ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997 TAG: 9703110068
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
An abortion-rights leader's acknowledged lying about 'partial-birth abortions' reinforces the need for objective information on which to base abortion policy.
THE QUALITY of the abortion debate, plagued already by fact-spinning and political sloganeering, has been lowered further by the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers.
Ron Fitzsimmons' assertion last year that "partial-birth abortions" - or what doctors call intact dilation and evacuation - were rare and used only in extreme situations, he now acknowledges in an interview in American Medical News, crossed the line from spinning into outright lying. In fact, he says, thousands of the procedures are performed annually, the majority on healthy fetuses.
Fitzsimmons' lie has done the abortion-rights cause no good, of course, and has led to renewal of the call for a federal ban on the "partial-birth" procedure. Generally overlooked, however, is that the lie involved late second-trimester pregnancies, when abortion is a legally protected right and so presumably beyond the reach of Congress anyway.
The point that third-trimester partial-birth abortions are rare has not been refuted. Neither has the point that at least some, and perhaps most, of these third-trimester procedures involved health-threatening pregnancies by women who wanted to have their babies. As proposed last year, the ban would have exempted such abortions to save the life of the mother, but not to save her health no matter how serious (short of life endangerment) the threat.
Unfortunately, the abortion debate is frequently and most vocally waged between (a) those who believe abortion should be available under all or nearly all circumstances and (b) those who believe it should be against the law in all or nearly all circumstances. Too seldom heard are those who believe that neither fetal nor maternal rights are absolute, that the relative weight of these rights changes over the course of a pregnancy, and that abortion policy should be based as much as possible on scientific knowledge and objective information.
If such voices of reason were more heeded, perhaps compromises like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's suggestion - to ban all third-trimester abortions except in cases involving "the life of the mother and severe impairment of her health" - would attract more political interest. Perhaps the courts could be persuaded to re-examine, in light of medical advances, the point at which a fetus becomes viable outside the womb. Perhaps people like Fitzsimmons wouldn't lie.
LENGTH: Short : 50 linesby CNB