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PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION GOES ON TRIAL
WASHINGTON (March 28,
2004) -- On Monday, March 29, federal district courts in New York,
Nebraska, and California will begin separate trials on legal challenges to
the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, a bill signed into law by President
George W. Bush on November 5, 2003.
The National Right to Life
Committee (NRLC), the nation's major right-to-life organization, led the
coalition that resulted in enactment of this federal law after an
eight-year fight. The NRLC website contains the Internet's most expansive
archive of documents pertaining to all facets of the debate over
partial-birth abortion.
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/index.html
Any journalist or
editorialist examining this issue will benefit from reading, at a minimum,
"Partial-Birth Abortion: Misconceptions and Realities," a memo written by
NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson, who has played a key role in
the long debate over the legislation. This memo addresses common
misconceptions and misinformation about partial-birth abortion, with links
to primary documents, including interviews with partial-birth abortionists
and investigative reports in American Medical News, The New York Times,
PBS, and other news media.
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/PBAall110403.html
The memo addresses these
topics: the actual language and legal intent of the bill; why
"partial-birth abortion" is a legal term of art that is NOT synonymous
with various pseudo-medical jargon terms used by the law's opponents; how
use of the nebulous label "late-term abortion" distorts the debate;
whether President Bush's statement (November 5, 2003) that partial-birth
abortion is violence directed against those who are "inches from birth" is
medically and legally accurate; evidence regarding minimum numbers of
partial-birth abortions; acknowledgments by the National Coalition of
Abortion Providers that "in the vast majority of cases, the procedure is
performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or
more along"; key turning points in the eight-year congressional debate;
how the U.S. Supreme Court currently splits on Roe v. Wade and
partial-birth abortion; and polls of doctors, obstetricians, nurses, and
the general public regarding the ban. The memo also discusses how
medically documented illustrations of two different abortion methods can
allow the public to better evaluate claims and counterclaims on what the
law actually covers and does not cover.
The three trials will
examine a number of medical issues pertaining to partial-birth abortion.
A collection of key documents pertinent to many of those issues -- some of
which are real eye-openers -- are posted here:
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/keymedical.html
One of the findings of
Congress, enacted in the law, states, "The vast majority of babies killed
during partial-birth abortions are alive until the end of the procedure.
It is a medical fact, however, that unborn infants at this stage can feel
pain when subjected to painful stimuli and that their perception of this
pain is even more intense than that of newborn infants and older children
when subjected to the same stimuli. Thus, during a partial-birth abortion
procedure, the child will fully experience the pain associated with
piercing his or her skull and sucking out his or her brain." The
organizations seeking to invalidate the law attempted to exclude expert
testimony about fetal pain from the trials, but at least two of the judges
have ruled that it is relevant. A collection of documents pertinent to the
pain of partial-birth abortion, mostly produced during the congressional
hearings, is posted here:
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/Fetal_Pain/index.html
"Partly born, premature
infants will continue to die at the point of seven-inch scissors, while
the abortion industry pursues these legal challenges," said NRLC's
Johnson. "We believe that this law will ultimately be reviewed by the
Supreme Court, where five justices in 2000 said Roe v. Wade guarantees the
right to perform partial-birth abortions at will. We can only hope that
by the time this law reaches the Supreme Court, there will be at least a
one-vote shift away from that extreme and inhumane position."
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