Abortion foes appear to be testing their new line of attack at the state level. Tara Culp-Ressler has
the details.
Several pieces of similar legislation emerging on a state level could be the beginning of a national trend. The measures are cloaked in emotional language about “fetal dismemberment” that’s reminiscent of the pro-life community’s successful push to enact the country’s first national abortion ban.
The first bill to use “dismemberment” language was introduced in South Dakota last year. Seeking to “prohibit the dismemberment or decapitation of certain living unborn children,” the measure was just a few paragraphs long and didn’t make it out of committee.
This year, similar bills have now surfaced in Oklahoma and Kansas, each of them called the “Unborn Child Protection From Dismemberment Abortion Act.” They’re identical and far more graphic in their description of "dismemberment abortion."
The term apparently refers to “knowingly dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.”
Unsurprisingly, these bills are not based in scientific fact, nor can they be properly interpreted by the medical field.
“The language is so vague that this would be impossible to enforce,” Dr. David Grimes, a clinical professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and an abortion provider who has been practicing for four decades, told ThinkProgress. “It reveals a lack of knowledge of the procedures that the bill proposes to outlaw.”
But reproductive rights advocates fear the new tactic resembles a replay of anti-abortion attacks on so-called “partial birth abortions” in the ‘90s, which resulted in bans passing in
more than 30 states. Those bans
were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2000, but in 2003 Congress passed the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. That law met challenges from abortion advocates but in 2007 the Supreme Court upheld the federal ban in
Gonzales v. Carhart.
The ruling was significant because the high court declared the federal statute to be constitutional even though it does not contain an explicit exception in cases in which a woman’s health is in danger. This was a significant departure from earlier abortion rulings, including the Stenberg decision, which require that laws restricting abortion include such a health provision.