Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 23, 1995 TAG: 9505250112
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATTHEW J. FRANCK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Depicting several GOP senators clustered around surgeon-general nominee Henry Foster, Herblock has them all protesting, just a bit too vociferously, that they're out to derail his nomination for reasons "having nothing to do with abortion." The Bob Dole caricature gives the game away, of course; Herblock has him saying, "This has nothing to do with the fact that I'm running for the GOP nomination and wouldn't dare cross the anti-abortion lobby."
Clearly we are to understand that Senate Republicans are playing a double game: trying to skewer Dr. Foster only on his "credibility" about how many abortions he has performed so as not to raise the issue directly before an audience they fear is majority pro-choice, while at the same time making sure they appease a powerful pro-life faction in their own party.
Fair enough. But if the Republicans can be accused of artfully dodging round the issue of abortion in the Foster nomination, the same can be said of Dr. Foster himself (who is no doubt speaking as coached by the White House). On the first day of the hearings on his nomination before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, Foster replied to "the attempt, by some, to say that this nomination is about abortion" by asserting flatly: "It is not." No senator appears ready to contradict him on this point.
It appears to be no more to Foster's liking than to his critics' that his nomination should spark a real discussion of the abortion issue. What we have here is a silently negotiated bargain between the Republicans and the Democrats to talk about anything but the most critical - and thus the most divisive - moral issue in American society.
On Foster's part (and that of the White House), the urge to turn the debate on the nomination toward avenues other than the abortion issue is understandable. Why make trouble? Foster is personable, professionally qualified in every technical sense to be surgeon general, and has the added tactical advantage of his race in today's sensitive political culture. Surely it makes sense for the Clinton administration to divert the discussion away from a controversy.
On the issue of Foster's integrity of forthrightness, the playing field is leveled and the nomination is likely to succeed; fundamentally dishonest he is not, and under the ground rules currently in place, there is no past action or statement that cannot be explained away. But there is an additional reason for Foster, President Clinton, and the Democrats to accomplish this diversion: Their position on abortion is far less defensible, and far more vulnerable, than that of the Republicans - who mistakenly believe theirs is the weaker position here, and are foolishly letting their opponents steer the debate, thus missing a real opportunity to do both the right thing and the politically advantageous thing.
If we examine the way the abortion issue has come up in the Foster nomination, and the way the nominee has couched his response, we can see a pattern that provides an opening that pro-life Republicans are crazy not to exploit.
Asked during the hearing about why he at first said that in the last two decades he has performed fewer than a dozen abortions, and subsequently had to revise that number upward to 39, Foster replied that his initial misstatement was "an honest mistake" made in "casual conversation," which he was subsequently able to correct after double-checking his records at Nashville's Meharry Medical College. Now, as an obstetrician-gynecologist of many years experience, Dr. Foster might easily misstate the number of times he had performed routine procedures such as Pap tests, but it is disturbing to think that he could be so "casual" about the occasions on which he had ended a prenatal life as to underestimate the number by more than two-thirds.
Contrary to the insinuations of Senate Republicans about his "forthrightness" on this score, Foster is entirely credible in his explanation - and that is the truly troubling thing: that the abortions he has performed are not indelibly etched in his memory. The quietly apologetic attitude Dr. Foster displays toward his lapse of memory is a small sign that he understands this himself, for who would be at all concerned about a similar slip regarding any other procedure he has performed in his career?
Is it tendentious to describe abortion as the ending of a prenatal life - or more bluntly, as a species of killing? Well, Foster has publicly stated that as an obstetrician, he regards every abortion as a failure. This has by now become standard fare in the rhetoric of abortion advocates. But that description forces us to ask, what is success, and why is abortion a failure? Supporters of unfettered access to abortion do not want that question asked, much less answered, but they raise the question themselves by the rhetorical attempt at "reasonableness" and should be made to confront it.
For the answer must be that live birth is a success and the death of the fetus a failure. And why is that? (The pediatrician does not typically call every tonsillectomy a failure. Perhaps an unfortunate necessity owing to tonsillitis, but not a failure.) It must be because the fetus is a human being.
Much fog has been produced by abortion advocates to render falsely difficult the question of when life begins, but Dr. Foster, by virtue of his training, is in a position to know the simple scientific truth (uncontroversial among honest members of his profession) that a distinct and unique human being, in the words of our Declaration of Independence, is endowed by the Creator with the unalienable right to life. That is, it only remains for us to decide whether to live by our own moral principles or to reject them for expediency's sake, sugarcoating our moral failures by calling them "failures" we cannot bear to identify plainly.
Foster also repeats by rote the mantra of the Clinton administration that he would like abortions to be "safe, legal and rare." Never mind for the moment the question "safe to whom?" - for every abortion is deadly for one of the human beings involved. Think about the tacit admission provided by the statement that abortions should be rare. Why, of course failures - the deaths of innocents by medical violence - should be rare. Do we seek to make other medical outcomes - say, cancer remissions after chemotherapy - rare?
Of course, we would like to make the necessity for such outcomes rare, by preventing more cancers in the first place. And Dr. Foster, it appears, has done laudable work in Nashville to help prevent teen-age pre-marital pregnancy. But it needs to be noted that while every cancer is an evil, pregnancy itself is never, under any circumstances other than direct threat to a mother's life, an evil in itself. It is only the consequences that may follow some births (medical, psychological, emotional, marital, financial or career consequences) that may be classified as evils to be prevented. But is their prevention to be weighed in the balance with a human life on the other side?
Those who mouth the slogan that abortions should be "safe, legal and rare" must be brought to recognize that they can say this only because abortion itself, not the birth of a human being, is the evil to be prevented. And as long as abortion is legal to the extent it is today, with abortion on demand for any reason enshrined as a right, we will be a long way from making this failure, this evil, a rare one.
Pro-life Senate Republicans are taking a cowardly pass on making these sorts of arguments; the rhetoric of Foster and the Clinton administration shows that "pro-choice" advocates are in retreat, sheltering in a sophistic redoubt with weak defenses, vulnerable to a siege if only one were mounted. Their last refuge is in another familiar argument repeated by Foster: that "every child should be a wanted child." Never mind that there is no such thing as a child unwanted by anyone. The gist of this last argument is that so long as parenthood is not perfectly planned by everyone, some human beings may be sacrificed to the desires of others who do not want them.
And thus we are back to abortion on demand, a "rare" million-and-a-half times a year, which GOP senators should know is consistently opposed by American majorities who need only straight talk to move in the right direction on this issue. It is no accident that not a single pro-life incumbent public official in either party was defeated for re-election in 1994.
You bet Foster and the Clinton administration don't want a debate on this issue. Republicans should want it, and should not rest without asking the question: Does America deserve as its highest-ranking medical officer a man who would like failures to be rare, but who publicly opposes any legislative steps that would effectively produce that result, and who would rather not talk plainly about the moral import of an act he has performed 39 times in his professional career?
Matthew J. Franck is an assistant professor of political science at Radford University.
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