Ending Piecemeal Abortion – State By State

A thought experiment.  Imagine a woman falling asleep in 1955—the year the “The Mickey Mouse Club” debuted—and waking in April 2015 to hear the reply of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fl.) to Rand Paul’s question: “Is it okay to kill a 7-Pound Baby in the uterus?”  Schultz’ reply: “I support letting women and their doctors make this decision without government getting involved.  Period.  End of story.”  The groggy woman would ask, “But surely no ‘women or their doctors’ would ever support such a thing?”  Those around her would reply, “Where ya been, honey?  It’s the procedure of choice for legal abortions past 12 weeks.” “What?” she’d say, “Abortions are legal?!”  And so on.  For her, Schultz’ remark would elicit confusion, disbelief, and horror.  For those of us who have grown up under the odious Roe years, it is a familiar reminder of the moral pits into which humans are capable of sinking.

Ms. Schultz was no doubt unsettled by the news of the past two weeks from Kansas and Oklahoma.  On April 7 and April 13, Governors Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma signed into state law respective bills known as the “Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act,” criminally prohibiting the gruesome Dilation and Evacuation (D & E) abortion procedure.

The D & E, called in the legislation “dismemberment abortion,” is the most common procedure for second trimester abortions, which number about 10% (or 100,000) of the one million abortions performed annually in the U.S.  At this stage of development, children have a beating heart, their own blood types, distinct fingerprints, even little eyelids, toes and fingernails.  They can grimace, swim and grasp objects.  Since dismemberment abortions are never medically necessary to save the life of the mother in acute medical emergencies, they are performed for only one reason.

The D & E begins with cervical dilation using either an osmotic dilator or the drug misoprostol.  An osmotic dilator is a thin rod made of seaweed or synthetic materials.  When inserted into the cervix, it absorbs moisture from the surrounding tissues and swells, thus expanding the cervix.  Misoprostol, taken in tablets, are prostaglandins that soften the cervix making it easier to penetrate with abortion tools.

When the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the doctor inserts a pair of grasping clamps through the birth canal into the uterus, clasps onto a piece of the fetus’ lower body, and pulls it back out through the cervix and vagina; the delicate fetal body easily rips apart.  The soft and serene world of the womb explodes for the fetus into a chaotic hell as again and again the doctor enters the sacred domicile with the deadly instrument, removing first legs, then torso, then arms, and finally the head (crushing it with his grip so it can fit through the dilated canal).  Then in a grotesque exercise of quality control reminiscent of an adult Sid Phillips (from Toy Story) playing with a macabre erector set, the doctor reassembles the fetal body parts to guarantee that all limbs and tissues were “safely” removed.

In a startling endorsement of the D & E, New York City-based abortionist Kathleen Morrell praised the dismemberment procedure saying, “my [second trimester] patients overwhelmingly choose D and E.  They are able to be asleep and comfortable for the procedure and then can go home to their own beds at night.”  Fifty bucks says they don’t sleep that night.

In another attempt to explain away the “unpleasant” details, a disgruntled LA Times editorialist recently opined:

The fact is, lots of surgical procedures sound horrific; most are intensely invasive and unpleasant to describe.  [Really?  Which ones?]  In this case, the ‘dismemberment’ is being done to fetuses that are not viable outside the womb and that scientists agree cannot feel pain.  (Don’t be fooled by the unscientific claims of some anti-abortion groups that they can.)

Wish though we might that the writer’s claims were true, no such scientific consensus exists.  On the contrary, the research I’ve done tells me that a majority of disinterested scientists agree that fetuses can experience pain of the most exquisite sort by the middle of the second trimester.

The National Right to Life model legislation adopted in Kansas and Oklahoma enacts that doctors who “knowingly” dismember a “living unborn child” and extract “such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus” will be subject to a misdemeanor on the first offense, and a felony for subsequent violations.  The legislation makes no exception for rape or incest, only to preserve a woman’s life or prevent irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.  According to the New York Times, similar bills have been proposed in Missouri, South Carolina and South Dakota.

Pray to the good God that the momentum continues.