Against Partial-Birth Abortion
By The Editors NRO

Let us pretend for a moment something that we do not believe: that Roe v. Wade, as modified by subsequent decisions, is now too old to be overruled, and that the Supreme Court should continue to protect abortion from legislative prohibition at any stage of pregnancy. Even on those assumptions, the Court should allow partial-birth abortion to be prohibited. Nothing in Roe commits the Court to keeping legislatures from prohibiting the killing of a partially born infant. The Court mistakenly ruled, in a 5–4 vote in 2000, that legislatures do not have this power. It should reverse itself.

Partial-birth abortion involves the partial delivery of a child, the puncturing of its skull, the removal of its “intracranial contents,” and then the delivery of a dead baby or extraction of its parts. Even many people who favor the abortion license in general think that this procedure should be banned. The case for protecting it from restriction comes in gross and sophisticated forms. Defenders of partial-birth abortion have typically resorted to misinformation: underestimating the frequency of the procedure, falsely claiming that anesthesia kills the fetus while still in the womb, and suggesting that it is done out of medical necessity.

Whether the procedure is “rare” is to some extent a subjective judgment. At least 2,000 partial-birth abortions are committed every year. As Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee has pointed out, the network news would be running stories about an epidemic if something killed prematurely born infants in neonatal wards so regularly. the rest