SOON PRESIDENT Bush will sign the partial birth abortion ban into law, which prohibits a partial-birth abortion to be performed unless the life of the mother is in danger. Abortion itself is a terrible thing, and a heart-wrenching decision for a woman to have to make, no matter how you feel about its legality. But partial-birth abortion is wrong. Period.
Opponents of the ban argue that the procedure interferes with a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. After all, abortion is legal in this country under the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision. Partial-birth abortion, however, borders on infanticide. Most people don't realize exactly what occurs during the procedure.
In a partial-birth abortion, the abortionist grabs the baby's leg with forceps and pulls it out into the birth canal. The abortionist then delivers the entire body, except for the head. This is where the truly horrible procedure begins.
According to the National Right to Life, the abortionist jams scissors into the baby's skull, pushing them open to enlarge the hole. A suction catheter is then inserted and the baby's brains are literally sucked out, causing the skull to collapse. The dead baby is then removed (www.nrlc.org).
Abundant medical evidence suggests that at this point in development, the baby has an extreme sensitivity to pain. Which means that the child can certainly feel all of this as it happens.
So, apparently what we're trying to protect here is a mother's right to have her child's brains sucked out. "Partial-birth abortion" is just another name for it.
The partial birth abortion ban would permit the procedure to be performed in cases where the mother's life is endangered, including physical health threats and physical injury. Opponents take issue with the fact that the ban makes exception to preserve the "life" of the mother, but doesn't include the "health" of the mother in its stipulations.
The problem with the word "health" is that in almost all cases, it is used in terms of mental health.
Kansas is the only state in which the law requires separate reporting for partial-birth abortions. In 1999, abortionists in Kansas reported performing 182 partial-birth abortions, all on babies defined as "viable" by the doctors themselves. And all 182 abortions were performed for "mental" health reasons.
The decision to have an abortion is one of the hardest decisions a woman would ever have to make in her life. It is a heart-wrenching decision to make under extremely sad circumstances, and regardless of your thoughts on abortion, it is impossible not to feel compassion for those women placed in that unfortunate position.
However, if a woman has such a problem with having a child, to the extent that it poses a mental health risk, she is free to have an abortion during the beginning stages of pregnancy. There is no reason for a woman to wait until the third trimester to decide she doesn't want to have a baby after all.
Many opponents believe that the ban on partial birth abortion is inconsistent with the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton Supreme Court decisions, both decided on the same day in 1973, which together allow for an abortion to performed for any reason up until the time when the baby is deemed "viable" (usually during the second trimester), and after that, permits abortions in cases where the mother's life or health is in danger.
The new bill, however, states that, based on the extensive information presented during congressional hearings, "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; [and] poses additional health risks to the mother."
It can be inferred, then, that partial birth abortions are almost exclusively performed, not for physical health reasons, but for mental health reasons.
In 1996, the Record, a northern New Jersey paper, published a report that included interviews with abortionists about the circumstances under which they perform partial birth abortions. One of the doctors stated that, of their patients, "most are Medicaid patients, black and white, and most are for elective, not medical, reasons: people who didn't realize, or didn't care, how far along they were" (www.nrlc.org).
Abortion is legal in this country. If a woman doesn't want to have a baby, she is certainly allowed to walk into an abortion clinic during the first trimester of her pregnancy and safely have an abortion. Under the partial-birth abortion ban, a woman may also have an abortion at a later time if the pregnancy poses a life-threatening danger, including physical threats and illness. But there is no reason for a woman to wait until her child is partially born to decide she doesn't want it anymore. That is murder. There's no question about it.
(Kristin Brown's column appears Wednesdays in the Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kbrown@cavalierdaily.com.)
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