The article was buried far down in section a of The New York Times on
Wednesday, February 26, 1997. But it hit supporters of abortion rights like a
punch to the gut. Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition
of Abortion Providers, admitted that he lied when he'd said that partial-birth
abortions were rare and performed primarily to save the lives and preserve the
health of women with badly deformed fetuses. In other interviews, he said he had
parroted the pro-choice line and "lied through my teeth." The procedure, he said,
was far more common than the abortion-rights movement had acknowledged and was
used routinely by some doctors to abort the healthy fetuses of healthy women.