The legal battle in three separate federal trials that have followed President Bush’s signing of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in November 2003 illustrates how the abortion-rights lobby perverts the law, coopts the medical profession, and debases the very language we speak. By controlling and distorting the debate in these ways, abortion advocates hope to prevent the American public from learning the stark truth about abortion practices—especially the abhorrent partial-birth method, in which a doctor delivers a living child until its legs and torso are hanging outside the mother and then pierces the child’s skull with a sharp instrument and vacuums out its brains.
Even before the act was signed into law, lawyers for Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the National Abortion Federation filed suit in federal courts in New York, Nebraska, and San Francisco, arguing that it was unconstitutional. On June 1, Judge Phyllis Hamilton entered an injunction in the San Francisco case permanently prohibiting the enforcement of the statute against doctors and clinics affiliated with Planned Parenthood. (The separate Nebraska and New York decisions are expected in late summer or early fall.)
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