By Nancy Romer, Pamela Smith, Curtis R. Cook and Joseph L. DeCook
The House of Representatives will vote in the next few days on whether to over-ride President Clinton's veto of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The debate on the subject has been noisy and rancorous. You've heard from the activists. You've heard from the politicians. Now may we speak?
We are the physicians who, on a daily basis, treat pregnant women and their babies. And we can no longer remain silent while abortion activists, the media and even the president of the United States continue to repeat false medical claims about partial-birth abortion. The appalling lack of medical credibility on the side of those defending this procedure has forced us - for the first time in our professional careers - to leave the sidelines in order to provide some sorely needed facts in a debate that has been dominated by anecdote, emotion and media stunts.
Since the debate on this issue began, those whose real agenda is to keep all types of abortion legal-at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason-have waged what can only be called an orchestrated misinformation campaign.
First the National Abortion Federation and other pro-abortion groups claimed the procedure didn't exist. When a paper written by the doctor who invented the procedure was produced, abortion proponents changed their story, claiming the procedure was only done when a women's life was in danger. Then the same doctor, the nation's main practitioner of the technique, was caught - on tape - admitting that 80% of his partial-birth abortions were "purely elective." Then there was the anesthesia myth. The American public was told that it wasn't the abortion that killed the baby, but the anesthesia administered to the mother before the procedure. This claim was immediately and thoroughly denounced by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which called the claim "entirely inaccurate." Yet Planned Parenthood and its allies continued to spread the myth, causing needless concern among our pregnant patients who heard the claims and were terrified that epidurals during labor, or anesthesia during needed surgeries, would kill their babies.
The latest baseless statement was made by President Clinton himself when he said that if the mothers who opted for partial-birth abortions had delivered their children naturally, the women's bodies would have "eviscerated" or "ripped to shreds" and they "could never have another baby."
That claim is totally and completely false. Contrary to what abortion activists would have us believe partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to protect a woman's health or her fertility. In fact, the opposite is true: The procedure can pose a significant and immediate threat to both the pregnant woman's health and her fertility. It seems to have escaped anyone's attention that one of the five women who appeared at Mr. Clinton's veto ceremony had five miscarriages after her partial-birth abortion.
Consider the dangers inherent in partial-birth abortion, which usually occurs after the fifth month of pregnancy. A woman's cervix is forcibly dilated over several days, which risks creating an "incompetent cervix," the leading cause of premature deliveries. It is also an invitation to infection, a major cause of infertility. The abortionist then reaches into the womb to pull a child feet first out of the mother (internal podalic version), but leaves the head inside. Under normal circumstances, physicians avoid breech births whenever possible; in this case, the doctor intentionally causes one - and risks tearing the uterus in the process. He then forces scissors through the base of the baby's skull - which remains lodged just within the birth canal. This is a partially "blind" procedure, done by feel, risking direct scissor injury to the uterus and laceration of the cervix or lower uterine segment, resulting in immediate and massive bleeding and the threat of shock or even death to the mother.
None of the risk is ever necessary for any reason. We and many other doctors across the U.S. regularly treat women whose unborn children suffer the same conditions as those cited by the women who appeared at Mr. Clinton's veto ceremony. Never is the partial-birth procedure necessary. Not for hydrocephaly (excessive cerebrospinal fluid in the head), not for polyhydramnios (an excess of amniotic fluid collecting in the woman) and not for trisomy (genetic abnormalities characterized by an extra chromosome). Sometimes, as in the case of hydrocephaly, it is first to drain some of the fluid from the baby's head. And in some cases when vaginal delivery is not possible, a doctor performs a Caesarean section. But in no case is it necessary to partially deliver an infant through the vagina and then kill the infant.
How telling it is that although Mr. Clinton met with women who claimed to have needed partial-birth abortions on account of these conditions, he has flat-out refused to meet with women who delivered babies with these same conditions, with no damage whatsoever to their health or future fertility!
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was recently asked whether he'd ever operated on children who had any of the described in this debate. Indeed he had. In fact, one of his patients - "with a huge omphalocele (a sac containing the baby's organs) much bigger than her head" - went on to become the head nurse in his intensive care unit many years later.
Mr. Koop's reaction to the president's veto? "I believe that Mr. Clinton was misled by his medical advisers on what is fact and what is fiction" on the matter, he said. Such a procedure, he added, cannot truthfully be called medically necessary for either the mother or - her scarcely need point out - for the baby. Considering these medical realities, one can only conclude that the women who thought they underwent partial-birth abortions for "medical" reasons were tragically misled. And those who purport to speak for women don't seem to care.
So whom are you going to believe? The activist-extremists who refuse to allow a little truth to get in the way of their agenda? The who benefit from the activists' political action committees? Or doctors who have the facts?
Dr. Romer is clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Wright State University and chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Miami Valley Hospital in Ohio. Dr. Smith is director of medical education in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Chicago's Mt. Sinai Medical Center. Dr. Cook is a specialist in maternal fetal medicine at Butterworth Hospital, Michigan State College of Human Medicine. Dr. DeCook a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The authors are founding members of Physicians" Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth, which now has more than 300 members.