Word: fostering
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Only an hour was left in the debate over Henry Foster's doomed nomination as Surgeon General last week when Senator Bob Smith, a beefy New Hampshire Republican, lumbered into the almost empty Senate chamber with a plastic fetus, an easel and six huge posters. For the next 30 minutes, he unnerved his colleagues--and the summer tourists who packed the galleries--with an excruciatingly detailed description of a medical procedure that abortion opponents call partial-birth abortion. "In illustration No. 4," Smith said calmly, "the abortionist takes a pair of scissors and inserts the scissors into the back...
...Foster's allies were livid and rushed back to the chamber. Though the Tennessee obstetrician and gynecologist had acknowledged performing 39 abortions during his 38-year career, no one had accused him of doing or even of condoning the grisly procedure described by Smith. "It's outrageous to bring something like that on the Senate floor," Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun complained...
...While Foster would go down to defeat in the final vote last Thursday, Smith's presentation will not be the last such display in Congress over the next few months. Abortion, an issue that simmered in the background during the Republicans' first months in power, is about to become the focal point of at least a dozen pieces of legislation, carefully drafted by abortion foes. Their strategy, at least for now, is not to make an all-out assault on the basic abortion right but rather to redirect the debate and whittle away at the gains the other side...
...Foster's nomination was the opening skirmish in what California Republican Bob Dornan promises will be Congress's "summer of life." Though apparently supported by a majority in the Senate, Foster was ultimately dragged under by the politics of the presidential campaign. Majority leader Bob Dole, fending off a play by rival Phil Gramm to curry favor with the right by staging a filibuster, deftly engineered a procedural vote under which Foster's supporters would have needed 60 votes even to debate the nomination; they fell three short, thus rejecting the nominee and robbing Gramm...
...help, two lives may have been saved, or, at the very least, we probably would understand why this murder-suicide happened. I hope that not only The Crimson but all prospective journalists will learn from this terrible tragedy, so that no news tip should ever be ignored. Sandra Foster Cambridge...