People magazine published an interview with Howard Dean
this week, full of the usual babble and fluff. But buried beneath
it were some surprisingly newsworthy comments. Consider Dean’s
skittishness during the interview about his work for abortion
provider Planned Parenthood.
“Were you both active in Planned Parenthood in Burlington?” asks
People of Judy and Howard Dean. Judy Dean tried to
downplay their work: “We both worked there, while we were
residents, but I wouldn’t call it active.” Not active? Howard Dean
served on New England Planned Parenthood’s executive board.
Then Howard Dean defensively answered a question not asked: “And
no, neither of us ever did an abortion.” People’s
interviewer, puzzled at Dean’s defensiveness, asks, “Why do you say
it that way?” Howard Dean: “Because I always get asked that.”
“Why didn’t you perform abortions?” asks People, a
logical question given Dean’s loud support for abortion and close
connection to Planned Parenthood. Howard Dean: “Because we don’t do
them. They don’t train residents to do that.” Really? Young doctors
in residence at Planned Parenthood are shielded from abortions?
That’s implausible since residents at Planned Parenthood are
offered training.
Judy Dean’s answer to the question was, “When we were residents,
we were working there basically to get GYN experience because you
don’t generally do it on hospitalized patients. And then you start
to have a practice without having a lot of GYN experience.”
Sensing some vaguely hypocritical backpedaling, People
asked the Deans, “Do you have a moral opposition to performing the
procedure? I mean, you’re both physicians, you at some point —”
Howard Dean cut the interviewer off, saying, “I think that’s a
private matter between the physician and the patient. I don’t have
a moral problem, but neither of us is trained to do abortions.
We’re both internists. Internists don’t do abortions.…It
would be malpractice if we did.”
This answer deserves further journalistic scrutiny, especially
since Vermont is a state which allows non-physicians to
perform abortions. If non-physicians can perform abortions in
Vermont, why can’t internists, especially one who served on the
board of Planned Parenthood?
“There is absolutely nothing to prevent an internist from doing
an abortion in Vermont,” says Vermont Right to Life head Mary Hahn
Beerworth to TAS. “This is just smoke and
mirrors.…There is no law in place preventing him from doing
abortions if he wanted to.”
According to the last available data from Vermont Department of
Health, half of abortions in Vermont are not even performed by
doctors, says Beerworth. She notes that on the Vermont state form
for abortion “there is a box for ‘other’ when it lists who can
perform abortions.”
When People asked Dean if he would do abortions “if
you’d had had the training,” he punted. “I’ve learned long ago not
to answer hypothetical questions like that. Both of us chose
internal medicine so we never had to make that choice. I firmly
believe in the right to choose. This is a private matter between a
doctor and a patient. It’s none of the government’s business,” he
said.
Dean has no training in abortion? According to a 1998
Vermont Magazine article, Dean “certainly understands the
medical procedures involved” in abortion. So he understands
abortion procedures but couldn’t perform them even in a state where
it is legal for him to do so? That’s puzzling.
Dean’s comments to People magazine raise more questions
than they answer. In a state where non-physicians are performing
abortions, it seems remarkable that a former Planned Parenthood
doctor and board member would never have performed, assisted at, or
referred for abortions. (If a Republican presidential nominee had
worked for the NRA, served on its executive board, and then said he
didn’t own guns, wouldn’t the press find that a little
curious?)
Dean’s “proud association” with Planned Parenthood is rapidly
becoming an embarrassing one. It may be occurring to this recipient
of the Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award that the country
isn’t liberal enough to elect as president someone so intimately
connected to the nation’s largest abortion provider. You can see
the speed of the backpedaling in Judy Dean’s comment “I wouldn’t
say active” (of their work for Planned Parenthood.)
But this is characteristic of Dean and his Park Avenue
radicalism. He has never wanted to be seen implementing the radical
policies he advocates. When he signed Vermont’s homosexual civil
unions law, he made sure to do so behind closed doors at his
office. The press was outraged.
Will this same curious press now get to the bottom of what Dr.
Dean did behind Planned Parenthood’s closed doors?
