Partial birth abortion BAN upheld by Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote has upheld the national law banning partial-birth abortions. Or, another way of putting it: they upheld a law prohibiting doctors from murdering viable infants, at least sometimes.

The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure today, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The decision pitted the court's conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush's two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how — not whether — to perform an abortion. The law bans a method of ending a pregnancy, rather than limiting when an abortion can be performed

The procedure at issue involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman's uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.

Abortion opponents say the law will not reduce the number of abortions performed because an alternate method — dismembering the fetus in the uterus — is available and, indeed, much more common.

This law is OK by me and I agree on Supreme Court upholding it. But like the above news item notes, this still does nothing to prevent doctors from murdering late term fetuses that could very easily live outside the womb. All this law did was prevent a particularly and visibly gruesome version of murder. It still lets the doctors murder viable fetuses, but in a way less likely to draw condemnation.

And for those abortion supporters who loudly and continually argue this procedure is only done on damaged and severely handicapped fetuses, that is a flat out lie of epic proportions. The stats indicate that damaged fetuses are only involved in 2% of these banned procedures.

• 71% Woman didn't recognize she was pregnant or misjudged gestation
• 48% Woman found it hard to make arrangements for abortion
• 33% Woman was afraid to tell her partner or parents
• 24% Woman took time to decide to have an abortion
• 8% Woman waited for her relationship to change
• 8% Someone pressured woman not to have abortion
• 6% Something changed after woman became pregnant
• 6% Woman didn't know timing is important
• 5% Woman didn't know she could get an abortion
• 2% A fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy
• 11% Other