By Dave Andrusko

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. They are very valuable

In compiling the daily email clips that are sent around the office, our communications department works under the fundamentally sound principle that it makes no sense to distribute only, or even largely, stories that support our point of view. If we are going to do our jobs well, it's essential that we know what the general public is exposed to and be able to glean insights from what the opposition is saying (at least publicly).

As a result sometimes much of what we read ranges from bad, through worse, ending up with the worst-to-date. An example of the latter is a piece that will appear in the Newsweek issue dated August 31 but which is available online now.

The article, written by Sarah Kliff, takes abortionist hero worship to new heights/depths.

You can read "The Abortion Evangelist" (Nebraska abortionist LeRoy Carhart), at http://www.newsweek.com/id/212017.

Abortionist Leroy Carhart

The hook for the story is the friendship Carhart had with the late George Tiller, the Kansas abortionist who was killed several months ago. Carhart worked part-time in Tiller's abortion clinic which specialized in abortions of babies so advanced virtually nobody else will perform them.

According to Kliff, in his own "practice," Carhart is now aborting babies later than ever ("before, he'd done so only at Tiller's Wichita clinic") and has "started planning a new late-term clinic to replace Tiller's, where he could see women in the late second and early third trimesters." He has also fielded calls from physicians who want to become abortionists.

"I think the only thing I can do…is just train as many doctors as I can to go out on their own and provide abortions and get enough people providing them," says Carhart. "That makes [the anti-abortion activist's] job 10 times harder because there are now 10 times more of us."

Kliff can attempt to make a hero out of anyone she wants, but making a visionary out of a man who does what Carhart does for a living takes a willful suspension of disbelief and a cast-iron stomach. You read her story and when she talks about the mechanics of tearing babies apart she limits her description to abortions performed earlier in pregnancy. This allows her to casually mention removing the "contents of the uterus" and the like.

Federal Judge Richard Conway Casey must be rolling over in his grave.

Judge Casey ruled against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (which was subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court), which Carhart had challenged. But the wording of Judge Casey's opinion was no less candid than his blunt, call a spade a spade questions:

"The Court finds that the testimony at trial and before Congress establishes that D&X [partial-birth abortion] is a gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized medical procedure," he wrote, "[and finds] credible evidence that D&X abortions subject fetuses to severe pain."

Truth and abortion rarely appear in news accounts, no matter how many times the record's been set straight. In a mere two-sentences, Kliff repeats the core canards of the enduring pro-abortion mythology.

She writes, "The bans [on partial-birth abortions], which state legislatures began to pass in the mid-1990s, generally targeted a procedure called intact dilation and extraction, in which the dead fetus is removed intact after the skull is crushed."

Attempting to play the always-receptive media, pro-abortionists obfuscated this unbelievable vile and violent "technique" with the impossible-to-decipher "dilation and extraction" for the same reason they refer to the unborn as a "fetus": to distance us from what is being done and to whom.

Moreover, in a standard partial-birth abortion the abortionist punctures the skull and sucks out the baby's brain, and the skull then collapses. There would be no way for him to "crush" the skull, as it is wedged against the cervix. The description Kliff offers is an element of a standard Dilation and Evacuation (D&E), not a partial-birth abortion.

"Partial-birth abortion" was not only a legal term of art, it had also been recognized and used by many eminent medical authorities for years. The law banned a very carefully defined method in which a premature human is deliberately pulled to within just a few inches of being, medically and legally, a live birth.

And one of the primary reasons partial-birth abortions upset an entire nation was precisely because the baby--inches from being completely delivered--is alive until her skull was punctured and the "contents evacuated."

But Kliff was just getting started. "It is a rare procedure, used in 2,200 of the 1.3 million abortions performed in 2000, and only in cases where doctors believed it was the best option for minimizing risks to a woman's health, according to the Guttmacher Institute." Baloney.

No one knows the exact number, in 2000 or since, but it is clearly much larger.

What we do know is that in February 1997, Ron Fitzsimmons-- then the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers --estimated that the method was used 3,000-5,000 times annually, and "in the vast majority of cases" on "a healthy mother with a healthy fetus, that is 20 weeks or more along." The number is probably much larger, given that in 1996, two New Jersey abortionists at a single abortion clinic in Englewood, independently told a reporter that they perform over 1,500 partial-birth abortions annually in that facility.

Then there are the finishing touches on Carhart the tireless humanitarian.

According to Kliff, while Carhart is "proud of his practice" he "seems equally burdened by it." Nobly, he sees killing babies--whoops, "being an abortion doctor"--a "job he had to take since few others would."

He tells Kliff, "It's like that quotation: 'If not you, who? If not now, when?' That whole thing."

Kliff interprets this as a modified version of a quote from the great first century BC Jewish religious leader Hillel, one of the two for which is most famous. Too bad Carhart didn't use the other as his moral compass--what is known as Hillel's ethic of reciprocity: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn."