Anti-Abortionists Will Go To Any Length

To understand the lengths to which abortion opponents will go to have their way, consider the second morning of Senate committee questioning in the strange case of Dr. Henry Foster.

That was the day Sen. Daniel Coats, a conservative Republican from Indiana, decided to use the hearing on Foster’s nomination to investigate the number of abortions that President Clinton’s nominee for surgeon general has performed. That had become a matter of contention because Foster and the White House initially had put forward contradictory numbers until finally establishing it was 39 - about one a year.

Coats poked and prodded to determine whether Foster had performed an abortion before 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion. Such an admission would doom the good-natured physician.

The senator seized on information Foster had revealed about an emergency hysterectomy he had performed on a woman with Meigs’ syndrome.

Foster described the condition this way: “an accumulation of fluid in the abdominal cavity, which restricts movement of the diaphragm, which restricts breathing, and, most dangerous, pulmonary edema, which is swelling of the lung lining. These patients die unless they are surgically treated. I performed the necessary surgery: a total abdominal hysterectomy with bilateral salpingoovariectomy, which means removal of the tubes, the ovaries and the tumors.”

Lab results, Foster said, showed this woman had “an early pregnancy in the uterus.”

Coats had his opening. The next morning, he contended Foster had admitted performing an “additional abortion prior to ‘73” that conceivably could have been illegal and would have added one abortion to the 39.

“Is the number 40 now?” Coats demanded.

Foster replied: “You can count 40, sir. I characterized that surgical case I did as a pregnancy termination. I did not do … an abortion technique.”

Coats: “If you don’t characterize it as that, … what are the other 39? Were they not pregnancy terminations in the sense that this one was?”

There you have Coats’ definition of abortion. It could encompass an emergency hysterectomy to save a woman who was, as Foster described it, “drowning in her own fluids.”

Having succeeded in his little game of trip-thenominee, the senator wanted to probe press accounts claiming Foster had performed abortions in Alabama during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Now Foster, whom much of official Washington had dismissed as a good doctor but a country bumpkin when it comes to political skill, delivered a response that wasn’t in the senator’s script.

“I know I did many operations called ‘incomplete abortions,”’ Foster replied. “You see, Sen. Coats, in those days, women came in by the dozens with botched abortions, bleeding, hemorrhaging, infected; some died. And to the lay person, an abortion is something that’s criminal; in medical parlance, it’s not. An incomplete abortion was a very common procedure. And it was miraculous that after 1973 in our hospital in Meharry, the incomplete abortions went down so (much) it was precipitous.”

Coats changed the subject.

Foster’s fate is still uncertain. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., hasn’t decided whether he’ll bring the Foster nomination up for a vote in the full Senate. Even if he does, Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, Dole’s rival for the Republican presidential nomination, intends to launch a filibuster. Foster is a mere pawn in their respective strategies to gain the favor of anti-abortion activists.

It’s all so sophisticated. The politicians’ statements on abortion are more finely honed than even their financial disclosure forms.

But there now are 218 solid anti-abortion votes in the House, a bare majority. There are 45 solid anti-abortion votes in the Senate - and enough senators who are so squishy on the issue that the outcome of every abortion-related vote is uncertain.

But one thing is sure: As the Christian right and other anti-abortion activists seek political repayment from the Republicans they helped place in control of Congress, there will be plenty of votes related to abortion.

Politicians seek refuge in nuance. But there is nothing subtle about the anti-abortion agenda. The goal is to make abortion illegal, period.

And nuance will not matter in a rural hospital emergency room when women start showing up again, hemorrhaging.

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