Supreme Court Brief in Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Case Says Childbirth Safer 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 4, 2006
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A pro-life law firm has filed a brief with the Supreme Court in the case concerning the Congressional-approved ban on partial-birth abortions. The American Center for Law and Justice told the court to reject the argument made by abortion advocates that abortion is safer than childbirth.
After President Bush signed the partial-birth abortion ban, pro-abortion groups launched three lawsuits against it and federal appeals courts in Nebraska, New York and California declared the ban unconstitutional.
The ACLJ has already filed a brief in the Nebraska case and submitted papers in the California case on Thursday.
“Yet again we see the proponents of abortion making the false assertion that abortion is actually safer than childbirth,” said Jay Sekulow, the ACLJ’s chief counsel.
“That assertion is not only inaccurate but in fact is the reverse of the truth, which is that abortion is more dangerous than childbirth. Our brief, with careful documentation, explodes the myth of abortion as safer than childbirth," Sekulow explained.
The legal papers are important because the Supreme Court rejected a state ban on partial-birth abortions in a 2000 case and said the ban needed a health exception in cases when a partial-birth abortion is necessary to protect the woman’s health.
However, numerous doctors groups have said that the three-day long abortion procedure is never necessary to protect the health of the mother or in an emergency situation and specialists testified to that during the lower court trials.
The ACLJ brief explains that the comparison of maternal mortality and abortion mortality statistics is akin to mixing apples and oranges and cannot be compared one-to-one. Further, the brief asserts the comparison is invalid because the data itself is inaccurate and incomplete.
The brief also cites numerous published research studies – in this country and abroad – as evidence that “strongly indicates that abortion, rather than being safer than childbirth, is in fact more dangerous.”
“In sum, there is ample reason to believe that abortion is detrimental to maternal health and, if anything, more likely to lead to death or other adverse consequences than is continuing the pregnancy," the brief argues.
"This Court should take with a very large grain of salt any assertion that abortion is healthy for women, much less some sort of panacea. There is good reason to believe precisely the contrary," it said.
In the Nebraska case, the ACLJ filed an amicus brief with the high court representing some 80 members of Congress and more than 320,000 Americans asking the high court to uphold the ban.
The California case is Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the high court will likely combine the cases into one. The Nebraska case is Gonzales v. Carhart.
The high court is expected to hold hearings this fall and announce a decision in early 2007.
Related web sites:
American Center for Law and Justice – https://www.aclj.org
