By Dave Andrusko

Part Two is a moving tribute to "A Brief Beautiful Life." Please send comments on either or both parts to daveandrusko@gmail.com.  Thanks!

I knew Tuesday's edition which dealt with a fawning Newsweek portrait of Nebraska abortionist Leroy Carhart would generate a lot of email. But I didn't expect the first to land within minutes of the edition being posted! And the response continued all day. (In case you missed my take on Sarah Kliff's adoring, he's-my-hero love note to Carhart, just click on www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/Aug09/nv081809.html.)

Abortionist Leroy Carhart

A reader called my attention to a companion piece Kliff wrote about witnessing one of Carhart's abortions. On my own I stumbled across what would be amusing if we were not talking about slicing and dicing live babies, "How Esquire got it wrong."

Kliff takes Esquire to the woodshed for incorrectly stating in its recent story about Colorado abortionist Warren Hern that he is the only "doctor" in American to "specialize in late abortions." Folks, she harrumphs, what about my guy, the guy I spent weeks with getting the inside scoop?

Granted, Hern kills babies even more developed even later in pregnancy, but Carhart "operates in the second and third trimester, worked at [George] Tiller's clinic for more than a decade, and is trying to open a new late-term clinic in the Midwest." Let's give the guy his props. "I don't see how Carhart wouldn't be counted among the country's late-term specialists."

(By the way her parting shot at Esquire is, "Accuracy always matters in journalism, and never more so than when writing about such a sensitive and controversial subject." As I pointed out yesterday, her own half-baked article is marinated in errors and sauteed in misleading comments.)

In a separate account Kliff also tells us about witnessing a first-trimester abortion at Carhart's grisly shop. The irony is hard to miss, as one reader perceptively pointed out. If she's all agog because Carhart makes the guys-willing-to sink-the-lowest Top Ten list, why didn't she watch the kind of abortion she celebrates her subject for performing?

For starters, she wouldn't be able to write things such as "a first trimester abortion, from my vantage point behind the glass window, looked like an extended, more invasive version of a standard ob-gyn exam. …I'd anticipated some kind of difficulty watching an abortion; it wasn't there." She would have to talk about the kind of ugly realities that would get in the way of her antiseptic account of a noble physician doing what few others have the fortitude to do.

When she gets back her friends and colleagues ask (I am not making this up) if she had "done it"--observed an abortion. Even the pro-choicers react with what I gather we are supposed to see as ambivalence--or, more specifically, "general discomfort when confronted with abortion as a physical reality, not a political idea. Americans may support abortion rights, but even 40 years after Roe, we don't talk about it like other medical procedures."

Which, she tells us, is probably appropriate--abortion involves "weighty choices" and all. She ends the piece by congratulating herself for her emotionally complicated and conflicted response which "may have been a reflection of our national ambivalence about a private medical procedure at the center of a very public debate."

Kliff's adulation gets so carried away she makes Carhart sound like the medical equivalent of Yankee closer Mariano Rivera, a "late-term specialist" who, instead of snuffing out the opponent's late-inning rally, snuffs out the lives of mature unborn children.

Part Two