| Opinion
Court Must Allow States To Ban
D&X
Don
Nelson, President
Nevada LIFE
Reno
Gazette Journal
April 25, 2000
(*This also appeared with slight variations in the Elko
Daily Free Press and the Las Vegas Review Journal)
On April 25th, the Supreme Court will hear arguments
as to whether states can ban the brutal late term D &
X abortion procedure known as “partial birth abortion.”
30 states have done so. The Court should uphold those
laws. Nevada LIFE hopes Nevadans too will soon ban this
horrifying procedure.
What is partial birth abortion? Why are 30 states banning
it? Used in late term abortions, sometimes as late as
32 weeks or more, the abortionist pulls the child feet
first through the birth canal. Since the head is too large
to pass through the cervix, the abortionist holds the
child’s torso, punctures his head, and inserts a
suction tube to remove the child’s brains so the
head can collapse to pass through the cervix in one piece.
Nurse Brenda Pratt Shafer who assisted abortionist Martin
Haskel, testified to Congress about the baby’s reaction.
He "delivered the baby's body and the arms-- everything
but the head. The doctor kept the baby's head just inside
the uterus. The baby's little fingers were clasping and
unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor
stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the
baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction,
like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. The
doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction
tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains out.
Now the baby was completely limp."
This happens thousands of times every year in our country,
even though the Former Surgeon General, and eminent pediatrician
Dr. C. Everett Koop, says it is never medically necessary.
Hundreds of medical experts concur.
Is this what “choice” is about-killing fully
formed babies for reasons that don’t threaten the
mother’s physical health? What kind of justice is
blind to the desperate flailings of a baby boy or girl?
This inhumanity is why the court must uphold this ban.
It is also why Nevadans must follow these 30 states in
banning it too.
Abortion advocates say it’s insulting to say a woman
would have a partial birth abortion for personal reasons.
But partial birth abortionists are the ones who’ve
testified to Congress that almost all partial birth abortions
are a choice, not a necessity. Other “medical”
reasons are so spurious that they can hardly be called
medical. What does depression, or social and financial
probabilities have to do with the “life of the mother?”
The cost of partial birth abortion is more than one life.
Our nation, dedicated to the proposition that all people
are created equal and, by their mere existence, possessing
the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness, has now created a class of people without
rights, the unborn. The violent 20th century warns us
that when one group is denied rights, others will be denied
rights too. Humanity denied anywhere, threatens humanity
everywhere.
Partial birth abortion demonstrates the inhumanity that
people will afflict on others when their rights are stripped.
If we allow the most innocent of our society to be treated
so brutally, what will we allow to others who have become
“burdensome” to families, or society, as unborn
children in the 5th, 6th, 7th,8th and 9th months have
become to certain women? What logic will we use to defend
them?
The Court needs the courage to let states end this barbaric
practice before this inhumanity undermines us all.
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