Will Clinton's support for partial-birth abortion spur
an overdue moral awakening?

A LINE IN THE SAND

By William E. Simon

There is a short, quick motion of the scissors into the partially born baby's brain. The baby cannot cry out because its head is still in its mother's womb. It twitches from the searing pain and then goes limp. The doctor works the scissors around to make a bigger hole. Next, the brain of the now-dead baby is sucked out. The soft little skull collapses inward. The doctor pulls the last little bit of the baby's body out of the mother and throws the body away.

That is the horror of partial-birth abortion. This technique for killing babies was developed to allow abortion doctors to deal with pregnancies of 20 weeks or later.

It can only be excruciatingly painful for the baby. Defenders have tried to argue that the anesthesia given the woman actually kills the baby. Leading anesthesiologists, however, say flatly that it is false, and that the baby cannot help but feel the agony of the sharp tool ramming into its little brain, ending its life at the beginning.

A strong majority of Congress rose up in outrage against this hideous and immoral practice. Lawmakers in the House and Senate voted to make partial-birth abortion a criminal offense. But President Bill Clinton, obviously not daring to cross the abortion-rights movement, vetoed the bill. Both houses of Congress voted to override Clinton's veto last fall, but the Senate fell three votes short of the needed two-thirds majority.

The United States of America was brilliantly conceived as a nation where morality, justice, and opportunity would transcend the decadence and corruption of the Old World. Now more than 200 years later, it has produced a president who refuses to put a stop to one of the most ghastly, immoral acts the mind can conceive, the deliberate killing of a live baby.

I am a father of seven children and a grandfather of 22. I did my best to teach them all that, despite an occasional departure, America is the leading example of justice, decency, and morality among the nations of the world. Now I wonder what my grandchildren will say to me when they learn that our own president can veto a law prohibiting this particularly despicable form of late-term abortion.

For years our public morality has been on a downward slope. Newspaper accounts of murder are now so commonplace as to be put on the inside pages.

The nation faces a tide of absolutely senseless murders of innocent people by vicious, cold-hearted predators. But President Clinton's veto of the partial-birth abortion ban - - and the inability to override his veto in Congress - - brings the condition of America's public morality to a new low. Americans who believe in morality and decency and humanity; Americans who love their country; Americans who refuse to watch America trickle away into the septic tank of history, must no longer stand mute. We must stand up and say, "No More!"

If President Clinton's shameful veto sparks a long overdue moral awakening among the people, perhaps his indefensible act will yet serve a purpose.

God works in mysterious ways.

William E. Simon, a supporter of National Right to Life, was secretary of the treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He is currently chairman of William E. Simon & Sons and president of the John M. Olin Foundation.