How Do Unborn Child-Dismemberment Laws Change the Abortion Landscape?

Pro-lifers hope legislation pushes Supreme Court a step closer to dismantling Roe v. Wade.

(photo: Petr Kratochvil/ CNA)

TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback this week made his state the first to have a law prohibiting a type of abortion referred to as dismemberment abortion — a law that promoters say is key to educating the public about what abortion really is.

Brownback signed the Unborn Child Protection From Dismemberment Abortion Act on Tuesday, and just a day later, the same act passed through the Oklahoma Senate, meaning it is now headed for an expected signature in that state from Gov. Mary Fallin.

The model legislation provided by National Right to Life is also under consideration in the legislatures of Missouri and South Carolina.

The act will affect a significant number of abortions in Kansas, where its three abortion facilities all offer this type of abortion. Records released April 1 by the Kansas Health and Environment Department show that in 2014 the method was used in 637 abortions, or 8.8% of the total 7,263 Kansas abortions reported.

But in addition to halting or at least shifting the type of abortions performed, the law is designed to create awareness, both for those who declare themselves pro-life and those who don’t.

“Passage of a law banning dismemberment abortions allows for a debate about the reality of abortion to take place and focuses the discussion on the unborn child, who is most often forgotten when the issue of abortion comes up,” explained Mary Spaulding Balch, director of the Department of State Legislation at the National Right to Life Committee.

“Most people do not realize that it is legal to dismember a living unborn child,” she told the Register. “This is something people need to know and understand. This bill allows for this discussion and, thus, has the power to transform the landscape of U.S. abortion policy.”

Kathy Ostrowski, legislative director of Kansans for Life, also emphasized the educational benefits of the act.

“We’re trying to help the people who aren’t with the program, who are on the edges, who haven’t thought about it,” she said. “[...] Obviously true believers understand it’s immoral to kill another human being no matter what the rationale would be, but the problem is that we’re in kind of a post-Christian society, and we’re still trying to bring people into the fold.”

Michael Schuttloffel, executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference, told Catholic News Agency that the abortion debate has become “disconnected from the reality of abortion,” and legislation like the Kansas law can “help shock people out of complacency.” 

He said that even many pro-life Kansans couldn’t believe the procedure was happening in their state.

“When it comes to this particular kind of abortion, people needed to hear exactly what was being done: Second-trimester babies, we’re talking three, four, five months along in pregnancy, were being torn apart, limb from limb,” Schuttloffel said. “There’s evidence that suggests the unborn child feels pain at that point. It’s just horrific.”

 

Court Invitation

The language of the law is very specific and designed to hold up to court challenges, following the precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2007 to uphold the ban on partial-birth abortion. 

In fact, according to Ostrowski, the Supreme Court itself is “waving us in” on a law such as this.

She told the Register that the strategy involves “trying to teach enough so that we gravitate toward and enact bills that have a real chance of permeating those hurdles that the Supreme Court has set up. ... The ban of dismemberment abortion, carefully defined, very much parallels what happened with ... partial-birth abortion.”

The Supreme Court considered partial-birth abortion twice, once in 2000, striking down a state ban, and then again in 2007, after Congress finally enacted a ban. (President Bill Clinton vetoed two measures passed in the mid-1990s.) In contrast with the 2000 decision, in 2007, the court upheld the ban.

Ostrowski explained that in that decision the justices affirmed that states have a compelling interest in protecting the integrity of the medical profession and showing respect for the developing unborn child and that partial-birth abortion was rightfully banned due to those two concerns.

“With that backdrop,” she said, “this [dismemberment ban] is one of those intermediary hurdles that we’re going to try to conquer, and we’re being waved in by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“Justice [Anthony] Kennedy said ... you have to tell people what’s happening to make good public policy,” Ostrowski noted. “And in Stenberg [the 2000 case], he complained that they were using these pro-abortionist terms, like ‘transcervical,’ which means something happening in the birth canal, or disarticulation, which means breaking a limb off a baby, and ‘paracervical.’ ... When you use these terms it obfuscates what’s happening. The reason people got outraged is: When they actually saw ... a medical illustration that was accurate and proportional of a partial-birth abortion, it changed minds and hearts.”

A similar diagram was used in the process of passing the Kansas law on dismemberment.

“The ultimate goal, of course, is a pro-life society, where abortion is not just illegal, it’s unthinkable. That’s our goal. How do you get there? You have these litigation hurdles you have to navigate. Then you have some educational and cultural things to bring people into the fold,” Ostrowski said.

The Kansans for Life official said the ban on partial-birth abortion and its aftereffects is “very instructive,” adding that it helped to bring about a 10% drop in abortions.

“The educational campaign is absolutely important,” she said. “[...] Even our own pro-life people didn’t realize that we were dismembering a living baby inside the mom.”

 

March of Science

Ostrowski suggested that such an education campaign highlights the fact that the progress of science increasingly places the medical and media community in a type of schizophrenia, on the one hand treating the unborn as persons who receive top-notch medical care or who must be protected from, say, smoking; and on the other hand allowing them to be dismembered.

Thus the Kansas law “helps move us toward the day when the conflict between this phony decision [the Supreme Court] came up with in Roe and the real-life practice of medicine in our culture finally hits an impasse,” she said. “They can’t keep stretching Roe in different ways. It’s going to break.”

“In the time of Roe, there were really no ultrasounds, just the beginning of ultrasound. There were no NICU units; there was no fetal anesthesiology; there was no fetal surgery,” said Ostrowski, contrasting the 1970s medical landscape with the vast possibilities in obstetrics and neonatal medicine in 2015.

“So we’re very confident that we’re [making] a good and productive legislative step forward here. Will the [court] take this up? We hope they will. Will they go back on what they said eight years ago? [...]

“What we’re trying to do is get them to the place where they take a bill and they finally say, ‘Enough is enough. We can’t uphold the essential holdings of Roe.’ See, every time they rule, the nine justices, every time they have an abortion case, they always say, ‘We reaffirm the essential holdings of Roe, but’ — and then they do something.”

Added Ostrowski, “We want to get to the day where they have [a] case in front of them and say, ‘We’re overturning the essential holdings of Roe.’”

 

Kathleen Naab writes from Houston, where she covers news

of the Church as a coordinator of Zenit News Service.