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The Daily Signal
Abortion
Procedure Extracting Unborn Child ‘One Piece at a Time’ Triggers
Controversy in Kansas
Kelsey Harkness
April 08, 2015
Mary Spaulding Balch has been fighting against what she calls
“dismemberment abortion” since she was 17 years old.
Now, at 60, she’s breathing a sigh of relief.
“It’s been a long time. Too long,” Balch told The Daily Signal in a
phone interview. “I was naïve enough to think back in the 70s, we would
be able to get this under control rather quickly.”
Balch was referring to an abortion procedure that requires doctors to
“knowingly dismember” a living unborn child during the second trimester
and extract it “one piece at a time” from the mother’s uterus.
On Tuesday, Kansas became the first state in the nation to ban a
certain type of dilation and evacuation procedure, where the unborn
child is dismembered before being killed.
Similar legislation was introduced in Missouri, South Carolina and
Oklahoma.
In Oklahoma, the bill was approved by the Senate on Wednesday afternoon
and will now go to the governor’s desk, where she is expected to sign
it into law.
Pro-life advocates—including Republican Gov. Sam Brownback—say this
type of dilation and evacuation (or “D&X”) is a particularly
“horrific” way to end an unborn child’s life.
“This is a horrific procedure and we are pleased to ban it in Kansas
and we hope it will be banned nationally,” Brownback said after signing
the bill into law.
According to language passed by the Kansas state legislature, the
procedure requires “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.”
The bill does not ban dilation and evacuation where the unborn child is
killed by suction without the use of forceps or where the unborn child
is killed by a lethal injection before dismemberment.
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the
method is “safe and effective” for the mother, is often “less
emotionally challenging” and usually “faster and may be more
cost-effective” than medical abortion.
With a medical abortion, certain drugs are taken to cause an abortion.
A medical abortion does not require surgery or anesthesia, but multiple
visits to a health care provider are needed.
The pro-life movement has been been waging a war on this type of
dilatation and extraction—what they call “dismemberment abortion”—for
years.
“We’re talking about a living unborn child, where the body is formed to
the point where you can’t simply use a vacuum to remove that child,”
Balch, who now serves as the director of state legislation for National
Right to Life, told The Daily Signal. “You now have to go in with sharp
forceps to grab limbs and disarticulate them from the baby’s body, and
the baby dies by bleeding to death.”
Pro-choice groups also criticize the law for not including exemptions
for cases of rape and incest (only to preserve the life or health of
the mother) and fear the ban is a first step to outlawing all types of
abortions.
“Planned Parenthood is disappointed but not surprised by the signing of
Senate Bill 95, which was written not by physicians and medical
experts, but by a national interest group bent on banning abortion
across the country,” said Laura McQuade, president and CEO of Planned
Parenthood Advocates of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, in a press release.
“We will continue to expose all extreme political measures aimed at
denying women access to health care and at undermining their
decision-making ability.”
Balch, whose organization National Right to Life penned the
legislation, says women seeking life-ending procedures still have
choices.
“There are other abortion procedures that would be available to a woman
who is raped but this particular procedure—there’s no reason to do that
to an innocent unborn child,” she said.
Senate Bill 95, which was signed into law during a private ceremony on
Tuesday by Brownback, is likely to be challenged in courts.
The bill appears to conflict with decisions handed down both by the
Kansas Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, which legalized
abortion until a fetus is able to survive outside the womb.
In that case, Balch says, National Right to Life would “welcome” the
opportunity to defend the policy in court.
We think the time has come for the American people
to understand just what a ‘dismemberment abortion’ is. We think that if
they knew what was happening in secret—what is happening within the
closed doors of groups like Planned Parenthood where they literally rip
a living unborn child from limb to limb until he or she bleeds to
death—I think most American people would demand that it stop.
This article was updated to clarify the type of dilation and evacuation
abortion procedure Kansas’ bill addresses.
Read this and other articles with photos at The Daily Signal
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