JUST TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT:

Put up or shut up (Mona Charen, March 12, 2004, Jewish World Review)

Medical records are used every day in litigation around the country. When the safety of particular drugs or medical devices is litigated, or a company is accused of polluting a stream, or someone sues tobacco companies over "second hand smoke," medical records are key evidence. They are provided all the time, with identifying information expunged.

But the plaintiffs who are suing to have the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 declared unconstitutional are making an interesting demand. The National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood are arguing that the law is unconstitutional because it does not contain a "health exception" (the law does have a "life of the mother" exception). Doctors sympathetic to their side will argue that the procedure is sometimes medically necessary and that they have performed such abortions on women in order to preserve their health.

If this is true, it is news, because Congress held hearings for several years considering this ban and specifically found that "a moral, medical and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a partial-birth abortion ... is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited." If Planned Parenthood's doctors are going to testify as experts that the procedure is medically necessary, then they ought to provide the medical records to substantiate their case. [...]

Laymen may wonder why the procedure is done at all. Consult Dr. Martin Haskell's paper presented to a meeting of the National Abortion Federation in 1992. Haskell was the originator of the procedure. It was designed, he said, because it could be done in a doctor's office under local anesthesia, rather than in a hospital (and many hospitals do not permit second- or third-term abortions). Second, it was quicker (for the doctor) than dismemberment abortions, which sometimes took "45 minutes." Third, "most surgeons find dismemberment at 20 weeks and beyond to be difficult due to the toughness of fetal tissues at this stage of development."

We know they don't want to talk about what really happens in an abortion. But refusing to provide redacted medical records to the court is chutzpah on stilts.

What is it they have to hide?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 12, 2004 10:23 AM