Thursday, July 01, 2010

More on Elena Kagan's alleged ghostwriting for ACOG

This from the corner:

The War on Science [Yuval Levin]
If you haven’t read Shannen Coffin’s piece on Elena Kagan and the partial-birth-abortion debate today, you really should. What he describes, based on newly released Clinton White House memos, is absolutely astonishing.


It seems that the most important statement in the famous position paper of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists—a 1996 document that was central to the case of partial-birth-abortion defenders for the subsequent decade and played a major role in a number of court cases and political battles—was drafted not by an impartial committee of physicians, as both ACOG and the pro-abortion lobby claimed for years, but by Elena Kagan, who was then the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.


And Wesley J. Smith over at Secondhand Smoke reports that when confronted by Senator Hatch about it (either her ghostwriting or an associated memo):

Update: Today (7/1), Kagan was asked by Senator Hatch whether she “wrote” the memo in question. She tried to skate away, for example saying she was “aware” of it. When Hatch kept pressing, Kagan finally said, “It certainly is in my handwriting.”


I wonder what ACOG will have to say about this.

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