“Elena Kagan will emerge as one of the Supreme Court’s most agenda-driven, reliably pro-abortion Justices. It is deeply troubling that the Senate voted to confirm Ms. Kagan without fully investigating her role in manipulating medical evidence during the partial-birth abortion debate in 1996-97. The American people want fair and impartial judges, and Justice Kagan’s negative impact will be felt for decades to come.”
- Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President & CEO of Americans United for Life Action
“Today’s vote to move forward on Elena Kagan’s nomination is clouded by outstanding questions regarding her role in manipulating the medical statements of two major organizations on partial-birth abortion. Last week, AUL Action delivered a comprehensive, 54-page report to the Senate on this issue. I strongly encourage Senators to closely examine our report and to formally investigate her role in the partial-birth abortion debate before bringing this nomination to a floor vote. Based on these concerns, I urge the full Senate to roundly reject her nomination.”
- Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President of Americans United for Life Action
Washingtion, DC – (7/20/10) – Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the United States Supreme Court. Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President and CEO of Americans United for Life Action, is available for post-vote reactions.
Yoest has been heavily engaged in the entire process.
She led an effort to release the noteworthy series of daily “Kagan File” legal memos; convened a major press event featuring Judge Robert Bork; testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee – calling for an investigation into Kagan’s manipulation of medical evidence during her time in the Clinton White House; met with Senator Sessions last week after issuing a 54-page report detailing Kagan’s role in the 1996-97 partial-birth abortion debate; and yesterday released a letter from former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop announcing his opposition to Kagan’s confirmation.
Experienced in the politics of the Supreme Court nomination process, Dr. Yoest also testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the July 2009 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. From her White House days in the Reagan Administration to her leadership as project director of the Family, Gender and Tenure Project at the University of Virginia where she received her PhD, Yoest is well versed in both Beltway politics and the science of politics. Yoest is well-known as an author and public policy expert and brings hands-on experience on domestic policy issues.
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wrote an open letter urging that Senators vote against the nomination of Elena Kagan. Last week, AUL Action released a 54-page report on Kagan and partial-birth abortion. Two major national media outlets have written about the Koop letter so far.
Excerpts from a USA Today blog post on this subject today at their On Politics blog:
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop is urging a no vote on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a letter that will be delivered today to senators who soon will be deciding to confirm her.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on sending President Obama’s second Supreme Court nominee to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote.
In the letter, Koop accuses Kagan of lobbying successfully to change the language of a 1997 statement by American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists on a controversial procedure that critics call “partial-birth abortion.”
Koop calls “unethical” and “disgraceful” Kagan’s effort to convince the medical group to describe the procedure as medically necessary.
“She was willing to replace a medical statement with a political statement that was not supported by any existing medical data,” writes Koop.
[...]
Charmaine Yoest, head of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, says her group will be on Capitol Hill today trying to call senator’s attention to Koop’s letter. Yoest says her group will be raising concerns about Kagan’s “apparent willingness to distort the record” in order to obtain “the political outcome she wanted.”
The abortion opponents are focusing on handwritten notes Kagan made on a draft of the doctors’ policy statement when she was a top aide to then-president Bill Clinton.
When he questioned Kagan about the memo last month, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said her draft language played “an enormous role” in the debate over the controversial abortion procedure. “The Supreme Court relied on it,” Hatch said, when the justices overruled a Nebraska law banning it. Kagan argued that her language did not change the ob-gyn group’s position, but more accurately reflected it.
Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire also wrote about the letter today:
In a letter released by the antiabortion group Americans United for Life, Koop attacks Kagan for her work in the Clinton administration on legislation banning partial-birth abortion procedures. According to records released by the Clinton Presidential Library, Kagan, now the solicitor general, had discussions with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a medical society, regarding their view of the procedure.
At her confirmation hearing earlier this month, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) observed the medical group had been planning to release a statement that it did not believe there were any situations where the partial-birth procedure was the only option for protecting a patient’s life or health. Kagan had written on an internal memorandum that “this, of course, would be a disaster.” The group later issued a statement saying that in some circumstances the procedure could be the best or most appropriate for a patient.
Koop, picking up from Hatch’s questions, construes Kagan as having “manipulated the medical policy statement on partial-birth abortion of a major medical organization.”
“In my many decades of service as a medical doctor, I have never known of a case where partial-birth abortion was necessary in place of a more humane and ethical alternative,” the 93-year-old Koop writes in his open letter addressed to the American people and the U.S. Senate. “I urge the Senate to reject the politicization of medical science and vote no on the Kagan nomination.”
Related:
Washington, DC (7/15/10) – The Sessions/Americans United for Life Action press conference has been postponed due to a floor vote that was scheduled in the United States Senate.
We regret any inconvenience.
Instead, Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President and CEO of Americans United for Life Action, will meet with Senator Sessions to discuss in detail the report that was released this morning on Elena Kagan’s role in the ACOG/AMA partial-birth abortion issue.
The complete report is available for download by clicking here.
To interview Dr. Yoest on this important document, please contact us.
The following message is a grassroots email that was sent out today by AUL Action:
Dear Friend of Life,
There is a startling new development in the Kagan nomination. We now know that Elena Kagan appeared willing to lobby not one, but two medical organizations.
During her time in the Clinton Administration, Elena Kagan urged the President to oppose any meaningful restrictions on partial-birth abortion. She told President Clinton at the time that any real limitations on abortion were “unconstitutional.” In addition, it now appears that Kagan pushed her agenda one step further by lobbying two major medical organizations to publicly change their positions on partial-birth abortion.
In a June 15th legal memo from our sister organization, Americans United for Life, AUL attorneys raised additional concerns about Kagan’s apparent lobbying efforts to change the position of a major medical group – the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) – on partial birth abortion.
When Kagan found out in December 1996 that ACOG was considering a statement that its experts “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,” Kagan wrote a memo stating that this “of course would be [a] disaster.”
In other words, Elena Kagan knew that if ACOG’s scientific opinion became public, her argument that partial-birth abortion is necessary would be completely discredited.
Kagan intervened and drafted language to alter ACOG’s position.
Yesterday, Kagan was questioned about this by several Senators and admitted that the new language was in her handwriting.
“I’m really stunned by what appears to be a real politicization of science,” Senator Orrin Hatch said yesterday. “The political objective of keeping partial-birth abortion legal appears to have trumped what a medical organization originally wrote and left to its own scientific inquiry they had concluded.”
Kagan told Senator Hatch that “….there was no way in which I would have or could have intervened with ACOG, which is a respected body of physicians, to get it to change its medical views on the question.”
Evidence released yesterday by Americans United for Life attorneys, however, reveals that Kagan may have lobbied the American Medical Association (AMA) to change its position as well.
Kagan was concerned about an AMA policy that that there is no identified situation in which a partial-birth abortion is medically necessary. She acknowledged in an email recovered from the Clinton Library files that she was in a meeting “on whether the AMA policy can be reversed at its convention on June 23.” She stated that “We agreed to do a bit of thinking about whether we (in truth, HHS) could contribute to that effort.”
This cryptic and troubling email demands further explanation.
Kagan was so opposed to the passage of a ban on partial-birth abortion, she hoped that ACOG and the AMA would suppress or modify their views and, written evidence suggests, may have worked behind the scenes to make that happen.
Evidence from Kagan’s time in the White House indicates that she may have been more involved in lobbying medical groups on partial-birth abortion than she admitted yesterday under oath.
Kagan’s possible lobbying of medical organizations on its own is troubling, but the effect of this successful effort is even more startling.
Later, a federal judge in Nebraska relied on the ACOG policy statement to strike down the federal prohibition of partial-birth abortion. Shannen Coffin, a then-Justice Department attorney defending the federal ban related how the judge emphasized the “integrity of the process that led to” the statement, writing that, “neither ACOG nor the task force members conversed with other individuals or organizations . . . concerning the topics addressed.” Coffin recounted that, “Kagan’s role was never disclosed to the courts.”
ACTION ALERT: Americans United for Life Action is calling for an immediate Senate investigation into the discrepancy between Kagan’s current characterization and what the written evidence indicates. All outstanding questions must be answered. The American people deserve to have all of the facts before their representatives consider a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court.
Please CLICK HERE to contact your Senator immediately to call for an urgent Senate investigation.
Yours for Life,
Charmaine Yoest, Ph.D.
President & CEO
Americans United for Life Action
Americans United for Life is helping provide live coverage of the Kagan hearings online. For more information on this coverage and on Elena Kagan, please visit AUL.org.
