KINDER'S COMMENTARY: PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION TESTIMONY RIVETING, EYE OPENING

Senate Bill 275, which would ban the gruesome practice of partial-birth abortion, received a highly favorable hearing Wednesday afternoon before the Judiciary Committee. After approximately two hours of some of the most riveting testimony ever heard in Jefferson City, the committee slam-dunked its approval of the bill by the vote of 8-0.

We presented three highly trained, expert professional witnesses for the bill. First was Brenda Pratt Shafer of Dayton, Ohio, a graduate nurse formerly of an abortion clinic who witnessed a doctor performing seven such procedures in the three days she worked there. Of these abortions, one was a Down Syndrome baby and the others were all performed on healthy babies carried by healthy mothers. The previously pro-choice Mrs. Shafer abruptly quit, transformed into a Witness, her life changed forever by the horror to which she now testifies.

Next up for proponents were two St. Louis physicians: Dr. Elizabeth Londino, a family practitioner, and Dr. Mark Stegman, an obstetrician/gynecologist with much experience in crisis pregnancies. Patiently and carefully, these skilled practitioners demolished each and every claim of defenders of this extremely unsafe and medically unrecognized procedure. These would include each and every out-and-out lie spoken by President Bill Clinton in support of his veto of the bill passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress.

Is it needed, in a particularly troublesome pregnancy, to preserve future fertility, as the president and other opponents of the bill claim? Absolutely not, said the doctors in uncontroverted testimony. In fact, the procedure is enormously dangerous not just to the baby, for whom, after all, a fatality is the whole purpose, but also for the mother through introduction of intra-uterine infection, itself a well-known cause of infertility. Moreover, as scissors are inserted into the back of the head in what is a "blind" procedure for the doctor whose hands are inside the birth canal, the risk rises of a puncture or tear of the uterine wall itself. An "incompetent cervix" is another likely complication. Indeed, one of the women trotted out by President Clinton has had five miscarriages since her partial-birth abortion.

During and after the hearing, I remarked privately to the chairman and to others of my fellow committee members as to what is made abundantly clear by opposition testimony at this hearing. No longer are "pro-choice" defenders of this procedure merely defending, in the abstract, "a woman's right to choose." No longer are they even merely defending a woman's right to an abortion. No. We have them, in their own words, at the logical conclusion of their ghastly argument. It is this: They are demanding an absolute right, not just to choose, not just to an abortion, but to a successful [UNITAL] abortion, i.e., to a dead, late-term baby, mercilessly executed by the abortionist as it passes through the birth canal, seconds and inches from being born alive.

With the discovery of and publicity over the partial-birth procedure, this debate has taken a crucial and historic turn against the abortion industry. No longer can pro-choicers successfully frame the debate as an abstract issue of "choice." We now focus on the Auschwitz-like nature of the procedure itself.

No wonder the opposition witnesses sounded shrill and defensive, with one actually screaming her insults at a patiently inquiring senator. You'd be more than defensive if you had her job: To champion the patently indefensible which, if you tried it on what we used to call a dumb animal, would get you strung up by the Humane Society.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communiciations and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.