 |
|
March
10, 2003, 11:25 a.m.
Still
Legal
Congress
tries again to ban partial-birth abortion.
|
|
his
week the U.S. Senate is set to begin to debate a ban on partial-birth
abortion, sponsored by Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.); Rep. Steve Chabot
in the House (R., Ohio).
This may feel like
déjà vu. The Senate has passed such a ban before —
but Bill Clinton was president and vetoed it twice. Now that both the
Senate and the House can pass it, and the president has asked for it,
it should be relatively smooth sailing — save for a phony ban (introduced
by Dick Durbin in the Senate, Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) and Jim Greenwood
(R., Pa.) in the House) and an affirmation of Roe (Sen. Tom Harkin
(D., Iowa)) the Senate is expected to take up during the debate. After
all, this is an issue that gets beyond the usual abortion-debate divide:
Even stalwart defenders of "choice" have realized that partial-birth
abortion is infanticide.
This year, 30 years
after Roe v. Wade, new numbers from the think tank for the
abortion movement, the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, have ironically given lie to the most repeated
myth (more
myth debunking here) about "so-called 'partial-birth-abortion,'"
as it is often called in the press. In a survey of abortion providers,
Guttmacher reported that there has been a tripling of partial-birth abortions
between the years 1996 and 2000. In 1996, the first year Guttmacher asked
about the procedure, the survey estimated there were "about 650"
annually. The new report says that by 2000, there were 2,200. Still, Guttmacher
dismisses the frequency of this form of abortion — in which babies
are subject to an especially brutal death: They are partially delivered,
their skulls cracked, and then their bodies are fully removed from the
womb — as "very small" and "rare."
But even the brutality
of the procedure is not enough to knock the Washington Post editorial
page from its usual position. "We are about to enter another round
of pointless debate about 'partial birth' abortions," the Post
complains. "From the language of the bill ('the child will fully
experience the pain'), it's clear this Senate bill is merely another way
for antiabortion forces to weaken the logic of Roe v. Wade
by insisting that a fetus is really a child at all phases and should be
treated as one."
While many pro-lifers
are happy to chisel away at Roe v. Wade step-by-step, the
specific brutality of this procedure should, in fact, be considered apart
from other forms of abortion.
The ban is expected
to become law this year (on the president's timetable), but the real question
is: Will the courts strike it down? The Supreme Court struck a blow to
pro-lifers when it nullified a Nebraska ban on partial-birth abortions
in Stenberg
v. Cahart in 1999. A particularly dangerous blow, too, as National
Review's Ramesh
Ponnuru has written: "[T]he Court wasn't saying merely that a
woman has a right to a partial-birth abortion when it is the safest way
of dealing with a threat to her health: It said that a woman in the eighth
month of pregnancy who wants her baby dead, whatever her reason, has a
right to have that baby killed in whatever way is safest to her."
Sponsors of the latest
version of the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act believe that
it will withstand the courts. Legislators point to a tighter definition
of the procedure it's banning ("D&X"
abortions) and to a new emphasis on the "health of the mother
issue": demonstrating (using the results of congressional findings
of fact) that there simply is no health-of-the-mother reason to ever
perform a partial-birth abortion.
But the ban still
has its stalwart opponents — among them Leroy Carhart, Nebraska abortionist
and pro-choice
superstar, who took his state's ban to the Supreme Court. He promises
to take the federal ban there, too. Carhart told The Hill last
week: "This whole issue is about control over women. They have picked
one very gross thing about abortion and tried to sell it to the American
people as wrong."
That makes him partially
right about partial-birth abortion. "Gross," yes — and
unnecessary, and "an abhorrent procedure that offends human dignity,"
as the president put it in his State of the Union address earlier this
year.
|
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
