After we learned what Sen. Marco Rubio had to say about Atul Gawande, a Biden nominee for a senior healthcare post, we joined with him in seeking his defeat.
Gawande is a Professor of Surgery at the Harvard School of Medicine, a Rhodes Scholar, a distinguished author, and the former CEO of a healthcare organization. This is surely why President Biden nominated him to be assistant administrator of the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
There are good reasons, however, why the senator from Florida sounded the alarm on Gawande. He is a defender of infanticide. As evidence of this, Rubio pointed to an infamous essay from 1998 that Gawande wrote on this subject.
Gawande casually describes what partial-birth abortion entails. “The fetus is delivered feet first. To get the large head out, the doctor cuts open a hole at the base of the fetus’s skull and inserts tubing to suck out the brain, which collapses the skull. Often, but not always, the fetus is injected lethally beforehand.”
Gawande knows how normal people react to this monstrous procedure, and he has a ready answer for them. “If partial-birth abortion is too gruesome to allow, however, it is hard to see how other late abortions, especially D and Es [dilatation and evacuation], are any different.”
He’s right about that.
“About 80 percent of late-term abortions are done by D and E,” Gawande says. “A couple of days ahead, small, absorbent rods are put in the pregnant woman’s cervical opening to expand it gradually. Then, for the actual procedure, she—and the fetus—are given heavy sedation or general anesthesia. The doctor breaks her bag of water and drains out the fluid. The opening won’t let the fetus out whole. So the doctor uses metal tongs, physically crushes the head, and dismembers the fetus. The pieces are pulled out and counted to confirm that nothing was missed.”
Gawande speaks with clinical detachment about the most Nazi-like practices.
“What makes abortion disturbing is that the fetus is big now—like a fully formed child. Two of my obstetrician friends, both strongly pro-choice, told me that, even when it is a mother’s life at stake and abortion is absolutely necessary, doing the D and E feels ‘horrible.’ We imagine, as we look in the fetus’s eyes, that there is someone in there.”
We asked our email subscribers to contact Sen. Rubio showing their support for his opposition to Gawande. Regrettably, we stood virtually alone among activist organizations in doing so.
