September 5, 1995

The Congress everyone discusses in superlatives -- most sweeping, most radical, most impatient -- returns to town on Tuesday. This time, it faces a job almost beyond words. With eight months gone and deadlines circling overhead like vultures, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate take up a list of commitments this week as incomplete as it is ambitious. Legislation to overhaul Medicare, marked for passage this fall, has yet to be introduced. Bills to trim Medicaid and disassemble the welfare system have barely moved out of the House.

Accused of botching an abortion on a woman seven months pregnant, Dr. Herbert Schwarz leaned forward, focused all the authority of 32 years in medicine into one intense blue glare and demanded: "Look at me. Do you really think that I did anything but what I was equipped by my experience to know was the very best for her? The best I knew how? Do you think I did anything but the best?" That is the question. Normally, at worst, it would probably be the crux of a typical malpractice case. But because Dr. Schwarz performs abortions -- has performed perhaps as many as 45,000 of them, or an average of almost 10 a day, by his own count -- his work carries an unusually powerful charge, emotional and political. And since one of his patients ended up hemorrhaging and undergoing emergency surgery to deliver a stillborn, 7-month-old fetus, he has been plunged into a maelstrom of allegations and counter-allegations, nasty publicity and legal clashes.

For almost 105 years, the Thyssen family has been the largest shareholder in Thyssen A.G., the giant steel company which is one of the cornerstones of Germany's industrial might. But in a deal that analysts valued at about $1 billion, Commerzbank A.G. of Germany announced today that it had purchased the remaining 15.4 percent stake held by the two great-grandsons of the company's founder, August Thyssen.

A baby girl who was delivered by Caesarean section after her mother was raped and beaten to death on Saturday remained in critical condition yesterday at University Hospital. The mother, Juanita Fudge, 28, was eight months pregnant when she was attacked on a Newark street, the police said. No arrests have been made.

William M. Kunstler, the lawyer who defended the pariahs of society, died yesterday at 76. Page B6.