[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.

                          ____________________