As "partial-birth abortion" emerged into America's consciousness, an Oregon woman named Jenny Westberg made a series of simple pen-and-ink drawings of the procedure. Those pictures--striking in their simplicity and devastating in their clarity--would change the trajectory of America's abortion debate. Evil flourishes in the darkness, and Westberg's drawings brought the murderous abortion procedure to light.
The pictures gripped the conscience, not only of the pro-life movement, but of many others as well. Keri Folmar, a congressional lawyer who was to write the first version of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, provided first-person testimony of the impact of the description and the drawings. "To think that a human being would actually hold a little baby in his or her hand, and then kill it--that's what got me," she said. "If you're holding that child in your hand, and knowingly killing the child, you can't argue anymore that it's not really a human being. You just can't do it."
The partial-birth abortion procedure--so proudly described by Martin Haskell--blew the lid off the abortion rights movement. "For two decades the people who frame legal-abortion campaigns in this country have been working assiduously to keep the door to that procedure room shut," Gorney reports, "redirecting the national attention to the action beforehand, and afterward, the choice to seek an abortion, the decision to have an abortion, the values inherent in a society that gives women the liberty to make this momentous decision without interference from the state. They had worried for years that if the general public were forced into a mangled-fetus-versus-women's autonomy tradeoff, the mangled fetus would win."
When the partial-birth issue hit the floor of Congress, organizations like NARAL were left grasping for an adequate response. As political leaders began to describe the procedure whereby "the child's brains are sucked out," abortion rights advocates tried to argue that the procedure was both rare and medically necessary. As Gorney acknowledges, the abortion advocates simply lied. Though they had claimed that the procedure was "extremely rare" and was used no more than five hundred times per year, the reality is that thousands are performed on an annual basis.
At one point in the early years of the controversy, a lobbyist for abortion organizations just invented low numbers and fed these to the press. Ron Fitzsimmons later admitted that he "lied through my teeth."
By overwhelming margins, Congress passed Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Acts, only to have the legislation vetoed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1997. As a matter of fact, efforts to outlaw the procedure were not successful until last year, when President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 into law.
The abortion rights industry immediately went to court in order to nullify the legislation. Significantly, simultaneous cases were heard in California, New York, and Nebraska.
Gorney's article takes the reader inside the San Francisco courtroom, where an abortion doctor named Maureen Paul, "lead author of a recent medical textbook on abortion," was being questioned by a lawyer from Planned Parenthood. The doctor testified that she used the procedure in order to kill and evacuate a late-term fetus. As she explained, "sometimes the fetus comes out in pieces, and I make instrument passes until the entire fetus is evacuated, and sometimes the whole fetus will come down into the [birth canal], at least as far as the head." In other cases, when the head is too large to pass through the canal, the doctor explained: "There are two things you can do. You can disarticulate at the neck . . . . Or what I prefer to do is to just reach in with my forceps, and collapse the skull, and bring the fetus out intact."
Disarticulate? This word is nothing less than a sinister euphemism used to disguise the dismemberment of a human fetus.
