c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service<
In last month's issue of Ms. magazine, in a jumble ofhealth-related dispatches on page 36, lurks the headline, ``Does abortion cause breast cancer?'' The first four and a half lines oftext below it note that one study concludes that women who have had abortions are 30 percent more likely to develop the disease.
But perhaps more interesting, and more illuminating, is what thenext and final seven and a half lines of text do. They belittle theresults, telling readers that women living in cities, after all,have a 50 percent higher risk of breast cancer. No sooner doesabortion receive a tiny, possibly insignificant bruise than a freshcoat of makeup is applied to its cheek.
Outside the pages of Ms., in the halls of Congress and thescattered offices of Planned Parenthood and other organizations,there is something similarly reflexive and, to many observers,unyielding in the way abortion rights advocates have come to reactto any potentially unflattering information.
The recent confession of one advocate that he deliberately liedabout the frequency of a controversial form of late-term abortionsuggests a movement enveloped by an extremism that prohibitsconcessions, compromise, maybe even candor.
But if such an atmosphere exists, it has arisen from a politicalbattle so passionate and divisive that warriors on both sides feelthat all is fair, that no weapon is out of bounds, and that anyadmission of weakness could give the enemy an opportunity for totalconquest.
``Both sides in the public debate are dominated by hard-linerswho can see no compromise and give no quarter,'' said Stephen L.Carter, a Yale law professor who has written extensively onabortion (though he hasn't stated his own view).
Speaking specifically of abortion rights advocates, he added:``They feel that any step in the other direction can lead them downa slippery slope to taking away all their basic rights. They feelthat virtue is found in being uncompromising, and they're clearlyon the defensive.''
What has put them there is the recent wrangling over a kind oflate-term abortion, called ``partial birth abortion'' by opponentsand ``intact dilation and extraction'' by defenders, in which afetus is partly extracted from the birth canal and then its brainis suctioned out before the rest of the body is removed.
Last year, President Clinton 
vetoed a ban on the procedurebecause it did not include an exception in cases when the mother'sgeneral health was at risk, only when her life was jeopardized. Thepresident also said the procedure was extremely rare and donemostly in medical emergencies.
But last month Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of theNational Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted that suchlate-term abortions were more common, and the reasons for themsometimes less urgent, than advocates had led people to believe.Fitzsimmons said that in an interview with ``Nightline'' in 1995 hehimself had lied about those facts.
In a telephone interview last week, Fitzsimmons declined to talkabout why he lied. He simply stated that it was time for moretruth-telling in general in the abortion debate.
The writer Anne Roiphe, whose most recent book is ``Fruitful: aReal Mother in the Modern World,'' agrees. Although she said shesteadfastly supports abortion rights, Ms. Roiphe added that for toolong, too many women like her have felt inhibited about discussingthe emotional ambivalence behind their political certainty, lestthey inadvertently assist the other side.
It is a siege mentality that has kept many who favor abortionrights silent about their qualms over late-term abortions and haspushed some toward an unequivocal defense of them. ``There areradical differences between a four-week-old fetus and aneight-month-old fetus,'' Ms. Roiphe said. ``Every woman knows thisin her heart. But her politics tells her there is no difference.''
Such attitudes have evolved from a conviction that something ofthe utmost importance is at stake, a right so treasured, and yet soseemingly tenuous, that there is constant dread of its loss.
For some of its defenders, abortion is also clearly a symbol ofone of the earliest and most decisive triumphs of the women'sliberation movement. These leaders are fighting for something bothbroader and vaguer than the option to terminate pregnancies, whichis why they remain as tenacious as ever despite the advent of anabortion pill and the promise of other medical strides that mightrender at least certain aspects of the abortion debate moot.
But their victories have come at what even some supporters sayis the cost of complete honesty. ``There's a feeling amongadvocates that this is a transcendent cause, and that the moralityof the cause is more important than the morality of the means topromote the cause,'' said Daniel Callahan, a medical ethicist atthe Hastings Center who has written two books about abortion.
Callahan, who identifies himself as pro-choice, said thismentality is shared by the opponents of abortion as well, whom hecriticized in particular for not accepting responsibility for theviolence that sometimes follows their use of inflammatory words.
Callahan said that from the beginning of the crusade forabortion rights, the efficacy of certain arguments was deemed moreimportant than their veracity. He recalled that in the late 1960s,one argument of abortion-rights forces was that the illegality ofabortion was men's way of suppressing women by keeping thempregnant, if not barefoot and in the kitchen.
But he said that in private talks with campaigners, they wouldtell of men pleading with, or coercing, women to have abortionsbecause the men didn't want responsibility for children.
``I said, `Gee, that's interesting—we never hear about that,''' Callahan recalled. ``And they said to me: `We're not going tosay that. That's not going to help us. We've got a good story—thesuppression of women—and we're not going to muddle it.' ''
Callahan said the same partial truth-telling characterizes someadvocates for AIDS victims concerned that any admission ofcontinued promiscuity would sacrifice public sympathy for gay men.Similarly, he said, anti-smoking campaigners trumped up thesignificance of studies on second-hand smoke, reasoning that theywere on the side of the angels.
But the abortion wars, he said, have provided the best paradigmof what he calls a new ``ethics of advocacy,'' modeled after thecombative behavior of lawyers in a courtroom, in which the qualityof facts takes a back seat to the deftness of their manipulation.
That style, say observers of the abortion fight, marks not justdefenders of abortion but also their opponents. The anti-abortionfilm ``Silent Scream,'' for example, was deemed by many physiciansto be a gross misrepresentation. The current anti-abortion campaignaimed at schools has encountered similar criticism.
The result, sadly, is skepticism, if not cynicism, among themajority of Americans whose opinions put them between the twodistant, rigid poles in the debate. ``I don't know how they havestatistics on some of the things they say they do,'' Dr. LynnRosenberg, a professor at Boston University's School of Medicine,said of both sides. ``So I don't believe anything.''
c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service=
DUBLIN, Ireland—A new national debate about abortion hasbroken out in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, where abortions may be legal only in cases where a woman's life isendangered by a pregnancy.
The debate, stimulated by a published report that an illegalabortion had been performed in Dublin two years ago, has promptedwidespread calls for a new national referendum on the issue and forlegislation to redefine legal and illegal abortion.
Current law, set by a Supreme Court decision in 1992, allows forabortion only in cases in which a pregnant woman's life isthreatened, but not where her health is endangered, nor in cases ofrape or incest.
The abortion issue, which divided the country five years agoduring a referendum campaign, now appears likely to do the sameduring the campaign before national parliamentary elections, whichmust be held by next January but are expected sooner, probably inJune.
The debate was revived after a report Feb. 28 in The Irish Timesthat a woman who said she had had an illegal abortion at a Dublin family planning clinic was now charging the clinic with a crime.
After medical complications developed, the report said, shedecided to go to the police. The Dublin police have confirmed thatthey arrested and questioned one of the clinic's doctors and that afile has been forwarded to the Department of Public Prosecutionsfor possible action. The identities of the woman and the doctorhave not been disclosed, and there were no further details.
The case has prompted calls from anti-abortion groups, like thePro-Life Campaign, the country's principal group, for a nationalreferendum calling for a categorical constitutional ban onabortion. Opposition political leaders have also called for areferendum, or for legislation to redefine legal and illegalabortion.
This week, Prime Minister John Bruton said he had no intentionof introducing a referendum or abortion legislation this year.Bruton's justice minister, Nora Owen, said: ``I don't believe weneed another referendum, and I don't think the government thinks weneed another referendum. I would hope there would not be a rerun ofthe kind of intemperate debate we've had over the last number ofyears.''
But John O'Donoghue, the spokesman on justice for the chiefopposition party, Fianna Fail, said the issue was ``in the centerstage of Irish life again.'' The Fianna Fail leader, Bertie Ahern,who is campaigning to replace Bruton as prime minister, confirmedthat the party was discussing a new referendum.
The abortion issue last raged in Ireland in 1992, after a14-year-old girl said she had been made pregnant by the father of afriend. At first, the government forbade her to have an abortion inBritain. Later, the Supreme Court in Dublin ruled in her favor, andshe went to Britain and had the procedure.
In November 1992, voters approved government-proposedconstitutional changes that gave women the right to travel abroadfor abortions. At least 5,000 Irish women go to Britain each yearfor abortions. The voters also approved the right to distributeinformaion about abortion and foreign abortion clinics.
But the voters rejected a change in the Constitution that wouldhave confirmed the earlier Supreme Court decision, which madeabortion legal if the woman's life was threatened. Anti-abortiongroups and the Catholic hierarchy said the proposal went too far.Women's groups in favor of liberalization said it did not go farenough.
Noting the number of women who travel abroad for abortions, aneditorial in The Irish Times recently said, ``Some of us might liketo congratulate ourselves that we have banished the dirty businessof abortion from Irish shores; but will we accept indefinitely themoral evasion of simply exporting our abortion cases to Britain?''<
c. 1997 N.Y. Times News Service=
In the 24 years since Roe vs. Wade, American women have neverbeen more in danger of losing their constitutional right to an abortion than they are this week—but so farcical, if far fromfunny, has been the debate surrounding ``partial-birth abortions''that many Americans, congressmen included, don't have a clue as towhat is really going on.
Confusion, deliberate and not, has been sowed on both sides ofthe issue, with each new ``controversy'' making the truth murkier.The latest chapter is typical. A man named Ron Fitzsimmons _routinely described in the press as a ``prominent'' abortion-rightsleader—announced that he had ``lied'' when he told Ted Koppel in1995 that there were only 500 ``partial-birth abortions'' inAmerica each year; he now says there are 5,000. But as FranklinFoer reports in Slate, Fitzsimmons is not prominent; his 1995``lie,'' though filmed, never aired on ``Nightline''; and ``thereis nothing new about what he `revealed.' '' That obscure journalThe Washington Post suggested last fall that as many as severalthousand of the procedures, known medically as intact dilation andextraction (IDE), may be performed each year. No reliablestatistics exist.
The issue is not how many, in any event, but why any at all?Even if 10,000 such abortions occurred each year, that would stillbe a tiny minority of America's annual 1.5 million abortions. Whywould any woman choose to have a fetus pulled out by a grotesqueprocess that requires its skull to be crushed to pass through thecervix?
Opponents of ``partial-birth abortion'' say these women are inthe final weeks or days of pregnancy—even ``just seconds'' awayfrom delivery, as Jack Kemp put it during the campaign—when theywhimsically opt for ``infanticide.'' Not true; such a scenario isalready illegal. Under Roe vs. Wade, states can ban all abortionsin the third trimester of pregnancy, except if the health or lifeof the mother is at stake, and 40 states and the District ofColumbia have done so. Only some 600 abortions, no matter what theprocedure, occur after the sixth month of pregnancy in the U.S.each year—all involving a tragically deformed fetus or a motherin peril.
That leaves the several thousand other cases; these occurearlier, before a fetus is viable—months, not days, beforedelivery. But why in a country where 99 percent of abortions occurin the first 20 weeks would a woman wait any longer to have anabortion, let alone one carried out this way? Pro-lifers say suchwomen frivolously make their ``elective'' choice once they findthey can't fit into a prom dress. Perhaps some do. But others whodelay abortions well into the second trimester are poor or ruralwomen who must save up to afford an abortion or a trip to aprovider (84 percent of American counties don't have one); scaredwomen delayed by fear of harassment or violence at their localclinics; teen-age girls who are either in denial or traumatized byparental notification laws (especially if the parent is also thefather) or fighting those laws clandestinely in slow courtproceedings; women who disastrously develop prenatal diabetes, andwomen who learn from amniocentesis (a second-trimester testrequiring a wait for results) of severe fetal anomalies.
Why would such women then choose intact dilation and extraction?They don't; their doctors do—when they feel it's the safestchoice for the patient. By the second trimester, (italics)all(enditalics) abortion procedures are grotesque. The principalalternative to an IDE requires the fetus's dismemberment, and it,too, could be jeopardized by the broad language of Congress's``partial-birth abortion'' ban; what's now on the line is Roe vs.Wade's protection of second-trimester abortions, period.
This is why pro-lifers are right to so strenuously champion theban; it begins the end-run process of gutting Roe vs. Wade a fewprocedures at a time, because those who believe life begins atconception can logically argue that most abortions are``partial-birth abortions.'' Politicians who purport to be``pro-choice'' but vote for this bill, by contrast, are biggerliars than Fitzsimmons. The ``partial-birth abortion'' ban does notstamp out infanticide, which is already illegal, but cripples botha woman's right to choose and a doctor's duty to recommend thesafest of the uniformly awful options for carrying out thatanguished choice.
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