News- United States

AGod Imposes, Man Disposes

To gain Congressional passage of a ban on partial-birth abortions, pro-lifers had to overcome a powerful propaganda campaign. To override President Clinton=s veto, they will need the help of eight Apro-choice Catholic senators.

By James McCoy

"Good afternoon," said President Bill Clinton at a press conference minutes after vetoing the partial-birth abortion bill last April. "I have just met with five courageous women and their families.... They all had to make a potentially life-saving--certainly health saving--but still tragic decision to have the kind of abortion procedure that would be banned by HR 1833." The bill to which he referred, of course, was the "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1995."

"Believe it or not," the President was saying, the women who he presented to the press that day "represent different religious faiths, different political parties, different views on the question of abortion. "They just had one thing in common," he went on. "They made agonizing decisions only when it became clear that their babies would not survive. Their own lives, their health, and in some cases their capacity to have children in the future were in danger."

They had one more thing in common: all five women said their partial-birth abortion had nothing to do with "choice" --and everything to do with their religion.

"As practicing Catholics," Mrs. Dorothy Line said, "when we have problems and worries, we turn to prayer... My husband and I were very scared, but we are strong people and believe that God would not give us a problem if we couldn't handle it.[ Their joy at having their first baby had turned into sorrow when, nineteen weeks into the pregnancy, an ultrasound indicated there was something wrong. The baby had hydrocephalus--an excess of fluid on the brain, which prevented normal development. "We asked about in utero surgery," Mrs. Line went on, "about the chance to remove the fluid, but there was absolutely nothing we could do.

Mrs. Line went on to extoll the President:

I thank God every day that I had the safe medical option available to me, especially now that I am pregnant again and expecting a baby in September... And I thank God for President Clinton.

Focus on religion

Each woman who followed Mrs. Line to the podium stressed the same points. "This is not about abortion and it's not about choice," said Coreen Costello, who said that she had baptized her daughter in utero. Tammy Watts of Tempe, Arizona, prayed with her pastor for "the three days we tried desperately to find something that could cure her. But in the end, she said, AI am so thankful to our doctors who were able to perform this very safe medical procedure, save our health, save our families."

Mrs. Watts called Clinton "a true blessing in all of our lives," and the President asked her, "and those are the prints of your baby, right?" "Yes," Watts replied. "This is my daughter MacKenzie's hand prints and foot prints. This is something that is very special to us and is something we would not have if we did not have this very safe procedure." (Other abortion procedures require the dismemberment of the baby before its extraction from the womb.)

"I didn't make the decision," said Vicki Stella, "God made the decision for my child to die. I had to make the decision to take him off life support." Her womb supported a son for eight months before ultrasound scanning discovered nine major anomalies, including the absence of a normal brain. "And, I miss my son, but the one part I want to stress is I needed this for health reasons: I am a diabetic," she explained. Abortions by anything other than the partial-birth process, Mrs. Stella said, "would not have been what I needed."

Before a partial-birth abortion can be performed, a woman's cervix must be dilated enough so that her baby can be delivered in breech position. This dilation, done with rods and under local anaesthesia, takes two days. When Claudia Ades, who is Jewish, completed the "third day of this grueling procedure, it was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year." And Yom Kippur is the day that you mourn those that have passed," she said, "and it's the day that you pray that God will inscribe them in the book of life... Like everyone else I just want to thank the President because it's an enormous, enormous responsibility that he's taken ..."

President Clinton thanked the women for their support. ABut these people have no business being made into political pawns," the President argued. Rather, "they happen to be in a tiny minority to bear a unique burden God imposes..." Clothing partial-birth abortion in religion, Clinton turned the virtue of faith inside-out. The humble religious attitude expressed in the traditional spiritual maxim, "Man proposes, God disposes," was transformed into "God imposes, Man disposes."

"They never had a choice," the President was concluded, "and I cannot in good conscience see their lives damaged and their potential to build good, strong families damaged. We need more families in America like these folks. We need more parents in America like these folks... That's what this veto was all about."

A nurse=s horror

"If President Clinton had been standing were I was standing at that moment," Brenda Pratt Shafer had told the House judiciary committee a month before, "he would not veto this bill."

Shafer was describing how she assisted at three partial-birth abortions at the Women's Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio. A registered nurse for 14 years, Shafer had seen "a lot of death -- people maimed in auto accidents, gunshot wounds, you name it. I have seen surgical procedures of every sort. But in all my professional years, I had never witnessed anything like this."

What she saw in the Dr. Martin Haskell's clinic on September 30, 1993 gives her nightmares to this day. Dr. Haskell, who had presented a "how-to" paper on this procedure to a National Abortion Federation conference the year before, needed another surgical nurse. Shafer, who worked for a temporary agency, was told that he was having a hard time keeping nurses, and might be interested in hiring her on a permanent basis. "I readily accepted the assignment," Shafer testified, "because I was at that time very pro-choice... I thought this assignment would be no problem for me."

She was wrong. The first two days at the clinic were routine enough--first- and second-trimester abortions--although during that time, Shafer also assisted in dilating the cervixes of six or seven women who were more than 20 weeks pregnant.

"A mother was six months pregnant," Shafer said. "A doctor told her that the baby had Downs Syndrome and she decided to have an abortion. She came in the first two days to have the laminaria inserted and changed, and she cried the whole time." On the third day Dr. Haskell brought the ultrasound in and hooked it up so that he could see the baby. "On the ultrasound screen," said Shafer, who was observing the procedure, thinking of it as a learning experience, "I could see the heart beating.[ She described the grisly events that followed:

Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms--everything but the head. The doctor kept the baby's head just inside the uterus. The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startled reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was completely limp.

I was really completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost threw up as I watched the doctor do these things.

After that, the doctor delivered the baby's head, cut his umbilical cord and threw him into a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had used. "I saw the baby move in the pan," Shafer went on."I asked another nurse and she said it was just 'reflexes.'" The woman wanted to see her baby, so they cleaned him up, put him in a blanket and handed him to her. "She cried the whole time," Shafer recalled, "and she kept saying, 'I'm so sorry, please forgive me!'" Shafer was weeping too.

The public kept in the dark

Polls show that the majority of Americans describe themselves as "pro-choice." Polls also show that, when partial-birth abortion is explained to them in graphic detail, the majority of Americans favor banning the procedure.

For over 20 years, "pro-choice" public opinion has been the unctuous attitude easing the nation's slide down a "slippery slope"--from abortion on demand to physician-assisted suicide. "The point about a slippery slope," said Wanda Franz, president of the Washington-based National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), "is not only that you slide down it, but once you've slid down it's very hard to climb back up." In this life-and-death struggle, according to Franz, "the pro-abortion side has everything. Their big problem is keeping the American public from figuring out what they have."

What they have, even more than unjust laws, is iron habit. Abortion has become a great American quick-fix, and one generation has hardened, another has grown up, with the abortion option available for the asking. Granted that "old habits die hard" -- in hardened hearts hardest of all--still they can die. It is, ordinarily, a painstaking process. Mark Twain said, "Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time."

Kate Michaelman understands that principle. The president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) praised President Clinton's veto by saying, "President Clinton's action demonstrates the importance of a pro-choice presidency in safeguarding reproductive rights against a Congress intent on returning women, step by step, to the back alleys."

While Wanda Franz worries about one slippery slope, one of abortion's leading legal proponents--has publicly worried about another. Last June, the CBS television news show "60 Minutes" interviewed Katherine Kolbert, the vice president of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York. Was a ban on partial-birth abortions the "just the first step," she was asked, "on that slippery slope to ban all abortions?" Kolbert replied: AAbsolutely. It's not just the first step; it's a very calculated political move."

The genesis of a bill

In a sense Kolbert is quite right. The National Right to Life Committee, the largest pro-life group in the country, recognized the importance of Dr. Haskell's "how-to" paper on the partial-birth procedure soon after he distributed it to abortionists in 1992. NRLC promptly distilled the information into a pamphlet, complete with graphic sketches of the procedure, and distributed six million copies in a massive campaign to stop the Freedom of Choice Act. That bill, popularly known as FOCA, would have made it impossible for states to ban any abortions, even those done by the partial-birth process. "We needed something really powerful to let people know how extreme FOCA was," Franz said.

The NRLC also passed Haskell's paper on to Congressman Charles Canady of Florida, who offered an amendment to FOCA which would have allowed states to ban third-trimester abortions. House Democrats refused to acccept any such amendment.

Another stunning blow to FOCA came at about the same time, in equally graphic form: the unforgettable photograph of 16-month-old abortion survivor Ana Rosa Rodriquez. This beautiful little girl's arm had been taken off during a botched third-trimester abortion in New York--where such abortions are banned, except to save the mother's life. FOCA, its opponents pointed out, would have have invalidated the New York statute, and the doctor who had maimed little Ana Rosa might have been exempt from publishment. Finally, FOCA--which on paper seemed destined to rocket through a Democrat-controlled Congress, soon to be signed by the new Democrat president--fizzled.

In the eyes of Wanda Franz of NRLC, the lesson to be learned from the successful battle against FOCA was that although most Americans may be theoretically Apro-choice, citizens and their Congressional representatives are "middle-of-the-road people and most of them are quite willing to limit abortion in cases that are really egregious, and this is one of them. Today, 23 years after the Supreme Court decision legalized abortion on demand, polls show that the majority of Americans still believe that abortion is legal only in the first trimester of pregnancy. What the court actually decided in the Roe v Wade case was that abortion must be legal during all nine months but, in the last trimester--or after the baby can live outside the mother's womb--the state can prohibit an abortion, if it has a "compelling interest" to do so.

Even then, the state has a losing hand. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey has written:

In Doe vs. Bolton, the companion case to Roe v. Wade, the Court defined Ahealth in such a way to make it an absolute trump over any ad all regulation of abortion. In Doe "health" was defined as the product of "all factors--physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age --relevant to the well-being of the patient. It is factually incontrovertible that this definition of Ahealth left the abortion industry completely exempt from government regulation... The grim reality of abortion on demand for all nine months gestation... may unfortunately be America's best kept secret (or act of collective denial).

Elective procedures

During his veto ceremony in June of this year, President Clinton ridiculed the idea that if the partial-birth abortion had ban included a health-of-the-mother exception, Athe doctor and the mother could say anything--well, they can't fit in their prom dress--that's a health exception." Yet the very next day, one of the women celebrants, Claudia Crown Ades, told a Mobile, Alabama radio station, "my procedure was elective. That is considered an elective procedure, as were the procedures of Coreen Costello and Tammy Watts and Mary-Dorothy Line... All our procedures were considered elective."

This was confirmed by Dr. Haskell himself, who said in a 1993 interview with AMNews (a publication of the American Medical Association): "And I'll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range... In my particular case, probably 20 percent are for genetic reasons. And the other 80 percent are purely elective..."

But that interview took place before the ban was even considered. Later, during testimony before the House Judiciary committee, abortion proponents alleged that AMNews had quoted Dr. Haskell out of context. Those charges prompted the AMNews editor to send a letter to Rep. Charles Canady, assuring him that "AMNews stands behind the accuracy of the report cited in the testimony. The comments... quoted were reported accurately and in context." Moreover, the AMNews continued, the entire interview had been taped, so anyone interested could verify the doctorss comments.

In fact, that same 1993 interview in AMNews contained Haskell=s rebuttal of another pro-abortion myth. Barbara Radford of the National Abortion Federation (an accreditation association for abortion clinics) had acknowledged that her group had received scores of calls from congressional staffers and others with questions about the partial-birth procedure, and had told inquirers that the fetuses are already dead before they're "extracted." That is not true. As Haskell told AMNews: AI had heard that they were giving that information. Haskell was downright scornful in his appraisal of his allies: AThe people that staff the NAF office are not medical people... They just had no idea. And here they're rabid supporters of abortion ... some of them have never seen one performed.

Mark Twain did not have "a woman's right to choose" in mind when he wrote about "the silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities that afflict the peoples." But the words certainly fit.

Finding the key words

During the Congressional battle over FOCA, the issue of partial-birth abortion had proven to be a powerful instrument, which could shatter the clay feet of the abortion colossus. The 1994 congressional elections, in which Republicans gained the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades, provided Congress with 50 new members ready to wield that instrument.

After his fellow Republicans took over Congress, Rep. Charles Canady set his staff to researching the issue. He found an unexpected source of help in Dr. James McMahon--who, having performed partial-birth abortions since the early 1980s, submitted charts and graphs on a series of over 2,000 such procedures. For the defenders of late-term abortions, observed one pro-life lobbyist, "there could be no worse enemy than the procedure's leading practitioners, McMahon and Haskell, because the claims made by the abortion lobby Aare totally, blatantly contradicted by the writings of these two doctors." Buoyed by what his research had uncovered, Rep. Canady wrote the bill banning partial-birth abortions, and introduced it in June of 1995.

The proposed ban, legislative craftsmen realized, would have to survive a Constitutional challenge. The Supreme Court had already ruled that "the word 'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn." But ironically, the Roe v. Wade decision itself contained a little-known provision which gave Canady and his allies a firm foundation. In the Roe v. Wade case, abortion advocates challenged a state law banning abortion. But they did not challenge a law which made it a felony to kill a baby "in a state of being born and before actual birth." While it overturned the other Texas legislation, the Supreme Court let that law stand.

So Canady and his staff focused on the partial delivery of the baby. If it was killed in the process of birth, that went beyond what Roe legalized. After consultation with physicians and lawyers, Canady's committee defined the procedure as "an abortion in which the person performing the abortion partially vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the fetus and completing the delivery." With this clear definition in mind, Canady himself invented the term: Apartial-birth abortion.

"A powerful agent is the right word," writes Mark Twain. "Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt." Canady and his committee had gained a powerful symbolic victory in the debate before it even began: they had the right word.

While wire-service reports typically commented that "partial-birth abortion" was "an ill defined procedure" (although the bill managed to define it in 25 words), the use of that term still had a palpable effect. Equally effective were the line drawings that illustrated the procedure. When the bill was under review by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Helen Alvare was slated to testify on behalf of the US bishops= conference. Richard Doerflinger, who works alonside Alvare in the bishops= pro-life office, recalls discussing what she should say to "describe why this is so horrible." The line drawings of the procedure, where the baby=s head is only three inches from being born, inspired him to come up with a slogan: "four-fifths infanticide and one-fifth abortion."

Alvare spoke before the committee November 17. She said:

A description of the partial-birth abortion is the single greatest argument against its continued existence... When a practitioner uses sharp scissors to stab a hole in the skull of a baby and vacuum out its brain contents and calls it a medical procedure, words have indeed lost their meaning... With regard to infanticide, no one looking at this procedure could disagree; it is one-fifth abortion, four-fifths infanticide. It kills a child when 80 percent of his or her body is out of the womb... If partial-birth abortions remain legal, if Congress allows them to continue, what next? Killing a child who has emerged from the womb 3 or 4 more inches... Opponents of this bill keep asking whether it would be the first step in an effort to ban all abortions, but the real question is whether allowing this procedure is not a step toward legalized infanticide.

Three weeks later the Senate voted 54 to 45 in favor of the ban.

A parade of lies

The introduction of Canaday=s bill in June 1995 was followed by a year-long parade of lies, damned lies, and statistics. Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado, read into the Congressional proceedings a letter from Dr. Haskell, who said that he had found no record of a "Brenda Shafer" working for him. Brenda Pratt's time card for the Kimberly Quality Care nursing agency and its bill to Haskell's clinic were produced. Rep. Schroeder then withdrew that allegation, explaining that it was due to confusion over Brenda Pratt Shafer's married name. "But it seemed peculiar to me at the time," Shafer told Congress this March, "that neither she nor her staff had contacted me, or the subcommittee staff, to request documentation, before she basically called me a liar in front of everybody. But there was much more of that sort of thing to come." To refute a year's worth of misinformation might itself take a year's time.

But there was one lie particularly damning to the abortion proponents' claim that women's health is their paramount concern. Since early in 1995, advocates of abortion had been spreading the claim that the local anesthesia given the mother for the partial-birth abortion procedure kills her unborn child. Kate Michelman of NARAL made that argument, as did representatives of the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood. Newspapers such as USA Today and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put that claim into news stories and editorials, while syndicated columnists such as Ellen Goodman still circulate it. "The anesthesia given to the woman kills the fetus before the full procedure takes place," the New York Daily News editorialized in December, 1995. "But you won't hear that from the anti-abortion extreme."

Dr. David Birnbach, the director of obstetric anesthesiology at Columbia University's teaching hospital in New York City, had heard several of his patients express concerns about anesthesia. "In last month's edition of Marie Claire," Dr. Birnbach went on, "a magazine which many of my pregnant patients read, an article about partial-birth abortion states >The mother is put under general anesthetic, which reaches the fetus through her bloodstream. By the time the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the fetus has overdosed on the anesthetic and is brain-dead.'"

As president-elect of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology, Dr. Birnbach testified before Congress, "This supposed controversy regarding the effects of anesthesia on the fetus must be finally and definitively put to rest." In order to kill the unborn child, he explained, Ait would be necessary to give the mother dangerous and life-threatening doses of anesthetics. This is not the way we practice anesthesiology in the United States." Dr. Birnbach complained that he had yet to see a newspaper or magazine article that states "in no uncertain terms, that anesthesia when used properly does not harm the fetus. He insisted: APregnant women must get the message that should they need anesthesia for surgery or analgesia for labor, they may do so without worrying about the effects on their unborn child."

Dr. Norig Ellison, the president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, made the same point in his own Congressional testimony on that same day, arguing "that the widespread publicity... may cause pregnant women to delay necessary, even life-saving, medical procedures, totally unrelated to the birthing process, due to misinformation regarding the effect of anesthetics on the fetus."

Not one medical expert or abortion practioner rose to testify against the doctors= claims. "Surely one of their experts," wrote Rep. Canady to his opposite on the subcommittee, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, "is willing to defend their claims. I find it disturbing that there is not a single medical expert to defend this claim which has been so prominent on the attacks on H.R. 1833."

Asked to defend her earlier claims, Kate Michelman of NARAL sent her regrets, explaining, "I will be unable to testify before the Subcommittee due to a previous commitment located outside of the District of Columbia." Thus, rather than break a commitment--or, more to the point, Michelman allowed her earlier misinformation to stand uncorrected, and potentially endangered the health of 50,000 American mothers-to-be. Partial-birth abortion advocates, and their faithful media allies, were apparently willing to risk women's health in order to protect what they claimed was a crusade to save it.

Eight key Catholic votes

Sometime this summer, Congress will take up an effort to override President Clinton=s veto, and make the partial-birth abortion ban a federal law. Supporters of that effort are confident that they will command the necessary two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, where the bill passed in March by nine votes more than two-thirds. Still, Rep. Canaday and his allies may delay the showdown, simply because they want extra time to build up support in the Senate.

In that upper chamber, the partial-birth abortion ban passed last December by the relatively slender margin of 55-44. To override the President=s veto, pro-life lobbyists must somehow find a dozen more Senate votes. They have already found one new recruit: Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who generally votes in favor of legalized abortion, has announced that he will switch his position to oppose the veto.

In an unprecedented joint letter to the President, all eight active Catholic cardinals in the United States, together with the head of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops "strenuously" condemned Clintonss "shameful" veto. They urged all Catholics--and "the 65 percent of self-described 'pro-choice' voters who oppose partial-birth abortions"--to do all they can to override the veto. In June, the bishops= Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities and the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment coordinated a campaign aimed at flooding Congress with 8 million postcards urging an override. Also unprecedented was the bishops= call for a national day of prayer and fasting on July 11 to support the pro-life cause.

Interestingly enough, it is Catholics who hold the key to the fate of the override effort in the Senate. Eight Catholic senators--all Democrats, and most of them representing states with a heavy Catholic voting population--voted against the bartial-birth abortion ban. (They are: Senators Chris Dodd of Connectict, Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and Patsy Murray of Washington.) If those eight Catholic senators cannot be persuaded to support the override, its success is highly unlikely.

Will prayer and fasting overcome the lunacy of keeping partial-birth abortion? Christ assures us so: "this kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting. Will the postcards have a political impact? American military leaders think so; they issued a directive forbidding Catholic chaplains neither from participating in the postcard campaign or encouraging others to do so.

But actions speak louder than words. At St. Joseph=s parish in North Gosvenordale, Connecticut, Father George Parker received a $5,000 donation from Sen. Dodd toward the costs of the local parish school. When Dodd voted against the partial-birth abortion ban, sent the money back.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

-- Inscription beneath Mark Twain's bust in the Hall of Fame.