June 30, 2010

By Dave Andrusko

Good evening. Part Two today is an overview of the tremendous NRLC convention. Part Three is the opening remarks of NRLC President Dr. Wanda Franz. Over at National Right to Life News Today (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org), we have a story about the winner of the Oratory Contest, a model sermon for a pastor first talking about abortion, and a look at Planned Parenthood's insatiable appetite for abortion. 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.

As time's permitted, I've watched some of today's confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. It doesn't require a lot of viewing to confirm that the consensus is, for once, accurate. Her answers are evasive, her responses ponderous, and her willingness to go beyond the bare minimum rare.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan

Our concern is how Kagan responded to questions from Senator Orrin Hatch about her behind-the-scenes role in altering/modifying/tailoring the opinion of the highly influential American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologist on the issue of partial-birth abortions. Hatch's queries likely grew out of an essay by former Bush Administration official Shannen Coffin which ran yesterday at National Review online. (See www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/June10/nv062910.html.)

Kagan's candor--or lack thereof--is crucially important because it lies at the heart of one of the major objections to her nomination. She has never been a judge and there is serious question whether she is better at political maneuvering than she is at a balanced reading of the Constitution.

Coffin went into great detail about ACOG's ultimate public posture on whether there was ever a "need" for partial-birth abortions. As he explained, the initial draft statement of an ACOG task force "did not include the statement that the controversial abortion procedure 'might be' the best method 'in a particular circumstance.' Instead, it said that the select ACOG panel 'could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.'"

But by the time Kagan was done, ACOG's position was not, Coffin wrote, "the judgment of an independent body of medical experts devoted to the care and treatment of pregnant women and their children" but "the political scrawling of a White House appointee" (Kagan). Mr. Coffin learned of Kagan's pivotal role in refashioning ACOG's statement so that it was more in line with the Clinton Administration's view when he read NRLC's letter to the Senate dated June 23. NRLC then made available to him the relevant documents from the Clinton Presidential Library.

As many have already noted, Kagan offered a lawyerly response to the simple question of whether she had written the controversial memo to pro-abortion President Bill Clinton. Once she grudgingly conceded the obvious, Kagan insisted her only motivation was to be sure that Clinton understood the entirety of ACOG's view.

Thus, when the memo talks about the initial ACOG statement being a "disaster," Kagan said she only meant "the disaster would be if the statement did not accurately reflect all of what ACOG thought." Put another way, Kagan was saying that she was tying up the loose ends all in the pursuit of comprehensiveness.

Responding to Kagan's too cute by half answer, Coffin updated what he said yesterday. He made two major points at http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDUyYzU0ODY3NjAyOTE0Y2MzMzEyM2UzZTg5NDU5NDc=.

First, that Kagan did not get involved until after an ACOG task force formulated its recommended position. "Therefore, any suggestion that her work was merely the synthesis of the task force's deliberations doesn't account for that time line -- she had no interaction with the task force itself, only the executive board of ACOG," he wrote.

Second, that prior to the special task force even been formed, the Clinton White House had already met with ACOG's former president. "At that meeting (which apparently Kagan did not attend but recounted in a memo to her bosses, dated June 22, 1996), Kagan wrote that the White House staffers were basically told that ACOG couldn't identify any particular circumstances where the procedure [a partial-birth abortion] was medically necessary."\

If you read virtually any newspaper online, you're being told Kagan's confirmation is as sure as her answers are evasive. Maybe, maybe not.

What we know for sure is, as NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson once put it, "The bottom line is that thousands of additional babies were mostly delivered alive and then stabbed through the back of the head, thanks to the deceptive but successful political strategy, to which Elena Kagan lent all of her considerable talents, that blocked the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act from becoming law during the Clinton Administration."

In slip-sliding around her real role, Kagan is demonstrating the very qualities that make her critics nervous: a political adroitness at fudging her true role in providing political cover for pro-abortion Democrats.

Part Two
Part Three