On March 11, 1997, the U.S. Senate and House committees met jointly to hear testimony on "Partial Birth Abortion: The Truth." The following testimony was presented by Helen Alvare, director of Planning and Information for the NCCB, detailing the lack of accuracy, if not intentional lies, in the media regarding this abortion technique: Another issue that has featured Prominent in our educational materials was the way partial-birth abortion advocates repeated false information and got away with it in the press. Some examples will illustrate this. I was interviewed last June by Eric Zorn, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Zorn's "thesis," as he explained it to me, was this: If any partial-birth abortions were performed for truly "elective" reasons, for reasons that the public would consider not serious, as the pro-partisan movement claimed, life, the movement should produce mothers involved. I explained at length that it was not "the movement" that claimed most of these procedures were "optional", this fact was stated by the partial birth abortion providers themselves. I sent Dr. Haskell's statements to Zorn quoted in American Medical News. I also sent the charts that Dr. McMahon had provided to the Subcommittee on the Constitution in which he detailed his rationale for the abortions he performed. These documents demonstrated the elective nature of most of these procedures – and in the words of abortionists themselves. I asked Zorn to reconsider his logic: Aren't patient records confidential and in the possession of the abortion providers themselves, I asked? And if you were a woman who had your healthy baby aborted, would you be eager to make it public? Nothing, however, could shake Zorn's tenacious hold on his thesis. She ended up writing, "This explanation doesn't cut it. If these once callous, cruel, and selfish women leading this national debate really exist, let's listen..." (June 6, 1996). In a later article, he wrote: "Well, there are late-term abortions, there are 'partial-birth' abortions, and there are abortions performed for non-medical or elective reasons. We find very little overlap... because late-term abortions are very rare and almost always performed for serious medical reasons. clinic performs about 1500 of these per year stating- "Most are for elective, non-medical reasons: people who didn't realize, or didn't care, how far they were..