Foster Calls First Abortion Figure an ‘Honest Mistake’ : Health: Surgeon general nominee defends faulty recall. Senate confirmation may rest on three votes.

Beleaguered Surgeon General nominee Henry W. Foster Jr., who recalled his Southern roots and early years in medicine, told a Senate committee Tuesday that he made an “honest mistake” when he understated the number of abortions he performed as a physician, insisting: “There was never any intent to deceive.

“I had no reason to do so,” he said during the opening moments of his confirmation hearing before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

“First of all, I am a doctor who delivers babies. My life’s work has been devoted to bringing healthy lives into this world and trying to assure that every child born is a wanted child.”

The hearing before the Republican-dominated committee climaxes a tumultuous three-month confirmation marathon for Foster and for President Clinton, who has vowed to “go to the mat” for the Nashville obstetrician/gynecologist and educator. Foster’s nomination has been caught in the polarizing debate between abortion-rights advocates and abortion foes, although most of the rhetoric has focused on Foster’s truthfulness--or lack of it.

Foster, 61, founder of a Nashville program for teen-agers called “I Have a Future,” has said that he wants to focus on combatting teen-age pregnancy.

A key element of the Nashville program, which Foster started eight years ago, is curbing pregnancy, but it is also intended to address the related problems of drug and alcohol abuse and violence and to encourage students to stay in school.

While his chances with the committee remain uncertain, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) has threatened to keep the nomination from reaching the Senate floor, and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) has vowed to filibuster it if it does. Dole, who is vying with Gramm for the GOP presidential nomination, has predicted that the nomination will die in committee.

Its survival now hinges on three GOP swing votes: Sens. Bill Frist, a fellow physician and Tennessean; Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas, who chairs the committee, and James M. Jeffords of Vermont, who frequently votes with the Democrats.

All three indicated Tuesday that they will base their decision on Foster’s professional credentials and his record and will not allow the nomination to rest on the inflammatory issue of abortion.

Kassebaum and Jeffords support abortion rights, while Frist personally opposes abortion, although he deems it medically acceptable under certain circumstances.

Foster “has been made a pawn in our abortion debates,” Kassebaum said. “I believe he deserves to be judged on his whole record. . . . Abortion is certainly part of this record and should be examined, but it is only one part of the whole record.”

Frist, a heart and lung surgeon, agreed that the hearing is not “the time or place to revisit our national policy on abortion.” Frist praised Foster’s “outstanding work” in his home state and said that the purpose of the committee’s scrutiny is not to dredge up “every mistake or imperfection.”

In a brief interview, Frist said that his own review of the material submitted to the committee in advance showed “no smoking guns.” Nevertheless, he said, his vote “would depend on how the hearing goes.”

Although Foster was expected to undergo harsh grilling, the senators were surprisingly gentle and dealt mostly with expected issues. They included Foster’s abortion record, questions about hysterectomies he performed decades ago on mentally retarded women who had not given their consent and questions about when he first became aware of a controversial syphilis study in Tuskegee, Ala., in which available treatment was withheld from infected men.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said that he was upbeat about Foster’s presentation and pleased with the comments of Kassebaum and Frist. Of the possible outcome, McCurry said: “I am hopeful; I am also realistic.”

For his part, Foster was unflappable, except for mistakenly repeating a comment made several months ago when he attacked his opponents as “white right-wing extremists” in a speech, instead of “right-wing extremists” as was in the prepared text. When Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) asked him Tuesday about the earlier reference, Foster made the same comment again--this time to laughter.

Foster went on to say that the word “white” was a “slip of the tongue.” By extremists, he said he meant abortion foes who break the law to prevent a woman from exercising her constitutional right to an abortion.

Foster insisted that he had not deliberately underestimated the number of abortions he performed during his nearly 40-year career. In the days following his nomination, he had said that he had done fewer than a dozen. Later, he said he had not carefully checked his records and acknowledged that the correct figure was more than three times that original number.

“I answered, based on my memory, without reviewing the record. That was a mistake,” Foster said. “I should not have guessed. But it was an honest mistake. In my desire to provide instant answers to the barrage of questions coming at me, I spoke without having all the facts at my disposal.”

He testified that during his 22 years at Meharry Medical College, where he was dean of medicine and later acting president, he was listed as the physician of record for 39 abortions. Under questioning, he said that he probably performed only one-quarter of those, while the rest were performed by residents under his supervision.

Regarding the Tuskegee experiment, he reiterated that he was not present at a 1969 meeting of the local medical society at which the decades-long syphilis experiment was allegedly discussed--three years before public disclosure forced its termination.

Although at least one member of the society’s board has claimed that Foster was present at the meeting, the nominee produced a statement from a Tuskegee woman who said he was at the delivery of her son the night the meeting took place.

Foster’s presence at a meeting where the experiment was discussed would have strongly suggested that he had ignored the serious ethical questions raised by the experiment, which today is considered one of the darker chapters of American medical research. “I was outraged frankly,” he said about his feelings when he learned of the episode. “It was awful.”

Foster also denied allegations that he once said he had performed at least 700 amniocentesis and therapeutic abortions. “I didn’t say it and I didn’t do it,” he said.

Kassebaum asked why statistics offered by his Nashville program for teen-agers appeared to fall short of demonstrating success. Foster attributed this, in part, to turnover among the participants. He said that the study was too small to reach accurate conclusions and that a large study is needed.

He stressed that 24 program participants graduated from high school last year and that 16 are now in college. “To me, that is what’s real,” he said.

Foster appeared to choke up as he spoke of his paternal grandmother, “Grandma Hattie,” who had worked as a domestic helper to better her family, and of his father’s pride in seeing him enter the University of Arkansas School of Medicine as the only African American student.

He also recalled his early days practicing obstetrics in Tuskegee. He said that keeping records was a problem so they used carbon paper, and transportation was also scarce. He said he convinced local funeral homes to loan hearses to women needing rides to the hospital. “Their patients could wait,” he said to laughter.

Many GOP senators who oppose Foster have declared that their position stems from questions about Foster’s credibility.

But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the committee’s ranking minority member, chided Foster’s Republican opponents as the ones who have a credibility problem.

“Our Republican opponents . . . now seem to agree that abortion is not the issue. In fact, they are desperate to keep it from becoming the issue,” Kennedy said. “They pretend to challenge his credibility on abortion, when in reality, as all of us know, they are trying to make abortion the issue indirectly, in a way that will not embarrass them.”

The hearing resumes today, and it is unclear whether it will extend into Thursday. Kassebaum said a vote will take place “in the next several weeks.”

Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this story.