Supreme Court Upholds Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act

Today, the United States Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision upheld the federal ban on partial-birth abortions. It has taken 13 years to get to this point.

In the early 1990s, a paper was presented at a conference of abortionists by Martin Haskell, an Ohio abortionist who was one of the developers of the partial-birth abortion. In this paper, Haskell described the technique in full detail.

In 1995, members of the new Republican Congress (most notably Congressman Charles Canady of Florida) began work on introducing legislation that would ban the procedure. The National Right to Life Committee, where I worked for 10 years (from 1994-2004), was the leading force in working to pass the ban.

A hearty thank you goes to Douglas Johnson, NRLC's federal legislative director. Mr. Johnson spent thousands of hours crafting op-eds, position papers and letters to members of Congress as well as sending countless corrections to the news media. He and his staff lobbied unceasingly for passage of the legislation and worked to help other states pass similar bans.

It has been a long time coming but this brutal procedure that bordered on infanticide is now banned.