AMA reproached for
supporting partial-birth
abortion ban

By Lori Tighe
Star-Bulletin

The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii has asked the American Medical Association to reverse its support of a bill to ban a type of late-term abortion that pro-life groups call partial-birth abortion.

The AMA was chastised by an independent consulting firm for support of the Republican-sponsored bill, which President Clinton vetoed twice.

"This issue was big in our past Legislature and was defeated in the 11th hour," Vanessa Chong, executive director of the ACLU of Hawaii, said yesterday. "This is a hot issue all across the country. The fact that the AMA supported it, made it difficult for state legislatures to defeat it. The AMA did a real disservice to women's health care."

The ban would have made it a crime for a doctor to partially deliver a living fetus before killing it and completing the delivery. The procedure is extremely rare and performed on women who may die if they give birth.

"It has not been a topic of discussion here," said AMA President Dr. Nancy Dickey, here for the AMA meeting at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. "Since the bill is gone and done, it's history. It will not be on our agenda now."

The ACLU says Congress may raise the partial-birth abortion issue in the spring. Although it failed in Washington, D.C., 27 states passed a partial-birth abortion law based on the federal bill, said Talcott Camp, staff attorney for the national ACLU.

Yet because the wording is so vague as to what a partial-birth abortion is, the state courts have thrown out cases heard under the new law, said Dr. Tod Aeby, an obstetrician-gynecologist affiliated with the University of Hawaii.

If the AMA does decide to reverse its position on the bill, nothing will happen until June, said Dr. Audrey Nelson, chairwoman of the AMA ad-hoc committee on Structure, Governance and Operations.

The AMA delegates representing 600,000 U.S. doctors asked Nelson's committee to hire an independent consulting firm to review the way AMA makes its decisions. The report done by Booz Allen & Hamilton used the AMA's support of the abortion bill as an example of bad decision-making.

"We weren't looking at the correctness of it," Nelson said. "The subject is not of interest to us. We call it a sentinel event, it created a lot of controversy. We wanted to find the lessons that could be learned from it."

One lesson learned, Nelson said: AMA officers shouldn't negotiate bill language. It should be left to AMA staff who are professional lobbyists.

"The AMA was wrong to endorse it in the first place," Camp said. "The audit was right, the AMA lost sight of protecting the doctor-patient relationship and patients' welfare. It was purely a political decision and a bad one."

Partial-birth abortion is "a pretty grisly procedure, one that nobody does. It's extremely rare and none have ever been done in Hawaii," Aeby said. "The agenda was to create media frenzy over what an awful procedure it is, and once it passed it could be used to ban any kind of abortion."

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists met with the AMA to discuss the abortion bill and took the opposite stance in opposing it, Aeby said.

"The AMA opposed it too. But in the 11th hour of politicking, the AMA came out for it."

The ACLU of Hawaii was ready to file a legal challenge if the bill passed here, Chong said, and is bracing for another "serious attempt" to pass it in the upcoming Legislature.