Following yesterday’s article by Shannen Coffin on Elena Kagan, we contacted Arthur Caplan, Emanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, to ask whether he believed Kagan politicized medicine by changing the 1996 ACOG memo.

Caplan, who criticized Bush for “politicizing” science by vetoing a stem-cell-research bill in 2006, had this to say in regards to Kagan:

“I don’t know this issue or what Kagan did or what the context was, but it is fair to say that, in America, for many decades abortion policy has had far more to do with politics than with anything else.”

As for the substance of her revision: “Partial-birth abortion, in my view, has a tiny place, when a horrific fetal anomaly incompatible with life post-birth is found during the third trimester.”