If you’re receiving this by e-mail, know that it first appeared in print in the May 6 National Catholic Register and is available at ncRegister.com. It is part of a series of articles about a Supreme Court decision that, with your help, could mean a major change in America.

This e-mail will present no ideology, show no partisan preference, and make no religious-based argument. It will simply quote the Supreme Court’s Gonzales v. Carhart decision, including the words of a doctor and a nurse.

But it will be difficult to read. In fact, we would never dream of printing it at all if we weren’t profoundly aware that we are at a turning point in history.

Many years ago, Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book Uncle Tom’s Cabin had presented a mass audience with the horrors of slavery. He said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great, great war!”

Before her book, the only decent thing to do in polite society was to ignore slavery. After her book, ignoring slavery became indecent.

She exposed the evils of slavery at time when America was ready to confront it, and America did.

Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about another civil war today. But we do think that America is ready to confront an ugly practice going on in our own day — even if it’s difficult to read about.

Here is a true description of the practice in the Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy in its recent case Gonzales v. Carhart.

The court quotes Dr. Kevin Haskell: “If I know I have good dilation … I reach in and the fetus starts to come out,” he said, speaking about late-term unborn babies, babies at the age when so many of us have seen their faces for the first time on ultrasounds. “At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and ‘hooks’ the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down).

“While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. … [T]he surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening. The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.

After concluding the doctor’s quote, the court’s opinion continues: “This is an abortion doctor’s clinical description,” it says. “Here is another description from a nurse who witnessed the same method performed on a 26-week fetus and who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

“‘Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms — everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus. … The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.

“‘The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. ... He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.’”

That’s the court’s description of “intact D&E,” or “partial-birth abortion.” Congress banned it, and the Supreme Court upheld the ban — though some politicians want to insure it stays legal.

But that’s not all the Supreme Court described. It also described the regular D&E procedure — a procedure that has not been banned, but which is perfectly legal to perform on healthy babies in all 50 states, throughout all nine months of pregnancy.

Here is another quote from the Supreme Court’s new Gonzales v. Carhart decision.

In the even more common D&E procedure, “The doctor, often guided by ultrasound, inserts grasping forceps through the woman’s cervix and into the uterus to grab the fetus,” says the decision. “The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it back through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even after meeting resistance from the cervix. The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman. The process of evacuating the fetus piece by piece continues until it has been completely removed.”

Let’s hope that our representatives in Congress will ban this one, next.