Two weeks ago, a man named Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of a major trade association for abortion clinics, briefly fessed up about partial- birth abortion. For almost two years, he and other pro-choice activists had insisted that the grisly procedure was extremely rare. It was, they said, an emergency surgery reserved exclusively for late-term pregnancies involving severe fetal abnormalities and life- or fertility-threatening complications for the mother. But then Fitzsimmons suddenly admitted, in a flurry of interviews, that this was simply a dishonest “party line.” There are maybe 5, 000 partial-birth abortions each year in the United States, he told ABC’s Ted Koppel and others — ten or more times the number he and his allies had claimed. And the vast majority of these abortions are, Fitzsimmons said, entirely elective, performed on healthy mothers and destroying healthy babies in the fifth or sixth month of gestation.
Most of American journalism, accustomed to passively accepting pro-choice propaganda as fact — and repeating it, unexamined, as news — has handled the Fitzsimmons confession as a major advance in the ongoing partial-birth ” story.” It isn’t. There has long existed voluminous and convincing evidence of the truth Ron Fitzsimmons has now freshly “revealed.” It’s just that, with few exceptions, the nation’s daily reporters have never bothered to look into the matter in any detail.
As early as 1992, a clinical report by partial-birth-abortion pioneer Martin Haskell made plain that he meant the procedure to be “routinely” employed on “all patients” between 20 and 24 weeks pregnant. In 1993, Dr. Haskell told the American Medical Association’s newsletter that 80 percent of his partial-birth abortions were “purely elective,” and the rest were for genetic indications like Down syndrome that posed no medical threat to the mother. And anecdotal testimony from Haskell and other doctors about the frequency of this surgery has never been consistent with the figures commonly cited by abortion-rights advocates. A single clinic in New Jersey acknowledges performing 1,500 partial-birth abortions annually all by itself.
Mind you, Ron Fitzsimmons was not motivated to come clean about all this by concern over the morality of partial-birth abortion. The surgery involves physical manipulation of a living fetus into an unnatural, breech position in utero. The abortionist then grabs the infant’s feet, delivers most of its squirming body through the birth canal, and kills it by breaking into its skull with scissors and vacuuming out its brain. “It’s a medically important procedure,” Fitzsimmons told the Bergen Record on February 26, with lone- honest-man bravado. “We shouldn’t be apologetic. We have nothing to hide.”
Most of his pro-choice colleagues clearly disagree. They are furious with him. And he is lately trying to make amends — hushing himself up and apologizing in writing to his association’s member clinics for “inappropriate, off-the-cuff remarks.” The old, false, pro-choice party line is again firmly in place. Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League says she “wouldn’t amend anything” of consequence she’s ever said on the subject. Partial-birth abortion remains the only means of preserving the lives and reproductive health of certain late-term pregnant women, all the leading pro-choice mouthpieces continue to say. And, they conveniently add, it remains the best and safest procedure for some much larger number of not-quite-so-late-term pregnant women. Therefore: Any proposed general ban on partial-birth abortion is cruel and unconstitutional.
President Clinton used this argument to defend his April 1996 veto of bipartisan congressional legislation banning partial-birth abortions. He was overridden in the House, but was narrowly sustained in the Senate. In the next several weeks, Hill Republicans plan to pass the same legislation again. And the White House is already signaling its plans for another veto — on exactly the same grounds. President Clinton thinks the “elective practice” of partial-birth abortion is “abhorrent,” press secretary Mike McCurry says. The president himself says he would “happily” sign a bill to ban that. But the ban Clinton wants must contain a “health of the mother” exception. And McCurry says it must not unconstitutionally “impair the privacy right” — which appears to mean it must not apply to abortions performed before the seventh month of pregnancy.
The president says his position — his preferred partial-birth abortion ” ban” — “is the pro-life position.” Here lies an opportunity for the American press, which has embarrassed itself with bad reporting on partial- birth abortion these past several years, to restore its good name. The partial-birth ban Bill Clinton claims to support is as glaring a fraud as any perpetrated in this debate so far. It should be reported that way.
“Health of the mother” exceptions, the Supreme Court says, must be granted for any reason — “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age” — a doctor certifies as “relevant to the well-being of the patient.” A late-term ban on partial-birth abortion that includes a “health” exception, in other words, is a ban that bans nothing. And a partial-birth ban that only applies to the third trimester of pregnancy is similarly toothless, as Ron Fitzsimmons has reminded us. Almost all partial-birth surgeries are performed before the third trimester.
No medical school in the entire United States teaches partial-birth abortion as a standard and approved medical procedure. No peer-reviewed medical research has ever endorsed the practice. No recognized safety data sustain it. In January of this year, the executive board of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concluded that there are “no circumstances” under which partial-birth abortion is “the only option to save the life of the mother or preserve the health of the woman.” In September 1995, the legislative council of the American Medical Association voted unanimously to endorse a nationwide legal prohibition of the surgery.
In short, despite President Clinton’s questionable anecdotal examples, partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary. It is never even medically preferable to some other abortion procedure. Banning it is therefore constitutionally uncomplicated. And just.
None of this is a secret. Nothing Ron Fitzsimmons “disclosed” a couple of weeks ago was a secret, either, for that matter. The truth about partial- birth abortion has always been rather obvious, in fact. It would be nice this year, as the partial-birth debate heats up once more, if American journalism finally noticed that truth. And told it.
David Tell, for the Editors
