Harder Hearts on Abortion
`Partial birth" abortions are unsettling even to read about--the only version of abortion in which fetuses, either viable or near viability, are partly visible outside the body while alive and inches away from birth before being dispatched.
They are typically performed at 20 to 24 weeks, but sometimes later. The fetus is manipulated so that its feet and sometimes part of its body are outside the mother. The head is left in the uterus. Then the skull is pierced and the brain is suctioned out, causing skull collapse and death.
Why is the head of the fetus left inside the uterus when the removal of the brain takes place? "Avoiding trauma to the cervix" is usually cited as the reason, but the bottom line is really legal. Stopping the head just short of birth is a legal fig leaf for a procedure that doesn't look like abortion at all. It looks like infanticide.
Brenda Shafer, a registered nurse who supports abortion rights, says she witnessed three of these operations during a brief assignment to assist Dr. Martin Haskell at an Ohio abortion clinic in 1993. She says the three fetuses, two normal and one with Down's syndrome, all three 25 or more weeks along, were alive when Dr. Haskell inserted scissors into their skulls. "I still have nightmares about what I saw," she said in a letter to an antiabortion congressman in urging passage of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.
Abortion-rights supporters have greeted the partial birth issue as the beginning of a new crusade to undermine Roe v. Wade. For some abortion opponents, it obviously is. But it also is true that a great many Americans, on both sides and in the middle, are deeply troubled by the brutality and questionable morality of this particular procedure. It deserves to be judged on its own.
"Costly vote." In the House vote, a dozen pro-choice congressmen, including Ted Kennedy's son Patrick, joined the lopsided majority and voted to ban partial birth procedures. They did this knowing they face some aggressive retribution from the abortion-rights lobby without gaining any support from the antiabortion side. "It was a costly vote," said Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia, an abortion-rights backer. "I'm not going to vote in such a way that I have to put my conscience on the shelf."
It should be noted that the abortion lobby is having trouble getting its facts straight. After Brenda Shafer made her statement, Dr. Haskell said he didn't recall any such person working at his clinic. An employment card was produced. Then Rep. Patricia Schroeder and others extracted a nondenial denial from Dr. Haskell's head nurse, saying that Brenda Shafer "would not" have been present at the three abortions she said she saw.
Kate Michelman and other abortion-rights lobbyists insisted that partial birth abortion is "confined to extraordinary medical circumstances" and that anesthesia "causes fetal demise ... prior to the procedure." Not true. A 1993 interview with Dr. Haskell in an American Medical Association newspaper quotes him as saying that 80 percent of these procedures are elective and two thirds occur while the fetus is alive. Dr. Haskell wrote a letter strongly implying he was misquoted. But an audiotape was produced showing that he wasn't.
And Michelman said, "It's not only a myth, it's a lie" that partial birth abortions are used to eliminate fetuses for minor defects such as cleft palates. But abortion practitioner Dr. James McMahon already had told Congress he had personally performed nine of these procedures solely because of cleft palates. Compared with the abortion-rights lobby, the O.J. defense looks obsessively ethical and tightly focused on verifiable truth.
In an article last month in the New Republic, feminist Naomi Wolf, an abortion-rights advocate, wrote that "with the pro-choice rhetoric we use now, we incur three destructive consequences ... hardness of heart, lying and political failure." She wrote: "By refusing to look at abortion within a moral framework, we lose the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity."
The partial birth issue is a good time for abortion-rights supporters to reclaim the moral framework that Wolf says they have relinquished. This repellent procedure goes way too far. No other Western nation, to my knowledge, allows it. It was unanimously condemned by the American Medical Association's council on legislation. (The full association later decided to duck the issue and take no position.)
Those who defend it reflexively because it may lead to other legislation are in the exact position of gun lobbyists who shoot down bans on assault weapons because those bans may one day lead to a roundup of everybody's handguns. They refuse, on tactical grounds, to confront the moral issue involved. More of the abstract hardness that Wolf writes about.
Killing a five-month or six-month fetus that's halfway down the birth canal raises a moral issue way beyond that of ordinary abortion. It's perfectly possible to support a woman's right to abort and still think that the anything-goes ethic of this horrific procedure has no place in a culture with any reverence left for life.
This story appears in the November 20, 1995 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.