Editorials Partial truth
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
PARTIAL TRUTH When President Bill Clinton vetoed a bill banning partial-birth abortions last April, he said the procedure was neces-sary for a "small but extremely vulnerable group of women and...
...Helen Alvare of the Bishops' Prolife Committee, who claimed the number of such abortions might be in the thousands rather than the hun-dreds, was subjected to a particularly ill-informed interro-gation by Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes...
...Not so...
...Reacting to Fitzsimmons's change of testimony, other abortion-rights leaders say they have not lied, but they admitted when questioned by reporters that partial-birth abortions were performed in the second trimester, but not on healthy women with healthy fetuses...
...Now a year later, Ron Fitzsimmons, head of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, and one of the abortion pro-ponents who supplied that information, says he "lied through my teeth" when he said the procedure was rarely used and then only in cases in which there was a threat either to the mother's life or of fetal deformity...
...Clinton got his information from abortion-rights propo-nents and the stories of the several women who appeared with him when he vetoed the bill, some of whom may not actually have had a partial-birth abortion (see, Commonweal editorials, April 19 and May 3, and correspondence with one of the women who appeared with the president, June 14,1996...
...Some say the numbers aren't im-portant and that "both sides manipulated the facts" (New York Times, March 3,1997...
...In the midst of a political strug-gle over abortion, it has become clear that no party-not Congress, not the president, not the media-made it their busi-ness to uncover the basic facts...
...In fact, there were and are no reliable statistics on how many women have partial-birth abortions or whether they have them in the second or third trimester...
...A new bill banning partial-birth abortions will be introduced in this session of Congress...
...It now appears that prolifers were more accurate, though like the rest of us they have no hard numbers...
...The Center for Disease Control does not gather statistics on abortion methods...
...An abortion method that is infanticide in all but name is wrong, whether one baby's life is ended or three thousand...
...Prolife advocates were accused of lying...
...But something else is at stake...
...But over the whole long debate that preceded the veto and the subsequent attempt to override it, few in the media went looking for the numbers or examined the testimony avail-able from doctors who admitted they used the method on healthy mothers with healthy fetuses...
...Then President Clinton should drop his op-position to what is in fact a very modest restriction on abor-tion practice in the United States...
...PARTIAL TRUTH When President Bill Clinton vetoed a bill banning partial-birth abortions last April, he said the procedure was neces-sary for a "small but extremely vulnerable group of women and families in this country, just a few hundred a year...
...If witnesses testify under oath, this time there is a chance that politicians will get their facts straight before they vote and before they veto...
Vol. 124 • March 1997 • No. 5
