Three years after ACOG released its statement on partial-birth abortion — that included verbatim the words that had been the handwritten notes in Kagan’s White House files — the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart, which declared Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion unconstitutional.

By Jane McGrath at CNSNews.com

On Dec. 5, 1996, the government relations office of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) privately provided the Clinton White House with the unreleased draft of a policy statement ACOG was preparing to put out on intact dilatation and extraction (D&X) abortion — the procedure used in a partial-birth abortion.

Having reviewed the draft of the ACOG statement, then-Associate White House Counsel Elena Kagan wrote an internal White House memo declaring that the statement would be a “disaster” for the Clinton administration if it were publicly released. This was because the statement as drafted contradicted the argument President Clinton had been making to defend his opposition to a ban on partial-birth abortion.

Kagan wrote the memo on Dec. 14, 1996, which was a Saturday. Just the day before, on Friday, Dec. 13, 1996, President Clinton had given a press conference in which he stressed that he opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion unless an exception for the health of the mother was added to it because, he insisted, “a few hundred women every year” who seek abortions would not be able to “preserve the ability to have further children unless the enormity — the enormous size of the baby’s head is reduced before being extracted from their bodies.” That is, unless they had a partial-birth abortion.

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