Well, I suppose that was to be expected, considering that the president that nominated her supports infanticide over and beyond the usual abortion debate.
Back in 1996 during her days in the Clinton White House, Kagan apparently wrote a memo specifically designed to distort a physicians group’s opinion of whether partial-birth abortion is medically necessary.
A major bit of evidence cited by pro-partial birth abortion advocates is a report issued by a "select panel" of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan medial organization. That report said that the partial-birth abortion procedure "may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman." The Supreme Court used the ACOG statement as the major example of medical opinion when it struck down Nebraska legislation outlawing partial birth abortion.
Shannen Coffin was a deputy attorney general during the Bush administration which later instituted legislation curtailing the practice, the Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act. He was the lead attorney who defended the Bush Administration's federal partial-birth abortion act in court.
As he reveals in his NRO article, the initial draft of the report said that the ACOG panel "could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman." So Kagan set about fixing the 'problem' by altering the language of the report itself:
Once the rabidly pro-abortion Elena Kagan, then a deputy assistant to President Clinton for domestic policy. This is what Kagan wrote in a memo to her superiors in the Clinton White House:
Todd Stern just discovered that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is thinking about issuing a statement (attached) that includes the following sentence: "[A] select panel convened by ACOG could identify no circumstances under which [the partial-birth] procedure ... would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman." This, of course, would be disaster -- not the less so (in fact, the more so) because ACOG continues to oppose the legislation. It is unclear whether ACOG will issue the statement; even if it does not, there is obviously a chance that the draft will become public.
So Kagan took matters into her own hands: incredibly, she herself appears to have written the key language that eventually appeared in the ACOG report. Coffin writes:
So Kagan set about solving the problem. Her notes, produced by the White House to the Senate Judiciary Committee, show that she herself drafted the critical language hedging ACOG's position. On a document [PDF] captioned "Suggested Options" -- which she apparently faxed to the legislative director at ACOG -- Kagan proposed that ACOG include the following language: "An intact D&X [the medical term for the procedure], however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman."
Kagan's language was copied verbatim by the ACOG executive board into its final statement, where it then became one of the greatest evidentiary hurdles faced by Justice Department lawyers (of whom I was one) in defending the federal ban. (Kagan's role was never disclosed to the courts.)
Her answers when she was asked about it by Senator Orin Hatch could almost be part of a Monty Python Routine:
Hatch: “Did you write that memo?”
Kagan: “Senator, with respect, I don’t think that that’s what happened — ”
Hatch: “Did you write that memo?”
Kagan: “I’m sorry — the memo which is?”
Hatch: “The memo that caused them to go back to the language of ‘medically necessary,’ which was the big issue to begin with — ”
Kagan: “Yes, well, I’ve seen the document — ”
Hatch: “But did you write it?”
Kagan: “Uhh, the document is certainly in my handwriting.”
What we're looking at here is a process by which The federal courts were scammed and deliberately deceived by an almost obscene manipulation of not only the scientific evidence by the legal system. And it was done by someone who wants a lifetime job as a justice on the highest court of the land - Elena Kagan.
Lagniappe: Conservative doyen Phyliss Schlafly has a superb piece in Investors Business Daily that explains exactly how an appointment like Kagan's endangers the Constitution.
Recommended.
4 comments:
that explains exactly how an appointment like Kagan's endangers the Constitution.
uh, what is a constitution?
just curious.
please note the word constitution is not capitalized in my request.
that is not a typo and the shift key on my keyboard works just fine.
Essentially, it's a unique document and inheritance from our Founders that is the supreme law of the land in the United States and says what government can't do.
This may help.
Regards,
Rob
Just one caveat ( is it caveat or proviso in English ? ), but a crucial one : it details what the fed gov --shouldn't-- be doing. They ( just my opinion ) regularly engage in all sorts of unconstitutional activities ( eg, FCC censorship, the ineffective & unconstitutional fed DEA drugs' prohibition, the Jimmy Carter military slavery sign-up, the bullying of the states & stealing of the states' authority via fed mandates -- not to mention the blackmailing of states by the feds' threatening to withhold public moneys : the list runs on interminably ... ) xxxxxx In my opinion, we last experienced true constitutional gov in the period running ca 1865 ( end to the US Civil War ) till ca the end of the Edwardian Era ( ca 1910 ), &, even then, I posit that it, ie, true adherence to constitutionalism, was limited to the Northern & Western states. The Southern states disregarded the civil rights of the Blacks under the Jim Crow regime. In fact, in my lifetime, when I was a kid, Blacks ( Negroes ) still had to ride at the back of the bus in the US South. ( Ironically, Blacks are almost universally supporting the Democratic Party, even though it was the party of slavery -- Thomas Jefferson's party -- & Jim Crow segregation & lynching. I think nothing has saddened me more about the political arena during my lifetime than witnessing that sorry spectacle ! ) xxxxxx In the event, the Income Tax Amendment & the so-called ' direct election ' of Senators Amendment were passed ( thereby removing the crucial safeguard of state legislature involvement -- terrible mistake changing that ! ) & the US drifted quickly into a de-facto unitary national system. xxxxxx Once upon a time, the pollsters would ask people when they thought that the fed gov had become unconstitutional. They would pose this question to members of the public till the late 1970s. The majority response was normally March 1933 : Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. It's a good selection ; however, for the reasons argued, supra, I should choose ca 1910. ( I spent about 20 minutes on the internet trying to unearth something, anything, about these opinion polls which they used to hold, but, unfortunately, history is positively anaemic re pre-1995 annals. The 1970s might as well be the Stone Age as far as the computer world is concerned. But I recall from my newspaper days that they were still printing them in the papers as late as the late 1970s. ) Oops, sorry for the length of this letter again ! --dragon/dinosaur
Just one caveat ( is it caveat or proviso in English ? ), but a crucial one : it details what the fed gov --shouldn't-- be doing. They ( just my opinion ) regularly engage in all sorts of unconstitutional activities ( eg, FCC censorship, the ineffective & unconstitutional fed DEA drugs' prohibition, the Jimmy Carter military slavery sign-up, the bullying of the states & stealing of the states' authority via fed mandates -- not to mention the blackmailing of states by the feds' threatening to withhold public moneys : the list runs on interminably ... ) xxx In my opinion, we last experienced true constitutional gov in the period running from ca 1865 ( end to the US Civil War ) till ca the end of the Edwardian Era ( ca 1910 ), &, even then, I posit that it, ie, true adherence to constitutionalism, was limited to the Northern & Western states. The Southern states disregarded the civil rights of the Blacks under the Jim Crow regime. In fact, in my lifetime, when I was a kid, Blacks ( Negroes ) still had to ride at the back of the bus in the US South. ( Ironically, Blacks are almost universally supporting the Democratic Party, even though it was the party of slavery -- Thomas Jefferson's party -- & Jim Crow segregation & lynching. I think nothing has saddened me more about the political arena during my lifetime than witnessing that sorry spectacle ! ) xxx In the event, the Income Tax Amendment & the so-called ' direct election ' of Senators Amendment were passed ( thereby removing the crucial safeguard of state legislature involvement -- terrible mistake changing that ! ) & the US drifted quickly into a de-facto unitary national system. xxx Once upon a time, the pollsters would ask people when they thought that the fed gov had become unconstitutional. They would pose this question to members of the public till the late 1970s. The majority response was normally March 1933 : Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. It's a good selection ; however, for the reasons argued, supra, I should choose ca 1910. ( I spent about 20 minutes on the internet trying to unearth something, anything, about these opinion polls which they used to hold, but, unfortunately, history is positively anaemic re pre-1995 annals. The 1970s might as well be the Stone Age as far as the computer world is concerned. But I recall from my newspaper days that they were still printing them in the papers as late as the late 1970s. ) Oops, sorry for the length of this letter again ! --dragon/dinosaur
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