Partial-Birth Abortion
Partial-Birth Abortion
The Partial-Birth Abortion procedure – used from the fifth month on – involves pulling a living baby feet-first out of the womb, except for the head, puncturing the skull and suctioning out the brain. The great majority of partial-birth abortions are performed on healthy babies, for entirely non-medical reasons.
Also known as a brain suction abortion or “Dilation and Extraction,” a partial-birth abortion is performed as follows:
1. Guided by ultrasound, the abortionist grabs the baby’s leg with forceps.
2. The baby’s leg is pulled out into the birth canal.
3. The abortionist delivers the baby’s entire body, except for the head.
4. The abortionist jams scissors into the baby’s skull. The scissors are then opened to enlarge the hole.
5. The scissors are removed and a suction catheter is inserted. The baby’s brains are then sucked out and the head is removed from the womb, completing the procedure.
The abortionist who invented this technique reports that he has performed over 700 of them, and he knows of another abortionist who has used a similar procedure on babies up to “32 weeks and later.”The abortionist “said the drawings were accurate ‘from a technical point of view.'” [1]
With partial birth abortion, “America is just inches from infanticide,” said Carol Everett, a former abortion clinic owner. The gruesome nature of the partial birth procedure is indicative of the violent and brutal nature of all abortion methods.
Alarmingly, in June 2000, the United States Supreme Court struck down Nebraska’s Partial Birth Abortion Ban (Stenberg v. Carhart). In his dissenting opinion, the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “The method of killing a human child –one cannot even accurately say an entirely unborn human child — proscribed by this [Nebraska] statute is so horrible that the most clinical decsription of it evokes a shudder of revulsion.”
Responding to the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow states to outlaw such procedures,the late Jack Willke, M.D. of Life Issues Institute wrote, “The Court has ruled that it is legal to directly kill a normal baby who has been 3/4 delivered. In the face of laws passed by overwhleming votes in over half the states to forbid this callous infanticide, the Court trampled on the rights and wishes of a great majority of the citizens of the U.S….This brutal extension of their 1973 Roe. v. Wade decision extinguished any hope that this present Court might show some mercy on these babies. It demonstrates to our nation that the only answer to the continuing abortion holocaust is to elect a president who will appoint federal judges who will respect the lives of all Americans, born and unborn, while at the same time offering their pregnant mothers any help they need to carry to term.”
Fortunately, after President Bush appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the Court upheld the Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in April 2007 in Gonzales v. Carhart.
[1] American Medical News, July 5, 1993, p. 21.
Revised 6/5/19