By Dave Andrusko
On Thursday, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the Supreme Court to review and reverse rulings which overturned the state’s 2016 Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act.
The law would ban a hideous abortion technique in which a living, growing human being is torn apart and pulverized. Using steel tools, dismemberment abortions rip heads and legs off of tiny torsos as the defenseless child bleeds to death. It is so awful that abortionists strain to come up with euphemisms to hide its utter depravity.
In late August NRL News Today reported on a split decision by a three judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s ruling striking down the law. We also wrote at length about Judge Joel F. Dubina’s very thoughtful dissent.
Marshall’s 33-page amicus brief (discussed below) comes two days after Indiana Attorney General Hill asked the High Court to overrule lower court decisions striking down HEA 1337. That law targets the practice of targeting unborn babies diagnosed with a genetic anomaly, most often Down syndrome and requires that abortion clinics bury or cremate the remains of aborted babies in a dignified fashion.
Eight other states have enacted laws forbidding dismembering living unborn babies. In addition, last week Ohio’s legislature forwarded to Gov. John Kasich its Dismemberment Abortion Ban (S.B. 145) for his signature.
Marshall’s petition to the Supreme Court quotes extensively from a dissenting opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart, where Justice Anthony Kennedy described what he called “a “standard D&E” [dismemberment] abortion. Quoting Kennedy, Marshall wrote
the abortionist . . . use[s] instruments to grasp a portion (such as a foot or hand) of a developed and living fetus and drag the grasped portion out of the uterus into the vagina.” He or she then “uses the traction created by the opening between the uterus and vagina to dismember the fetus, tearing the grasped portion away from the remainder of the body.” As a result, “[t]he fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb.” Indeed, with its heart still beating, “[t]he fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.” Afterwards, “the abortionist is left with a tray full of pieces.”
Marshall explained, as have other state attorneys general, that there are alternative methods to the nihilistic practice of dismemberment abortions.
He concludes, in light of all the states passing similar bans, “The constitutionality of a state ban on dismemberment abortion is an important question of national significance.”