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D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton released testimony in advance of this afternoon’s hearing for a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks in D.C. It’s the testimony she would have given had she been permitted to testify—which she wasn’t. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was particularly irritated, NBC4 reports:
“We have a member of Congress who wants to come in and talk about her district, I can’t even imagine a situation where someone else would be denied that opportunity and I think it’s wrong,” Pelosi said. “And I think it’s not civil and if we don’t raise the level of civility around here it just further alienates the public.”
Pelosi continued:
“What are they afraid of? The facts? The impact on the District of Columbia? The persuasiveness of the Congresswoman to represent her people? … They have prevented her from having a vote on the floor, now they don’t want her to have a voice in a committee on a subject of concern to her district, I think it’s wrong.”
So who is testifying? Three doctors and one District resident named Christy Zink—an activist who needed a late-term abortion when physicians found her fetus had abnormalities.
The first doctor is Anthony Levatino, a self-professed “former abortionist” who apparently found the procedure too gruesome and personally stressful, and stopped providing them to women in 1985.
The second doctor is Colleen Malloy, a physician and professor at Northwestern who once wrote a letter to the Chicago Sun-Times arguing that abortion to save the life of the mother “is almost never necessary.” Rather, she says the body will miscarry eventually or the woman should carry the fetus to term.
The third is Bryan Calhoun, a member of a conservative physicians’ organization who published a report claiming a link between premature births and abortions in the black community. (The report came out in a journal that had also published now-debunked studies that abortions lead to breast cancer.)
One thing all of these doctors have in common? None of them practice medicine in D.C.
Photo by Darrow Montgomery