U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton of San Francisco was right to declare the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act—signed last year by President Bush—unconstitutional. Such a ban constitutes a grave threat to women's health and a violation of their rights and should be struck down.
When abortion was illegal in America, many women died or suffered serious medical problems from either self-induced or illegal "back-alley" abortions. Women streamed into emergency rooms with punctured wombs, massive bleeding, and rampant infections.
Thanks to the Roe v. Wade (1973) Supreme Court decision, women today have access to safe abortions by medically trained professionals under sanitary conditions. But anti- abortionists are changing all this.
A law banning "partial-birth" abortions establishes a precedent for criminalizing other types of abortion—as America slides down the dangerous slope to "back-alley" abortions. Those who are truly pro-life must grasp the ominous implications of and underlying motives behind such anti-abortion laws—before it's too late.
Intact dilation and extraction (D&X), most commonly known as "partial-birth" abortion, is designed primarily to be used in the case of 5- and 6-month-old fetuses that are dying, malformed, or threatening the woman's health or life. The procedure involves pulling the fetus from the womb, except for the head which is too large to pass without injuring the woman. The head is then collapsed to allow removal. This procedure is designed for the maximum protection of the woman. The late-term alternative to D&X, one that doesn't require partial removal, involves dismembering the fetus in the womb before extraction—a much riskier procedure.
Anti-abortionists coined the term "partial birth" to suggest that the partially removed fetus is no longer "unborn," and, therefore, Roe vs. Wade no longer applies (so they allege). But linguistic manipulation can't create an essential distinction when none exists. A woman has a right to her own body, and, if she chooses to abort, then all effort should be made to protect the woman from injury. To rule otherwise is to negate this right.
Banning any type of abortion to "protect the fetus" necessarily grants rights to the fetus—an utter perversion of individual rights. If a woman has no right to her own body, then by what logic does a fetus (which, by definition, is a biological parasite) have a right to the woman's body? Properly, an infant's rights begin after the fetus is removed from the mother's body.
It is a woman's individual rights—to her life, to her liberty, and to the pursuit of her happiness—that
sanction her right to have an abortion. Once "fetal rights" are granted to one stage of the pregnancy, nothing will prevent their extension to all stages. "Fetal rights" are a gimmick to destroy a woman's individual rights.
Next page in this article
1 | 2
