HT: LTI Blog
Partial-birth abortions, the court reasoned, could be banned because they occur outside the woman's body. Other abortions need not be outlawed, since the womb conceals them.
It's not about concealment. It's about maintaining the fiction that abortion is about "controlling" the woman's body, rather than about killing a fetus. Once the fetus is 3/4 of the way out, past the shoulders, it's clear that stopping to kill it -- when it could, after all, be delivered live -- is purely done to achieve its death. PBA destroys the illusion that abortion merely intends to end a pregnancy.
"[T]he notion that either of these two equally gruesome procedures … is more akin to infanticide than the other, or that the State furthers any legitimate interest by banning one but not the other, is simply irrational," [Ginsburg] wrote.
On the one hand, she's right. The fetus is just as dead either way. And, frankly, I'd rather be stabbed in the skull and have my brains quickly sucked out than be dismembered and disemboweled, unanesthetized. But on the other hand, she misses the point -- Killing the fetus while still in the womb maintains the illusion that it's only the pregnancy, rather than the life of the fetus, that abortion is intended to end. By stopping three quarters of the way through an induced breach delivery to kill the fetus, both the mother and the doctor make it 100% clear and indisputable that the death of the fetus is the goal, since the pregnancy would be just as "terminated" with a live baby in the NICU.
Pro-lifers are often caricatured as stupid creationists who just want to put women back in their place. Science and free inquiry are supposed to help them get over their "love affair with the fetus." But science hasn't cooperated. Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.
As you ought to be.
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