Tuesday, January 31, 2006

"Continue pulling to disarticulate at the neck."

Here's a link to the 9th Circuit Court's decision on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. They declared it unconstitutional.

How sad is that Supreme Court precedent says something like this is constitutionally protected?

An intact D&E proceeds in one of two ways, depending on the position of the fetus in the uterus. If the fetus presents head first (a vertex presentation), the doctor first collapses the head, either by compressing the skull with forceps or by inserting surgical scissors into the base of the skull and draining its contents. The doctor then uses forceps to grasp the fetus and extracts it through the cervix.5 If the fetus presents feet first (a breech presentation), the doctor begins by grasping a lower extremity and pulling it through the cervix, at which point the head typically becomes lodged in the cervix. When that occurs, the doctor can either collapse the head and then remove the fetus or continue pulling to disarticulate at the neck. (If the doctor uses the latter option, he will have to use at least one more pass of the forceps to remove the part of the fetus that remains, and the procedure is not considered an intact D&E.)
(emphasis mine)

So some abortionists finish off a partial-birth abortion not by sucking the brains of the child out, but by pulling on the child's body until the child's body is separated from the child's head.

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