Dr. Paul Kengor: Meet Hillary’s Abortion Doctor

Dr. Paul Kengor, a professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of its Center for Vision & Values, has written a new article for The American Spectator in which he introduces the world to Hillary Clinton’s abortion doctor.

No, Clinton has not had an abortion—and there’s no evidence to refute that—but one of her first personal physicians, who later became a close friend, was Dr. William F. Harrison who, during his lifetime, was the most prolific abortionist in the state of Arkansas. In many ways, Kengor wrote in his article, Harrison offered a look into the heart, mind and soul of the Democratic presidential nominee.

That Clinton has made Roe v. Wade and unfettered access to abortion a key component of her agenda is no secret. But in his piece, Kengor is able to describe not only how Clinton got there, but also why.

I shared with Harrison my struggle to explain how Hillary Clinton could be a lifelong, committed “old-fashioned Methodist” (as she put it) and so staunchly, rabidly favor legalized abortion. Harrison was offended by my intimation: “Hillary [is] a Methodist,” he snapped. “I was raised a Methodist. The Methodist church [is] very strongly pro-choice.”

The United Methodist Church (UMC) at the time officially supported legal abortion, and was a member of the hideous Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which, mercifully, it finally withdrew from only this past April. The UMC’s liberalism on abortion appealed to Hillary and her abortion-providing doctor.

Like Hillary, Harrison saw legal abortion as moral. He waxed religious in searching for words to characterize it. He described his patients as “born again,” even while conceding, “I am destroying life.” He candidly called himself an “abortionist”—a term of derision employed by abortion foes. “You don’t understand,” he reprimanded me. “I consider what I do very pro-life. I am saving lives when I do abortions.”

Harrison died of cancer nearly a decade ago, but weighed in on the obvious political ambitions of his friend. He also explained to Kengor his hope for an America living under the leadership of a President Hillary Clinton.

I noted how Bush, on his first day in office, had authorized a ban on all U.S. funding of international abortion-rights groups, reversing President Bill Clinton’s executive order. I noted that in January 2003 Bush had signed the “Sanctity of Life” bill, and then, two months later, did not veto the Republican Senate’s ban on partial-birth abortion. He signed the ban. Bush also began commemorating each Jan. 22 as a National Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life Day. On and on.

I asked Dr. William Harrison if he expected that a President Hillary Clinton would change these policies. The abortion doctor again invoked religious language: “Oh, absolutely. … I hope to God she does.” He meant that literally. He and other pro-choicers were (and are) counting on Hillary.

Though he was in his 70s at that time, Harrison did not want to slow his activity at the abortion mill, at his Fayetteville Women’s Clinic. He was eager to continue performing about 1,200 abortions per year. The key, said Harrison, was whether the electorate could appreciate both the Clintons, whom he said history would judge “with a much more reasoned and rational mind than the idiots who have hated [them], seemingly for no more reason Christ was hated.”