WASHINGTON - The emotionally charged issue of a contentious abortion procedure was back in the congressional spotlight yesterday in a bitter and bruising House-Senate hearing as GOP lawmakers renew their effort to outlaw the technique.
Opponents of the method, which anti-abortion forces call a "partial-birth" abortion, have been bolstered by an abortion-rights advocate's admission last month that he did not tell the truth about the number of such procedures and the conditions of the women who undergo them.
"A very important issue here is that Congress was lied to," Rep. Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.) said, referring to the arguments against the ban made by abortion-rights groups over the last two years.
The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow to draft legislation making it a crime for anyone to perform the procedure, known technically as "intact dilation and evacuation," which some physicians use to remove a relatively large fetus from the womb in one piece. The only exception would be to protect the woman's life. President Clinton vetoed similar legislation last year.
The House is to vote on the measure next week.
The procedure involves pulling the fetus out of the birth canal, feet first. The surgeon then punctures the back of the fetus' head, sometimes with surgical scissors, and removes the brain, permitting the skull to be partially collapsed and brought through the cervix, the narrowest part of the birth canal.
During last year's congressional debate, abortion-rights supporters said the procedure was almost exclusively done when the fetus had severe abnormalities or when continuing the pregnancy threatened the woman's life. They estimated it was done about 500 times a year.
Reporting by several newspapers, including The Washington Post, found that at least 2,000 of the procedures were done annually, most of them on normal fetuses carried by healthy mothers.
In virtually all the cases in which the fetus was normal, however, the procedure was done before the fetus was "viable" - capable of surviving outside the womb. In its 1973 ruling, the Supreme Court held that government cannot restrict a woman's right to an abortion before the fetus is viable.
Anti-abortion lawmakers had abortion-rights advocates on the defensive during yesterday's joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution. Lawmakers and advocates on each side of the issue sparred verbally, often interrupting each other and challenging the other's integrity.
"The sacrifice of intellectual honesty is very disheartening to me," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, (R-Utah.).
At one point, Rep. Bob Inglis, (R-S.C.), who is running for the Senate in next year's election, asked Renee Chelian, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, to hold a plastic model of a 20-week-old fetus and a pair of surgical scissors as he asked whether she was comfortable with the procedure.
Chelian, visibly angry, told of how she had undergone an illegal abortion in a downtown Detroit warehouse when she was 15, for which her father paid $1,000. "What I want for my daughters, what I want for your daughter, is that they never have to go through the humiliation, the danger that I went through ... before abortion was legal," she told Inglis.
Later, Rep. Bob Barr, (R-Ga.), told Chelian and three other women from abortion-rights groups that he found them "very hardened, very cold, very callous." They had, he said, "developed ... a moral blindspot."
Nearly two years ago, Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, deliberately understated the number of, and reasons for, the procedure during an interview with ABC News that was never broadcast. This month, he publicly admitted he had lied, setting off a furor over the issue.
Abortion-rights supporters sought to diminish the impact of the Fitzsimmons' admission that he deliberately understated the number of such abortions and the health of the women and the fetuses.
Vicki Saporta, executive director of the National Abortion Federation, which represents doctors, nurses and centers that provide abortion services, defended the number Fitzsimmons provided as "good-faith estimates. ... We now have admitted that our original numbers appear to have been low. But they were the best numbers we had at the time."
In vetoing the bill outlawing the procedure, Clinton said it did not go far enough in protecting the health of the women involved, creating an issue that GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole tried to use against him in last year's election campaign.
Clinton has said he would sign the measure this time if it included an exception to protect the woman's health, a term the Supreme Court has held includes "all factors - physical, emotional, psychological, familial and the woman's age - relevant to the well-being of the patient." Anti-abortion forces argue that language is so broad that any ban including that exemption would be meaningless.