As noted in The Cathoholic, pro-life advocates and 'originalist" legal scholars have expressed concerns about her politicized approach to the law and how that might influence her role as a juror.
National Review just posted a story, which argued that Kagan, while serving in the Clinton administration, misrepresented the medical community's consensus position on paritial-birth abortion.
UPDATE: The Volokh Conspiracy targets the issue:
"[Kagan's] notes, produced by the White House to the Senate Judiciary Committee, show that she herself drafted the critical language hedging ACOG’s position. On a document [PDF] captioned “Suggested Options” — which she apparently faxed to the legislative director at ACOG — Kagan proposed that ACOG include the following language: “An intact D&X [the medical term for the procedure], however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.”
UPDATE: Today [June 30], during the Senate judicial confirmation hearings, Sen. Hatch (R-Utah) asked Kagan about her efforts to alter an official statement from the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists regarding the necessity of partial-birth abortion as an available medical procedure. Reuters reported that " Kagan was forced to defend her revision of an obstetrician group's policy statement on partial-birth abortion while she was an adviser in the Clinton White House."
Reuters reported on the following exchange between Sen.Hatch and Kagan:
"Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told Kagan .. "Your language played an enormous role in both legal and political fights over banning partial-birth abortion," he said. "The political objective of keeping partial-birth abortion legal appears to have trumped what a medical organization originally wrote and left to its own scientific inquiry and that they had concluded."
Congress passed a ban on the procedure twice in the 1990s but President Clinton vetoed it both times. The procedure was finally banned in 2003 when President Bush signed it into law. The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban in 2007 in a 5-4 ruling.
On Wednesday, Kagan disputed Hatch's version of the events, but admitted that she did speak with ACOG to revise the statement.
She also refused to take ownership over the memos advocating the less restrictive language.
"What I did was to advance the policy of the president," she said.
Kagan also said ACOG couldn't identify any circumstances in which the procedure was the only one that could be used in a given case but could find situations in which it was least riskiest procedure for women.
"There did come a time when we saw a draft statement that stated the first of these things which we knew ACOG to believe, but not the second, which we also knew ACOG to believe," she said. "And I had some discussions with ACOG about that draft.
"And so we knew that ACOG thought of both of these things," she said. "We informed President Clinton of that fact."
Kagan said the "disaster" would have been a statement that didn't reflect the group's two beliefs.
Hatch wasn't satisfied with her explanation.
"Well, I'll tell you this bothers me a lot because I know that there are plenty of doctors in ACOG who did not believe that partial-birth abortion was an essential procedure and who believed that it was really a brutal procedure and it was a constant conflict there," he said.
"That's something that does bother me because it would be a disaster, you wrote, because ACOG opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion. If anyone ever found out -- and you wrote that it could leak -- even if ACOG did not officially release its original statement, it could have negative political consequences," Hatch said."
ADDITIONAL UPDATE: National Review's The Corner, returns to the subject, with some interesting points from Shannen Cofin.
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