In an NR article yesterday and in a tweet thread today, John McCormack has done an excellent job exposing how extreme Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s so-called Women’s Health Protection Act is: imposing a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy; invalidating broadly popular state laws on parental consent, parental notification, and informed consent; enabling abortions on the basis of race, sex, and disability; gutting conscience and religious-liberty protections for religious hospitals and doctors; and laying the groundwork for requiring states to fund Medicaid abortions.
I will highlight one other radical feature: The bill also would invalidate various state bans on partial-birth abortion.
The bill states (in section 5(b)(3)) that it “shall not supersede or apply to … the procedure described in section 1531(b)(1) of title 18, United States Code.” That refers to the provision in the federal ban on partial-birth abortion that defines the term partial-birth abortion to mean
an abortion in which the person performing the abortion—
(A) deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus; and
(B) performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus.
But some longstanding (and immensely popular) state bans on partial-birth abortion describe the prohibited procedure more expansively and thus would fall outside the bill’s carve-out. Georgia law, for example, defines the term partial-birth abortion to mean “an abortion in which the person performing the abortion partially vaginally delivers a living human fetus before ending the life of the fetus and completing the delivery.” So it would apply when just part of the baby’s head is outside the mother’s body. Other states, including Missouri, apply their bans to partial abdominal (e.g., Cesarean) deliveries as well as to partial vaginal deliveries.
These state statutes are important not simply because they apply more broadly than the federal ban. States also can’t count on the federal government to enforce the federal ban, in part because of limited resources, but especially when, as now, the White House and the Department of Justice are closely allied with the abortion industry.
So any member of Congress who supports the Women’s Health Protection Act is facilitating the atrocity of partial-birth abortion.