Harkin and his support of partial birth abortion

Iowa voters- As I have previously noted callmecrusader is now a first time grandmother. I regret to say that I was too busy loving my own children and taking interest in other children in my life that I failed to pay attention to the issue of abortion. Not now. I share the following, thinking that there are other Americans who never grasped what abortion was all about.

While I can’t go back and change the past I will do all in my power to help other Iowans understand abortion. Today I start with Tom Harkin. After you have the stomach to read what “partial-birth abortion” is, then please note that Iowas own, Tom Harkin, supports such horrific killings, all in the name of a woman’s right to choose.

There are other posts on Iowa Defense Alliance that highlight Tom Harkin’s views on abortion. With the election looming ever closer, I once again feel the urgency to bring attention to Harkin and his abortion record. Please give this post your time and consideration. Share it with others. Iowans keep rewarding Tom Harkin with another trip back to Washington, D.C. and more opportunities to work with others who also uphold the right to kill babies.

This year I implore you to use your vote for a candidate, Christopher Reed, who will stand up for life.

Tom Harkin must be stopped from continuing his despicable ways of supporting partial birth abortions.

http://www.priestsforlife.org/articles/williammay090199.html

Partial-birth abortion and Catholics

What is ‘partial-birth abortion’?

The procedure in question is properly called “partial-birth abortion” because, as even secular sources acknowledge, it requires the doctor to deliver the unborn child partially from the uterus, feet first, leaving the baby’s head inside the womb. The doctor then uses scissors and a hollow needle to empty the skull of its contents. The unborn baby’s head then collapses and the doctor removes the dead baby entirely from the mother’s body. Given the nature of the procedure, the congressmen who drafted legislation to prohibit it, the “Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 1995″, defined the procedure as follows: “an abortion in which the person performing the abortion partially vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the fetus and completing the delivery”.

The doctors who perform this barbaric act and those who seek to justify it attempt to hide its nature by describing it euphemistically as “intact dilation and evacuation/extraction” or as “intrauterine cranial decompression”. The procedure is usually performed on unborn children suffering from hydrocephaly, Down’s syndrome or other anomalies whose mothers are suffering maternal depression on learning that their unborn children suffer from such problems or on unborn children whose mothers are undergoing major life crises.

The claim is sometimes made – and it was made by President Clinton in his veto of legislation to prohibit this form of abortion – that this procedure is necessary at times to protect the life and health of the mother or to preserve her fertility. But as the “Physicians Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth” (PHACT), a group of more than 300 medical specialists organized to counter the misinformation provided by the abortion industry of the United States, pointed out: “Partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to protect the health of a woman or to protect her future fertility; in fact, the procedure can pose grave dangers to the woman”.

The eight Catholic senators who voted to uphold Clinton’s veto and thus voted in favor of partial-birth abortion were: Thomas Daschle, Christopher Dodd, Thomas Harkin, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Barbara Mikulski, Carol Moseley-Braun and Patty Murray.

The issue is clear. Catholic political leaders and legislators who, like the U.S. senators who refused to override President Clinton’s veto of a bill designed to protect unborn children from a particularly heinous and barbaric form of abortion, fail to “stand up for human life” and to do what lies in their power to protect the inviolability of innocent human life act publicly in a way contrary to their Catholic faith.