{"id":322289,"date":"2024-11-29T11:33:45","date_gmt":"2024-11-29T17:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=322289"},"modified":"2024-11-27T19:25:29","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T01:25:29","slug":"trump-pro-life-dr-oz-medicare-medicaid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/trump-pro-life-dr-oz-medicare-medicaid\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump appoints pro-life Dr. Mehmet Oz to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. Mehmet Oz, formerly a TV show host of “The Dr Oz Show,” was recently appointed by President-elect Donald Trump to be the new head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under the incoming administration. Although not as attention-grabbing as some of Trump\u2019s other picks, Oz\u2019s appointment has some interesting and very direct implications in the ongoing fight to protect preborn children.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Turkish-American Mehmet Oz is a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon with degrees from Harvard and University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Though best known for his long daytime television career, he earned the nomination of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania as a 2022 candidate for the U.S. Senate \u2014 a political race which he ultimately lost to incumbent Democrat Senator John Fetterman.\u00a0<\/span>During that race, Oz’s views on abortion became more known.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI do believe that life starts at conception, and I\u2019ve said that multiple times,\u201d he said during a tele-town hall as reported by <\/span>NBC News<\/span><\/a>. \u201cMy mother-in-law wrote a lot of the original pro-life literature in Montgomery County. […] If life starts at conception, why do you care what age their heart starts beating at? It\u2019s, you know, it\u2019s still murder if you were to terminate a child whether their heart\u2019s beating or not.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He also clarified some earlier remarks about being opposed to six-week abortion bans, claiming that if six weeks wasn\u2019t medically accurate, the pro-life law would be invalidated. He claimed that a baby\u2019s heart begins beating at around nine weeks, but according to the Endowment for Human Development (EHD), <\/span>this is incorrectly late<\/span><\/a>, even when noting that there are <\/span>two ways of measuring gestational age<\/span><\/a>. The heart begins to beat between 16 and 22 days after fertilization, though it has not yet formed a full four chambers.<\/span><\/p>\n