What Is Behind Biden’s Choices for Nominees for Federal Positions?

            President Joe Biden chooses nominees for various positions in the federal government without considering bias towards the specific topic. The latest nominee put forth by Biden is Atul Gawande to lead global health development at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The reason that Gawande is a poor choice for this position because of his past comments about gruesome partial-birth abortion techniques. According to Mary Margaret Olohan, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) delayed a committee vote on this nominee and gave the following explanation for his decision. 

“Atul Gawande’s defense of infanticide is disqualifying,” the Florida Republican said in a statement. “Infanticide should be condemned, not celebrated, but Gawande’s radical, anti-life views are becoming mainstream in today’s Democratic Party.”

“President Biden should withdraw Gawande’s nomination and replace him with someone who is committed to upholding the agency’s mission of saving lives,” Rubio, a senior Republican on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations, added.

            Olohan continued her article at The Daily Signal with an explanation that “Partial-birth abortions have been banned in the United States since the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act passed Congress in 2003. This act was signed into law by President George W. Bush and was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2007.

According to the legislation, a partial-birth abortion is one in which an abortion doctor delivers a living baby until the baby’s head is outside the mother’s body, then punctures the back of the baby’s head, “removing the baby’s brains.”

            Gawande is a doctor of endocrinology and a professor at Harvard Medical School. In his 1998 Slate op-ed, Gawande “suggested that critics should not vilify partial-birth abortion over other abortion procedures merely because it is gruesome: ‘Grossness is not a good objection. Lots of operations are gross – leg amputation, burn surgery, removal of facial tumors, etc. But that does not make them wrong.’” Gawande did acknowledge that “partial-birth abortions are ‘disturbing’ since the baby being aborted is ‘big now – like a fully formed child.’” He then described the abortion “procedure in gruesome detail,” while “comparing partial-birth abortions to dilation and evacuation procedures (abortion in which the abortion doctor vacuums the baby out of the mother’s womb).”

“Partial-birth abortion is, if anything less grotesque,” he wrote. “The fetus is delivered feet first. To get the large head out, the doctor cuts open a hole at the base of the fetus’s skull and inserts tubing to suck out the brain, which collapses the skull.”

            Gawande said that “dilation and evacuation abortions may also be too gruesome to be permitted” if “partial-birth abortions are ‘too gruesome to allow.’” I agree with him that they are too gruesome, and they should be “the inevitable next target for pro-life advocates.”

            Abortion of any kind is too gruesome, and American tax dollars should not be used to pay for them. Gawande does not sound like a man who should be trusted with protecting the lives and health of people receiving American aid – including unborn babies.