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 or anecdotal indicator of decline. Here we seem too coarse with one another. There we seem too easy on ourselves as individuals. 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. You can almost feel the country’s desperation whenever it catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror.
Our politicians can feel it, too. They are eager to earn partisan advantage from all the nervous national self-scrutiny. So they throw fat clods of talk at one another about character and principle. With few exceptions, this charge-and-counter-charge routine skitters ineffectually over the surface of quotidian reality. Bill Clinton is ethically rudderless and untrustworthy, Bob Dole says: The president does regular violence to the truth. 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.
Dole is right. Clinton isn’t. But neither man’s accusation, at this late date, can much persuade anyone not already convinced of its justice. The debate therefore holds little promise of resolving the most obvious problems now gnawing on the American conscience. 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.
How, then, might the Republican presidential campaign revivify morality as a political question? 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?
There is one. It is abortion, partial-birth abortion in particular.
As many as several thousand American women each year undergo the procedure. 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. It is then, alive and sentient of pain, removed from its mother’s body, all but the head. 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.
It is the most brutal assault on human life our laws permit. Bill Clinton, with his veto pen, defends the practice. Bob Dole, were he to occupy the Oval Office, would sign a bill to end it. Here, at last, we have a practically and morally consequential difference on our presidential ballot.
And yet the two men have so far directly engaged each other on this controversy only once. During a May speech in Philadelphia, Dole suggested that Clinton’s then-recent veto of the congressional ban on partial-birth abortion “pushed the limits of decency too far.” 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. And within hours, Clinton himself had joined the fray.
“I am always a little skeptical when politicians piously proclaim their morality,” the president announced, He instantly went on piously to proclaim 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.” 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 “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.” So ” I fail to see how [Dole’s] moral position is superior to the one I took.”
Well. 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. And he is breathtakingly dishonest about it, to boot.
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. 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?
Actually, no. 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. 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.” This provision of Texas state law — a ban on partial-birth abortion -remained on the books following the Roe decision. It is still there.
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. The “medical community . . . broadly supports the continued availability of this procedure” in such cases, Clinton claims. Hardly. Partial-birth abortion is not taught in a single medical residency program anywhere in the United States. It is not recognized as an accepted surgery by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. No peer-reviewed medical journal has ever passed on it. Last September, the American Medical Association’s Legislative Council voted unanimously to endorse a ban on partial-birth abortion.
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. Their prognosis, according to former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, an expert on the subject, “is usually good.” Many or most of them can experience future, normal pregnancies. Meet Margaret Sheridan of Chew Chase, Maryland, who lost a son to Trisomy 18, 45 minutes after his birth. Mrs. Sheridan has subsequently borne five children, all normal. And not all of these women’s afflicted children must die. Meet Andrew Goin of Orlando, Florida, who was born with his stomach, liver, spleen, and small and large intestines exposed — outside his body. Next month Andrew will celebrate his first birthday, healthy and alive.
What risk would Bob Dole run in highlighting partial-birth abortion during the remaining few weeks of his campaign? 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? 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?
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. 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. But partial-birth abortion is different. 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. As many have already recoiled from the president.
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. No matter. The debate and the votes will embarrass the president and further, deservedly, demonize partial-birth abortion.
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. How much better it would be — for Republican electoral prospects and for the country — if Dole made the cause his own.
David Tell, for the Editors
