Some excerpts from my NRO essay today, “The Mystery of the Missing Lawsuits: One year after the Supreme Court’s partial-birth abortion ruling”:

Exactly one year ago today, the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Carhart rejected a facial challenge to the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003.… Instead, the Court virtually invited practitioners of partial-birth abortion and their allies to bring so-called as-applied challenges that would carve out from the Act’s scope any circumstances in which partial-birth abortion might be shown to be necessary to preserve the mother’s health.… In dissent, Justice Ginsburg predicted that these as-applied challenges would “be mounted swiftly, to ward off serious, sometimes irremediable harm, to women whose health would be endangered by the [Act’s] prohibition.” … So how many as-applied challenges have been filed over the past year? Zero.… Planned Parenthood and its allies continue to maintain that bans on partial-birth abortion threaten women’s health. Perhaps they will bring as-applied challenges to the federal partial-birth abortion ban one of these days. But their failure to have done so over the past year naturally invites suspicion that they are, to paraphrase their own Ron Fitzsimmons, just lying through their teeth once again.