TIn a 1993 interview in Cincinnati Medicine, Dr. Martin Haskell described how he had developed a partial-birth abortion procedure — and used it more than 700 times. Because of the “toughness and development of the fetal tissues,” he explained, late-pregnancy abortions were difficult to complete using the standard dismemberment and extraction technique. They sometimes took 45 minutes. But when the baby was in a breech position, feet first, Haskell discovered he could make things “very, very easy” “serendipity. ”
Brenda Pratt Shafer is a registered nurse who assisted Dr. Haskell at his Dayton, Ohio, clinic in September 1993. During her third day at work, Nurse Shafer watched him perform three abortions. The first patient, according to her congressional testimony, was a mother 26-and-a-half weeks pregnant with a Down syndrome child.
“Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal,” she said. “Then he delivered the baby’s body and arms — everything but the head. . . . 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 startle reaction, like a baby does when you throw him up in the air and he thinks he might fall. Then the doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube through the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.”
Later the same day, Brenda Shafer observed two additional, similar operations, both of which “involved healthy mothers with healthy babies.” And then she quit her job.
Congress has now voted to ban the use of partial-birth abortions in the United States. President Clinton, with his April 11 veto of the ban, has acted to preserve the practice. The president’s veto was wicked. It should be overridden. And failing that, it should be held against him — in the fall campaign and ever after.
For most of the past year, organized abortion proponents have contended that Brenda Shafer’s tale is untrue. “There is no such thing as a “partial birth,'” Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League told a radio audience in November.
“Question: When does the fetus die?” asked a fact sheet circulated by Planned Parenthood last fall. “Answer: The fetus dies of an overdose of anesthesia given to the mother. . . . This induces brain death in a fetus in a matter of minutes. Fetal demise therefore occurs . . . while the fetus is still in the womb.” A contemporaneous National Abortion Federation document reported that “the narcotic analgesia given to the pregnant woman prevents any [pain] sensation” her baby might experience.
But these claims were contradicted by Haskell himself in July 1993. When asked by the American Medical Association’s newsletter “whether or not the fetus is dead” before it enters his patient’s birth canal, the doctor responded without hesitation. “No, it’s not. No, it’s really not,” he said. ” A percentage are . . . probably about a third of those are definitely dead before I actually start to remove the fetus. And probably the other two- thirds are not.” A clinical paper Haskell submitted to a 1992 National Abortion Federation seminar exactly tracks Nurse Shafer’s account of his methods. And it clearly identifies his relevant instruments: “a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors” that “the surgeon then forces . . . into the base of the skull,” and a “suction catheter” that “evacuates the skull contents.” Haskell does not use — and does not pretend to use — anesthesia as an agent of fetal demise, as his political defenders have claimed.
The late Dr. James McMahon of Los Angeles, the only other American physician prominently associated with partial-birth abortion, did imply before his death in October that anesthesia was the key, humanizing element in the procedures he employed. “The fetus feels no pain,” he wrote in a letter to the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution last June. ” This is because the mother is given narcotic analgesia” that passes “directly into the fetal bloodstream.” The result: “A medical coma is induced in the fetus. There is neurological fetal demise. There is never a live birth.”
Against this suggestion — and with great heat, though little press coverage — the nation’s anesthesiologists have rebelled. Dr. Norig Ellison, president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, called the McMahon letter “entirely inaccurate” in House testimony last month. “In my medical judgment, it would be necessary, in order to achieve neurologic demise of the fetus in a partial-birth abortion, to anesthetize the mother to such a degree as to place her own health in serious jeapardy.” Dr. David Birnbach, president-elect of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology, concurred. If Dr. McMahon was using massive, lethal doses of anesthesia during partial-birth abortions, he was also “definitely placing the mother’s life at great risk.” And this is “absolutely not” an acceptable medical practice.
Dr. Ellison said it was a “gross misconception” that a human fetus feels no pain during partial-birth abortion. A Pittsburgh man had written “as a physician” to assure the subcommittee that “there is no such thing as pain to a fetus. Plain and simple, pain does not exist to a fetus.” When that letter was read to him, Dr. Ellison seemed genuinely offended. “I find it inconceivable that any physician would make a — would attach his name to a letter like that.” Again, Dr. Birnbach agreed. Both men, incidentally, announced themselves pro-choice during this hearing.
Partial-birth abortion, then, is what it appears to be from Brenda Pratt Shafer’s testimony. As another witness at last month’s hearing, the director of pediatric care at Atlanta’s Emory University, put it: “This procedure, if it was done on an animal in my institution, would not make it through the institutional review process.”
And yet, bowing to his most extreme abortion-rights constituents, Bill Clinton has upheld that procedure and vetoed the legislative ban sent him by Congress. Five McMahon patients stood with the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 11 as he announced his veto. Each told a harrowing and heartbreaking story of severe fetal abnormality and late-term maternal complication. Each was convinced her health had been preserved, and could only have been preserved, by partial-birth abortion. And so, on behalf of this “tiny minority” of American women, just “a few hundred” each year whose well-being he said depends on it, the president rejected the bill. Without a “health of the mother” exception, the administration asserts, a partial-birth ban is unconstitutional and unacceptable.
But the Supreme Court has defined maternal ‘health” as “all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant to the well-being of the patient.” It is a nebulous category that essentially encompasses the entire universe of abortion rationales. And partial-birth abortion is not, as it happens, primarily an emergency procedure. Dr. Haskell has written that he “routinely” performs such abortions, with limited exceptions, on “all patients” between 20 and 24 weeks pregnant. “I’ll be quite frank,” he said in July 1993. “Most of my abortions are elective in the 20-24 week range. . . . In my particular case, probably 20 percent are for genetic reasons. And the other 80 percent are purely elective.” Before he died, Dr. McMahon reported that a plurality of what he called “non-elective” partial-birth abortions for reasons of maternal health involved the mother’s ” depression.” His most common non-elective “fetal indication” was Down syndrome. He sometimes performed the operation because the baby had a cleft palate.
Is partial-birth abortion ever the safest, necessary procedure in a late-term pregnancy? Dr. Warren Hern, author of Abortion Practice, the standard American abortion textbook and a specialist in late-term abortions, says no. “I have very serious reservations about this procedure,” he told American Medical News in November. “You really can’t defend it. . . . I’m not going to do it.” And “I would dispute any statement that this is the safest procedure to use.” Quite the contrary; Dr. Hern believes it to be ” potentially dangerous.”
The partial-birth ban President Clinton has vetoed would have left other safe medical procedures — and other abortions — still available to late- term pregnant women under health-threatening circumstances. The ban was, in other words, plainly constitutional. And the administration’s contention that constitutional protections for abortion do somehow extend to so hideous a practice will, if they can be brought to understand it, almost certainly shock the sensibilities of most Americans — who still innocently tell pollsters that they believe Roe v. Wade and succeeding Supreme Court decisions legalized early-term, first-trimester abortions alone.
Pro-life advocates vow they will keep the partial-birth controversy alive as long as possible, and use it to correct popular misconceptions about abortion law and practice generally. They hope his recent veto will haunt President Clinton. It should haunt him, in every respect.
David Tell, for the Editors
