August 2, 2002
A Letter to Newsday

Dear Sir:
   

          Through your newspaper, Sheryl McCarthy's article (July 29) on "partial-birth" abortions entered our home. I offer this response for your reader's consideration.

          She calls pro-lifers "anti-choice" and they are....when one choice allows the killing of innocent children in the womb. Top medical authorities have testified that this procedure is never necessary to save a life.

INTACT EXTRACTION

It sounds like a doctor is removing a tooth rather than a torso. This "empty-headed" procedure does just that....it empties the head! Science-fiction horror stories pale in comparison. Read Sheryl's description of a surgical procedure born in Hell. "The doctor perforates the fetus' skull, removes the contents of the head and removes the fetus, more or less intact."  "More or less intact? The head is now an empty skull!

This procedure is barbaric but she said "no abortions are pretty." That is exactly why abortionists don't want parents to view one, yet doctors have no qualms about showing live births to parents. Why....because only dead babies never smile!

Sheryl said that this procedure allows women to "exercise their choice" Too bad that the child only gets to exercise its lungs....in a final silent scream of agony!

To minimize the horror of this act, she said "childbirth and miscarriages are not for the squeamish, either", missing the glaring distinction. In these two procedures the mother's hands do not become bloody! For her to add that the "percentage of those undergoing "intact extraction" is relatively small" is no comfort to the "small relatives" being extracted!

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who performed over 60, 000 abortions, realized the error of his ways and is now an ardent pro-life defender. Sheryl, please reflect on this for the unborn need your voice....before losing their own.

In conclusion, I wonder how many parents, after reading her column, looked down at their "fully intact (not "more or less") children and offered a silent prayer of thanks to God.

Robert Quinn

                  Let not procrastination govern our actions, for a vast chasm separates "late" from ......"too late."

P.S. Below is the complete article of Sheryl McCarthy which appeared in Newsday.

             House plays politics with ban on abortions

     Just when we weren't paying attention, the anti-choice crowd slipped one in on us. While our heads were turned by our fear of terrorists and dirty bombs, by our anger at the CEO's who've squandered our savings, and by our horror over a stock
marked in free fall, the anti-abortion gang in Congress struck again.

      Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill banning a medical procedure that its opponents call partial-birth abortion and that its defenders refer to simply as intact extraction. The bill would impose a two-year prison term on any
doctor who performed the procedure, and would permit relatives of the mother to sue the doctor for damages.

      But wait. Wasn't this issue already settled? Didn't the U.S.Supreme Court decide two years ago that a Nebraska law that banned the very same procedure was unconstitutional? Yup.

      But, like the phoenix, this issue simply will not die. I suppose this latest bill should come as no surprise. The anti-choicers have been trying to wipe our legal abortions for years, and the campaign against intact abortions is only their most recent ploy.

     Congress has repeatedly approved bills that would outlaw the procedure (five times since 1996). They went nowhere because Bill Clinton kept vetoing them. Then the Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska law in 2000, and the anti-choicers backed off for a year. Now they're at it again.

      Just to clarify, intact extractions are performed in the later stages of pregnancy, when the fetus has grown larger and can't be removed by more routing methods. The mother may have decided that she doesn't want to have the baby, or the doctor may have determined that because of severe complications the mother's health is in danger or that the child isn't going to survive. The doctor dilates the cervis, reaches in, finds a limb and partially pulls the fetus in the birth canal.

      Then the doctor perforates the fetus' skull, removes the contents of the head and removes the fetus more or less intact. Intact extraction has been vilified as barbaric and inhumane. But no abortions are pretty, even though they are sometimes necessary. For that matter, childbirth and miscarriages are not for the squeamish either.

      Intact extraction allows women to exercise their choice to have or not have a child, and lets doctors end severly compromised pregnancies without risking the mother's health. Since the overwhelming number of abortions are performed early on in pregnancy, the percentage of those where intact extraction is necessary is relatively small.

      Surely, the choice of which procedure to use should be left up to the woman'sdoctor, and not to people like Steve Chabot, the Republican congressman from Ohio, who sponsored the House bill. "They're thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court and they're thumbing their noses at women," Julia Ernst, legislative counsel for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, said of the bill's passage.

      This latest bill is just as unconstitutional as the Nebraska law was, but its supporters now have a president in the White House who has said he would sign it if it also passes in the Senate. No such bill is currently pending in the Senate, however.

      For now, the bill is a display of grandstanding by the anti-choicers, who, with the fall elections coming up, want to be able to show that they're still holding the line against abortion. They'll use their votes for the bill in their campaign ads, and they remain hopeful that conservative appointments to the Supreme Court by  George W. Bush will lead to more restrictions on abortions.

      There are those who say that American women have grown so accustomed to having freedom of choice that no politicians or judges would dare take it away from them at this point. But what happened in the House last week proves that there are people still hard at work, trying to make that happen.