As legal challenges to the partial birth abortion ban enacted last year by Congress begin to work their way through the appellate courts, abortion rights proponents are strenuously refusing to confront the disturbingly non-medical nature of the procedure, instead casting it in the high-sounding language of a woman’s right to choose.
The reality cuts through that rhetoric like a surgeon’s scalpel. The American Medical Association, which refers to the practice as “intact dilation and extraction,” leaves no doubt about what actually happens. Second or third-trimester fetuses – some well past the point of viability – are pulled from the mother after the doctor artificially dilates her cervix. The head is left inside. They are “intact” because they are too well-developed to be cut up or otherwise destroyed inside the womb without seriously threatening the mother’s safety, and they can only be “extracted” after their heads – which are by then large and solid – are punctured by a sharp tool and then “partially collapsed” by vacuuming out the “intra-cranial contents.”
The truth is that a living thing is being killed in a violent, painful way. Recognizing this, the AMA endorsed a similar 1997 bill, arguing that the there was always an optional procedure available that would cause the fetus less pain and suffering. When Dr. Maureen Paul, chief medical officer of abortion provider Planned Parenthood Golden Gate, told the Los Angeles Times that it is the “safest available” procedure, she was really saying that it is difficult to abort well-developed fetuses without harming the mother. For the fetus, there is nothing “safe” about it.
In fact, partial birth abortion is so repugnant that even the law’s most strident defenders are hesitant to use the graphic language necessary to make their case in court. According to the Times, government attorneys in New York cautioned that the descriptions to be given during testimony “are not for the faint of heart.”
About the only thing that puts the ban’s opponents in a swoon is the thought that Roe v. Wade might be threatened. That fear is unfounded. The extremely rare procedure – estimates range from 2,000 to 3,000 a year – is never performed in the first trimester, the period of time in which the vast majority of abortions take place.
The first trimester also happens to be the approximate time span during which, under Roe, governments have little power to restrict abortion techniques.
Congress, when it enacted the ban, was actually operating within Roe’s limitations. As the fetus moves closer to and eventually passes the point at which it can survive outside the womb, government has more and more authority to restrict and even ban abortion procedures to protect the life of the developing child.
It is remarkable that any citizen of a country that considers itself among the most advanced and enlightened on earth would tolerate such violent and unnecessary destruction of human life. When abortion rights groups vociferously attack this law, it shows how calloused their members have become.