[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 46 (Friday, March 29, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E515-E517]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SENATE AMENDMENTS TO H.R. 1833, PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION BAN ACT
______
speech of
HON. BART STUPAK
of michigan
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, March 27, 1996
Mr. STUPAK. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my support of the
Senate amendments to H.R. 1833, legislation to ban partial-birth
abortions.
I would like to share with my colleagues some highly cogent articles
on the highly emotional issue of partial-birth abortions. I believe
Dennis Byrne of the Chicago Sun-Times; George Will, writing for
Newsweek magazine; and, John Leo, in U.S. News and World Report, convey
some very important views that we should take into consideration as we
debate and deliberate this legislation.
[From the Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 12, 1995]
Truth in Reporting? Gimme a Break
(By Dennis Byrne)
Hands-down winner of the sleazy, dishonest journalism award
is NBC's ``Dateline'' for its ``reporting'' on the partial-
birth abortion ban. Not that NBC didn't have some stiff
competition from other pro-choice media acolytes who blindly
parrot the line that partial-birth abortions don't hurt the
kid and are used only to save mama.
But NBC outdid all of them with a segment broadcast before
the Senate voted Thursday to approve the ban on grisly
partial-birth abortions. In it, NBC gave the white, middle-
aged male senator who backed the bill (apparently no self-
respecting woman of child-bearing age could be found to
support the bill) a fraction of the time and none of the
sympathetic treatment accorded the other side: a tearful
woman who told Congress she had to have the procedure because
of a defect in her fetus. The grieving, sensitive couple was
even interviewed at graveside.
NBC neglected to make one critical fact clear, though: The
couple's story had absolutely nothing to do with the ban. The
whole story was irrelevant because the law would apply only
to such abortions on live fetuses. This couple's was dead.
Continuing the parade of horribles: ABC's Sam Donaldson
(M.D., Ph.D., etc.) explained Sunday that partial-birth
abortions are used only for the most serious of health
reasons. Which ignores what one doctor who performs them,
Martin Haskell, told the American Medical Association's
newspaper, American Medical News: ``In my particular case,
probably 20 percent are for genetic reasons. And the other 80
percent are purely elective.''
The story also speared some other pro-choice myths, such as
the idea that the fetus is dead before the abortion begins.
``No, it's not,'' replied Haskell, estimating that in his
case, about two-thirds of the fetuses are alive at the start
of the procedure. Naturally, pro-choice extremists attacked
the publication for supposedly misrepresenting Haskell, but
the paper stood by the reporting, and produced a transcript
from a tape recording.
Then comes AP reporter Diane Duston, who, in a story Friday
about President Clinton promising to veto the bill, wrote
without attribution: ``Late second- or third-trimester
abortions are performed to remove a severely deformed or
already dead fetus that could cause the mother to die, become
infertile or otherwise desperately ill.'' She ignores
Haskell, who himself testified that ``agoraphobia'' (fear of
open places) was among the reasons some women had sought a
second-trimester abortion. Another physician testified that
three of her own patients had gone to Haskell for abortions
well beyond 4\1/2\ months into pregnancy--and that none were
ill and all had normal fetuses. Another doctor who performed
partial-birth abortions, the late James McMahon, acknowledged
he performed at least 39 partial-birth abortions for
``depression'' and nine for cleft palate.
Then there is Kate (``I-make-it-up-as-I go-along'')
Michelman, president of the National Abortion and
Reproductive Rights Action League, who said that anesthesia
kills the fetus before the abortion. That riled the American
Society of Anesthesiologists, which said such claims have
``absolutely no basis in scientific fact.'' It doesn't kill
the fetus, and may not even relieve its pain. Such false
claims, the group added, endanger pregnant women and their
unborn children because they might discourage medically
necessary surgical procedures.
Finally, the Chicago Tribune weighed in Nov. 8 with a one-
sided report of a National Organization for Women press
conference opposing the ban. It was a moving story of a
Naperville woman who had this procedure to spare her deformed
child the trouble of living. But neither the Tribune nor NBC
bothered telling the equally moving and eloquent story of an
Oak Park woman, a Democrat, who also testified before
Congress about how she decided not to have the procedure.
More on her later.
____
[From the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 4 1996]
Never Let Facts Impede Ideology
(By Dennis Byrne)
Somehow the wacky idea has gotten out that giving pregnant
women anesthesia is bad.
The American Society of Anesthesiologists worries that
women will delay necessary or even lifesaving medical
procedures because they fear anesthesia will harm their
fetuses. Dr. David Birnbach, of the Society for Obstetric
Anesthesia and Perinatology, says cases of maternal concerns
about dangers to the fetus have recently surfaced, the
American Medical Association's American Medical News
reported. Rep. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who still delivers
babies, said a patient even refused epidural anesthesia
during childbirth.
Birnbach and other experts uniformly insist that the fear
is unfounded. Dr. Norig Ellison, president of the American
Society of Anesthesiologists, told Congress that more than
50,000 pergant women are safely anesthetized annually without
ill effects to mother or fetus.
Yet some folks are saying otherwise, including Kate
Michelman, president of the National Abortion and
Reproductive Rights Action League. Their insistence that
anesthesia administered during partial-birth abortions
prevents fetal pain and causes fetal death is having an
unfortunate consequence: Some women are becoming afraid that
anesthesia will harm babies they're planning to have.
Ellison's group has no position on the controversial ban on
partially-birth abortions, in which a live, late-term fetus
is partially pulled feet first, from the womb, stabbed in the
back of the neck and its brains sucked out. But they do feel
strongly about Michelman's misinformation. Birnbach said
assertions that anesthesia causes fetal death in such
abortions are shocking and crazy.
Ellison branded as ``entirely inaccurate'' a claim by an
abortionist that the anesthesia eliminates fetal pain and
causes brain death before the abortion. The fact is, he said,
only a small portion of general anesthesia crosses the
placenta to reach the fetus, depending on the amount, and
none administered regionally does. It is not ``absolutely
known,'' he added, that the anesthesia even reduces the
fetus' pain. ``I have not spoken with one anesthesiologist
who agrees with [the abortionist's] conclusion, and in my
judgment, it is contrary to scientific fact. It simply must
not be allowed to stand,'' he said.
As their evidence, pro-choicers cite a letter from an
Albuquerque physician (not an anesthesiologist), Lewis
Koplik, who opposes the ban. I read the letter to Ellison,
who branded its conclusions ``wrong'' and ``untrue.'' A dose
of anesthesia massive enough to kill the fetus, as cited in
the letter, places the mother's own health ``in serious
jeopardy,'' Ellison said, and should require the presence of
an anesthesiologist (which is not standard practice).
Despite all this, Michelman's misinformation continues to
be repeated as the unqualified truth by, for example, Sen.
Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Chicago), syndicated columnist Ellen
Goodman, a USA Today editorial, KMOX-AM in St. Louis and
Planned
[[Page E516]]
Parenthood, said the National Right to Life Committee.
Michelman repeated the assertion in a letter to the editor
here on Sunday, attacking my support of the ban. (She also
claimed I said that the anesthesia ``does not affect the
fetus''--which I didn't. But accuracy apparently isn't
Michelman's strong suit.)
Ellison confesses to frustration that Michelman's
misinformation gets circulated without challenge, while his
scientific evidence is barely mentioned. Welcome, Doc, to the
abortion wars, as referred by the ever-objective media. Never
let facts stand in the way of a favored ideological agenda.
Not even at the expense of women's health.
____
[From Newsweek, Dec. 11, 1995]
The Last Word--Fanatics For Choice
Partial-birth abortions, sonogram photos and the idea that ``the fetus
means nothing''
(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 startled
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 a 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 say 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 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 ban 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 hope 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?
[From U.S. News & World Report, Nov. 1995]
Harder Hearts on Abortion
(By John Leo)
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.
[[Page E517]]
In an article last month in the New Republic, feminist
Naomi Wolf, an abortion-rights advocate, wrote that ``with
the prochoice 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.
____________________