September 23, 1996
I've been wondering about the partial-birth abortion bill, vetoed by President Clinton in April and overridden by the House last week. The mystery to me was how anybody can be partially born. It raises the same dilemma as saying someone was partially exterminated, partially dead, or partially raped. It seems to me these physical states are binary, like on or off. So I investigated the partial-birth procedure that President Clinton wants to preserve.
First, what is a partial-birth abortion procedure? It's a simple technique medically known as dilation and extraction. The abortion specialist pulls the baby out of the birth canal feet first until all but the skull is exposed. Scissors are used to puncture the skull, and in the words of Dr. Martin Haskell, a famous Dayton, Ohio, abortionist, “the surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter (tube) into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.”
According to anesthesiologists, while the mother is under a local anesthesia, there is no relief for the baby who “is more sensitive to pain than a full-term infant would be if subjected to the same procedures,” says Dr. Jean A. Wright, associate professor of pediatrics and anesthesia at Atlanta's Emory University School of Medicine.
Why the procedure? It turns out that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Fourteenth Amendment protections apply only to persons, not the unborn. However, a living, just-delivered baby, no matter how premature, feeble, and tenuous, is constitutionally a person. Legally a baby is not born, and hence not a person, until the head passes through the birth canal. Therefore, when an abortionist leaves the head in the birth canal, he is free to kill the baby and escape murder charges. It's a matter of three or four inches that makes the legal difference between murder and abortion.
Now you may wonder why the procedure is used at all. Dr. Martin Haskell, who reportedly has performed more than a thousand dilation-and-extraction procedures, says, “Among its advantages are that it is a quick, surgical outpatient method that can be performed on a scheduled basis under local anesthesia,” adding that he “routinely performs this procedure on all patients twenty through twenty-four weeks from LMP (last menstrual period) with certain exceptions.” Haskell sometimes uses this mostly elective procedure as late as six months into a pregnancy, while other doctors have used it as late as nine months.
Americans will never agree on every aspect of the abortion controversy, but this kind of abortion, having little or no medical justification, has to be disgusting even to many proabortionists. It is a practice that comes just short—3 inches—of infanticide.
Under immense pressure from proabortion groups, President Clinton vetoed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (HR 1833) that would have prohibited the procedure except if necessary to save the life of the mother. Most Americans (71 percent) see the partial-birth ban as a reasonable measure. But many abortion activists see the ban as that important camel's nose into the abortion tent and they must fight the nose, lest the entire beast enter.
The historical evidence of other “reasonable” measures suggests proabortionists have adopted the right strategy. After all, who would have thought, at the time, a “reasonable” measure like banning fully automatic weapons would have led to today's gun-control laws? Who would have thought yesterday's “reasonable” measure requiring smoking and no-smoking sections on airplanes would have led to today's restrictions?