I thought this issue was dead, pardon the pun.

The January issue of Vogue magazine features a story about Lori Campbell, modeling partial birth abortion chic.

I won't be picking up the magazine, but according to JivinJehoshaphat, Campbell says she got a pba in 1998 at 22 weeks gestation due to incompetent cervix and ruptured bag of waters.

Lots of holes in the story (to match the hole in her baby's head?), but whatever. Lori looks fabulous.

UPDATE, 1/11, 11a: Stanek proofreader Angela has alerted me that Lifesitenews.com includes excerpts of the Vogue story. Angela also noted it is strangely juxtopositioned against the cover story on Angelina and her happy adoptions.]

Pro-lifers have had numerous heated exchanges on this blog and in print and radio about the Supreme Court's Partial-Birth Abortion Ban decision, lifting the lid on familial differences of opinion on how to win the war against abortion. Accusations by pro-lifers against the ban are still quite fierce. You can catch up on the conversation by scanning blog posts here.

As one of those called "duped" by the ban, Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life has weighed in with his thoughts on his blog, where you can read why he thinks the ban is good.

As for the in-fighting, Pavone noted some pro-lifers will always complain:

This important victory has also taught us how our movement handles victory. Some segments of our movement have been bitterly divided in the wake of this decision. Some groups have complained about how other groups have exaggerated the significance of the decision. Some leaders have warned that because no state can legitimize even a single abortion, it is quite wrong to be happy about a decision that still leaves abortion legal, with just the slightest modifications needed in a single procedure.

Of course, even when Roe vs. Wade is reversed and the legality of abortion is determined state by state, the same argument will be made. Abortion will still be legal in most places, and one will still have to say that no state can legitimize even a single abortion. But to fail to see at that moment that progress will have been made will be as much of a mistake as it is to fail to see the progress made now. In short, we should never exaggerate our progress, and neither should we fail to recognize it.

[Hat tip: Reader Carder]

Pro-lifers opposing the Partial Birth Abortion Ban say it will force abortionists to commit more torturous abortions, and this may be true.

Whereas the PBA Ban prohibits breech abortions of babies delivered past the navel and head-first abortions of babies delivered past the chin, some pro-lifers say abortionists will now simply deliver a baby's legs and rip them off before proceeding, or deliver the baby almost to the navel and disembowel the baby, etc..

However, the very pro-lifers making this argument oppose fetal pain legislation, so their argument is disengenuous. Stated Brian Rohrbaugh, president of Colorado Right to Life, in an interview

[O]ur position, as a board, is that we will never support any law that ends with "and then you can kill the baby." That includes every type of law that would regulate abortion. So anything that allows for the abortion after you meet these certain conditions is inherently evil. It goes against God's command of Thou Shalt Not Murder.

We took that position on the Informed [Fetal] Pain Consent... bill.... What was wrong with that bill is it's very good to warn women that their child is going to suffer intense pain. But its evil to offer a solution and then to allow the abortion to continue, so if that bill would of just said, "You must notify women if they have an abortion, their baby is going to be tormented and tortured to death," we would not have opposed the law.

But when you offer a solution you make abortion more humane, more palatable, you ease the conscience of society and of the mother and you undoubtedly will increase abortion by doing so.

I can only call it ruthless to purposefully withhold pain relief from someone you know is about to be tortured to death, which you can't stop.

Even the Roman soldiers killing Jesus demonstrated some semblance of compassion by offering Him wine vinegar.

And to say offering fetal pain relief would "undoubtedly... increase abortion" is 180 degrees wrong, IMO. Rather, how many mothers would stop their abortions if their abortionist were mandated to offer pain relief for the baby they were about to kill?

Bottom line: Don't complain about the torturous side effects of the PBA Ban if you don't support fetal pain legislation.

[Photo is of premature baby. Doctors now routinely provide pain relief to preemies born the same age as those aborted.]

I said two nights ago I would post how the Partial Birth Abortion Ban helped the pro-life cause.

I wrote in 2003 it helped by converting Americans to the culture of life. I realize this is just theory, but here are reputable national polls dating back to when PBA was first nationally discussed in 1995:

[Polls moved to page 2]

Although a couple specific conclusions differ, long-term polls clearly show an American opinion shift on abortion. Was it due to the PBA revelations? I think so, at least in part.

On to specifics....

Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family made two sound points in a June 7 column:

But when the Supreme Court handed down Carhart [PBA decision]... the court majority signaled that the special deal for abortion cases was coming to an end. The language in the opinion made it clear that from now on it will be nearly impossible for abortionists to run to federal court to block an abortion law before the ink is dry, in a facial challenge.

With this latest abortion decision, it looks like the Supreme Court is establishing a new paradigm for abortion cases. Although the lower federal courts in California and Nebraska had struck down the 2003 federal PBA ban via the typical "facial" challenge, the Supreme Court opinion held that "these facial attacks should not have been entertained in the first instance." Only "as-applied" challenges should be entertained in the future in such cases, wrote Justice Kennedy in the majority opinion. That means abortion laws can only be challenged as to specific, actual situations that may come up – and if exceptions need to be judicially carved out of the law to solve those rare problems, the bulk of the law remains intact.

Undoubtedly, the Carhart decision will breathe new life into the passage of abortion-limiting laws around the country. And when those new laws are passed, they'll stay on the books and they'll be enforced, and lives will be saved because of Carhart....

Carhart was significant for yet another reason. The court acknowledged for the first time since 1973 that an abortion procedure could be prohibited because of "ethical and moral concerns," including the observation that "some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained."

By accepting and defending Congress's right to base an abortion law on moral concerns, the Court punctured the hot air balloon that has carried the abortionists' lie since 1973 – that a preborn baby is a blob of tissue that the mother needn't think about in human terms.... Pro-lifers have been waiting a long time to hear such moral concerns validated in a Supreme Court opinion.

Dan McConchie of Americans United for Life listed what pro-lifers got from the PBA decision in a speech I recently attended, some overlapping Minnery's points:

Restored guidelines from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is deferential to state legislation

Reinforced importance of informed consent. Kennedy wrote something unprecedented in a Supreme Court decision:

The State has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed. It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.

Narrowed the unlimited health exception from Doe. v. Bolton, which created a wide health definition. In the pba decision, the Court stated it now has to be of a substantial nature

Implied the Court will not support human cloning.

I wrote on April 30 about dissent among pro-lifers whether the Partial Birth Abortion Ban is a good thing.

Pro-life hardliners believe to support legislation limiting abortion is to sanction the rest. Hardliners believe the solution to abortion is for all pro-lifers to work together to pass a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution.

I heard Daniel McConchie, VP and Exec. Dir. of Americans United for Life, speak on this topic last week, and he gave me permission for me to post these points....

What does the Supreme Court's April 18 pba decision do that is good and bad?

What did we get from the decision?

Restored guidelines from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is deferential to state legislation

Reinforced importance of informed consent. Kennedy wrote something unprecedented in a Supreme Court decision:

The State has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed. It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.

Narrowed the unlimited health exception from Doe. v. Bolton, which created a wide health definition. In the pba decision, the Court stated it now has to be of a substantial nature

Implied the Court will not support human cloning.

What did we not get?

A change of heart in Kennedy - still have 5 votes for Roe

An overturning of previous Supreme Court decision such as Stenberg v. Carhart

An opinion that undermined the central holding that abortion is right

An open door fur future federal legislation for the other side: Thomas stated, "I also note exercise of Congress' power under the Commerce Clause is not before the court. The parties did not raise or brief that issue; it is outside the question presented; and the lower courts did not address it." Thomas seemed leery of the way commerce clause was used in this and gives opening to other side. For additional insights on this point, read this April 30 LegalTimes.com article.

What's next in legislation?

Mostly state legislation will be the future

Will see state pba bans stronger than the federal ban

Increased informed consent

RU-486 regulation

Key cases in pipeline

Planned Parenthood v. Rounds - South Dakota informed consent law requiring that women be informed that they are carrying a full, distinct human being

Roe v. Crawford - 8th Circuit case regarding prisoner right of abortion - not for state to pay but for state to transfer

Northland Family Planning Clinic v. Cox - 6th Circuit case regarding Michigan's Legal Birth Definition Act

Planned Parenthood v. Strickland - 6th Circuit case regarding regulation of RU486.

Pro-abort hardliners aren't all who oppose the Partial Birth Abortion Ban. Some pro-life hardliners do as well.

From Alan Keyes, April 28:

... I cannot join in, or even understand, the approbation which others have expressed for this decision. It is in fact an abominable affirmation of the Court's unconstitutional decisions in Roe and Casey. With grotesquely meticulous care, the man whose pivotal vote preserved so-called abortion rights in the Casey decision (Justice Kennedy) carves out an exception intended to prove and strengthen the rules set forth in Roe and Casey....

As my good friend Judie Brown put it recently... Kennedy played the part of a skillful gardener, cutting back the evil planted by Roe/Casey in order to strengthen and extend its roots, hoping no doubt to make it harder to overturn in any subsequent ruling. While allowing for a state interest in restricting one brutal way of murdering the nascent child, he makes it clear that this restriction is tolerable under Roe/Casey only because abortionists still have access to other equally brutal modes of killing.

At one point, with what seems like dogged satisfaction, Kennedy describes such an alternative in almost clinical detail....

This reminds me of the careful logic that I'm told is often characteristic of serial killers, psychopaths who follow arcane rituals in order to distinguish their killings from anything so profane as ordinary murder. In like fashion, Kennedy makes clear that the abortionists who rip the child limb from limb while it is still within the womb are doctors helping a woman to exercise her "right to choose" - while those who mangle the child when it has emerged past a certain point are violators, subject to the restrictive force of law. Though the child is in principle the same person in both situations, the Court's glassy-eyed observance of its own fanatically arcane and ritualistic logic is supposed to establish some invisible line of demarcation separating one act of murder from the next.

This decision is not a harbinger of hope for an end to the Court-imposed reign of terror in the womb. It is evidence of a legal elite gone mad, hopelessly lost in the maze of its own psychopathic logic.

From Pastor Bob Enyart, April 24:

Our Christian leaders have mislead millions into thinking this ban would prevent at least some abortions. In reality, pro-lifers volunteered, they made phone calls, and gave money, all to promote a ban that utterly lacked the authority to save even a single baby. Sadly, our leaders are not wiser than that. Rank-and-file pro-lifers were never told that this ban had no ability to actually save a child, and instead was a public relations event "to keep the issue in the news."

Even the justices themselves wrote... "The question is whether the Act... imposes a substantial obstacle to late-term... abortions. The Act does not on its face impose a substantial obstacle..."

The opinion... is repeatedly vulgar in its affirmation of the brutal tearing apart of living unborn children.... [F]or the purpose of this current opinion, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito ruled that, "the removal of a small portion [such as 'of a still living fetus, say, an arm or leg,' first pulled outside of the mother, as far as up to the navel] of the fetus is not prohibited."

Here's another like-minded opinion.

Pro-life hardliners view any prohibition of abortion as sanctioning all else. I have many reasons for supporting the PBA ban, both ideological (incrementalism works) and actual (as I stated in a column, "We cannot overlook one human atrocity for fear of being outsmarted with another."). It also should be a red flag when pro-aborts and pro-lifers agree on the same abortion ruling.

But I have many good friends who disagree with me strongly on the topic of incrementalism. And I am concerned Alan Keyes' assertion that the PBA decision might actually have codified Roe.

Your thoughts?

[Hat tip: Fran at IR]

Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker wants to reassure those frightened about dwindling abortion options following the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban. (I know pro-aborts hate that term, preferring it called the Dilatation and Extraction Abortion Ban or the Intact Dilatation and Evacuation Ban. Sorry.)

Says Parker:

In fact, women can still render themselves unpregnant, in the vernacular of choice-speak, by several means. They can "disarticulate the fetus" and even "reduce" or "separate the fetal calvarium."

If the vocabulary is confusing, that's the point. Using Orwellian language to sanitize the issue, so to speak, is a time-honored tactic of the "pro-choice" arbiters. If we don't say what it is, we can pretend what it isn't.

Herewith, a brief translation:

Disarticulating a fetus, which sounds like suspending a pre-born's instant-messaging privileges, means to dismember it. Reducing a calvarium - a thoroughly desirable-sounding procedure, like lancing a boil - means to suck the brains from the baby's head. Separating the calvarium means to sever the head with scissors....

Paying attention to the language of abortion - or anything else for that matter - is instructive when trying to consider right from wrong. If you have to dress something up to obfuscate the truth of what's in play, you can probably assume it's wrong.

When a man murders his wife, we don't say, "Mr. X rendered his wife unalive by efficiently evacuating her cranial cavity with an instrument customarily associated with construction." We say, "He bashed her brains out in a brutal attack with a claw hammer."

We apparently have no stomach for similarly descriptive (honest) terminology when it comes to the unborn....

Reality pop quiz: When rational people can dispassionately discuss whether it's better to dismember or collapse the skull of a pre-born baby, are they still allowed to call themselves rational?

Is anyone prepared to take that pop quiz?

[Hat tip: Patte S.]