Abortion and the President
Tell, David
Abortion and the President Americans worry endlessly and admirably over the quality of our virtue as a people. We do it more and more these days, groping to account for the latest statistical...
...Bill Clinton is ethically rudderless and untrustworthy, Bob Dole says: The president does regular violence to the truth...
...This provision of Texas state law—a ban on partial-birth abortion— remained on the books following the Roe decision...
...Actually, no...
...So “I fail to see how [Dole’s] moral position is superior to the one I took...
...So they throw fat clods of talk at one another about character and principle...
...Next month Andrew will celebrate his first birthday, healthy and alive...
...No peerreviewed medical journal has ever passed on it...
...Meet Andrew Goin of Orlando, Florida, who was born with his stomach, liver, spleen, and small and large intestines exposed— outside his body...
...Bill Clinton Preserved the practice with his veto pen...
...Bill Clinton, with his veto pen, defends the practice...
...But neither man’s accusation, at this late date, can much persuade anyone not already convinced of its justice...
...And scissors are next forced through the base of the baby’s skull by the surgeon, who finally evacuates the child’s brain with a suction catheter...
...But partialbirth abortion is different...
...How much better it would be—for Republican electoral prospects and for the country—if Dole made the cause his own...
...He had acted to defend pregnant women suffering unusual prenatal complications, Clinton claimed, women for whom partial-birth abortion is “the only way” to avoid “serious physical damage, including losing the ability to ever bear further children...
...Hardly...
...They are eager to earn partisan advantage from all the nervous national self-scrutiny...
...And yet the two men have so far directly engaged each other on this controversy only once...
...The debate and the votes will embarrass the president and further, deservedly, demonize partialbirth abortion...
...And he is breathtakingly dishonest about it, to boot...
...Does this mean that if partial-birth abortion is the best and only solution for certain pregnant women, the Constitution requires that it remain an option...
...You can almost feel the country’s desperation whenever it catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror...
...No matter...
...Bob Dole is ethically rudderless and untrustworthy, Bill Clinton responds: Dole’s tax and budget proposals would do violence to the elderly, the poor, the Earth itself...
...There is one...
...Their prognosis, according to former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, an expert on the subject, “is usually good...
...The original plaintiffs in Roe v. Wade successfully challenged articles 1191-1194 and 1196 of the Texas Penal Code, which prohibited abortion for any purpose other than saving the life of a mother...
...There we seem too easy on ourselves as individuals...
...It is still there...
...Partial-birth abortion is the most brutal assault on human life our laws permit...
...How, then, might the Republican presidential campaign revivify morality as a political question...
...And within hours, Clinton himself had joined the fray...
...Why, for that matter, should the Dole campaign not make a television ad about partial-birth abortion and spend a million dollars, or two million dollars, to broadcast it nationally...
...Such a stalemate in moral argument works this year to the benefit of President Clinton’s reelection campaign— blessed as it is to take place in a country enjoying economic growth and relative peace overseas...
...But the Roe plaintiffs declined to challenge article 1195, which criminalized abortion of “a child in a state of being born and before actual birth, which child would otherwise have been born alive...
...It is not recognized as an accepted surgery by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists...
...Meet Margaret Sheridan of Chevy Chase, Maryland, who lost a son to Trisomy 18, 45 minutes after his birth...
...And everywhere the preciousness of our lives—the idea that there exist certain lines of personal and social dignity that must not be crossed— seems badly eroded...
...As many have already recoiled from the president...
...Many or most of them can experience future, normal pregnancies...
...For a man with an unerring nose for the slipperiest middle way through any given political dispute, President Clinton is this time caught stark naked on the argument’s extreme...
...In the next few weeks, the House of Representatives, with support from scores of Democrats, including minority leader Dick Gephardt and minority whip David Bonior, will probably vote to override Clinton’s partial-birth veto...
...The Senate will probably fall short of the 67 votes necessary to enact the ban into law...
...As many as several thousand American women each year undergo the procedure...
...And in any case, partial-birth abortion is not the best and only solution for pregnant women facing the fetal complications the president most commonly cites: hydrocephaly, gross abdominal wall defects, or chromosomal trisomy...
...At the beginning of a partial-birth abortion, the baby—in the seventh or even eighth month of fetal development—is manipulated by forceps into a feet-first, breech position...
...With few exceptions, this charge-and-countercharge routine skitters ineffectually over the surface of quotidian reality...
...And not all of these women’s afflicted children must die...
...It is the most brutal assault on human life our laws permit...
...It is abortion, partial-birth abortion in particular...
...If that’s the end of it this year, of course—if Bob Dole neglects to burn the issue into national consciousness and President Clinton goes on, as now seems likely, to win reelection—then partial-birth abortions will continue to stain the American landscape for at least another four years...
...We do it more and more these days, groping to account for the latest statistical or anecdotal indicator of decline...
...On which of the myriad issues dividing the two majorparty contenders this fall might a national decision— in Bob Dole’s favor—actually and immediately improve the quality of American virtue...
...He instantly went on piously to proclaim his own...
...That rule of thumb holds sadly true, for the most part, and our national abortion controversy remains largely submerged— and wholly unresolved—as a result...
...Bob Dole Would End it...
...It is an entirely horrible idea for almost everyone who comes fully to understand it, and most of them instinctively recoil from any public figure prepared to endorse the practice...
...Last September, the American Medical Association’s Legislative Council voted unanimously to endorse a ban on partial-birth abortion...
...The “medical community . . . broadly supports the continued availability of this procedure” in such cases, Clinton claims...
...Well...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...It is “okay” with Bob Dole, according to Clinton, “if they rip your body to shreds and you could never have another baby even though the baby you were carrying couldn’t live...
...Here, at last, we have a practically and morally consequential difference on our presidential ballot...
...Clinton isn’t...
...Dole is right...
...Our politicians can feel it, too...
...It is then, alive and sentient of pain, removed from its mother’s body, all but the head...
...Sheridan has subsequently borne five children, all normal...
...Instead, according to abundant public testimony, the “medical community” routinely preserves the health of those women President Clinton wants us to believe cannot otherwise be helped...
...Partialbirth abortion is not taught in a single medical residency program anywhere in the United States...
...Why should he not explain the issue—and his position on it—at length, every time he appears in public, not just when he is addressing committed pro-life audiences...
...Here we seem too coarse with one another...
...The debate therefore holds little promise of resolving the most obvious problems now gnawing on the American conscience...
...What risk would Bob Dole run in highlighting partial-birth abortion during the remaining few weeks of his campaign...
...During a May speech in Philadelphia, Dole suggested that Clinton’s then-recent veto of the congressional ban on partialbirth abortion “pushed the limits of decency too far...
...By the logic of Supreme Court jurisprudence, a pre-fetal-viability abortion may not be banned if no other procedure exists that equally serves the mother’s health interests...
...Before Dole had even left the hotel in which he made these remarks, White House aides were paging attending reporters on their beepers, reminding them that the president’s veto was necessary to defend the Constitution, since the legislation failed to include a “health of the mother” exception...
...I am always a little skeptical when politicians piously proclaim their morality,” the president announced...
...If their doctors are not allowed, as the president put it euphemistically, “to reduce . . . the head of the baby,” these women “are going to be eviscerated...
...It is a rule of thumb in contemporary American politics that candidates who make more than passing mention of abortion do so at their own peril, since so many voters are queasily conflicted about the subject and resent even being asked to think about it...
...Bob Dole, were he to occupy the Oval Office, would sign a bill to end it...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 2
