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A "Zealous Pro-Abortion
Political Animal" Part Three of Four By Dave Andrusko
Speaking of aphorisms, remember the one about "Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth"? In our case that might translate into uncritically accepting the analysis of a "pro-choicer" when he or she unveils a pro-abortion ploy and mostly gets it right. Tempting, perhaps, but not a good idea. Slate's Will Saletan recently wrote about the tempest that never really turned into a storm during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. The issue was Kagan's behind-the-scenes maneuvering where, while working for the Clinton Administration, she massaged (to be kind), re-shaped (to be accurate) the conclusions of the influential American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on partial-birth abortion. In so doing Kagan fundamentally changed ACOG's statement, which carried enormous weight with various federal courts. To hear Kagan tell it she was just "clarifying" ACOG's position. Saletan dismisses that innocent explanation in the first paragraph of his July 3 column. "Fourteen years ago, to protect President Clinton's position on partial-birth abortions, Elena Kagan doctored a statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists." But by the next paragraph, Saletan was minimizing the importance of the key alteration she had made. "Kagan, who was then an associate White House counsel, was doing her job: advancing the president's interests." So, who is "the real culprit"? It "was ACOG, which adopted Kagan's spin without acknowledgment." In fact, both were guilty but only one is trying to become the next justice of the Supreme Court. Saletan goes through the chronology in considerable detail. The back and forth has to be read very carefully so as to understand the full significance of Kagan's role. The initial draft ACOG statement on partial-birth abortion--called various other things by its defenders including "an intact D&X"--sent to the White House in December 1996 said, "a select panel convened by ACOG could identify no circumstances under which this procedure, as defined above, would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman." (Emphasis added.) Kagan then got out her editing pencil and added language which made its way into the final ACOG statement released January 12, 1997. That sentence read, "An intact D&X, however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman, and only the doctor, in consultation with the patient, based upon the woman's particular circumstances can make this decision." Saletan is able to lay most of the blame off on ACOG by adding qualifier after qualifier to what Kagan did. "Kagan didn't override ACOG's scientific judgments. She reframed them." There's more. Kagan "reframed but obeyed the constraints of ACOG's objective beliefs"; "changed its emphasis"; and [referring to her confirmation testimony] "considerably stretches the truth as she recorded it" [in a memo she wrote about a June 1996 meeting with ACOG's chief lobbyist and its former president]. In a word you would come away thinking Kagan had not changed the substance of ACOG's draft statement, only (to use Saletan's word) added "spin." Not so. Cathy Ruse, over at www.frc.org, is absolutely correct that Saletan is absolutely wrong. She writes, "Before Kagan, partial-birth abortion was equal to or lesser than other methods in ACOG's view. With the addition of Kagan's wording that it 'may be the best' method 'in a particular circumstance,' partial-birth abortion now became potentially better than other methods in the official view of ACOG. Saletan apparently doesn't understand that making it potentially best in some unnamed hypothetical situation was equivalent to making it definitively best in the view of the reviewing courts. Even a cursory reading of the lower court rulings shows that the Kagan 'best' language was absolutely key to the courts' reasoning in overturning the bans. "Ultimately, of course, the Supreme Court got past this politicized medicine and got the ruling right. But this revelation should be a permanent black eye for ACOG's reputation on any abortion-related issue in the future, and is proof that Kagan is a zealous pro-abortion political animal trying to disguise herself in judge's robes." Please send all of your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are now following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. |
