Guess Who?

He goes around the country on abortion saying, “Well, I reduced -- or abortions came down in the City of New York while I was mayor.” Well, they declined everywhere in America. The one place they did not decline was in the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation that he ran. The number of abortions increased during the course of his mayoralty in the hospitals he ran. Now, not only did the number of abortions increase, but late-term abortions, what the mayor and others like to call partial-birth abortions -- we became a magnet for late-term abortions. In New York City Health and Hospitals Corporations, we had some of the best doctors in the country performing late-term abortions in New York City facilities under Mayor Giuliani. So it isn’t just a matter of he was pro-choice; he implemented that in concrete policy. The City of New York is one of the very few places -- now, this started before Giuliani, but he continued -- that will pay for the abortion of any woman who’s not covered by Medicaid, where it’s not a medically necessary decision. Rudy Giuliani paid for thousands of those abortions with city funds, when Medicaid wouldn’t. Wayne Barrett