Pro-Life Groups React to Supreme Court Decision on Partial-Birth Abortion 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 19, 2007
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Pro-life groups are elated about yesterday’s Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on partial-birth abortions. The decision was a reversal of a 2000 ruling that overturned a Nebraska ban on the gruesome abortion procedure and invalidated the bans passed in other state legislatures.
The National Right to Life Committee complained that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her allies "blocked this law for 12 years."
"But finally, it is illegal in America to mostly deliver a premature infant before puncturing her skull and removing her brain, which is what a partial-birth abortion is," NRLC’s legislative director Douglas Johnson told LifeNews.com.
Nikolas Nikas, the Bioethics Defense Fund president and general counsel, told LifeNews.com about some of the legal aspects of the court’s decision.
He said it seems to signal the Supreme Court’s rejection of unsupported and speculative facial challenges consistently brought by the abortion industry to strike down reasonable abortion regulations.
That could be good news for state legislation that sometimes runs into roadblocks at the local and appeals court level as attorneys defending the laws now have another strong case to cite to defend them.
Serrin Foster, the president of Feminists for Life, said the court was especially moved this time by testimony during the federal appeals court hearings about the actual method of partial-birth abortion.
“This is a procedure that hurts women,” Foster said. “After three days of intense, forced labor, the doctors stop the delivery, kill the child by stabbing it in the back of the head, drain the baby’s brains, and discard the baby. At the end of this procedure, the woman has an empty womb, empty arms and a hole in her heart.”
Meanwhile, Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia and the head of the pro-life activities for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, applauded the decision.
He welcomed the court’s acknowledgment of key facts, including that "abortion is the taking of a human life, and that government has a legitimate interest in protecting and preserving this life at every stage."
Finally, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, commented on the high court’s ruling.
"After three very dark days for our nation, those who cherish life rejoice in the news that the Supreme Court no longer endorses the senseless killing of innocent, partially-born babies," he said.
"In a week where the effects of violence have been so keenly felt, we applaud the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision today upholding Congress’s statute that ends the bloodshed of the unborn by the horrific partial-birth abortion procedure," he added.
