The right decision on Partial Birth Abortion

The SCOTUS, with Justice Kennedy writing the majority decision, delivered the right decision upholding that Partial Birth Abortion is illegal. I hear the cries of the defenders of "womens rights" but I take issue with how they frame the question. It is not a matter of a woman's right to eliminate an unwanted pregnancy. It is a question of whether a woman's rights extend to a woman's right to kill an unborn child.

From Kennedy's opionion - how this procedure is done and its effect on the unborn child:

Kennedy cites a 1992 presentation by a Dr. Martin Haskell describing the method of "intact D&E" ("dilation and evacuation"):

The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.

The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents.


After quoting this clinical description, Justice Kennedy goes on to relate the eyewitness testimony of a nurse who witnessed the same method performed on a 26-and-a-half-week fetus:

The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.


Kennedy notes that Dr. Haskell's approach is not the only method of "killing" (Kennedy's word) the fetus once its head lodges in the cervix. The procedures have evolved. He recites the gruesome litany of alternative ways of accomplishing the same end. Again, relying on Haskell, Kennedy says:

Another doctor, for example, squeezes the skull after it has been pierced "so that enough brain tissue exudes to allow the head to pass through." [citations omitted] Still other physicians reach into the cervix with their forceps and crush the fetus' skull. [citation omitted] Others continue to pull the fetus out of the woman until it disarticulates at the neck, in effect decapitating it. These doctors then grasp the head with forceps, crush it, and remove it. [citations omitted]


Kennedy provides much more detail, but I will spare you, gentle reader, from the gory details. You get the idea.

This is what the women's rights groups are fighting for? This saddens be beyond words.