Straight Talk on Partial Birth Abortions

by Robert D. Novak Vol. X, No. 1, January 1997

During last Friday's [13 December 1996] masterful press conference, President Clinton worked himself into a fever over women deprived forever of bearing children if denied 'partial-birth' abortion. The problem: There are no such women.

The president's passion was such that his words landed on front pages everywhere: "Hillary and I, we only had one child. And I just cannot look at a woman who's in a situation where the baby she is bearing, against all her wishes and prayers, is going to die anyway, and tell her that I am signing a law which will prevent her from ever having another child.”

In fact, there is no medical evidence of any woman's fertility being damaged by failure to abort a fetus. Nor is this Clinton's only misrepresentation. Partial-birth abortions are frequent, not rare as he says. Most do not occur in the final trimester, as he implies.

Why would the president commit an abortion whopper? "Because he believes it to be true,' said one longtime aide, who thereby implied it was not true. He has built a dream world to justify an unpopular position. Bill Clinton has no more elections to win, but he still plays the game.

Pro-life forces this year launched a campaign to prohibit what they called partial-birth abortions, in which the doctor removes the fetus, feet first and usually still alive, and then sucks the brain from its head. The public was appalled, and Congress passed a prohibition. The president vetoed it.

Justifying the veto because of reproductive rights was not good enough for a president seeking reelection. On May 23, he raised the fertility issue, mimicking presidential opponent Bob Dole: “It's okay with me -- whatever -- if they ripped your body to shreds and you could never have another baby, even though the baby you were carrying couldn't live.”

Actually, the opposite is true. On Sept. 18, four eminent obstetricians opposed to partial-birth abortion told Congress the procedure “can itself pose serious risks to the health and future fertility of women,” adding that destruction of a fetus never is needed to "preserve the life, health or future fertility of the mother.” In the New York Times on Sept. 26, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop wrote that "the procedure's impact on a woman's cervix can put future pregnancies at risk.”

Consider the case of Claudia Ades, one of the five women who underwent partial-birth abortion and were brought to the White House for the April 10 veto ceremony. She said that after the operation she "unfortunately lost five more [by miscarriages], but we are very blessed that in July we're going to adopt a baby."

In last week's press conference, the president repeated his frequent claim that "there are just a few hundred" partial-birth abortions. That is contradicted by investigative reporting in the Bergen (NJ.) Record, which found that the procedure is performed at least 1,500 times annually in New Jersey alone - three times the supposed national figure. Most, a doctor there said, "are for elective, not medical reasons; people who didn't realize or didn't care how far along they were. Most are teenagers.” Ades said her abortion and those of the other women at the veto ceremony were elective."

All such partial-birth procedures, where the life of the woman is not at risk, would be banned by the vetoed bill - regardless of the age of the fetus. Clinton last week claimed he would “happily” sign a bill banning third-trimester abortions unless the woman had “a very serious health problem."

Two days later White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta was asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether the president would extend the ban into the second trimester. No, said Panetta, “he would not go beyond that. He would want a woman to have the right to choose."

The dirty little secret is that 90 percent of the many thousands of partial-birth abortions occur in the fifth or sixth month - the second trimester. This is not about late-term abortions intended to save a woman's fertility but involves a particularly abhorrent procedure that could force Americans to consider abortion anew.