The Partial-Birth Abortion Challenge

Reason Magazine | Steve Chapman | April 23, 2007

What the Supreme Court hath wrought

Most Supreme Court decisions can be read over breakfast, at least after your first cup of coffee, but the one last week upholding a federal ban on partial-birth abortion is not one of them. This procedure is one of those topics, like war and sausage, in which ignorance is bliss. But five justices refused to be accomplices in shielding the public from the truth.

The court cited one nurse’s account of this procedure. The doctor, she said, “delivered the baby’s body and arms — everything but the head.” At that point, she said, “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… The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out.”

The striking fact about the debate here is not that some people are appalled and revolted by what is done in these instances, but that some people are not. They don’t flinch from the violence visited on well-developed fetuses in the name of reproductive freedom. Any abortion, in their eyes, is a justifiable abortion.

So they were furious last week when the Supreme Court said that while it was prepared to permit a vast array of abortions, it was not obligated to permit these. It upheld a law passed by Congress in 2003 making it illegal for doctors to use this method to destroy a fetus.

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