Linda Greenhouse has a very good article in the Times about the pending “partial-birth abortion” case and the U.S. Supreme Court. The question, as she makes clear, is whether Anthony Kennedy will vote to uphold precedent — in evaluating a nearly identical case, the court ruled that an abortion ban without a health exception is unconstitutional — or vote along the same lines that he did in the previous case. Complicating matters is the fact that Congress passed the abortion ban in the face of judicial precedent. That is, the court had already ruled that any abortion ban has to have a health exception to be Constitutional — so Congress responded by passing this ban anyway, and simply stating that the procedure is never necessary to preserve the health of the pregnant woman.
Which is certainly true. Are most medical procedures and treatments entirely and unquestionably necessary to preserve one’s health? That is, aren’t there almost always alternate treatments which could be used, but which just aren’t as effective or as safe?
Such is the case with the PBA ban. Yes, there are other types of later-term abortion procedures, but they may not be as safe for that particular woman’s condition. And as Greenhouse details in her article, many times doctors don’t know if the fetus will come out fully intact or not during a later-term procedure; removing it intact is generally less risky, but the PBA ban is so broad that it’s unclear whether standard second-trimester procedures would be criminalized as well.
The PBA ban won’t get rid of later-term abortion; in fact, I’m not sure that it’ll stop even one single abortion from occurring. But it will scare doctors out of choosing the safest procedures for their patients. It will threaten women’s health. And it will inevitably only succeed in punishing healthcare providers and their patients.
Anti-choicers, naturally, aren’t above blatantly lying in order to get their political goals met:
Abortion opponents are now the ones who describe the procedure as rare, seeking to offer reassurance that banning it would not deprive women of access to safe second-trimester abortions.
In fact, in their eagerness to portray the procedure as aberrant, the statute’s sponsors declared in the preamble that “no medical schools” teach it. In fact, it is taught at leading medical schools including Columbia, Cornell, Yale and New York University.
The administration describes the law as taking “only the limited step of proscribing a rarely used and inhumane abortion procedure resembling infanticide.”
“Infanticide” is a potent label, frequently used by abortion opponents. One brief describes the procedure as “killing a child in the birth process.” While this description is true in the sense that uninterrupted gestation leads to birth — “He not busy being born is busy dying,” in the words of the Bob Dylan song — it is well off the mark as a description of what actually occurs.
Can I just say that I love her even more for quoting Bob Dylan to prove her point? I think Dawn Eden should take note (fyi: What follows is… wrong. And bad. And I’m really, really sorry. You know when you smell something really, truly awful, and you just have to make someone else smell it so that they know what you’re talking about? It’s like that.)