KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SEEING A LATE ABORTION CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

I stood at the doctor's side and watched him perform a partial-birth abortion on a woman who was six months pregnant. The baby's heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. The doctor delivered the baby's body and arms, everything but his little head. The baby's body was moving. His little fingers were clasping together. He was kicking his feet. The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby's head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. Then the doctor opened the scissors up. Then he stuck the high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I never went back to the clinic. But I am still haunted by the face of that little boy. It was the most perfect, angelic face I've ever seen. -- Brenda Pratt Shafer, R.N.

In September, 1993 a nurse with 13 years' experience, was assigned by her nursing agency to an abortion clinic. Since nurse Shafer considered herself "very pro-choice," she didn't think this assignment would be a problem. She was wrong. Her statement quoted above relates what she witnessed. It was that day, nurse Shafer says, "that my life and views about abortion were changed forever."

And then there are the Democrats of conscience for whom this is, finally, where they climb down from the pro-choice wagon. One such is Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the distinguished liberal Democrat from New York. He told the New York Post that he will vote to override President Bill Clinton's veto of the partial-birth abortion ban: "I think this is just too close to infanticide. A child has been born and it has exited the uterus and what on Earth is this procedure?"

I recognize the reaction. In the waning days of the 1996 legislative session last month, I rose to offer an amendment to an abortion bill. My amendment was nearly identical to the federal ban on partial-birth abortions that Clinton vetoed. I described what I had read about the gruesome procedure, which its practitioner, in chillingly clinical detachment, has described as "dilation and extraction" or "D&X." I quoted a cardinal of the Catholic Church who described this procedure as "one-fifth abortion, four-fifths infanticide."

Once I distributed to all senators a handout containing the graphic depiction of the procedure excerpted here, plus nurse Shafer's chilling testimony, what debate that did ensue was pretty minimal. Not even the most determined pro-choicer wanted to spend much time or energy defending what was done to this little guy.

Think about it: Do this to little puppies and you'd have my good friends at the Humane Society down on you. A baby whale? A spotted owl? CNN would demonize you in real time, simultaneously, in dozens of time zones. Do it to a human baby, though, and most mainstream media types will identify you as a proponent of "reproductive rights" -- a term that future historians will surely identify as the most ironic in current usage.

After my amendment carried by a vote of 30-2 on the roll call I requested, two colleagues approached me. The first, an ardently pro-choice Republican, shuddered as she informed me, in words similar to Sen. Moynihan's, how she couldn't imagine this. Next, one of my most liberal Democratic colleagues volunteered: "Kinder, I just cast my first pro-life vote ever."

On the final day of the session, the bill onto which I successfully amended this ban on partial-birth abortions died. The effort to protect innocent unborn life, however, will continue next year.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.