. Allred said he and the Republican's anti-abortion, anti-gambling nominee for governor had an "enjoyable" lunch together at the racetrack two years ago. A week later, Lungren returned Allred's sizable contribution. "I don't think he wanted to be connected to me," Allred said. "But we certainly support him."

If Lungren is shy about his association with the abortion doctor, Wilson is not. The governor's numerous political committees and causes have taken at least $294,750. One day alone, Allred handed Wilson $50,000....

The generosity has been appreciated. In 1994, the governor appointed Allred to a two-year term on the California Horse Racing Commission, the same agency charged with overseeing racetracks like the one Allred operates. Lewis and Johnson co-sponsored legislation in 1995 that would have allowed a handful of the state's horse racetracks to open casino-style betting clubs. Had it passed, the new law could have eventually -- if local authorities also approved the move -- yielded millions more in gambling profits for Allred. (State Senator Ken Maddy -- another "anti-abortion" Republican who takes money from Allred -- wrote the gambling-expansion bill.) The next year, Pringle and Baugh ensured that Allred's contributions would continue to flow: they helped kill a bill to limit gambling-industry gifts to state legislators. In May, Congressman Steve Horn honored the doctor by placing his name in the Congressional Record for "persistent and professional dedication" to health care. Allred has given the Long Beach Republican $4,000.

-- "The Abortionist Who Funds Pro-Life Republicans," by R. Scott Moxley, Orange Country Weekly, June 26, 1998


VIOLENCE AGAINST CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES IS ON THE RISE worldwide, according to the Vatican Congregation for Evangelization. Fides, a news service sponsored by that Congregation, reported that 68 missionaries were killed in 1997. That marked a substantial increase over 1996, when 48 missionaries were slain. Already this year there have been 10 missionaries killed....

Most of the victims of this violence were Catholics of African origin: 8 from Rwanda, 6 from Congo, and 1 from Nigeria as well as 40 seminarians from Burundi. There were 3 missionaries from India who gave their lives in 1997, and 2 from Brazil. Other victims were from Canada, Colombia, the Philippines, Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United States.

-- "Martyrs of Today," from "World Watch" in Catholic World Report, June 1998


MICROSOFT'S BILL GATES RECENTLY GAVE A SEVEN-FIGURE SUM to the United Nations Population Fund. No surprise there, certainly. Just as "reproductive services" is a euphemism for abortion, so "population" in this context usually means depopulation. Going back to John D. Rockefeller, this has been perhaps the most enthusiastically embraced cause of the rich....

Another population worrier, Ted Turner of CNN, promised $100 million a year for ten years to the United Nations itself. Wisely, he decided on further reflection not to give the money to existing U.N. programs. Expense accounts would blossom. An aide surely warned Turner that within existing programs, the money would literally be eaten up -- in New York City restaurants. Instead, he will be selecting from a "menu" of new programs, intended (I gather) to help "the poorest of the poor." Right on....

David Packard died in 1996, but his long-time partner William Hewlett, 85, is of like mind in this as in business matters. His William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which ambitiously seeks "the well-being of mankind," and is administered by Hewlett's son Walter, has poured tens of millions of dollars into population control. Believing that "rapid population growth continues to be a significant worldwide problem," it supports family planning in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, and gives grants to such well-established groups as the Population Council and the U.N. Population Fund. One year it gave $450,000 to the radical Catholics for a Free Choice.

-- "The Hazards of Charity," by Tom Bethell, The American Spectator, July 1998


OVER THE LAST SEVERAL MONTHS, bills on partial-birth abortion have been struck down in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona, and Nebraska....

The charge on "vagueness" has run through all of the cases, as serviceable as it is implausible. In Ohio, the Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit found something too hazy, apparently, in the definition of the "D&X" procedure (dilation and extraction), the procedure that marks the partial birth abortion....

The problem of vagueness"...is not in the language, or the clarity of the statute. It lies rather in the fact that there is no clear way of distinguishing the killing done on the child near birth from the killing routinely done in other, even grislier abortions.

-- "Out of This Nettle, Danger," by Hadley Arkes, Crisis, June 1998


ON APRIL 20, 1998, A TWELVE-YEAR LEGAL BATTLE KNOWN AS NOW V. SCHEIDLER culminated in a federal jury decision against Joe Scheidler, the director of the Pro-Life Action League, along with his co-defendants Tim Murphy and Andrew Scholberg and another activist organization, Operation Rescue....

How will pro-life activists respond to the threat of lawsuits? Joe Scheidler contends that the Chicago decision will energize the movement, and that it will not prevent any type of picketing. Even Scheidler, however, acknowledges that massive rescues are a thing of the past. As he indicated in a recent interview, "We have to pray the women out of the clinics."

-- "Do They Look Like Gansters?", by Keith Schieber, Catholic World Report, June 1998


DOWN THERE [IN STEPHEN D. MUMFORD'S BASEMENT] are more than 300,000 tiny yellow pellets in rows of white plastic jars. The pellets, made of a compound known as quinacrine, are bound for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco and more than a dozen other countries. There, in remote, often filthy clinics and doctors' offices, they will be used to sterilize some of the world's poorest women.

In the past decade, quinacrine pellets supplied by Mr. Mumford have been responsible for the irreversible chemical sterilization of more than 100,000 Third World women. There are enough pellets in his basement at the moment to sterilize 20,000 more.

Inserted directly into the uterus, quinacrine (pronounced KWIN-a-krin) prevents pregnancy by scarring the fallopian tubes. No anesthesia is used, and the procedure is painful; some women faint. For many, short-term side effects include abnormal menstrual bleeding, backaches, fever, lower abdominal pain and headaches.

Longer-term consequences are less certain but potentially more ominous: Independent laboratory studies in the U.S. indicate that quinacrine causes cells to mutate. Some scientists say this is circumstantial evidence that it may cause cancer as well; according to the World Health Organization, between 60% and 80% of known mutagens are also carcinogens.

Because questions of safety and efectiveness haven't been resolved, quinacrine sterilizations aren't permitted in the U.S. They are also opposed by nearly all major family-planning organizations and by many foreign governments....

World-wide, Mr. Mumford and his partner, a like-minded contraceptive researcher named Elton Kessel, are the sole distributors of the substance. In a remarkably quiet crusade, they have managed to pay for its manufacture in Switzerland, arrange for its free distribution in about 20 countries and mobilize a far-flung network of doctors, nurses and midwives to administer it....

Mr. Mumford blames the Catholic Church for discouraging population control while promoting the migration of Catholics to the U.S. to bolster the strength of the church in this country. "Overpopulation is a gravely serious national-security issue, even more serious than the nuclear threat," warns Mr. Mumford, who calls his tiny, not-for-profit organization the Center for Research on Population and Security. "The security survival interest of the U.S. is in conflict with the papacy's long-term survival," he adds....

From the start, the two men's bare-bones financial needs -- about $1 million over the past decade -- have been met by an assortment of U.S. backers, some of them linked to the anti-immigration movement.

Their most devoted fund-raisers are Donald A. Collins and Sally G. Epstein, a Washington, D.C., couple. Both are on the board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a group that, like Mr. Mumford, favors sharp reductions in immigration.

-- "Population Bomb," by Alix M. Freedman, The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 1998


IN 1970 JAMES LONG WAS WORKING TOWARDS HIS BACHELOR'S DEGREE in biology at the University of Virginia. He had grown up in the Methodist Church, and had been very active in it; but now he began to read books that made him take a new look at his faith, especially J.B. Phillips' Your God Is Too Small.

"I realized," he says, "that I did not have a personal relationship with Christ. I asked Him into my life then."

In 1976 he completed his M.D., also at the University of Virginia, and began work as an obstetrician/gynecologist. He would never do abortions or IUDs: "The evidence is extremely clear that those kill a child who at conception is a unique individual and child of God. I also was not comfortable with progesterone-only pills; those are clearly abortifacient, as well."

But until 1990, a significant part of Dr. Long's practice involved other forms of birth control. Concerned to distinguish carefully abortifacients from others, he was searching the medical records one day.

"During that search, I felt that God spoke to me in a still, quiet voice. It was not audible, but still I knew it was His voice saying, 'You are looking in the wrong book.' I took that to mean I should go back and look at Scripture. When I did a detailed Scripture search, it seemed to leap out at me."

-- "Converging Paths," by Elizabeth Altham, Sursum Corda, Summer 1998


POPE JOHN PAUL II'S EFFORT TO END DEBATE on such issues as the ordination of women, through changes he made this week in canon law, will not succeed in forcing obedience from the many Roman Catholics alienated from the church, several theologians and scholars said yesterday....

"It's a pretentious attempt by the present pope to stifle conversation and dialogue," said Thomas Groome, a professor of theology and religious education at Boston College. "I read the blessed thing and without being too melodramatic, I was on the verge of tears. It's a very sad day."

-- "Papal step won't affect alienated Catholics, scholars say," by Diego Ribadeneira, Boston Globe, July 2, 1998

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