An Arkansas state legislative committee approved a bill to make it the next state to ban a gruesome abortion method called dismemberment abortion. The abortion method tears apart unborn children limb by limb.
A group of state legislators filed a bill called the Arkansas Unborn Child Protection From Dismemberment Abortion Act. The legislation would ban the dilation and evacuation abortion procedure used in the second trimester.
The bill, HB 1032, defines dismemberment abortion as an abortion performed with a specific purpose of causing the death of the unborn child that purposely dismembers the baby and extract the baby’s body one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps forceps or scissors. The legislation would punish abortion practitioners who do that type of abortion once it is against the law and would be subject to a sentence of up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
Here’s more on today’s action:
The bill filed by state Rep. Andy Mayberry, R-Hensley, would create the Arkansas Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion act. Introducing himself as “unabashedly pro-life,” Mayberry defended the legislation in front of the House Public Health, Welfare and Labor Committee on Thursday morning.
The lawmaker, accompanied by Dr. Richard Wyatt, a gynecologist from Little Rock, said he would love someday to present the General Assembly with a proposal that banned abortion outright.
But this bill is not that, Mayberry said. Rather, it prohibits a procedure he described as “barbaric and cruel and savage” that should not be embraced by a “civilized society.”
Wyatt, speaking in support of the bill, said the procedure causes a physician to “pull out the baby’s pieces.”
Laura McQuade, president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said the abortion business would oppose the bill.
Dismemberment abortion, performed on a fully-formed, living unborn baby, is a barbaric and dangerous procedure in which the unborn child is literally ripped apart in the womb and pulled out in pieces. In the abortion procedure, the abortionist is typically using forceps, clamps, scissors or similar instruments on a living unborn baby to remove him or her from the womb in pieces. Such instruments are used in dilation and evacuation procedures.
Those in the abortion trade currently refer to this abortion procedure as “dilation and evacuation” or “dilation and extraction” (D&E) abortions. The method is commonly used starting at about 14 weeks of pregnancy, and extending into the third trimester.
“In a dismemberment abortion, the abortionist uses steel tools and brute force to twist and tear off the arms and legs of a well-developed unborn child. If Hillary Clinton has anything to say about it, this common abortion method will continue unabated,” said Douglas Johnson of National Right to Life in an email to LifeNews.
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“Dismemberment abortion kills a baby by tearing her apart limb from limb,” said former National Right to Life Director of State Legislation Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D. “Before the first trimester ends, the unborn child has a beating heart, brain waves, and every organ system in place. Dismemberment abortions occur after the baby has reached these milestones.”
“No unborn child should be subjected to the brutality of having her arms and legs torn off with steel tools that grasp, tear, and crush,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life.
In his dissent to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 Stenberg v. Carhart decision, Justice Kennedy observed that in D&E dismemberment abortions, “The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.” Justice Kennedy added in the Court’s 2007 opinion, Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the ban on partial-birth abortion, that D&E abortions are “laden with the power to devalue human life…”
