Court transcripts should not make you sick. But the transcripts of the partial-birth abortion trials now under way are almost too much to bear.

They should be required reading for every politician who voted to keep this procedure legal.

As soon as President Bush signed the new law, Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation and the American Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuits in three federal courts claiming the ban takes away a fundamental constitutional right. A parade of abortion doctors has climbed onto the witness stand in the last few weeks to describe how they kill children in the fifth and sixth months of pregnancy. Their testimony is dispassionate, clinical and frank.

“It is necessary to insert our forceps, open them as wide as possible to try to capture the head within the opening of the forceps and then crush the head using external force applied against the head,” said Dr. Carolyn Westoff in the New York trial. She admitted there is “usually a heartbeat” when she performs a partial-birth abortion and that even when she collapses the skull, the baby is still “living.”

She spoke of the baby's “tiny face and a relatively large head” and how stabbing the head with scissors or her own finger causes it to look “a little wrinkly and collapsed, but the facial structures are not disturbed at all by that procedure.” She testified about the “small coffins” and the “little hats” available to “cover the back of the head where the incision had been made.”

Dr. William Knorr told the Nebraska court that “if I have enough room to slip a finger between the cervix and the fetal head … I can then insert my crushing forcep around the head, crush the head and extract it. If the cervix is very tight, I can't do that, I will use a craniotomy procedure, will turn the fetus so the back is up and find the area that I want to open and either with a finger, dilator or a scissor will open that area and gently pull down. That pressure alone is enough to empty the cranium and extract the head.”

Another witness in the Nebraska trial told the judge, “I just pull down with the forceps and, you know, see what part you have, and see if you can get more of that part out. If you get more of the part out, you twist to try to get more tissue out. If that doesn't happen, then you pull hard enough that it will disarticulate at that point or break off at that point.” Dr. William Fitzhugh's only worry was delivering a live baby: “The one thing that … I don't want the staff to have to deal with is to have a fetus that you remove and have some viability to it, some movement of limbs, because it's always a difficult situation.”

They appear to have become detached from their own humanity as they recount what they have done and continue to do to little human beings. Emotion returns only when the question of fetal pain comes up, and the emotion is anger for having been asked the question in the first place.

Judge Richard Casey in New York asked Dr. Mari-lynn Fredriksen what she tells her patients: “Do you tell them whether or not it hurts?” he asked.

She stuttered, “Who am I — what am I …” “The patient,” Casey continued, “The woman, the mother.”

“It doesn't hurt her, no,” Fredriksen said.

Casey pressed on. “Do you tell whether or not it will hurt the fetus?”

Her response: “The intent [is] that the fetus will die during the process of uterine evacuation.”

“Ma'am, I didn't ask you that,” Casey persisted. “You will deliver the baby partially and then insert a pair of scissors in the base of the fetus' skull … Do you tell them whether or not that hurts the fetus?”

In response, Fredriksen snapped, “I have never talked to a fetus about whether or not they experience pain.”

A pain specialist in the California trial, Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, said “there will be pain caused to the fetus. And I believe it will be severe and excruciating pain.”

The “pro-choice” movement and its friends in Congress and Hollywood have been sounding off about new threats against “choice” — chief among them, according to their literature, is this ban on partial-birth abortion. But as these political activists promote the abstract notion of “choice,” abortion doctors in courtrooms coast to coast are explaining just what that word means.

“Pro-choicers” might speak in apocalyptic terms about this modest restriction on abortion — the first since Roe v. Wade — but the abortion doctors on the witness stand are more blunt and candid.

Westoff told the court she doesn't like the new law because “I mean, I know what my purpose is … to empty the uterus in the safest way possible. Yet this language implies that I have this other purpose, which is to kill the fetus. So, to me, it's like — kind of like there is an elephant in the room besides me and my patient … there is somebody judging what my purpose is in bringing the fetus out a certain way.”

Oh yes, doctor, you are quite right. Someone else is in the room. And someone is judging you.

The fervor to win a legal prize seems to have blinded the abortion lobby to the impact this testimony will have in the court of public opinion. As they make admission after admission, under oath, a permanent public record is built of the holocaust of abortion. From this day forward, Americans will judge abortion by its chief proponents — in their own words.

Cathleen Cleaver Ruse is director for planning and information at the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.