Former Surgeon General: Kagan's Alt Eration Of Statement ‘Unethical’ And ‘Disgraceful’

In an open letter delivered last week, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop is urging senators to vote against Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, in light of her role in the alteration of a medical statement about partial-birth abortion from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).

“I was deeply disturbed to learn the Elena Kagan, the nominee for Supreme Court scheduled for a Senate committee vote next week, manipulated the medical policy statement on partial-birth abortion of a major medical organization, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) in January 1997,” Koop wrote in his letter.

As CNSNews.com has reported, in 1996, when she was associate White House counsel in the Clinton White House, Kagan obtained a preliminary draft of ACOG’s “Statement on Intact Dilatation and Extraction.” (Intact Dilatation and Extraction, or “Intact D&X,” is a form of partial-birth abortion.)

She wrote in a December 14, 1996, memo that “it would be disaster” if the statement were released or leaked because it stated that “[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.”

As Kagan admitted recently in her testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that language she “suggested” -- that was eventually added to ACOG’s final statement -- was written in her handwriting and found in her Clinton Library files. The added language stated: “An intact D&X, however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.”

This added language that partial-birth abortion “may be the best or most appropriate procedure” was later specifically quoted in the Supreme Court case Stenberg v. Carhart Opinion of the Court that struck down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion.

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