New Senate Majority Leader 
Frist Promotes Pro-Life Legislation

January 15, 2003—Washington, DC: The pro-life community has waited with baited breath to find out how Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist would handle pro-life legislation now that he, and not pro-life Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), is the Senate Majority Leader.

Frist provided his first glimpse when speaking on several talk shows Sunday morning. He said he would work toward a ban on partial-birth abortions and on human cloning research.

When asked about potential abortion-related legislation on NBC's "Meet the Press," Frist said, "We are just beginning sort of all the planning in terms of what particular bills. I think things like partial-birth abortion—and I can tell you as a physician who has been in the operating room for thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours, the whole concept of partial-birth abortion offends the sensibilities of me as a physician. It's a rogue procedure. It's not in the medical textbooks. Something like that where we've got not consensus but broad, broad support among the American people, I can see that coming very, very quickly."

He added, "It's an abhorrent, abhorrent procedure that offends the civil sensibilities of every, I think, just about every American."

Frist also said he "[a]bsolutely" supports a ban on both reproductive and therapeutic cloning—opposed by pro-life groups.

About therapeutic cloning, he said, "I am opposed to any time that you create an embryo itself with the purpose being destruction, and that would include the so-called research cloning," adding, "And remember, research cloning is just that, it's experimental. There's been no demonstrated benefit of that to date." He said the Senate would address a cloning ban "at some point."

Meanwhile, on the question of President Bush's pro-life judicial noinations, Frist said he will support Bush's renomination last week of U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering to serve on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Pickering has been criticized by many pro-abortion organizations and because of his opposition to abortion. The Senate Judiciary Committee last March voted 10-9 along party lines to reject Bush's original nomination of Pickering.

"There are many people who think he did not get a fair hearing before," Frist said, adding, "So I receive his nomination gladly. ... I plan on supporting Pickering."