[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 204 (Tuesday, December 19, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2393-E2394]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             COLUMNIST GEORGE F. WILL, A NATIONAL TREASURE

                                 ______


                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, December 18, 1995

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring attention 
to the work of Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and author, George F. 
Will. In him, Mr. Speaker I believe we have a national treasure. Time 
and again by his labors at the keypad Mr. Will has shown himself to be 
a man of great insight and depth. I believe him to be a among that 
rarest of rare breeds--an original thinker. The concision and clarity 
with which he transforms those thoughts to the written word evidences a 
deep commitment on his part to understand and illuminate the human 
condition. His will to toil year after year so that others might not be 
lead astray by intellectual fads or fallacious reasoning is a model to 
all who would seek to shape the course of public life. Anyone willing 
to give his work a fair reading will find each week some troubling 
societal question logically explored, element by element and ultimately 
reduced to its essence without rancor or sentimentality.
  I became a fan of George F. Will many years ago when the writer and 
father in him came together in a gloriously uncompartmentalized way to 
render an unambiguous rebuke to anyone who might doubt the quality of a 
life lived at less than physical perfection. With a few deft paragraphs 
Mr. Will wrote of his own son's enormous capacity to love and be loved. 
He explained that his ``Oriole fan'', despite whatever limitations 
Downs Syndrome had placed on him, could experience the joys and 
tragedies of life in the same way we all do--mostly through things as 
common as baseball. The boy was fully alive, fully human and perfectly 
formed in the image of God. It is my belief, Mr. Speaker that no writer 
in our land of literary greatness could deliver this urgent message 
with more force and grace than Mr. Will. It is clear that we are truly 
blessed as a nation to have him.
  It is also obvious that despite the passing decades Mr. Will has not 
lost any of the, above-described commitment to his craft. His most 
recent Newsweek column is another fine example of all that is good and 
true about his work. And so Mr. Speaker, I enter that essay into the 
Record so that Mr. Will's own words can testify to the greatness of 
this decent, courageous and talented American.

                        Fanatics for ``Choice''

                          (By George F. Will)

       Americans are beginning to recoil against the fanaticism 
     that has helped to produce this fact: more than a quarter of 
     all American pregnancies are ended by abortions. Abundant 
     media attention has been given to the extremism that has 
     tainted the right-to-life movement. Now events are exposing 
     the extraordinary moral evasions and callousness 
     characteristic of fanaticism, prevalent in the abortion-
     rights lobby.
       Begin with ``partial-birth abortions.'' Pro-abortion 
     extremists object to that name, preferring ``intact dilation 
     and evacuation,'' for the same reason the pro-abortion 
     movement prefers to be called ``pro-choice.'' What is 
     ``intact'' is a baby. During the debate that led to House 
     passage of a ban on partial-birth abortions, the right-to-
     life movement was criticized for the sensationalism of its 
     print advertisements featuring a Dayton nurse's description 
     of such an abortion:
       ``The mother was six months pregnant. The baby's heartbeat 
     was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. The doctor went 
     in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them 
     down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body 
     and the arms--everything but the head. The doctor kept the 
     baby's head just inside the uterus. The baby's little fingers 
     were clasping and unclasping and his feet were kicking. Then 
     the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, 
     and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle 
     reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. 
     The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered 
     suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains 
     out.''
       To object to this as sensationalism is to say that 
     discomforting truths should be suppressed. But increasingly 
     the language of pro-abortion people betrays a flinching from 
     facts. In a woman's story about her chemical abortion, 
     published last year in Mother Jones magazine, she quotes her 
     doctor as saying, ``By Sunday you won't see on the monitor 
     what we call the heartbeat.'' ``What we call''? In partial-
     birth abortions the birth is kept (just barely) partial to 
     preserve the legal fiction that a baby (what some pro-
     abortion people call ``fetal material'') is not being killed. 
     An abortionist has told The New York Times that some mothers 
     find such abortions comforting because after the killing, the 
     small body can be ``dressed and held'' so the (if pro-
     abortionists will pardon the expression) mother can ``say 
     goodbye.'' The New York Times reports, ``Most of the doctors 
     interviewed said they saw no moral difference between 
     dismembering the fetus within the uterus and partially 
     delivering it, intact, before killing it.'' Yes.
       Opponents of a ban on partial-birth abortions say almost 
     all such abortions are medically necessary. However, an 
     abortionist at the Dayton clinic is quoted as saying 80 
     percent are elective. Opponents of a ban on such abortions 
     assert that the baby is killed before the procedure, by 
     the anesthesia given to the mother. (The baby ``undergoes 
     demise,'' in the mincing words of Kate Michelman of the 
     National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. 
     Does Michelman says herbicides cause the crab grass in her 
     lawn to ``undergo demise''? Such Orwellian language is a 
     sure sign of squeamishness.) However, the president of the 
     American Society of Anesthesiologists says this 
     ``misinformation'' has ``absolutely no basis in scientific 
     fact'' and might endanger pregnant women's health by 
     deterring them from receiving treatment that is safe.
       Opponents of a ban say there are only about 600 such 
     procedures a year. Let us suppose, as not everyone does, the 
     number 600 is accurate concerning the more than 13,000 
     abortions performed after 21 weeks of gestation. Still, 600 
     is a lot. Think of two crashes of jumbo airliners. Opponents 
     of the ban darkly warn that it would be the first step 

[[Page E2394]]
     toward repeal of all abortion rights. Columnist John Leo of U.S. News & 
     World Report says that is akin to the gun lobby's argument 
     that a ban on assault weapons must lead to repeal of the 
     Second Amendment.
       In a prophecy born of hope, many pundits have been 
     predicting that the right-to-life ``extremists'' would 
     drastically divide the Republican Party. But 73 House 
     Democrats voted to bar partial-birth abortions; only 15 
     Republicans opposed the ban. If the ban survives the Senate, 
     President Clinton will probably veto it. The convention that 
     nominated him refused to allow the Democratic governor of 
     Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, who is pro-life, to speak. Pro-
     choice speakers addressed the 1992 Republican Convention. The 
     two presidential candidates who hoped that a pro-choice 
     stance would resonate among Republicans--Gov. Pete Wilson, 
     Sen. Arlen Specter--have become the first two candidates to 
     fold their tents.
       In October in The New Republic, Naomi Wolf, a feminist and 
     pro-choice writer, argued that by resorting to abortion 
     rhetoric that recognizes neither life nor death, pro-choice 
     people ``risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us 
     with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and 
     women who share a cheapened view of human life.'' Other 
     consequences of a ``lexicon of dehumanization'' about the 
     unborn are ``hardness of heart, lying and political 
     failure.'' Wolf said that the ``fetus means nothing'' stance 
     of the pro-choice movement is refuted by common current 
     practices of parents-to-be who have framed sonogram photos 
     and fetal heartbeat stethoscopes in their homes. Young 
     upscale adults of child-bearing age are a solidly pro-choice 
     demographic group. But they enjoy watching their unborn 
     babies on sonograms, responding to outside stimuli, and they 
     read ``The Well Baby Book,'' which says: ``Increasing 
     knowledge is increasing the awe and respect we have for the 
     unborn baby and is causing us to regard the unborn baby as a 
     real person long before birth . . .''
       Wolf argued for keeping abortion legal but treating it as a 
     matter of moral gravity because ``grief and respect are the 
     proper tones for all discussions about choosing to endanger 
     or destroy a manifestation of life.'' This temperate judgment 
     drew from Jane Johnson, interim president of Planned 
     Parenthood, a denunciation of the ``view that there are good 
     and bad reasons for abortion.'' So, who now are the fanatics?

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