OK, OK, so it's the New England Journal of Medicine. Just what do those punks know anyway?
The Partial Death of Abortion Rights
The Intimidation of Physicians — Banning Partial-Birth Abortion
Politics: April 2007 Archives
... is raising my blood pressure today. I just love the spokesbitch for the Family Research Council. She sneered at the statistics (from the CDC!) suggesting that the death rate from birth is higher than that from abortion, and said it was just "typical" of the way the pro-choice side shows its "bias." However, she didn't explain why those statistics are inaccurate and the other participants didn't press her. The whole thing will be available on the NPR website tonight.
An article from Harper's a couple years ago makes the point that this case and cases like it involve a lot of stomach-turning detail about what mid-term abortions really look like... and for the anti-abortion crowd, that's the point.
The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban does not prohibit what most people think it prohibits. It is not a late-abortion law. Apart from a single quoted remark in its “findings” section, which is a kind of declaratory preface, the ban contains no mention at all of third-trimester abortion, or of any gestational point in pregnancy. It criminalizes only by method, outlawing some actions during a pregnancy termination but not others, meaning that as practical legislation—isolated from its mission, that is, and considered solely as a directive on what physicians may and may not do in a procedure room—it makes clear ethical sense only to people who don't spend much time thinking about abortion. Defending the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban in court, as teams of Justice Department lawyers were dispatched this spring and summer to do, requires arguing to judges that pulling a fetus from a woman's body in dismembered pieces is legal, medically acceptable, and safe; but that pulling a fetus out intact, so that if the woman wishes the fetus can be wrapped in a blanket and handed to her, is appropriately punishable by a fine, or up to two years' imprisonment, or both.
There's a lot of other stuff in this article, some of it potentially trouble-triggering, so I'm not quoting it here, but he article is definitely worthwhile, if sobering, reading.
A first-person account explaining why this ban is so bad
Edited to add: And here's another (heartbreaking) one
What she said
Isn't it terrific news that the Supreme Court has upheld the ban on "partial-birth abortions"? Yeah, because of course women have late-term abortions for fun!
Conservative white men should always be in charge of making decisions about medical care! Hurrah!
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