Lofland bLOG

The supreme court finally upheld the ban on “partial birth abortion” or rather, as it is correctly known: intact dilation and extraction.

Sounds like a huge win, right?

Maybe, or is it really just more right wing spin stupidity?

Here is my understanding: This does NOT stop abortions at any point. What it does is simply legislate a procedure. Instead of intact dilation and extraction, where they kill the little guy and pull him out whole, they must use “dilation and evacuation” where they kill him, then chop him up into little pieces first and then pull him out.

So, who wins? Nobody.

Maybe I am completely misunderstanding this, but it seems like they are just banning a specific procedure because it sounds bad, and thus requiring the use of another procedure that doesn’t have an inflammatory name (not a real name, but one put on it by protesters) like “partial birth” with no net reduction in abortions.

Actually, to add to the bazaar nature of this, I don’t think the law even mentions the procedure, but rather uses the words “partial birth” which is, well, not a medical term. So it seems up to a judge, somewhere, some day (soon I am sure) to set up case law to decide what “partial birth” means.

The use of spin terms, instead of medical terms in this law makes this whole thing that much more suspicious. It sounds like they just want to be able to put “passed the partial birth abortion ban” on their resume, even though the bill ranges from meaningless to dangerous.

Here is an article that goes into some of it, although it leaves a lot of questions unanswered and seems to start out with a bias in favor of abortion, although, again, it is hard to tell if they are in favor of abortion, or just against silly legislation:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5168163

I am interested in other views or corrections, but please, include citations. We can “talk” about it all day long, but this isn’t an opinion, there are facts there somewhere, if we can just unearth them from beneath all of the spin.

P.S. You may NOT cite anything from anyone associatd with Pat Robertson, or his ministries. I am afraid he lacks credibility.
Posted 4/18/2007 3:14 PM

2 Comments:

Interesting… didn’t think about it in those terms… To reply to your statement on my page, what about this: “Without repentance there can be no forgiveness…” Repentance requires an understanding of sin, and forgiveness is requisite to salvation (since we must be perfect… grace through faith). If there is no forgiveness, there is no salvation, and without repentance there cannot be forgiveness, and so it leads us inexorably to the final conclusion that without the understanding of sin there cannot be repentance, hence no forgiveness, hence no salvific state… Jesus told a parable about two men who were both forgiven their debts: One only owed $20 or so, while the other owed hundreds of thousands. Who would LOVE the one who forgave them more? The answer: the one who knew that he had the massive debt. The love comes from the understanding that they were forgiven of massive sin… It does not usually, unfortunately, come of its own accord, leading to repentance. Even so, the concept of sin is still understood by the feldgling believer. Two more cents in your direction. L8ers.
Posted 4/19/2007 5:53 PM by NathanKing

Ok, I read the NPR article, and from what I can tell a small battle has been won- however small. It does not stop abortions but it limits the inhumaniy in the abortion. Here’s what the article said:

[the bill] prohibits doctors from knowingly performing a “partial-birth abortion,” a procedure it defines as one in which the person performing the abortion “deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”

In other words they can NOT deliver the baby, alive, then kill it by puncturing it’s head (D&X). This is terrible and I am glad they aren’t allowed to do it any more.

So I’m guessing that this new laws implication is that the child must be killed while it is still inside the woumb (correct me if I’m wrong). The fact that this is legal at all is horrific, and I’m sure they could do just as much harm to a child in the woumb as they do out of it, but in some sense, I still feel like the law has limited the amount of brutality allowed. Also, because of the risk of lacerating the cervix there is a chance that some women would not have abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Even if this only saves a few, it’s something.

I think the bigest sign that this law does have some positive influence is the fact that pro-abortion lobiests are upset about it. As the article says:

“Abortion-rights backers say the ban is a first step toward trying to outlaw all abortions. Even some supporters of the ban say that if it is upheld, they could then move on to try to outlaw the far more common D&E procedure, whose description is nearly as unpleasant as that of the D&X.”

This is exactly what we want. Let’s pray that by God’s mercy, it will be the case.”

“Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.” (Ecclesiastes 3:16) But I still believe that we should rejoice in any small steps that Justice can take in a world ever more given to sin.

“I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work.” (Ecclesiastes 3:17)
Posted 4/24/2007 1:20 PM by Tegwenava