It’s still legal to kill a partially delivered child, at least for now

On November 8, 2006, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood to help them decide whether the Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is constitutional. After President George W. Bush signed this law in November of 2003, it was challenged in court by various pro-abortion groups including Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

During the oral arguments, Solicitor General Paul Clement argued for the Bush administration saying partial birth abortions are never medically necessary and they “blurred the line between abortion and infanticide.” Meanwhile, attorneys Eve Gartner and Priscilla Smith representing the pro-abortion groups argued against the ban, claiming it banned a variety of abortion procedures and was necessary to preserve the health of women. Thankfully, many doctors have testified before Congress that such arguments are not medically based. Transcripts from those Congressional hearings have been made available to the U.S. Supreme Court judges.

Clement argued, “The basic point of this statute is to draw a bright line between a procedure that induces fetal demise in utero and one where the lethal act occurs when the child or the fetus, whichever you want to call it, is more than halfway outside of the mother’s womb.”

Prolifers are optimistic the addition of Justice Samuel Alito in place of former Justice Sandra O’Connor will tilt the court in favor of the prolife side. Six years ago in Stenberg v. Carhart, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 majority, which included the now retired O’Connor, that Nebraska’s ban on partial birth abortion was unconstitutional. Hopefully, the court with its new members will overturn the 2000 decision.

Though numerous states have attempted to ban partial birth abortion, and this subject has been in the news for more than a decade, many individuals still believe that this procedure (where a child is partially-delivered before being killed) doesn’t really take place. That position is becoming more and more untenable as abortion advocates and abortionists have testified in favor of this procedure.

While abortion advocates originally attempted to hide the details of this gruesome procedure when it first became known to prolifers in the 1990’s, their attorneys now argue the procedure should stay legal because the intent of some abortionists “is always to remove the fetus as intact as possible,” tried to argue that partial birth abortions are safer for women than other late term abortion procedures, discussed how some abortionists deliver the child past the navel while others deliver the child to the head and even described some cases where the child is delivered head first before being killed.

Court observers believe the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down its decision in this case sometime during the spring of 2007. Until then, partially delivering a child before killing him or her, be it feet first or head first, will remain legal in the United States of America.

Back to the table of contents