George Tiller, who currently faces 19 criminal charges for performing illegal late-term abortions in Kansas, was caught on hidden tape admitting that he has performed abortions as close as one day before the mother’s delivery date.

Students for Life of America, a pro-life student group, recently released a video on YouTube with footage of Tiller’s comments during and after the Feminist Majority Foundation’s annual Women’s Leadership Conference held Mar. 9 at the National Education Association in Washington D.C.

The video shows Tiller presenting graphic slide images of fetuses that were aborted for their fetal abnormalities.

“What is most disturbing about this video is the point when Dr. Tiller shows footage of children he has aborted,” SFLA director Kristan Hawkins, who taped the video with a colleague, told LifeNews.com.

“One had an extra arm: could not that child have survived and received corrective surgery? Was violently killing the child the only way to go?” she asked.

The crowd at the NEA event applauded Tiller’s presentation and Kathy Spillar, vice president of Feminist Majority Foundation, even commended the abortion practitioner’s acts as “courageous.”

Following the event, Hawkins and another SFLA member questioned Tiller about the 2002 Born Alive Infants Protection Act, a federal bill signed into law that protects born children from murder and illegalizes infanticide.

He said it was “reprehensible” for a doctor performing an abortion to let the baby accidentally slip out alive.

“If the baby is born alive, that is sloppy medicine,” Tiller said in the video.

He also expressed objections to the legislation, saying, “Let’s say you have 15 or 16, you had one slip out with a heartbeat; that is not a viable fetus, but that is born alive or has a heartbeat. Then you have to take that non-viable fetus and rush it directly to the hospital against the woman’s wishes.”

Last year, Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison filed 19 criminal charges against Tiller for failing to get the permission of a second doctor who was financially or legally independent of him before carrying out late-term abortion procedures. Morrison had also dismissed 30 more serious criminal charges against the abortionist filed by the former attorney general before he left office.

If convicted under Morrison’s charges, Tiller will face up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine for each of the 19 charges. Furthermore, Tiller’s medical license to practice could be suspended or revoked.

The notorious Kansas abortionist has been known nationwide for offering easy late-term abortions, which breaks Kansas laws of only providing abortions if there is a reasonable medical concern.

He has been accused several times of performing illegal late-term abortions and offering only vague reasons why the operation is necessary.

The Kansas Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments on three subpoenas for patient records by the grand jury investigating Tiller’s abortion clinic on Apr. 8.

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Late-Term Abortion Bill Expected in Senate (970513)

WASHINGTON —Debate on so-called partial birth abortion is expected to begin in the Senate Tuesday, nearly two months after the House voted to ban the procedure by a veto-proof margin.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, would allow the procedure only when the woman’s life is at risk, and could impose fines or imprisonment of up to two years for doctors who perform it.

President Clinton vetoed a similar bill last year, saying any law should also include an exception for when a woman’s health is endangered. The White House said in March that Clinton would veto the bill that passed the House.

Opponents of the ban have said it hampers women’s constitutional right to choose abortion, but even some abortion rights supporters have been swayed by a graphic campaign for the ban on the House floor, including line drawings of a fetus being aborted by this method.

Officials cautioned that debate on the abortion bill may be pushed back until Wednesday because of other pressing matters, including the budget.

The debate in the Senate is likely to be colored by a measure crafted by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota which would include bans on all late-term abortions with exceptions for cases where the woman’s life is in danger or where she risks “grievous injury” to her physical health.

Daschle said his standard for banning abortion procedures was viability of the fetus, which he said occurred starting at weeks 23-28 of gestation. The woman’s physician would certify that the health risks justified an abortion, under Daschle’s proposal.

But Santorum and other abortion opponents said the Daschle language was aimed at undermining any ban on the so-called partial birth procedure.

“Sen. Daschle’s proposal is filled with loopholes which really trivialize this debate,” Santorum said in a statement. “It’s billed as a compromise —some have even been confused to think that it goes further than our bill, but it would not prevent a single partial-birth abortion.

“It is an attempt to subvert and confuse the effort to ban an inhumane, barbaric procedure,” Santorum said.

The procedure, which opponents call partial birth abortion and which can also be referred to as dilation and extraction, involves the partial extraction of the fetus feet-first, the subsequent suctioning out of the fetal brain and removal of the fetus.

The House voted 295-136 March 20 to pass the ban.

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee, said he was not optimistic that the measure would pass the Senate by the two-thirds majority required to withstand a Clinton veto.

“It’s an uphill climb,” Johnson said in a telephone interview, estimating that 61 senators were prepared to vote for the ban, or six short of the required 67.

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Santorum’s crusade against abortion colored by his own experience (970515)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Touched by personal tragedy, Sen. Rick Santorum is crusading with zeal and passion in leading the Republican drive to ban a certain type of late-term abortion.

The Pennsylvania senator says the death of his son two hours after birth last fall served to reinforce his opposition to abortion.

Santorum and his wife twice considered and rejected abortion even though they knew the fetus had a defect and would die after birth. Doctors presented the abortion option less than two weeks after Santorum led an unsuccessful fight to override a presidential veto of a bill that would have outlawed what opponents call partial-birth abortions.

“We were presented with a situation not dissimilar to a lot of women with partial-birth abortions,” Santorum said in a recent interview. “In a sense I’ve gone through what everyone on the Senate floor said I had no understanding of. That’s not true anymore.”

Santorum denounces the late-term abortion technique as “infanticide.” As he opened debate this week on a bill identical to last year’s, he was somber in graphically describing the procedure and ardent in questioning how, morally, anyone could support it.

“It is so important for people to understand that you don’t have to kill the baby. You don’t have to do that. I know,” he said in a Senate floor speech.

“Obviously, if it was a choice of whether both Karen and the child are going to die or just the child is going to die, I mean it’s a pretty easy call,” Santorum said in a Philadelphia Inquirer interview published earlier this month.

Santorum is a main sponsor of the Senate bill, which would ban the late-term abortion procedure, except when a mother’s life was at stake.

The Senate was expected to pass the bill this week but fall short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a threatened presidential veto. Last year, the Senate fell eight votes short of an override.

Santorum caused some friction Wednesday when he unsuccessfully sought permission for a 5 1/2-year-old girl to view the debate from the visitors’ gallery. Senate rules say children must be 6 or older.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., objected to Santorum’s request, saying she thought it was “exploitive.”

In a telephone interview, the girl’s mother said she had been told she needed an abortion when she was seven months pregnant because the fetus’ death was imminent from severe hydrocephalous and loss of brain tissue.

The mother, Lori Watts of Greencastle, Pa., said she declined the abortion and her daughter now has a life “very akin to other children her age.” The girl, Donna, is educated through home schooling, as are her three sisters, the mother added.

Opponents of the legislation say the procedure, more complicated than first-trimester abortions, is uncommon and used only when the fetus has severe abnormalities or when the woman has serious health problems.

Foes like Santorum maintain the procedure is common and often elective. Santorum opposes all abortions except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother.

Santorum said he spoke with doctors, friends and members of the clergy and studied fetal development in detail before concluding during his 1990 House campaign that he was against terminating pregnancies.

He has not relented since.

“Rick is by nature a very passionate person,” said William J. Green, a Republican political consultant in Pittsburgh. “He doesn’t come to these positions lightly. He takes his time, but when he gets there, he’s there. He’s fairly adamant, and there isn’t a lot of wiggle room.”

Santorum and his wife, Karen, considered abortion while she was in her fifth month of pregnancy, first when the fetus was diagnosed with a fatal defect and a few days later when corrective intrauterine surgery caused a life-threatening infection to the mother.

Mrs. Santorum began feeling cramps, a sign of early labor, two days after the surgery. She was treated with antibiotics that fought the infection while the labor progressed. The infant, Gabriel, died shortly after birth.

“We bundled him up, put a little hat on his head to keep him warm,” Santorum wrote in a May 4 commentary piece in the Inquirer. “We held him, sang to him and cried for him. We knew the end was near, so we tried to pack a lifetime of love into those few hours.”

Santorum’s critics believe he should be willing to let others have the same choices that he and his wife had to accept or reject abortion.

“He is an ideologue,” said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. “He is very overbearing. I don’t think one has to force one’s opinion down anyone else’s throat.”

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American Medical Association Backs Partial Birth Ban (970520)

WASHINGTON — Senate lawmakers are scheduled to vote on a controversial measure Tuesday that would ban partial birth abortions.

On Monday, the influential American Medical Association threw its support behind the proposal.

Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican who is the sponsor of the Senate bill, announced the AMA endorsement of a slightly modified version of his bill. He said he hoped it would sway the six to eight senators who by his count are still undecided.

Santorum said he has 62 “solid” votes, more than enough to pass the measure. But he needs 67 to override a presidential veto. The measure passed the House by a veto-proof majority.

President Clinton vetoed an identical bill last year and said he will do so again this year because it does not make exceptions to preserve the health of the pregnant woman. The Santorum bill makes exceptions only if her life is endangered.

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Senate passes abortion bill (970520)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate today passed a bill outlawing a controversial late-term abortion procedure, but fell three votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override an expected veto by President Clinton.

The vote was 64-36, with even Democratic leader Tom Daschle, whose attempt at compromise failed last week, voting for the Republican bill. “It is not an easy decision because I favor a women’s right,” Daschle said on the Senate floor moments after the vote.

The bill’s lead sponsor, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., passionately implored colleagues to follow the American Medical Association and support the ban on what abortion opponents call “partial-birth” abortions.

The AMA endorsed the bill Monday after its sponsors, including Santorum, agreed to technical changes, which the Senate also approved today. The AMA had declined to endorse it last week and remained neutral.

“We worry so much about the right to choose,” Santorum said in closing the three-hour debate. “What about the right to choose life?.”

The bill would outlaw the procedure except when a woman is at risk of death and no other medical procedure can be used to end the pregnancy.

But abortion-rights advocates, including Clinton, oppose it because it doesn’t include exceptions for when the health of a woman is at risk.

“This bill does harm,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., one of the Senate’s strongest abortion-rights advocates. “Colleagues, please do not relegate women to the status that says ... their health does not matter.”

Boxer noted that the American Medical Women’s Association opposes the bill. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading medical organization in women’s health care, also objects to it on grounds that it is “inappropriate, ill-advised and dangerous” for lawmakers to meddle in medical decision-making.

In a statement, the AMA said its board decided to support the bill because it has been “significantly changed” to meet the organization’s criteria for abortion legislation.

Sponsors said the measure, among other changes, now protects doctors from prosecution when they are intending to deliver a baby but are forced to resort to the abortion procedure to save the mother’s life.

“Although our general policy is to oppose legislation criminalizing medical practice or procedure, the AMA has supported such legislation where the procedure was narrowly defined and not medically indicated,” AMA executive vice president P. John Seward wrote in a letter to Santorum.

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Bummed Out At the Prom (970615)

by George F. Will

According to a friend, 18-year-old Melissa Drexler paused in front of the mirror in the bathroom to touch up her makeup before rejoining her date on the dance floor at the prom. She had just tossed her 6-pound, 6-ounce baby boy into a trash bin next to the bloodstained stall in the restroom where she had given birth. “She seemed to be enjoying herself,” said a classmate about Drexler’s postpartum dancing.

Medical examiners have determined that the baby was alive during the birthing process, which occurred early in the prom. He was soon discovered by a maintenance worker who thought the trash bag was unusually heavy. Unsuccessful attempts were made to resuscitate him.

Believe it or not, much may depend on whether it can be determined that the baby died before the umbilical cord was cut. Or whether the air sacs in his lungs inflated, indicating that he breathed, however briefly, independent of his mother. Ms. Drexler may be charged with something. Maybe murder. Maybe endangering a child. (Maybe conducting a partial-birth abortion at a prom without a license?)

Who taught Ms. Drexler to think, or not think, in a way that caused her to regard her newborn baby as disposable trash? Many people and things, no doubt.

She may have come from a less than attentive home environment. An assistant prosecutor says family members did not know she was pregnant. She has grown up in a society that does not stress deferral of gratification, and it’s not her fault that the baby arrived during the prom, for Pete’s sake. She has come of age in a society where condom-dispensing schools teach sex education in the modern manner, which has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists. If she is like millions of other young adults, she has spent thousands of hours watching movies and television programs not designed to encourage delicacy of feelings or to suggest that sexuality has morally complex dimensions and serious consequences. If she is like millions of other young adults, she has pumped into her ears thousands of hours of the coarsening lyrics of popular music. And she certainly has grown up in a social atmosphere saturated with opinion leaders’ approbation of, and collaboration with, the political program of reducing abortion —the killing of something —to a mere “choice,” like choosing to smoke a cigarette, only not nearly that serious.

However, foremost among the moral tutors who prepared Ms. Drexler to act as she did is the Supreme Court. By pretending in Roe v. Wade not to know when life begins, the court encouraged looking away from the stark fact that abortion kills something. Ignoring elementary science, the court said, preposterously, that a fetus is “potential life.” But as Walker Percy, an M.D. as well as a novelist, wrote, it is a commonplace of modern biology that a life begins “when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism.” Percy continued:

“The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the thirteenth century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate.”

Biology does not allow the abortion argument to be about, or anyone to be agnostic about, when life begins. Conscientious people can disagree about the appropriate moral and legal status to be accorded the life that abortion ends. But science complicates —to say no more —the “pro-choice” movement’s project of making the world safe for the likes of Ms. Drexler, the project of presenting the ending of an inconvenient young life as akin to a bowel movement.

Pregnancy is a continuum. What begins at conception will, if there is no natural misfortune or deliberate attack, become a child. If it becomes a child at a prom, it must be attacked quickly, lest the whole night be a bummer.

The barbarism at the prom is being termed a “tragedy” calling for “compassion” all around. No, an earthquake is a tragedy. This was an act of wickedness —a wicked choice —and a society incapable of anger about it is simply decadent. Perhaps the brevity of the life of Ms. Drexler’s son will accelerate the transformation of the nation’s vague unrest into a vivid consciousness that today’s abortion culture, with its casual creation and destruction of life, is evil.

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Indian state to curb female infanticide with aid to mothers (970818)

NEW DELHI, India (AP) — A state in India is trying to protect unwanted baby girls from being killed by poor familes aiming to avoid dowry payments.

The government of Tamil Nadu state plans to pay poor mothers and keep them in the hospital for a month, United News of India news agency reported Sunday. It quoted the state’s chief revenue administrator, Renga Rao, as saying that mothers often kill the babies within a month of their birth.

Details of the plan were not immediately disclosed.

The practice of killing female infants is believed to be widespread among poor peasants in parts of India. Parliament passed a law two years ago barring doctors from telling parents the sex of their fetuses to avoid abortions.

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Woman sentenced for killing newborn baby (980319)

PITTSBURGH, Pa. (AP) — A judge on Thursday sentenced a woman to serve up to four years in prison for killing her newborn baby by wrapping the child in T-shirts and dumping the body in a trash bin.

Sharon Cygnarowicz, 24, of McCandless, pleaded guilty in February to involuntary manslaughter, abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child.

Cygnarowicz, who lived with her parents, hid her pregnancy by explaining she had gained weight. She spent seven hours in labor alone in her bedroom before the child was born in December 1996.

Cygnarowicz then placed the baby on T-shirts, shoved the shirts under her bed and went to sleep. The next day she put the shirts and baby in a garbage bag and tossed it into a trash bin near a bank where she worked.

An autopsy showed the baby was born alive and died in part from a fractured skull.

In requesting leniency, defense lawyer Gary Gerson said his client was depressed.

“She was and is a good and decent person, a moral person,” he said. “She got caught up in events.”

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The Return of the Ban…and the baby (National Review Online, 030313)

By Pia de Solenni

The partial-birth abortion ban is back and a vote is scheduled for Thursday in the Senate. Congress approved the ban in 1996 and 1998, but our erstwhile president vetoed the ban. Both times the ban was passed, politicians from each party supported it. This should come as no surprise. For both sides, it’s a chance to distance themselves from infanticide. The Born-Alive Infant Protection Act passed for the same reason. We weren’t talking about a “clump of cells” or even a woman’s difficult situation. Front and center, we know it’s a baby who’s being born and could either have her brains sucked out or be wrapped in swaddling clothes and taken to the nursery.

Still, Senators Kennedy, Feinstein, and their ilk have spent the past few days saying that now is not the time to discuss PBA, as if we were all sitting at a family dinner table where they’re the parents and we’re the unruly children.

Supporting a PBA ban is a win for either side of the abortion debate. For pro-lifers, it keeps abortion from progressing towards full-blown infanticide. For abortion supporters, it keeps them from looking like Peter Singer who would give parents the right to kill their children 30 days after they’d been born.

Banning PBA won’t endanger the lives of women. A women who faces a pregnancy that has become critical needs only to deliver the child, not to kill it. PBA usually involves a breech delivery (feet first) which would be more harmful to a woman than a normal delivery or a caesarean section.

A PBA ban won’t eliminate abortion. It will simply eliminate a particularly gruesome abortion procedure that’s currently used thousands of times each year in the United States. It will make things harder for the abortionist because he’ll have to employ another form of abortion, like dilation and evacuation, which will be more time consuming. So he’ll have to spend more time and effort to make his money.

Which brings us to why some abortion supporters won’t support the ban. The ban would make their billion-dollar a year industry a little less lucrative and begin to impose some regulations on a largely unregulated business.

Those in Congress who take seriously the job of representing their constituents will vote in favor of the ban because doing so will represent the sense of the people. 70% of them favor a PBA ban according to a January USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll.

So when would be an appropriate time to discuss PBA? Actually, we’ve passed the time for discussion. It’s time for action. It’s time for a ban.

If we were to describe PBA as a procedure done to puppies, support among the senators would increase dramatically and Senators Feinstein and Kennedy might move out of the way. The unborn child, however, has become so political that it’s lost its face. Puppies, on the other hand, still have theirs.

The PBA ban, like the Born-Alive Act, legally puts a face on the unborn child and that makes some politicians squirm. Abortion has no face. Babies do.

— Pia de Solenni is a fellow at the Center for Human Life and Bioethics of the Family Research Council.

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Senate Bans ‘Partial Birth’ Abortions (Foxnews, 030313)

WASHINGTON — After three days of emotional debate on the constitutionality of limiting a woman’s right to an abortion, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a ban Thursday on a late-term procedure that abortion opponents called “barbaric.”

The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 received a 64-33 vote. It now heads to the Republican-led House, which passed the ban last year before it was stopped in the then-controlled Democratic Senate.

House Republicans said they expect to pass the bill by Easter. President Bush has said he would sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

“Partial-birth abortion is an abhorrent procedure that offends human dignity, and I commend the Senate for passing legislation to ban it,” Bush said in a prepared statement. “Today’s action is an important step toward building a culture of life in America.”

But Thursday’s vote showed that several Democrats also oppose the procedure, which consists of partially delivering a fetus in the 20th and 26th week, then puncturing the brain cavity. In the event of a breech delivery, partial birth would mean “any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”

The bill makes it illegal for doctors to commit the “overt act” of killing the partially delivered fetus unless the mother suffers from a pre-existing condition that would amount to a full-term pregnancy endangering her life.

“This is a great day for humanity. I am delighted to see us taking the step to eliminate this practice that some of our colleagues in the past have called the closest thing to infanticide,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

“It will become law this year,” he said.

But not everyone believes that the late-term procedure should be banned, and some accused the bill’s Republican sponsors of trying to roll back the clock on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that made it legal for a woman to seek an abortion.

“This bill is unconstitutional,” argued Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., citing the lack of an exemption in cases where the mother develops a life-threatening condition as the result of pregnancy.

The debate over partial birth abortion has been brewing since Republicans took control of the House in 1995.

Twice, the Congress passed a partial birth abortion ban, but former President Clinton vetoed it. In 2000, the Supreme Court derailed efforts to pass a ban when it invalidated a Nebraska state law that closely resembled the measure moving through the House and Senate.

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The Senate passes a partial-birth abortion ban (Weekly Standard, 030314)

The president says he’ll sign it. Will it hold up before the Court?

YESTERDAY, with 64 Senators supporting it, the Senate approved a bill that would ban partial-birth abortion in all 50 states. Congress passed similar bans in 1995 and 1999 that were vetoed by Bill Clinton, but George W. Bush has said he will sign the ban into law. But can it survive Supreme Court scrutiny?

The new bill is identical to one passed by the House last July but then smothered by the Democratic Senate. That bill featured two changes that address the Supreme Court’s ruling in Stenberg v. Carhart, which overturned a Nebraska law banning the procedure.

The first change is the bill’s definition of “partial-birth abortion.” The majority opinion in Stenberg found Nebraska’s definition of the term too vague and ruled that it could be interpreted to cover not only abortions in which the baby is delivered alive before being killed, but also the “dilation and evacuation” method, in which an unborn baby is dismembered while still inside the mother.

To eliminate confusion the new bill states: “The person performing the abortion deliberately and intentionally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside of the mother, or, in the case of breech delivery, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside of the mother.”

The second change responds to the “health of the mother” issue. The Court ruled in Stenberg that an abortionist must be allowed to perform a partial-birth abortion if it is the method least likely to cause side effects for the mother. The majority reached this result by referring to abortionist Leroy Carhart, who claims that late-term partial-birth abortion is sometimes the method least likely to cause injurious side effects.

The new bill confronts this issue by relying on congressional findings that partial-birth abortion is never necessary to protect a mother’s health and may even expose her to serious health risks. The bill reads: “Congress finds that partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to preserve the health of the mother; is in fact unrecognized as a valid abortion procedure by the mainstream medical community; poses additional health risks to the mother; blurs the line between abortion and infanticide in the killing of a partially born child just inches from birth; and confuses the role of the physician in childbirth and should therefore be banned.”

The National Right to Life Committee is optimistic about the future of the bill, which should move quickly through the House. A letter to members of Congress from the NRLC expresses hope that the new bill could satisfy Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s concern that the dilation and evacuation procedure should be excluded from the ban.

Rachel DiCarlo is a staff assistant at The Weekly Standard.

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House Passes ‘Partial Birth’ Abortion Ban (Foxnews, 030605)

WASHINGTON — Moving the restriction a crucial step closer to President Bush’s signature, the House voted 282-139 Wednesday to ban a procedure that abortion foes call “partial birth” abortion.

With the vote, Congress was on the verge of ending a practice that Rep. Steve Chabot said was “truly a national tragedy.”

President Bush hailed passage of the legislation he said “will help build a culture of life in America. I urge Congress to quickly resolve any differences and send me the final bill as soon as possible so that I can sign it into law.”

Abortion rights groups said they would challenge the ban in court as soon as it becomes law, thrusting the issue of the ban’s constitutionality toward a divided Supreme Court.

The ban would be one of the most significant restrictions on abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision recognizing abortion rights. Ken Connor, president of the anti-abortion Family Research Council, said passage was indicative of “a tide that is running against Roe v. Wade, which will eventually be dismantled.”

Bush — unlike former President Clinton, who twice vetoed partial birth abortion bans — had urged Congress in his State of the Union address in January to give him a bill he could sign.

The administration strongly believes the bill “is both morally imperative and constitutionally permissible,” the White House said in a statement.

The Senate passed a nearly identical bill in March, but differences with the House must still be ironed out before the legislation is sent to the president. Likely to be deleted: nonbinding language added by the Senate in support of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Abortion opponents have pushed the bill since Republicans captured the House in 1995, saying they want to stop a particularly abhorrent means of ending a pregnancy. “Partial birth abortion is a gruesome and inhumane procedure and it is a grave attack against human dignity and justice. This practice must be banned,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., at the opening of the debate.

Under the bill, partial birth abortion is defined as a procedure in which the fetus is killed after the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother or, in the case of breech presentation, “any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”

The legislation characterizes the procedure, which typically involves puncturing the fetal skull to bring about death, as “the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus.”

Physicians who knowingly perform the procedure would be subject to up to two years in prison.

Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the organization would file a suit immediately after Bush signs the bill and would seek an injunction to stop its implementation.

Talcott Camp of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project said they too would challenge the bill on behalf of the National Abortion Federation, an association of abortion providers and clinics. “I’m confident that the constitutional protections of women’s health have not diminished in the past three years,” she said.

Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, the chief sponsor of the House bill, said Tuesday they had tightened the language to meet the court’s objections and had accumulated evidence to prove that the procedure was “dangerous to a woman’s health, and never medically necessary.”

But the deciding factor in any Supreme Court decision could be the court’s makeup. Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor, two of the five who voted to strike down the Nebraska law, are considered among the justices most likely to retire in the near future, allowing Bush to nominate a more conservative replacement.

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Hearing a Cry: A partial-birth-abortion ban heads to the president (National Review Online, 031024)

When Laci Peterson and her unborn child were discovered dead in April, vast majorities of Americans — 84% in one poll — supported criminal charges for both crimes. Nearly all of those surveyed recognized that the death of an eight-month-old unborn child merited appropriate punishment.

Similarly, vast majorities of Americans have consistently supported banning the practice known as “partial-birth abortion,” a procedure that terminates the life of unborn — and often viable — children during the final trimester of their mother’s pregnancy. Even on an issue as divisive as abortion, there are some instances where nearly everyone recognizes a clear division between right and wrong.

Read the words of a nurse who took part in one of these procedures, as she testified to Congress in 1993:

The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.

The doctor opened the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.

Or the testimony offered by Dr. Jean Wright, a pediatric anesthesiologist, who told Congress that unborn babies feel pain by the 20th week of their development, often more intensely than adults. Representatives of the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology have testified that this procedure is never the sole available method of abortion. Nor is it ever the preferred abortion procedure.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop stated simply: “Partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to protect a mother’s health or her future fertility.”

By large bipartisan majorities, Congress twice before voted to ban this gruesome, medically unnecessary procedure. Each time, President Clinton, who said that the law must include an exception for a mother’s health — an exception so broad that the ban would have been virtually meaningless, vetoed the legislation outlawing it. In any event, the bills that had passed the Senate already included language that would have allowed the procedure when necessary to save the life of a mother who is endangered by a physical disorder, illness, or injury.

Perhaps Kate Michelman, the head of the NARAL Pro-Choice America, more accurately described the real reasons for vehement opposition to a ban on partial-birth abortions. She called it “the first step in banning all abortion procedures” and part of “an extreme right wing ideology.”

That’s nonsense, of course. It takes a certain amount of shamelessness to dismiss a ban routinely supported by as many as seven out of every 10 Americans as “extreme” or “right wing.”

Sometimes I fear that our country’s social discourse has irreparably deteriorated to a point where basic moral values are now shrouded in partisanship and politics. If we cannot come to terms with the clear, undisputable horror of inserting scissors into the skull of an otherwise viable and nearly fully developed child to end her life, without worrying about ramifications to some special-interest agenda, then our great nation is in serious trouble.

Luckily, a large, bipartisan majority in Congress has not allowed that to happen here. This week the Senate joined the U.S. House of Representatives in voting once again to ban partial-birth abortions. And President Bush has promised to sign the legislation.

I’m particularly gratified that a strong majority in the Senate — which is often divided, and divided very bitterly — joined with us in that effort. Sixty-four out of 100 senators voted for the ban. Then again, there should have been more.

— Senator Jon Kyl is a Republican senator from Arizona.

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Bush Handing Abortion Opponents a Victory (Foxnews, 031105)

WASHINGTON — President Bush is handing abortion opponents a victory sought through seven years of political battle as he signs legislation that bans some abortions.

The president’s signature represents an end to a legislative crusade that began when Republicans captured the House in 1995. Former President Clinton twice vetoed similar bills, arguing that they lacked an exception to protect the health of the mother.

But for abortion rights advocates, the current president’s action simply moves the fight over a procedure opponents call partial birth abortion from Congress to the courts.

The bill Bush has said he was pleased to usher into law Wednesday forbids an abortion, generally performed in the second or third trimester, in which a fetus is partially delivered before being killed, usually by having its skull punctured.

Aware of its backing among the religious conservatives that make up a key portion of his base of political support, the president called the bill “very important legislation that will end an abhorrent practice and continue to build a culture of life in America” when it gained final congressional approval late last month.

But despite his strong anti-abortion credentials, Bush is also mindful of the more moderate voters he cannot afford to alienate. So last week during a news conference with reporters, he repeated a position he offered during his 2000 campaign, saying he would not seek a total ban on abortion because public opinion had not yet shifted to support such a move.

The bill prohibits doctors from committing an “overt act” designed to kill a partially delivered fetus. There is no exception to the ban if the woman’s health is at risk of if the child would be born with ailments.

Similar to a Nebraska law struck down by the Supreme Court three years ago, the legislation imposes the most far-reaching limits on abortion since the high court in 1973 established a woman’s right to end a pregnancy.

Supporters argue the bill applies only to a procedure done late in pregnancy — and relatively rarely — and that the procedure is never necessary to protect the health of the mother.

But abortion-rights groups say the law has overly broad language that could criminalize several safe and common procedures and fault it for not providing an exception to protect a mother’s health. They also fear the law will represent the first step in a larger campaign to eventually bar all abortions.

As a result, opponents attacked it in three separate challenges even before it became law, with lawsuits filed Friday in federal courts in San Francisco, Omaha, Neb., and New York City. Hearings were scheduled Wednesday on all three suits’ request for temporary restraining orders that would block the law from taking effect.

Planned Parenthood sued in San Francisco on behalf of the group and women seeking the type of abortions the law would ban, while the Center for Reproductive Rights filed in Omaha on behalf of physicians. The ACLU sought a similar order in New York.

Also Wednesday, an abortion rights group was airing a television ad that says Bush’s signature would erode doctor-patient privacy rights and could represent his first step toward overturning a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. The NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation is spending nearly $500,000 to air ads in Washington, as well as Des Moines, Iowa, and Manchester, N.H., the sites of key early voting in next year’s presidential contest.

And activists, organized by the National Organization for Women, were planning a protest outside the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center where Bush was to sign the bill.

“We won’t stand by silently as this administration attempts to erode our rights,” NOW President Kim Gandy said.

The new bill defines partial birth abortion as delivery of a fetus “until, in the case of a headfirst presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of the breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus.”

Sponsors of the legislation say it is used roughly 2,200 times a year, principally during the 20th through 26th weeks of pregnancy.

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Gov’t Promises to Defend New Abortion Law (Foxnews, 031107)

NEW YORK — The government promised to defend a new law banning certain late-term abortions, despite rulings by three federal judges who blocked its enforcement so legal challenges — which they concluded would likely succeed — can go forward.

Federal judges in New York and California blocked the law Thursday, a day after it was signed by President Bush. The rulings likely prevent enforcement of the ban nationwide until a challenge to its constitutionality can be heard.

Judge Richard Casey in Manhattan suspended the effect of the law for 10 days, saying he expected an association of abortion providers in the United States and Canada and seven doctors will succeed in their challenge. The National Abortion Federation says its members perform half of abortions nationwide.

Later in the day, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in San Francisco ruled the law appears unconstitutional because it provides no exemptions for a woman’s health, mirroring the reasons cited by the other judges and affecting doctors at 900 Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide.

The two rulings together cover a majority of the abortion providers in the United States.

On Wednesday, less than an hour after Bush signed the law, a federal judge in Nebraska made a similar ruling that covers four abortion doctors licensed in 13 states across the Midwest and East. The Justice Department said in a statement that it “will continue to strongly defend the law prohibiting partial birth abortions using every resource necessary.”

It cited arguments it made in court papers that Congress considered testimony over an eight-year period, including physicians who “uniformly agreed that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to advance the health or life of women.”

Casey noted in his three-page order granting a temporary restraining order that a government lawyer told him at a Wednesday hearing that the medical community remains divided over the issue and that Congress did not reach a consensus.

He said the position left him with no choice but to “conclude that it is substantially likely” that the law will be found unconstitutional.

Douglas Johnson, a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee, said the New York judge’s ruling was “not surprising but it is distressing.”

“It means that partly born babies will continue to die at the point of 7-inch scissors,” he said. “Certainly these judicial orders severely impede the government’s ability to protect these premature infants.”

The new law outlaws a procedure generally performed in the second or third trimester in which a fetus is partially delivered before being killed, usually by puncturing its skull. Anti-abortion activists call the procedure “partial-birth abortion.” President Clinton had twice vetoed similar bills.

Opponents of the law say it is overly broad, lacks any exemption for the health of a woman and could outlaw several safe and common procedures. They also contended it is the first step in a larger campaign to ban all abortions and undo Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark decision establishing a woman’s right to an abortion.

Abortion-rights advocates expect a showdown over the new law with the Bush administration at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued the case in New York, said the ACLU was “enormously gratified but not surprised that that law appears now to be unconstitutional.”

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Labor and delivery (WorldNetDaily, 050520)

ABORTION: A gruesome Florida abortion saga reveals sordid—and possibly illegal—practices in late-term procedures | by Lynn Vincent

“It’s a women’s clinic . . . My friend is having an abortion and the baby was born alive. . . . They’re not allowing her to use the phone there. They’re wanting the baby to die! . . . and she’s not wanting that to happen.”

That was a portion of the 911 call to the Orlando Fire Department on April 2, when a woman named Angele Taylor, 34, claims to have delivered a live baby during a botched abortion at the EPOC Clinic—and that the child died after clinic workers refused to render aid or call for help (see “Rowan’s story,” WORLD, May 7).

On April 27, Orange County, Fla., Chief Medical Examiner Jan Garavaglia prepared her report on the death of the boy, whom Ms. Taylor named Rowan. Dr. Garavaglia—who is a bit of a celebrity with her own show on the Discovery Health Channel—found “no forensic evidence” that Rowan had been born alive. Dr. Garavaglia did conclude that Rowan was a baby, including in her report a physical description of the boy having red, slightly wrinkled skin, normal facial features, tiny fingernails, and hair on his head.

That’s not what abortion workers at the EPOC Clinic told the Orlando Fire Department (OFD). Clinic workers told OFD medical rescuers that an abortion patient had “passed some tissue,” was “hysterical,” and that no live baby had been born. A spokeperson for abortionist and clinic owner James Scott Pendergraft later told reporters that what Ms. Taylor claimed “absolutely never happened.”

The EPOC Clinic is one of six Florida abortion businesses owned by Dr. Pendergraft, a self-avowed empire builder who in 2000 told BusinessWeek he dreamed of expanding his chain of clinics up the Sunshine State’s east coast all the way to his home state of North Carolina.

But a seven-month federal prison stint stemming from a 2000 extortion conviction stalled those plans. (The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in 2002, but left open the possibility of retrying Dr. Pendergraft and another man on conspiracy charges.) Now, the incident at the EPOC Clinic could spell further trouble for the abortionist—particularly in light of revelations that his employees may have deceived fire and law enforcement officials.

An OFD paramedic, who asked that his name be withheld to protect his job, said that at 10:23 a.m. on April 2 a friend of Ms. Taylor’s, who had driven her to the abortion clinic for day two of a “labor and delivery” abortion procedure, called 911 to report that the baby had been born alive. Three paramedics and one emergency medical technician sped to the scene at 609 Virginia Dr. They were greeted outside by an EPOC Clinic worker who told them that no baby had been born alive—that such a thing wasn’t even possible. Instead, a woman scheduled for an abortion had “passed some tissue,” was “hysterical,” and was refusing to hand “the tissue” over to clinic workers.

According to the OFD paramedic who spoke with WORLD, fire personnel were not aware the “tissue” in question was in reality a fully formed baby boy. That, along with clinic workers’ assertion that Ms. Taylor was clinging hysterically to “the tissue,” would explain why fire department medical workers, in their report, noted that they had assisted the Orlando Police Department (OPD) in handling a “disturbing the peace” call.

Dr. Pendergraft has told WORLD he will not comment on the April 2 incident.

The OFD paramedic’s story matches OPD Officer Jonathan Pinder’s account of events. One of two OPD officers to respond to the scene, Mr. Pinder told WORLD that the fire department “called us in reference to releasing the baby. I guess [Ms. Taylor] wanted to hold onto the fetus, and the clinic had some concerns that she wouldn’t release it.”

When Mr. Pinder arrived, “the fire guy told us the baby had already been turned over. I made contact with [Ms. Taylor] as a courtesy,” and helped Ms. Taylor and her friend call a funeral home and a cab.

According to the OFD paramedic WORLD spoke with, EPOC Clinic workers told fire department responders that the situation inside the clinic was under control and that a doctor was supervising the whole affair. That conflicts with a complaint that Liberty Counsel, a conservative public interest law firm, lodged with the Florida Department of Health and Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration (AHCA). The complaints cited several violations of Florida law in the April 2 incident, including the absence of a doctor during the abortion procedure.

The procedure in question is called a “labor and delivery” (L&D) abortion. In 2000, Jill Stanek, a registered nurse who worked in the labor and delivery department of Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill., testified before Congress in support of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act of 2000. According to Ms. Stanek’s testimony, Christ Hospital clinicians when performing L&D abortions medically induced premature cervical dilation, so that “the small, pre-baby drops out of the uterus, oftentimes alive.” Ms. Stanek went on to tell the congressional panel about infants born alive and, limbs flailing weakly, left to die in the L&D ward’s “soiled utility room.”

Christ Hospital isn’t the only institution performing L&D abortions. In March 2001, Washington C. Hill, director of maternal-fetal medicine at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, gave a presentation in which he described the L&D procedure. The slideshow that accompanied his lecture noted that “success [was] dependent on fetal demise,” while “complications” included “live birth.”

Last week, Ms. Stanek told WORLD that hospitals and abortion clinics approach L&D abortion differently. “Hospitals don’t kill the baby before they initiate the procedure. They have more of a mentality of a covert type of killing, of inducing prematurely and letting them die ‘naturally,’” sometimes by allowing them to suffocate in the birth canal. Abortion clinics, however, try to kill the baby before inducing labor, often by injecting the baby’s heart with digoxin.

The autopsy findings of Dr. Garavaglia, the medical examiner, verified Ms. Taylor’s claim that Harold Perper, the EPOC Clinic worker who induced her premature labor in preparation to abort Rowan, never injected the baby with digoxin. The examiner found no puncture wounds in the baby’s chest. Neither did Dr. Garavaglia find any evidence that the baby had breathed after birth, leading her to report that “no forensic evidence” suggested he had been born alive.

But breathing is only one of four signs of live birth according to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act—any one of which mandates that medical workers provide lifesaving medical care. The other three life signs are a beating heart, a pulsating umbilical cord, or movement of voluntary muscles.

Ms. Taylor, meanwhile, has said that Rowan both moved and grasped her finger with his hand—leading her to instantly regret her decision to abort. Her story did not surprise a former medical assistant who had been in training to do L&D abortions at Dr. Pendergraft’s Hyde Park clinic. “When I was in training to do second trimester abortions, I was told that we would have [women] deliver into the toilet so that if the baby happens to be alive, that it drowns,” said the former worker, who requested anonymity because she feared Dr. Pendergraft.

The medical assistant said she had never seen a baby born alive, but that co-workers at the clinic told her they had. “They would see them move or make a little sound, and other people would say that was involuntary. I didn’t believe that and neither did they.”

According to the medical assistant, all babies, dead or alive, were stuffed into red biohazard bags for later pickup by a medical waste service. She herself had delivered women with no doctor present, and disposed of babies’ bodies that way. She added that no doctor was present during most deliveries, leaving medical assistants, and often unlicensed workers to care for patients. When she worked for Dr. Pendergraft, she said, she was one of two licensed workers among 10 on staff.

Florida’s AHCA has uncovered late-term abortion problems with the clinic before. In a 2003 survey it said in 11 out of 11 third-trimester abortions sampled, the facility failed to have two physicians certify “to a reasonable degree of medical probability” that the abortions were necessary to save the life or preserve the health of the woman as required by Florida law. AHCA allowed the clinic to amend its records to “correct” the discrepancies.

During one incident, the medical assistant said, she delivered a 28-week-old baby dead while Dr. Pendergraft was out having lunch. “When I turned it over [on its side], the baby’s hands went together like it was praying. . . . I was waiting for it to scream. . . . It looked so much like a living baby.” That, she says, is when she decided she couldn’t work there anymore. —•

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Hawaii Supreme Court: The Unborn Are ‘Not Human Beings’ (Christian Post, 051206)

Wednesday, November 30, the Supreme Court of Hawaii overturned the manslaughter conviction of Tayshea Aiwohi. The 32-year-old woman had been previously found guilty for causing the death of her newborn son by smoking crystal methamphetamine three days before his birth and on the morning he was delivered.

The State’s High Court unanimously ruled that Aiwohi’s son was an unborn fetus at the time she abused crystal meth, and therefore not a person. WorldNetDaily rightly characterized the decision in this fashion, saying that in Hawaii unborn children are “‘not human beings,’ and therefore women cannot be prosecuted for causing the death of babies by harmful behavior during their pregnancies.”

According to the Honolulu Star Bulletin, Hawaii’s penal code states that a person is defined as “‘a human being who has been born and is alive.’ Most states allow for the prosecution of a person for violence against a pregnant woman resulting in the death of her child after birth. Thirty-four states have ‘fetal homicide’ laws allowing prosecution of a person for causing the death of a fetus. Most infamously, Scott Peterson faces the death penalty in California for his conviction of two counts of murder for the deaths of his wife, Laci, and their unborn child.”

But in Hawaii there is no such law. And so open-ended is the matter in Hawaii, Justice Paula Nakayama wrote “that ‘the logical implication’ from the Aiwohi ruling is that a person who attacks a pregnant woman, causing the child’s death after birth, ‘also cannot be prosecuted [for the child’s death] under the manslaughter statute, inasmuch as the Legislature has not included fetuses within the definition of the term ‘person.’”

However, under the new federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act — also known as “Laci and Conner’s Law,” enacted by Congress in the wake of the murder of Laci Peterson and her unborn son, Conner, by Laci’s husband, Scott Peterson — any person who perpetrates violence against a pregnant woman and causes the death of her fetus can be prosecuted. Still, mothers are protected from their own injurious actions to their unborn child, while others are not.

Hawaii’s Supreme Court ruling in the Aiwohi case and the State’s penal code clearly define personhood on the basis of functionalism. In other words, what one does defines one’s status as a person; persons are defined by certain functions and behaviors. The Holy Scriptures, however, define one’s personhood not by what one does but by what one is — a human soul made in the image of God. One needn’t be “born and is alive” to achieve such a status, only conceived.

Peter Kreeft with the American Life League rightly contends that functionalism has largely arisen with the erosion of the family. He writes: “Our civilization is dying primarily because the family is dying. Half of our families commit suicide, for divorce is the family committing suicide qua family. But the family is the place where you learn that you are loved not because of what you do, your function, but because of who you are.” Kreeft, therefore, further notes that consequently the new “Quality of Life Ethic” is replacing the old “Sanctity of Life Ethic.” “In this new ethic,” he writes, “a human life is judged as valuable and worth living if and only if the judgers decide that it performs at a certain level.”

This new approach is a matter of extreme danger in that it leads to a frightening form of despotism. For who decides the social utility of one’s existence? As Kreeft argues: “When it is in the self-interest of certain people to kill certain other people, whether fetuses, or the dying, or enemies of the state, or Jews, or Armenians, or Cambodians, or heretics, or prophets, the killers will simply define their victims as non-persons by pointing out that they do not meet certain criteria. Who determines the criteria? Those in power, of course.”

Moreover, the Aiwohi case and current federal law which protects a woman’s so-called “right” to choose, as well protects her from her own detrimental actions against her fetus, is remarkably reminiscent of the attitudes reflected at the time of the notable Dredd Scott case (1856-57).

In the Dred Scott decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Negro slaves nor their descendants could have rights or be considered citizens. The Court at that time essentially said people of African ancestry were not people, but simply the property of the slave owner. Abolitionists fought for the human rights of slaves when the prevailing notion was that a black man didn’t even have a soul. Blacks were neither considered human beings or persons, only chattel.

Cecil Hook of Freedom’s Ring, in an insightful article titled “Human Chattel,” argues: “Who would have thought that, more than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, we would hear the infamous Dred Scott case revived so loudly and adamantly? Once it was the slave and his child who had no rights or soul; now it is the unborn child who has neither rights nor soul. In those times a master could deal with his slave as chattel; now the unborn is regarded as disposable property possessed by the mother — a part of her body which she can destroy without conscience.”

Interestingly, when Abraham Lincoln spoke out against the Dredd Scott decision, he cited the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that all men are “created equal” with certain “unalienable rights,” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Lincoln then went on to say that the Founding Fathers “did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all then were actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them .... They meant simply to declare the right, so that enforcement of it might follow as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all ....”

Indeed! And may God hasten the day when the unalienable (God-given) right to life is restored for the unborn “person.”

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Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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Partial Birth Abortion Law Struck Down in Two Courts (Christian Post, 060201)

Two federal courts ruled on Tuesday that the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, which bans a certain type of late-term abortion, is unconstitutional, putting two cases on track to be appealed to the Supreme Court.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld lower court rulings that the law was invalid because it did not provide an exception when the health of the mother was in danger.

The Partial Birth Abortion Act, which was passed by Congress and signed by President Bush, had already been ruled illegal in a previous court decision. That case has been appealed to the Supreme Court but the Justices are still considering whether to take it up. Tuesday’s rulings were the second and third cases in which the law was ruled as violating the constitution.

With the appointments of two conservative Supreme Court justices in recent months, observers will be looking to see how the court tackles the abortion issue. Justice Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. on Tuesday replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who supported legalized abortion.

In 2000, O’Connor voted against a Nebraska law barring “partial-birth” abortion because it lacked a health exception. The 2003 law that was struck down on Tuesday states that partial-birth abortion is “never necessary to preserve the health of a woman.”

A physician that “knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion” could also face civil and criminal charges under the law, including up to two years in prison.

“We are reluctant to invalidate an entire statute,” wrote 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt. “However, after considering all of the obstacles to our devising a narrower remedy, we conclude that such is our obligation.”

A ruling last month by the Supreme Court sent back a case to the lower courts involving abortion because the Court ruled that the entire law had unnecessarily been thrown out when only certain parts of it should have been invalidated.

The High Court told a lower court to determine if there could be a way to keep most of the law but change the parts which were unconstitutional.

In the 2nd Circuit Court case, which was brought forth by the National Abortion Federation, the Appeals Court gave both sides 30 days to recommend how to fix the parts considered unconstitutional.

The specific procedure that was prohibited in the law is called intact dilation and extraction, where the fetus is partially taken out of the womb and the skull is crushed or punctured. It is usually performed in the second trimester.

In his dissent, Judge Chester J. Straub brought up the issue of infanticide in relation to partial-birth abortion.

“Allowing a physician to destroy a child as long as one toe remains within the mother would place society on the path towards condoning infanticide,” he said.

When the Partial Birth Abortion Act was originally signed by President Bush in 2003, several pro-choice groups challenged the law in court.

A similar case decided by the 8th Circuit Court is on hold, with the Supreme Court still considering whether or not to hear arguments.

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Partial Truth: The press and partial-birth abortion. (National Review Online, 060501)

“I remember sitting in my office,” Kate Michelman recalled years later, “and James saying to me: ‘Kate. This is a disaster.’” Michelman was the head of NARAL, the abortion lobby, and its vice president, James Wagoner had just brought her a copy of a congressional letter on partial-birth abortion. It was bad enough that the Republicans had just taken Congress a few months previously. Now NARAL and its allies had to deal with a new issue that was tailor-made for their opponents.

They quickly came up with a few defenses. Partial-birth abortions, they claimed, were done rarely and only for medical reasons. Planned Parenthood explained, “The procedure, dilation and extraction (D&X), is extremely rare and done only in cases when the woman’s life is in danger or in cases of extreme fetal abnormality.” There were only 500 to 600 such cases a year. Moreover, NARAL and Planned Parenthood claimed, the fetus felt no pain, since anaesthesia given to the mother had already killed it.

The press bought it. The Los Angeles Times reported that there were only 200 such abortions a year. “Typically, it is used in late pregnancies to save a mother’s life or after the detection of severe fetal abnormalities.” A New York Times story also echoed the abortion lobby’s talking points. USA Today, the New York Daily News, and syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman all repeated the claim that anaesthesia killed the fetus before the scissors made contact. None of these stories even acknowledged that pro-lifers disputed these claims.

All of them were false.

The claim about anaesthesia was debunked first. Martin Haskell, the abortionist who had first brought partial-birth abortion to public attention, had said in a 1993 interview that the fetus was not dead before the D&X began. Dr. Norig Ellison, the president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, testified before the House that the claim that anesthesia killed the fetus was “entirely inaccurate” and dangerous to spread, since it could cause mothers to turn down anaesthesia to protect their unborn children. At this point, anaesthesia dropped out of the debate.

In September 1996—after Congress had passed a bill banning partial-birth abortion and Bill Clinton had vetoed it—Ruth Padawer, a reporter for the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record, disclosed that a local clinic performed 1,500 partial-birth abortions per year. That was more than the abortion lobby and much of the media had claimed took place nationwide. Within days, David Brown and Barbara Vobejda reported in the Washington Post that it was “possible—and maybe even likely—that the majority of these abortions are performed on normal fetuses.” Their finding tracked with Haskell’s remark that 80% of the partial-birth abortions he performed were “purely elective.”

Five months later, a bigger bombshell: Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, told American Medical News and the New York Times that he had “lied through [his] teeth” about partial-birth abortion. When Nightline interviewed him in November 1995, he had followed the party line: Partial-birth abortions were rare and performed only in extreme cases. In truth, he said, the vast majority were performed on healthy mothers with healthy babies. “The abortion rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else.” He estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 were performed each year.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, maintained that there were “about 650” partial-birth abortions in 1996, or at any rate that the number fell between 500 and 1,000. It stuck to that line for several years. Later, it issued a new figure: There had been 2,200 partial-birth abortions in 2000. Either the number had tripled in four years, or one or both estimates were flawed. Since clinics’ participation in the institute’s survey is voluntary, both numbers are probably underestimates.

Assume, however, that there are 2,200 partial-birth abortions annually. Is this a big number? Its defenders point out, accurately, that it is a small fraction of the total number of abortions each year in America. Yet it is also true, as pro-life lobbyist Douglas Johnson notes, that “[i]f a new virus [were] killing 2,200 premature babies annually in neonatal units, it would be on the TV evening news every week.”

Many reporters continued to spread myths about partial-birth abortion long after they had been debunked. In 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported that partial-birth abortion was “typically” performed “for medical reasons.” The same year, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Miami Herald made the same false claim.

Much of the press, led by the New York Times, avoided using the phrase “partial-birth abortion” (or placing it in distancing quotes) whenever possible. This impulse has led to some convoluted Times headlines: “House Acts to Ban Abortion Method, Making It a Crime”; “President Vetoes Measure Banning Type of Abortion”; “Bush Signs Ban on a Procedure for Abortion.” The kids at Hogwarts speak the name of Voldemort more freely than the Times editors use the phrase partial-birth abortion.

The press has not shown any general reluctance to adopt politically contested phrases. When Congress banned “assault weapons,” the NRA bitterly protested that the phrase had been made up and referred to no distinct class of firearms. Yet the press adopted it without resorting to locutions such as “a class of guns called ‘assault weapons’ by advocates of gun control” or “Congress Bans Type of Gun.”

When pro-life presidents cut off family-planning funding for groups that counsel women to have abortions, pro-choicers called the policy a “gag rule”—and the press did not handle the phrase with gloves and tongs. Headlines, including New York Times headlines, regularly used variants of the phrase. Linda Greenhouse casually referred to Rust v. Sullivan, which concerned the policy, as “the abortion gag-rule case.”

The conservative Media Research Center analyzed 217 stories about partial-birth abortion on ABC, CBS, and NBC that aired between 1995 and 2003. They found that only 18 of those stories explained what took place in a partial-birth abortion (and only three of them explained it between 1998 and 2003). They reported on congressional votes and Supreme Court decisions about partial-birth abortion, but refused to provide the facts that would make it clear what the fuss was about.

The partial-birth-abortion debate was, as Michelman predicted, a disaster for the abortion lobby. But the press did everything it could to contain the damage.

—Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review and author of The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.

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Kan. Grand Jury to Probe Late-Abortion Death Case (Christian Post, 060505)

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) – Anti-abortion activists in Kansas have been able to get a grand jury to look at possible charges against one of the nation’s only doctors to perform late-term abortions.

A grand jury will be convened to hear about a mentally retarded woman who died after a late-term abortion under Doctor George Tiller’s care.

State investigators earlier found no reason to discipline the doctor in the 19-year-old’s death. But anti-abortion activists took advantage of a 1970 state law and petitioned for the grand jury inquiry. They contend the patient with Down syndrome didn’t have the mental capacity to consent to sex or to an abortion.

Tiller has been the target of abortion protests for years. His clinic was bombed in 1985 and he was shot by a protester in 1993.

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‘Bioethicist’: OK to kill babies after they’re born: ‘Animal-rights’ promoter asserts actual birth makes no difference (WorldNetDaily, 060914)

An internationally known Princeton “bioethicist” and animal-rights activist says he’d kill disabled babies if it were in the “best interests” of the family, because he sees no distinction in the child’s life whether it is born or not, and the world already allows abortion.

The comments come from Peter Singer, a controversial bioethics professor, who responded to a series of questions in the UK Independent this week.

Earlier, WND reported Singer believes the next few decades will see a massive upheaval in the concept of life and rights, with only “a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists” still protecting life as sacrosanct.

To the rest, it will be a commodity to be re-evaluated regularly for its worth.

His newest sermon on his beliefs came in a question-and-answer interview the Independent set up with readers.

Singer’s response came to Dublin reader Karen Meade’s question: “Would you kill a disabled baby?”

“Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole. Many people find this shocking, yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion,” he said.

He added that one point on which he agrees with the pro-life movement is that, “from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby.”

The statement furthers the arguments that Singer’s position is just an extension of the culture of death that has developed in the world, with euthanasia legal in some locations, abortion legal in many and even charges that in some repressive societies there’s an active business in harvesting healthy organs from victims in order to provide transplants for the wealthy.

“At least he’s consistent,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told LifeSiteNews.com.

Singer holds that man is no different from other forms a life, and therefore man’s life is not worth more than, for example, a cow.

He told readers he’d kill 10 cows before killing one human, but that’s not because they are of less value, only that humans would mourn.

“I’ve written that it is much worse to kill a being who is aware of having a past and a future, and who plans for the future. Normal humans have such plans, but I don’t think cows do,” he said. However, he did qualify his description with the word, “normal.”

“Once again Singer is making distinctions between human beings he would consider normal and those he would consider not normal, thus he is deciding who is a person and who is not,” Schadenberg told LifeSiteNews. “Non-persons are allowed to be killed,” under Singer’s theology, he said.

Singer also said the focus on infanticide was not his, but those who oppose him and the media. “It’s always been a minor aspect of my work,” he said.

Singer declined to answer whether he believes Steve Irwin, TV’s “Crocodile Hunter,” got “what he had coming,” saying he never watched the television show.

Irwin died recently while filming an undersea special when he approached a stingray and was fatally stung.

But he advocated for the closure of health research centers where animals are used and said it’s not at all unreasonable to ascribe human characteristics to animals.

“Anyone who ascribes rights to babies or humans with intellectual disabilities must be willing to attribute rights to beings who can’t understand the concept,” Singer said. “It’s the moral agents, the ones who are acting, who need to understand the concept. Those to whom we attribute rights, do not need to understand these concepts.”

The only moral absolute, he noted, “is that we should do what will have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions.”

In WND’s earlier report, Singer said that the court-ordered circumstances that killed Terri Schiavo, a disabled Florida woman, in 2005 may be the turning point at which holding the position of the sanctity of life became “untenable.” She died after a court ordered, upon her husband’s request, that water and food be withheld from her.

Singer’s support for legalized euthanasia and his endorsement of killing the disabled for up to 28 days after birth also sparked protests against his hiring in 1999 by Princeton, a university founded by the Presbyterian denomination.

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The Supreme Court’s Back Alley: Scientific evidence does not show that D&X is a safe and necessary procedure. (National Review Online, 061106)

By Clarke D. Forsythe

One of the reasons why American medicine is the envy of the world is that it has increasingly emphasized “evidence-based medicine” over the last 50 years. This means that new medical techniques, drugs, or devices are not introduced into the marketplace for patients based on mere intuition or hunches, but rather once their safety and effectiveness has been proven by controlled, scientific studies.

The reason for the success of this approach is that well-designed, controlled studies are vastly superior to the fallible intuitions of doctors based on individual, clinical observations alone. Intuition is subject to several common errors, including bias and overconfidence, and scientific research is needed to check such errors. No matter how compelling they are, inferences can be mistaken. This has been repeatedly confirmed by scientific studies. Hence, under federal law, there must be “substantial evidence” of the safety and effectiveness of any new medical drug or device.

There are numerous examples in medical history where medical innovations — like the routine use of episiotomy during childbirth — were first introduced based on intuition and small studies and then — after prospective, controlled studies — were shown to increase rather than decrease the risk of maternal injury.

Evidence-based medicine has been increasingly adopted in all specialties and areas of medicine — except when it comes to partial-birth abortion (also called D&X). In the early 1990s, partial-birth abortion was an untried alternative to established procedures like medical induction of labor and dilation and evacuation (D&E). Partial-birth abortion was first used on patients based on intuition that it would work safely, but with insufficient evidence of its safety or effectiveness. No empirical studies existed in 1992. None existed in 2000, when the Supreme Court first approved partial-birth abortion. None exists today.

Empirical evidence is particularly important in abortion practice because most abortion clinics don’t do follow-up on abortion patients. Women who suffer short-term complications usually go to a hospital emergency department (ED); they don’t return to the clinic. And EDs typically don’t inquire or report about abortion complications. Consequently, many abortion providers are not aware of the short-term or long-term complications of abortions.

The Supreme Court directly created this dysfunctional abortion system over the past 33 years by eliminating the abortion laws of all 50states, requiring no regulation, and then repeatedly obstructing states’ attempts to regulate abortion.

In 2000, the Supreme Court gave its stamp of approval to partial-birth abortion in the Stenberg case. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court dismissed the need for any empirical evidence showing the value of the procedure, deferred to the intuition of a handful of abortion providers who performed the procedure, and threw out state prohibitions on partial-birth abortion enacted by overwhelming margins in Nebraska and 29 other states.

On November 8, the Supreme Court will revisit the issue, when it hears arguments over the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. These new cases are very different from Stenberg, because they include extensive trial records based on weeks of medical testimony.

This evidence that was presented to the trial courts on the safety and effectiveness of partial-birth abortion was little more than intuition. Consider the objective standards of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). The USPSTF evaluates the quality of empirical evidence that is needed before a new medical technique or device can go to market. The USPSTF 2005 Guide to Clinical Preventive Services grades the quality of the overall evidence for a service on a 3-point scale (good, fair, poor). “Poor” evidence is “insufficient to assess the effects on health outcomes because of limited number or power of studies, important flaws in their design or conduct, gaps in the chain of evidence, or lack of information on important health outcomes.”

While the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) says that they adhere to USPSTF standards, they have ignored the standards when it comes to partial-birth abortion. The evidence in the cases before the Supreme Court never rose above the “poor” grade.

Realizing the lack of empirical data supporting the safety and effectiveness of partial-birth abortion, the supporters of D&X rushed a study to publication during the court trials. That study was found on several grounds to fall far short of providing reliable evidence for the superiority of the partial birth abortion procedure. The main author admitted that he could not state that D&X was superior to other techniques and that D&X did not avoid the complications to women that often are concurrent when such a procedure is desired. The study found no difference between partial-birth abortion and D&E in procedure time or blood loss.

If evidence-based medicine is thrown out in the case of partial-birth abortion and intuition is to become the standard, intuition shows multiple potential risks from D&X. These include heightened risk of placenta previa in future pregnancies, heightened risk of pre-term birth (PTB or prematurity) in future pregnancies, heightened risk of maternal laceration from crushing the fetal skull or puncturing the fetal neck, increased risk of infection from extended dilation of the cervix, and heightened risk of uterine trauma from internal rotation of the fetus during D&X, which carries risks of uterine rupture, abruption, and trauma to the uterus.

In 2000, the Supreme Court struck down the partial-birth-abortion prohibitions passed by overwhelming majorities in 30 states on the rationale that “division of medical opinion…signals the presence of risk, not its absence.” But risk of what? The records in the new cases show that a division of medical opinion based on intuition, in the absence of empirical evidence, signals uncertainty as to whether D&X involves a greater or lesser risk for women than well-established procedures.

In 1973, the Court struck down the abortion laws of all 50 states, put the burden on the states to regulate the procedure, and then erected barriers to such regulations. The Court’s casual deference to the subjective intuition of abortion providers allows abortion providers to thumb their nose at evidence-based medicine, as they have done since 1973.

Much emphasis has been placed on how partial-birth abortion is really infanticide, and rightly so, but too little attention has been given to how the procedure carries serious potential risks for women. The lack of empirical data to support the safety or effectiveness of the D&X procedure after 15 years justifies the Supreme Court in upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and in overturning its 2000 decision in Stenberg, so that the people in the states, through their elected representatives, can re-enact the 30 state prohibitions enacted between 1995-2000.

— Clarke D. Forsythe is the attorney and director of the Project in Law & Bioethics of the Americans United for Life in Chicago.

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Against Partial-Birth Abortion (National Review Online, 061107)

By The Editors

Let us pretend for a moment something that we do not believe: that Roe v. Wade, as modified by subsequent decisions, is now too old to be overruled, and that the Supreme Court should continue to protect abortion from legislative prohibition at any stage of pregnancy. Even on those assumptions, the Court should allow partial-birth abortion to be prohibited. Nothing in Roe commits the Court to keeping legislatures from prohibiting the killing of a partially born infant. The Court mistakenly ruled, in a 5–4 vote in 2000, that legislatures do not have this power. It should reverse itself.

Partial-birth abortion involves the partial delivery of a child, the puncturing of its skull, the removal of its “intracranial contents,” and then the delivery of a dead baby or extraction of its parts. Even many people who favor the abortion license in general think that this procedure should be banned. The case for protecting it from restriction comes in gross and sophisticated forms. Defenders of partial-birth abortion have typically resorted to misinformation: underestimating the frequency of the procedure, falsely claiming that anesthesia kills the fetus while still in the womb, and suggesting that it is done out of medical necessity.

Whether the procedure is “rare” is to some extent a subjective judgment. At least 2,000 partial-birth abortions are committed every year. As Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee has pointed out, the network news would be running stories about an epidemic if something killed prematurely born infants in neonatal wards so regularly.

Nobody has ever shown an instance in which a partial-birth abortion was necessary to save the life or health of a woman. The most defenders can show is that there may be instances in which individual abortionists may decide that it is the safest method of abortion.

The sophisticated case is the one made by Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and in lower courts by, among others, Judge Richard Posner. The argument is that nothing morally distinguishes partial-birth abortions from other methods of abortion in the second and third trimester. What difference could it make to a fetus, these jurists ask, whether its feet are in or out of the womb when it is killed? The bans are irrational.

This argument has some force, but even more chutzpah. The Supreme Court, with the eager assent of all of these jurists, has declared that the child within the womb can have no protection. The mother has a right to kill it at any time it is within her. The ban on partial-birth abortion is an attempt to mark an outer boundary to this right.

If that boundary is to fall, one could, with equal force, ask what difference it makes to a child whether it is killed within the womb or entirely outside it. One could, that is, use the Court-enforced legality of late-term abortion to construct a right to infanticide. Surely some abortionist somewhere could be found who would conclude that it is safer for the mother to remove the child entirely from her womb before dealing the fatal blow.

The Court may now have a majority willing to allow a ban, the Senate having wisely confirmed Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Whether the Court will have more such justices, or more Ginsburgs and Stevenses, will depend on today’s votes.

The Court takes up the issue this week. An argument can be made that it should junk Roe and its progeny altogether, and get out of the business of micromanaging abortion policy. But it is not necessary for it to do so to reach the right result in the case.

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You Don’t Need a Weatherman: To know which way the Greenhouse gases blow. (National Review Online, 061108)

By Douglas Johnson

Last June, Linda Greenhouse, who has covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times for most of the last 28 years, took time out to receive an honor at Harvard. According to a later report about her speech on National Public Radio, Greenhouse lamented, among other discouraging developments, what she called a “sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.” She added, “To say that these last few years have been dispiriting is an understatement.”

Trooper that she is, however, Greenhouse is back on the front lines at the Supreme Court this week with a commentary in the Times’s Sunday, November 5, “Week in Review” section about the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, on which the Court will hear oral arguments on today.

There are several points in Greenhouse’s essay that are worthy of careful analysis, but here I will focus on just one: Her attempt to discredit the idea that human babies are really being mostly delivered alive before they are killed. It seems that Greenhouse recognizes that this notion bothers a lot of people — including even many people who, for some reason, are not so troubled by other types of abortions.

Greenhouse quotes, from a legal brief, a characterization of the partial-birth-abortion method as “killing a child in the birth process.” She then comments, “While this description is true in the sense that uninterrupted gestation leads to birth — ‘He not busy being born is busy dying,’ in the words of the Bob Dylan song — it is well off the mark as a description of what actually occurs.”

But off the mark in what way? Greenhouse offers only one statement in support of her “off the mark” declaration — a quote from abortionist Warren M. Hern, who explains that he (among others) kills a fetus by injecting a lethal drug into the womb and then removing the cadaver a day or two later. “The cognitive construct of the law has nothing to do with current medical practice,” Hern said.

All that demonstrates, however, is that Hern is not performing partial-birth abortions. That is not terribly surprising, since Hern once told American Medical News that he did not employ the method because of safety concerns: “I have very serious reservations about this procedure. . . You really can’t defend it. I’m not going to tell somebody else that they should not do this procedure. But I’m not going to do it.”

The method Hern says he uses is not covered by the law, because his killing takes place entirely inside the uterus — a free-fire zone under Roe v. Wade. In contrast, by explicit definition in the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, a “partial-birth abortion” is an abortion in which the abortionist “delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus” [emphasis added].

Greenhouse apparently wants her readers to believe that nobody is actually “killing a child in the birth process.” Such exercises in studied denial are nothing new. When the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was first introduced in 1995, groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood propagated a myth that anesthesia given to the mother caused the fetus to expire peacefully before the rest of the process commenced. But this fabrication soon was exploded by the leading professional societies of anesthesiologists, who said that the fetus is not much affected by anesthesia given to the mother.

In reality, it has been established beyond reasonable dispute that many abortion practitioners do, in fact, mostly deliver living babies before killing them by puncturing the base of their skulls with sharp instruments, such as the seven-inch Metzenbaum surgical scissors or the trochar (a pointed, hollow metal tube). The practitioners who prefer this method usually employ it in the fifth and sixth months, and sometimes later.

Martin Haskell, the abortionist who initially engendered controversy over the method when he promoted it in an explicit 1992 instructional paper, was asked by American Medical News whether the fetus is dead before the delivery. “No, it’s not. No, it’s really not,” he replied, estimating that about “two thirds” were alive at the time of their “extraction.” (He added that “80% are purely elective.”)

Other abortionists made similar admissions during the trials in the three separate legal challenges to the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act — some of which were quoted by Cathy Cleaver Ruse in her powerful article “Partial-Birth Abortion on Trial.” For example, in the trial before U.S. District Judge Richard Casey in New York, Dr. Carolyn Westoff testified that there is “usually a heartbeat” when she begins delivery in a partial-birth abortion, and that the fetus is living until she collapses the skull.

Another abortionist, Timothy Johnson, told the judge that when the “fetus” has been extracted, “Feet could be moving, yes.”

After hearing extensive testimony from both sides, Judge Casey said in his opinion: “The Court finds that the testimony at trial and before Congress establishes that D&X [partial-birth abortion] is a gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized medical procedure . . . [and finds] credible evidence that D&X abortions subject fetuses to severe pain.”

Obviously, the babies would not experience pain if they were already dead.

But still — is it really a partial birth?

Legally, under the laws of virtually every state and under federal law, once a human is all the way outside the mother and draws breath, or shows other signs of life such as heartbeat or movement of voluntary muscles, a live birth has occurred, and all the protections of law attach — whether or not the baby is “viable” (capable of long-term survival).

In February 1997, Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, told Greenhouse’s newspaper that “in the vast majority of cases” the method is used on “a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along” (New York Times, Feb. 26, 1997). Twenty weeks is halfway through a full-term pregnancy — the middle of the fifth month.

Even early in the fifth month, babies are often born alive when expelled spontaneously by premature labor. By 20 weeks — 4-1/2 months — a prematurely delivered baby may breathe for an hour or so before dying. By 23 weeks (just into the sixth month), roughly one-third of preemies survive long-term. By 24 weeks (about halfway through the sixth month), more than half are long-term survivors.

To put it another way: At the stages of development that most partial-birth abortions are performed, the great majority of babies would be legal “live births” if they were expelled by spontaneous premature labor, and many would be long-term survivors.

So, in a partial-birth abortion, a premature human is deliberately pulled to within just a few inches of being, medically and legally, a live-born person even under the law of Roe v. Wade. Thus, this abortion method does indeed amount to a partial live birth — or “partial birth.”

So, it is Greenhouse who is “well off the mark as to what actually occurs” — and President Bush who spoke the painful, literal truth on the day he signed the law in 2003, when he called partial-birth abortion “a terrible form of violence . . . directed against children who are inches from birth . . .”

The Dylan song that Greenhouse quoted is aptly titled “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” On November 8, lawyers for Greenhouse’s side will try to persuade at least five Supreme Court justices that partial-birth abortion, too, is “alright,” just another straightforward application of the constitutional doctrine constructed in Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, no big deal. They will try to persuade the justices that the elected representatives of the people must not be allowed to interfere with the practice of borderline infanticide.

If, God forbid, they succeed, many will see it as yet another declaration by the nation’s highest tribunal (if I may borrow further from the same song):

That not much

Is really sacred.

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The Rise of Infanticide? (Mohler, 070328)

A spate of murdered babies has shocked Germany in recent weeks. The Times [London] reports that at least 23 babies have been killed this year, “many of them beaten to death or strangled by their mothers before being dumped on wasteland and in dustbins.” German officials believe the total number of babies killed this year to be even higher than what has been reported.

Police investigating the murders are at a loss to explain the sudden surge in such cases, which have involved mothers of all ages all over the country.

Now city councils have launched an advertising campaign to highlight the problem and to promote greater use of the Baby-Klappe hatches that allow women to drop off their babies to be found and cared for without having to give their names. Posters were being put up in cities and towns across Germany yesterday, urging women to make use of the Baby-Klappe, with the slogan “Before babies land in the rubbish bin . . .”

The campaign has already attracted criticism from senior clergymen and from charities, including Caritas, who argue that it could actively encourage mothers to dump their children. But there is agreement that something must be done to address what appears to be an infanticide epidemic.

One criminologist suggested that these mothers are murdering their babies because they seek to save a relationship with the father. Whatever the motivation, these women are committing the homicide of their own infants. The German government’s idea of “drop-off points” is an effort to save at last some babies in the future. According to press reports, there are now more than 90 drop-off points in Germany. Six babies have been pushed through a slot in just one Berlin center since 2003.

The rise of infanticide is shocking, but hardly surprising. After all, in many societies these babies could be safely aborted almost up to the time of their delivery. The logic of infanticide is just the logic of abortion pushed beyond the moment of birth.

The fact that Germans have responded with outrage over this spate of infanticides is comforting in one sense, but it also reveals the hypocrisy of the age. How can infanticide be wrong and abortion be a basic right? Both mean the killing of a baby, and both represent the Culture of Death at its most deadly.

Meanwhile, British authorities are considering a proposal to allow nurses to carry out abortions without a physician present. As The Telegraph [London] reports:

Dr Kate Guthrie, a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: “This is logical. As long as standards of care are high and as long as there is adequate training, competent clinical staff should carry out early surgical abortions and it does not matter if it is a doctor or a nurse.”

But Anthony Ozimic, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: “Do nurses really want to perform abortions, the killing of innocent human beings?

“The pro-abortion lobby claims that so-called safe, legal abortion was necessary to safeguard women’s health yet, having achieved legal abortion, it now wants to remove safeguards by getting nurses to do doctors’ dirty work for them.”

The effect of this proposal would be to make abortion even more readily available — radically enlarging the number of persons deemed qualified to perform the procedure.

The Culture of Death advances with developments like these. The twenty-first century is looking scarier all the time.

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Supreme Court Upholds Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act (Foxnews, 070418)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act “have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court’s conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how — not whether — to perform an abortion.

Abortion rights groups have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although government lawyers and others who favor the ban said there are alternate, more widely used procedures that remain legal.

The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions.

More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States each year, according to recent statistics. Nearly 90% of those occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not affected by Tuesday’s ruling.

Six federal courts have said the law that was in focus Wednesday is an impermissible restriction on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The law bans a method of ending a pregnancy, rather than limiting when an abortion can be performed.

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High Court Backs Ban on Partial Birth Abortion (Christian Post, 070418)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.