White House Defends Foster’s Record on Sterilizations

The White House played down the significance Saturday of revelations that President Clinton’s nominee for surgeon general had performed hysterectomies to sterilize some severely retarded women in the 1960s and 1970s.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said the information was available to Administration officials before Clinton’s selection of Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. He said Foster, in scholarly writings, had “eloquently” explained his conduct in the context of medical thinking for that time.

“We wanted to know more about the circumstances of this, what the medical practices were at the time,” McCurry said. “We looked into the matter.”

Administration officials said Foster, along with the mainstream medical community, no longer considers sterilization of retarded women by hysterectomy to be appropriate.

The Administration volunteered the names of prominent doctors who said it had been accepted medical practice decades ago to perform hysterectomies on severely retarded women for hygienic reasons and for sterilization.

The Administration is promising to push ahead with Foster’s nomination despite growing opposition from anti-abortion forces upset that he performed 39 abortions during his decades as an obstetrician-gynecologist. Some senators also have raised concern about Foster’s credibility because of shifting accounts of how many abortions he performed.