Clinton's choice.

President Bill Clinton had a chance to practice what he preaches on abortion but is passing it up. Early in his term, Clinton said that he thought abortions should be safe, legal, and rare. Now he has promised to veto "The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban," which would have made at least one form of abortion rarer--it could be used only to save the life of the mother. The law, banning what its supporters call "partial-birth abortion" and what the law's opponents call "intact dilation and extraction," would have prohibited a procedure used in late second- and third-trimester abortions, that is, after twenty weeks gestation.

According to testimony given in graphic detail about the procedure before a House committee last year: after dilating the cervix, the physician draws down the body of the fetus into the birth canal exposing everything but the head; the cranium is then punctured and the content of the brain cavity is suctioned out, thus killing the fetus. The head is crushed and the remainder of the fetus is "delivered."

By twenty weeks, a fetus, though still very small, looks remarkably like a baby. That is one reason why John Leo, writing in U.S. News and World Report, concluded that the procedure "looks like infanticide" (November 20, 1995). But for the agnosticism of Roe v. Wade about when and how fetal life is to be protected, it would be infanticide. Another inch or two, another minute, and a baby, premature to be sure but a baby nonetheless, would have been born. At that point, the law requires doctor and nurses to swing into action to try to save its life.

Accurate information on the procedure is hard to come by. Few doctors perform the procedure--or, at least, few admit to it. Congressional hearings identified two. Proponents of the procedure say that it is required in cases where the mother's health and future fertility is in jeopardy, but at least one physician has said he uses the procedure for elective abortions. Nor is it clear how many such abortions take place each year. Of the 13,000 annual late-term abortions, it is estimated that 450 to 2,000 use this method.

Abortion-rights proponents argue that the ban on partial-birth abortions is an unwarranted legislative intrusion into medical practice and a wedge meant to curtail late-term abortions. It is true that all late-term abortions are grisly; most end in delivering what, after all, looks like a baby. Why single out the partial-birth abortion procedure for legislative action? Perhaps, because more than other procedures it highlights the legal anomaly--the fine line between life and death, between killing a fetus and caring for a premature infant. Perhaps, because it shows that what Roe v. Wade did allow--restrictions on abortion after viability--has never been honored in law or medical practice. Perhaps, because those opposed to abortion have so few avenues for bringing to the attention of the media or of lawmakers the reality of abortion: It involves the taking of an infant life; in this case, demonstrably so.

In the national debate, abortion opponents are commonly portrayed as the heavies, rigid in their thinking and uncaring in their attitudes. In this instance, they raised a legal and moral issue which deserved serious consideration. Congress paid attention (yes, a very conservative Republican Congress, but the bill passed with many Democratic votes). Still, abortion supporters adamantly refused to deal with the facts of the matter, instead finding in the hearings, the pictures, the descriptions, and the vote a direct attack on what they love to call a fundamental constitutional right. Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARRAL), said the House vote in favor of the ban, "is the most devastating and appalling attack on a woman's freedom to choose in the history of the House" (New York Times, November 4,1995).

Here is the real quandary: Why does a procedure that can reasonably be called infanticide get so much support from prochoice forces and from Bill Clinton?

Last year, the New Yorker (Jane Mayer, December 4,1995) and the New Republic (Naomi Wolfe, October 16, 1995) opened their pages to examinations of the moral issues involved in abortion. Wolfe wrote that she wants abortion supporters to admit "that the death of a fetus is a real death; that there are degrees of culpability, judgment, and responsibility in the decision to abort a pregnancy." Mayer allowed that "intact dilation and extraction, which can be used as late as the twenty-fourth week, can be portrayed--and not altogether implausibly--as bordering on infanticide." She, too, thought that prochoice advocates, "by refusing to entertain the idea that some abortions under some circumstances might in fact be wrong, are preventing themselves from arguing convincingly for those that are right." Yet in the end, neither writer could find in her moral queries and concerns any reason to conclude that this particular procedure or any abortion procedure was morally or legally beyond the pale. In the final analysis, these writers exude a moral earnestness about abortion that is not matched by any substantive moral or political action. President Clinton is guilty of the same grave failing.