Let Allen give you a hand.

[Ed note: Today is Allen's 60th birthday, and I want to take just a moment to wish him a beautiful and happy birthday. For more than forty remarkable years Allen has worked tirelessly on behalf of and fought relentlessly for the civil rights of not just LGBT people but all minorities. His work is deeply appreciated both by his friends and the many people whose lives he has helped make better. Happy Birthday, Allen!]

It seems as though St. Vincent’s Medical Center in the once-gay populated Greenwich Village, home of Stonewall, may be closed. The community and its elected officials are up in arms. While the downtown community needs a full service hospital I wonder how all these so-called progressive pro-choice advocates justify keeping a hospital, which refuses to provide women’s reproductive medical services or abortions, open in the once progressive pro-choice village.

Why would pro-choice politicians support an anti-choice institution? St. Vincent’s does not respect a woman’s right to choose. It doesn’t perform abortions, family planning counseling or tubal ligations. It doesn’t even offer birth control.

And the LGBT community should remember that as a Catholic hospital, St. Vincent’s may care for people with HIV/AIDS, but it is also part of an institution that condemns us as human beings.

When John Langan’s partner, Neal Conrad Spicehandler, died after surgery at St. Vincent’s, Langan filed a wrongful death suit against the hospital. St. Vincent’s lawyers argued that the civil union did not make him a legal spouse for purposes of the suit. This institution claims sensitivity to our community? Hospital visitors are exposed to Catholic imagery, from statues of saints to pictures of clergy to crucifixes over the beds. This hospital is funded by tax dollars, both in reimbursement for services and for its programs.

One local elected writes “As I told hundreds of stakeholders who turned out on January 28 for SEIU 1199’s St. Vincent’s Community Town Hall Meeting, we need St. Vincent’s Hospital. We need a full-service hospital and health care facility in this neighborhood and on the lower West Side of Manhattan. We need the care that St. Vincent’s provides for the people that no one else wants to treat.”

This elected official misspoke, St. Vincents is not a full service hospital, full service hospitals provide abortions, reproductive services, and family planning. St. Vincent’s Hospital deprives women of basic health care.

I hope the situation can be reversed to save the jobs of the nurse staff and other dedicated health care providers. I however believe we must never deprive a woman of the right to choose. The solution is to dump the bigots and get new management in.

If the Church of Scientology ran this hospital, could you imagine the outrage? I guess some cults get more respect than others. I guess a women’s right to chose is dispensable when it is convenient.

While on the subject of abortion rights, National Abortion Rights League’s Executive Director, Kelli Conlin has been bashing Harold Ford and has endorsed Kirsten Gilibrand. I am not criticizing this endorsement. Gillibrand deserves pro choice support and endorsements, but Conlin’s endorsement is meaningless and holds no sway in my camp. She endorses whoever she finds herself in good favor with and that has included some right wing Republicans, like Rudolph Guiliani, who appointed Conlin to the City’s Human Rights Commission and Jeanne Pirro. Her romance with Michael Bloomberg could only amount to his generous dollar contributions to NARAL. His 2009 opponent William Thompson was and is superb on reproductive rights. How empowering Republicans helps empower poor women needing health care is beyond me, then again, poor women do not seem to be Colin’s concern. When Conlin is on the television I change the station, she is not welcome in my apartment.

Where is Conlin’s voice on St. Vincent’s hospital? Is there no political mileage in her standing up for a women’s right to choose in Greenwich Village? With Conlin it is all about political mileage.