Over the weekend, former president Bill Clinton revealed that Elena Kagan was instrumental in persuading him to veto the ban on partial-birth abortion. The New York Times reports:

His decision to veto the measure was driven home at a White House news conference, he said, when five women spoke agonizingly about undergoing the procedure because of serious risks to themselves and their fetuses.
“The truth is, for a very small percentage of women with a problem it was medically necessary,” Mr. Clinton said. “At least that is what I thought and that is what she thought.”
Ms. Kagan referred to the five women herself in a 1997 memo to Mr. Clinton that she co-authored, saying they would fall under the health exception included in a stringent Democratic abortion proposal she recommended the president endorse in keeping with his call for a narrow exception available only when a woman “faces real, serious adverse health consequences.”

At the press conference, Clinton suggested that partial-birth abortion was necessary to preserve the future fertility of these women. “The enormous size of the baby’s head,” Clinton said, had to be “reduced before being extracted.” Dr. Watson Bowes, an authority on fetal medicine, had previously written to the chairman of the House subcommittee on constitutional issues that an enlarged fetal head could be reduced without the intentional killing of the fetus. Since Clinton’s successor signed a federal ban on partial-birth abortion, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of compromised fertility.

The alternative Democratic legislation, which the Times describes as “stringent,” was nothing of the kind. A major practitioner of partial-birth abortion told the press that this alternative would not change his practice in the least.