Pro-Life

AFA Attorneys Use Novel Approach on Partial-Birth Abortion

E-mail this page to a friend

The AFA Center for Law & Policy (CLP) is developing a new approach to cases involving the controversial procedure known as "partial birth abortion."

The grotesque procedure involves delivering a baby except for its head, inserting scissors into the base of the skull, then vacuuming out the baby's brain. The baby's skull is then crushed, allowing the delivery to be completed.

The CLP has argued in a number of cases that a so-called partial birth abortion is not an abortion at all it is nothing short of infanticide, and therefore falls outside the reach of previous court decisions on abortion.

In establishing this point, AFA attorneys have argued that the personhood of a human being takes place in two stages: the first stage is pregnancy, which begins at conception and ends when the living child begins to exit the uterus; the second stage, birth, or parturition, begins when the living fetus begins to exit the womb.

"Birth is inevitable once the membranes of the amniotic sac are ruptured and the living child begins his emergence from the womb by breaking the plane of the cervical os (the point of the cervix that normally dilates, and separates the womb from the birth canal)," said Steve Crampton, General Counsel for the CLP. "Once this rupture has occurred and the plane has been broken, pregnancy has ceased."

At this point, with pregnancy ended in a medical sense, Crampton said judicial rulings concerning abortion cease to apply. "While the courts may say there is a right to abortion in the womb, there is no right to take the life of a child in the process of being born," he said. "In fact, there are laws on the books that are called parturition statutes, that say you may not take the life of a child in the process of being born."

This is a legal difference noted even by the Supreme Court. "From Roe v. Wade through Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed that a woman has a constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy...," said Crampton. "In no case has the United States Supreme Court ever contemplated, much less held, that the constitutional right to abortion extends to any other stage of child development, including the process of birth."

Crampton said the very nature of partial birth abortions is closer that ever to infanticide. "Abortion is certainly abhorrent to all those who value innocent human life," he said. "But partial birth abortions nudges the nation one step closer to actual and literal infanticide outside the womb."

This novel defense of state laws which ban partial birth abortions is the first of its kind. "AFA attorneys were the first to posit this view," said Crampton, "and we hope that it will ultimately be used to close the door on this awful procedure."