Clinton’s Veto Callous, Indefensible

Democrats have an abortion problem.

The president’s recent veto of a proposed ban on “partial-birth” abortions has annihilated Democrats’ plans to portray anti-abortion Republicans as “extremists.”

Here’s how partial-birth abortion - also known as “dilation and extraction” (D and X) or “intact dilation and evacuation” (IDE) - works: A doctor dilates a woman’s cervix and prepares her for giving birth. As the baby moves down the birth canal, the doctor reaches in, grabs the feet and delivers everything but the head. Then the physician makes an incision in the skull, inserts a suction catheter, “evacuates” the brain and removes the corpse.

One moment, the baby is alive and inches from entering the world. The next, it arrives limp and dead.

Dr. W. Martin Haskell of Cincinnati, inventor of the D and X procedure, made it clear in comments to American Medical News several years ago that the operation seeks to produce live mothers and dead babies. “The point here is you’re attempting to do an abortion,” he said. “That’s the goal of your work, to complete an abortion.”

The president and other defenders of the practice say they merely want to save the lives of women threatened by potentially lethal pregnancies - but they ignore the fact that the legislation would exempt such cases from the ban.

The real problem is that few if any partial-birth abortions involve cases of imminent physical jeopardy. Haskell has estimated that 80 percent of his D and X cases are “purely elective,” with the other 20 percent being “genetic.” The late Dr. James McMahon, who performed more than 2,000 such abortions, kept painstaking records, and none of his clients faced life-threatening deliveries.

Clinton has developed a backup position, which he offered during a May 23 press conference. He said most women undergo the procedure to get rid of hard-to-deliver monstrosities, such as babies with hydrocephaly and anencephaly. He accused presumptive GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole and other supporters of the ban of telling women: “It’s OK with me, whatever, if they rip your body to shreds and you can never have another baby.”

Wrong again. McMahon noted that only about 4 percent of his cases involved victims with enlarged skulls. Doctors can reduce the swelling in such instances by just draining the excess fluid without killing the fetuses.

This leaves the Clinton administration with the unsatisfying alternative of claiming to be protecting the mothers’ health.

Abortion law defines “health” so broadly as to encompass everything from a life-threatening condition to mild emotional distress. Clinton’s jargon thus would permit any kind of abortion at any time.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a pro-abortion-rights Democrat from New York, speaks for many of his colleagues when he says of the procedure, “If that’s not infanticide, nothing is.”

Yet, the president has reasons for adopting his position.

Partial-birth abortions differ from standard abortions primarily in the timing of the baby’s death. Other abortionists kill the fetus with fatal chemicals and then remove the victim piece by piece. Haskell’s procedure is less barbaric in the sense that it does not scald the child before ending its life.

Clinton understands that a ban on partial-birth abortions would force abortion-rights advocates to make logically fatal concessions. They would have to admit that human life begins sometime before delivery - and that a child in the womb has rights. They would have to confess that some of their defenses of abortion rest on coldblooded, utilitarian calculations of price.

When a parent argues that a deformed child would impose unconscionable costs on society, that person reduces life to a dollars-and-cents proposition. By this same logic, medical authorities could disburden society of expensive dead weight - Alzheimer’s patients, people racked with terminal illnesses, severely retarded or disabled children and so on. In this way, what begins as a quest for “choice” ends as a walk down the trail Dr. Mengele trod.

Anti-abortion activists have offended women by refusing to acknowledge the hardships motherhood can impose on single young mothers. But in looking breezily past the ghoulish practice of partial-birth abortion, the president shows equal callousness toward the unborn.

He explained on May 23 that “the president is the only place in this system of ours where there is one person who can stand up for people with no voice, no power, who are going to be eviscerated.”

This time, however, he’s nearly the only person indifferent to the pain and plight of the voiceless few “who are going to be eviscerated” by partial-birth abortions.

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