to sign a ban on what critics call (New York Times)
c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service<
WASHINGTON—After two years of acrimonious debate in which bothsides were intransigent, pressure is mounting for Congress again topass and President Clinton to sign a ban on what critics call``partial-birth abortion.''
With a bill banning the procedure to be re-introduced in theHouse this week, and with the Senate to start hearings within twoweeks, abortion opponents say that recent recantations by anabortion-rights advocate about the frequency of the procedure maygive them the edge to succeed this time. Last year, Congress passedthe ban but the Senate failed to override a presidential veto.
The White House says Clinton's position is unchanged—that hewill sign a ban only if it makes an exception for women who need tohave the procedure for health reasons, a provision abortionopponents will not accept.
But as lawmakers supporting abortion rights reconsider theirpositions and whether they went out on a limb with themisinformation by the advocate, pressure is building on Clinton toreassess his position as well. Public-opinion polls last yearshowed that three-fourths of Americans favored banning theprocedure.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan , D-N.Y., who supports abortionrights and voted to impose the ban, said on the NBC News program``Meet the Press'' on Sunday that Clinton should sign the ban.
``There's no hiding behind numbers at this point, and I thinkthis bill will pass and will be signed,'' he said.
And on Tuesday, Steve Forbes, the former presidential candidate,is to begin airing radio advertisements urging Clinton to have ``achange of heart and conscience'' and sign the ban.
Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., who is to re-introduce the Housebill this week, said in an interview, ``The president is getting inmore and more of a box on this, defending something which fewer andfewer people are going to be willing to defend.''
The renewed hope for abortion opponents came last week in theunlikely form of Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of theNational Coalition of Abortion Providers, a lobbying group based inAlexandria, Va., that represents 200 abortion clinics.
He told American Medical News that he had ``lied through myteeth'' when he said earlier, in an effort to bolster theabortion-rights movement, that the ``partial-birth'' procedure wasperformed rarely, no more than 450 times a year.
Now he says it is performed more frequently, perhaps as often as5,000 times, and in the late second trimester, not only in thethird, as he and other abortion-rights advocates had led the publicto believe. He also says it is performed on healthy women carryinghealthy fetuses, not just on those in medical emergencies, asClinton has contended. Neither side is disputing the facts thatFitzsimmons presented.
Fitzsimmons' statements managed to reopen a seeminglyintractable debate, heartening those who oppose abortion andsending abortion-rights advocates scrambling to try to salvagetheir credibility on Capitol Hill.
Both the House and Senate voted last year to ban the procedureat any time except to save the life of the woman. Clinton vetoedthe measure, saying he also wanted an exception for a woman'shealth. He called the procedure ``a potentially life-saving,certainly health-saving'' measure for ``a small but extremelyvulnerable group of women,'' which he put at ``a few hundred ayear.'' The House overrode the veto with four votes to spare; theSenate fell nine votes short.
Abortion opponents adamantly oppose Clinton's health exception,saying it is so elastic as to be meaningless. A spokesman for theRight to Life Committee, Douglas Johnson, calls the president'sinsistence on such an exception a public-relations ploy to tug atpeople's heartstrings while diverting attention from another of thepresident's conditions—that the ban be in place only for thethird trimester.
As Fitzsimmons asserted, and abortion-rights advocates have notdenied, most ``partial-birth'' procedures occur in the secondtrimester, not the third. All abortion procedures, including thisone, known medically as dilation and extraction, are legal untilthe third trimester, although several states allow exceptions inthe third trimester to protect a woman's life and health.
``If the phoniness of what Clinton is saying is dispelled, wesee the potential for conversions to our side,'' Johnson said.
The changes in Congress from last year's elections suggest thatboth houses will pass the ban again: the House had a net loss offive or six anti-abortion votes, and the Senate had a net gain ofperhaps two. The question is whether the political dynamic changesenough for Congress to find the two-thirds votes necessary tooverride a likely veto.
Sen. Rick Santorum , R-Pa., who has introduced the Senate bill toban the procedure, said: ``I don't think Mr. Fitzsimmons'revelation is enough per se to turn the tables, but those who gottheir information early and stopped listening will come back andsay, `Let's look at the bidding again.''
Already, some lawmakers who support abortion rights are sayingthey felt betrayed by the advocates on whom they had relied.
Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., who supports abortion rights andvoted with the president last year, was one of the few lawmakerswho would discuss his reaction on the record. ``It has hurt ourcause because all of us took what was told to us, at the time thebill was up, at face value,'' said Hinchey, a Catholic whose voteagainst the ban was an issue in his re-election. ``That we weregiven information that turns out to be deceitful will causeeveryone to reassess their position.''
He said he doubted he would switch positions on the issue,because he firmly believed the government should not interfere withpersonal and medical decisions. But his openness to the possibilityreflected that of other lawmakers who said privately that theycould just as easily change their votes.
Several abortion-rights proponents did switch last year andvoted to override the veto. And that was before November, when Sen.Tom Harkin of Iowa, a Democrat, and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, aDemocratic Senate candidate, nearly lost because they opposed theban.
Abortion foes have successfully built their case on graphicpresentations of the ``partial-birth'' procedure, which involvesdelivering the fetus part-way, vacuuming out its brains and thenremoving the rest of the body from the birth canal.
Abortion-rights advocates argue that banning this method woulddeny doctors and women one of the safest options for endingpregnancies and that other methods are just as gruesome. They saytheir foes, who find no method of abortion acceptable, are on amission to outlaw abortion, procedure by procedure.
Dr. Richard Schwarz, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology atNew York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., said the``partial-birth'' method was developed in part as an alternative todismembering the fetus, piece by piece, which he said couldperforate the woman's uterus.
``Both sides of this issue have so badly overstated the case,it's ridiculous,'' Schwarz said. ``The president vetoed the billbecause he was led to believe that this procedure was the only wayto save the life of the woman. It may be the best way, but it's notthe only way.''
But banning it, he said, would open the door to undermining Roev. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, andwould give lawmakers a say in how medicine is practiced.
The New York Times said in an editorial on Monday, March 3:
Republicans in Congress are expected to reintroduce legislationthis week to ban the abortion procedure that they describe as``partial birth abortion'' but whose technical name is ``intactdilation and extraction.'' Both houses of Congress passed the billlast year, but it was vetoed by President Clinton after a heateddebate that pitted the gruesomeness of the procedure against theright of women to choose the best means of abortion in consultationwith their doctors.
The debate last year was marred by distortions and evasions onboth sides, and recent comments by Ron Fitzsimmons, executivedirector of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, havereignited the controversy. Fitzsimmons now says that he lied in1995 when he claimed that the procedure was used very rarely andonly in cases where the mother's life was in danger or in cases offetal abnormalities.
The anti-abortion forces will no doubt use his comments to tarpro-choice advocates who fought the bill last year. PresidentClinton is now in the awkward spot of having to justify last year'sveto, which he defended on grounds that the procedure was used onlyrarely and only for critical health reasons. But no one can claimhonesty here. Both sides manipulated the facts.
The procedure is one of a few that doctors use to abort fetusesafter 20 weeks of gestation. It involves dilating the cervix,pulling the fetus partially into the birth canal and collapsing theskull. There is no firm count, but it is likely that a few thousandabortions using this method are performed every year on women withhealthy fetuses. The great majority of those abortions are donebefore 24 weeks of gestation—in other words, in the secondtrimester—before the fetus is viable outside the womb. Abortionsperformed in that time frame are legal and constitutionallyprotected from undue state intrusion, which would seem to precludebanning an accepted medical procedure.
However, neither anti- nor pro-abortion groups chose to focus onthe use of the procedure in the second trimester. Instead,supporters of a ban consistently preached against its use in theeighth and ninth months of pregnancy in blatant attempts to misleadthe public into believing that healthy babies were being abortedjust before birth with this procedure. They also presumably wantedto downplay the fact that the greatest impact of a ban would occurduring the period when women have a constitutionally protectedright to an abortion.
The pro-choice groups responded by arguing that only a fewhundred of these ``late term'' abortions—by which they apparentlymeant third-trimester abortions—were done each year, to protectthe mother's health or because of fetal abnormalities. They werecorrect in that respect. But they were silent on the thousandsperformed in the second trimester, perhaps because they feared thatthe public would find using this method to abort a 23-week-oldfetus equally distasteful.
The less-than-honest quality of the debate has beendisheartening. But the squabbling over numbers should not obscurethe principle at stake. A ban on the procedure is still an unacceptable political invasion of private medical decisions and anattempt to limit access to abortion.
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