ON PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION

Two emails from two sides:

Concerning “partial birth abortion,” I agree with the late Senator Pat Moynihan that this is nothing but infanticide. -The fiction being floated that this is done “for the health of the mother” is simply a lie. -I am a physician (full disclosure: -I am not an obstetrician), so I do know something about this. -To perform this procedure, the baby has to to be turned in the uterus from the normal head-first position into a buttocks-first (breech) position which is MORE DANGEROUS FOR THE MOTHER. -What we have here is bunch of “physicians” who concocted this procedure as a way to perform infanticide and get away with it. -The AMA and the American College of Obstetrics have both said that there is no MEDICAL reason for performing this procedure. -Quite frankly, I do not know how the people who do this stuff can live with themselves. I am in the pro-life camp, but one can be pro-choice and yet be against this barbaric fraud. -Several pro-choice people, to their credit, have been intellectually and morally honest enough to speak out against “partial birth abortion.”

Then there’s this:

Let me tell you a little story about a very common birth defect. Like a Downs Syndrome fetus it occurs when there are three chromosomes. In this case the fetus has three of the thirteenth chromosomes, Trisomy 13. The fetus develops massive multiple organ failures. Sometimes the organs develop outside the body cavity. In many cases the fetus will demise in utero and spontaneously abort. Other times the fetus is carried full term, delivered and dies on the mother’s stomach. Ever see a heart pumping outside of the chest cavity, Andrew?
Until you have sat in hospital room with a mother as she is told that she is carrying a Trisomy 13 fetus, that has no chance of surviving outside the womb. And that she will have to continue to carry that fetus for three more months because the legal date of termination of the pregnancy has passed, you have no right to call late term abortions infanticide.

I reprint. You decide. Or something like that.