Planned Parenthood of the Heartland contends that a prominent Catholic priest played an “outsized role” in the state medical board’s decision to ban use of a telemedicine system for providing abortion pills.
Planned Parenthood’s complaint is aimed at Msgr. Frank Bognanno, who has been a member of the Iowa Board of Medicine since 2012. Bognanno, who has been an outspoken abortion opponent, took part in an 8-2 board vote last August to bar doctors from using Planned Parenthood’s video-conferencing system to dispense abortion pills to women in outlying clinics.
The medical board’s ruling is on hold while Planned Parenthood pursues a lawsuit in Polk County District Court. Planned Parenthood recently filed hundreds of pages of supporting documents in court. The information includes the allegation about Bognanno’s role.
Planned Parenthood said that a few weeks before last year’s board vote, Bognanno sent other board members dozens of pages of materials collected by anti-abortion groups.
continue at Des Moines Register
A well written article.
Some background:
Kilimanjaro-climbing Iowa priest nominated to medical board
Climb every mountain: a priest’s journey up Kilimanjaro
Three weeks after the Iowa Senate rejected a Dubuque anti-abortion activist for a seat on the Iowa Board of Medicine, Gov. Terry Branstad has nominated a prominent Catholic priest, also an abortion opponent, for the spot.
Msgr. Frank Bognanno, the pastor at Des Moines’ Christ the King Catholic Church, has routinely spoken against abortion, which his faith condemns. The medical board, which licenses physicians, gets involved in the issue when abortion opponents file complaints about abortion providers.
Democrats controlling the Iowa Senate voted last month to block Branstad’s nomination of Colleen Pasnik to the medical board. Pasnik is a past director of the Family Life Office for the Archdiocese of Dubuque and a past employee of Dubuque County Right to Life.
Among other things, the Democrats noted that Pasnik was photographed with national abortion activist Cheryl Sullenger during a 2010 meeting of the medical board, at which opponents objected to a Planned Parenthood system of dispensing abortion pills via a video system. Pasnik has denied any direct association with Sullenger, an Operation Rescue leader who was convicted of bombing a California abortion clinic in the 1980s.
continue at Des Moines Register
