When Laci Peterson and her unborn child were discovered dead in April, vast majorities of Americans–84 percent 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.