Joint Hearing on "Partial-Birth Abortion: The Truth"
March 11, 1997
Testimony by Gloria Feldt
Planned Parenthood Federation
President
Good morning, Mr. Chairmen and members of the Committees. My name is Gloria Feldt. I am president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation's largest and oldest provider of reproductive health care and education, serving five million people nationwide each year. I embrace this opportunity to talk about why Planned Parenthood believes so strongly that Congress should not impose its judgment on decisions best left to women, their families, and their physicians.
Today's hearing is about "truth." Truth is very important to Planned Parenthood. For 80 years, countless women have trusted Planned Parenthood to give them the truth - about their bodies, about their health, and about their options.
Just ask your wives, your mothers, your sisters, and your daughters - they will tell you that Planned Parenthood has always been there - with reliable information that enables women to make informed decisions about their reproductive lives.
To speak to the truth about women's lives, we must start by discussing the term "partial- birth abortion." Use of this vague and medically inaccurate term - accompanied by diagrams of fully formed, healthy fetuses being aborted - has utterly corrupted public discussion of this issue.
It has allowed those who oppose a woman's moral and legal right to make childbearing decisions at any stage of pregnancy to frame this debate.
It is inaccurate to equate so-called "partial-birth abortion" with "intact D&-E," one of the abortion procedures that would be eliminated by this legislation.
But outlawing intact D&E or any of the procedures affected by this ban will not eliminate the circumstances that call for them. It will eliminate safe health care options for women.
Before viability, roughly the first 24 weeks of the normal 40-week pregnancy, these circumstances - while of great importance to the women we serve - should not be judged by the government. A woman's privacy during this part of pregnancy is the law of the land.
This is an important distinction to make. Many times, the "when" has been confused with the "why" or the "how" an abortion is performed. Pro-choice groups were criticized for not being forthcoming about intact D&E figures regarding second-trimester abortions before viability.
The truth is that until recently, the framers of this debate talked almost exclusively about late, third-trimester abortions, and that is what our responses addressed.
In December 1995, Senator Phil Gramm described the procedure being performed "almost always with a late-term baby which is ... viable outside the womb." We responded by talking about Claudia Crown Ades of Los Angeles, who discovered in the 26th week of a desperately-wanted pregnancy that her fetus had a genetic condition that caused extensive brain damage, serious heart complications, and liver, kidney, and intestinal malformations.
Around the same time, Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council in a news release talked about the "killing of children who can survive outside the womb." We met Tammy Watts from Scottsdale, Arizona, who made the agonizing decision to end her pregnancy at 28 weeks because her-fetus was missing chambers in her heart, and had a severely damaged brain and misformed skull.
Last March, Haley Barbour of the Republican National Committee referred to the bill that "prohibits ninth-month abortions." We responded by talking about Mary-Dorothy Line, originally from Chicago, who made the agonizing decision to end her pregnancy at 21 weeks after learning that in-utero operations and other such "miracle" treatments could not repair the fluid filling her fetus' head or cause his stomach to develop.
Many proponents of the bill, including Representative Hyde, talked about the fetus being killed in the birth canal "three inches from life." Clearly, we all see now that the implications of this bill are far broader than this kind of inflammatory and misleading rhetoric would suggest.
Those who argue that Claudia, Tammy, and Mary-Dorothy do not exist or, by extension, don't matter must be either tragically misinformed or are deliberately misleading Americans.
The bill trivializes women who must make difficult life decisions under circumstances that would soundly defeat their critics here today. For every fiction they concoct, there is a woman who faces unavoidable truth. And for women experiencing a difficult, or even health-threatening pregnancy, the truth can be agonizing.
In the quarter century since the Roe v. Wade decision, American women have not had one moment's rest - not from legislative attempts to restrict their rights - nor from violent protesters willing to use any means to interfere with their private and personal decisions.
I have worked to promote and protect women's health for 23 years, and I am still amazed by those who would say to a woman, "We're not doctors, and we're not your family, but we'll decide what you can do."
Thank you.
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