This Time Truth May Save Abortion Bill

The lie that went all the way up to the White House and was repeated by a willing President Clinton as the reason to kill an abortion bill has finally been exposed by one of the liars who started it.

As a result, Congress may again pass a law banning partial-birth abortions. President Clinton may find it embarrassingly impossible to veto the bill the second time around. Abortion supporters may suffer the big crack in their long record of hardball successes. The media might be embarrassed enough by their biased reporting to do a fairer, better job on this tired, old issue.

And the lives of thousands of healthy, normal babies may be saved.

The man who recanted his lie is Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers. He said he had deliberately distorted the truth about how many partial-birth abortions are done on the healthy babies of healthy mothers because he feared damaging the abortion-rights cause.

“Partial-birth abortion” is the term opponents use to describe a procedure in which all but the head of an unborn baby is pulled out of the womb, a sharp instrument is used to make a hole in the back of the head, the brain is sucked out and the head is collapsed before delivery is completed. Supporters prefer to call it “intact dilation and evacuation” or “D&E.”

It sounds gruesome. It is.

But when Congress considered passing a law to ban it, abortion-rights supporters pulled out all their public relations strategies to defeat it. Partial-birth abortion is done only a few hundred times a year, they insisted, only to save the mother’s life or only if the unborn baby is grossly deformed or to preserve the mother’s future fertility.

Fitzsimmons said he “lied through my teeth” in support of the abortion party line. He wasn’t the only one. Most abortion-rights proponents used the same phony numbers and cited the same heart-wrenching excuses and case histories.

Abortion-rights groups also used the same spin on the media, whose pro-choice bias is well known and documented. A recent PBS documentary, “Media Matters,” reports on how uncritically the print press, in particular, repeated the pro-choice lies without independent checking.

Congress passed the bill banning partial-birth abortion anyway. President Clinton, who was eager to flaunt his pro-choice views in an election year, bought into the right-to-choose line and lie. His veto message read like an abortion-rights press release, fake statistics and flimsy excuses and all.

But instead of only a few hundred women having partial-birth abortions every year, there are at least several thousand. No accurate figures are available. But one reporter found that a single clinic in New Jersey, for example, performs an estimated 1,500 such procedures every year.

Instead of the procedure being limited to third trimester situations where the mother’s life is supposedly endangered or the fetus terribly deformed, most such abortions are performed on unborn healthy babies who are about 20 weeks to 26 weeks old, almost mature enough to survive on their own. Most mothers are healthy and simply didn’t seek an abortion sooner.

The argument that partial-birth abortion preserves the mother’s future fertility doesn’t make sense. There is no medical justification for it, no follow-up studies to show that it is superior to other abortion techniques.

What has made abortion tolerable for many health professionals and pro-choice supporters is that the killing is invisible. No one can see what is being done. The baby dies inside the mother’s body. What is finally delivered is dead tissue, not living infant.

This is one reason partial-birth abortion seems like an easy target for right-to-life groups. It comes close to being infanticide - and visibly so. A fully formed, living baby is outside of the mother’s body, except for its head, before it is killed.

Last fall, the House voted to override President Clinton’s veto of the partial-birth abortion bill, but the attempt failed in the Senate. Now, a similar measure has been reintroduced in Congress and the dismal battle will be fought all over again - though this time, perhaps, with more actual information.

The bill prohibits partial-birth abortions except when necessary to save the life of a mother endangered by a physical condition “if no other medical procedure would suffice for that purpose” and levies a fine or prison term up to two years or both on the abortionist, but not the mother. The bill would not prohibit all late-term abortions; others methods are available.

This issue has importance far beyond just the legality of a gruesome procedure. If Congress does finally pass the ban - with or without Clinton’s legal approval - it would represent a major breach in the right-to-abortion position.

Pro-choice and pro-life groups are implacable opponents, unwilling to make compromises that might get this stale, stalemated issue off the political agenda. Hard-core right-to-abortion groups fight every attempt to put any limits whatsoever on what they insist on calling a woman’s right to choose. Hard-core right-to-life supporters oppose any attempts to end any pregnancy, even as early as a fertilized ovum.

A federal ban on partial-birth abortion would at least end one horror of abortion and save some healthy lives.

xxxx