Mark Kennedy: “even the strongest abortion rights supporters have a hard time defending this procedure. In four of the last five…”

“even the strongest abortion rights supporters have a hard time defending this procedure. In four of the last five Congresses, Congress has passed a partial-birth abortion ban by a two-thirds majority. Instead, abortion rights supporters insist this procedure is rare and used only in the most extreme positions to avoid serious physical injury to the mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of obstetricians have stated they regularly treat women for medical conditions used to rationalize partial-birth abortions, and these babies are regularly delivered with no threat to the mother's health or future fertility. These medical reasons include depression and other treatable conditions like emotional trauma, psychological problems, and age. While these may be serious, I do not think that they warrant the life of an otherwise healthy unborn child. Even Dr. Martin Haskell who has performed more than a thousand of these abortions has stated that 80 percent of those were purely elective, meaning the health had nothing to do with it. What is most disturbing is that multiple doctors have testified that this procedure is typically done on healthy women with healthy unborn children after 20 weeks when a baby can often survive without assistance for hours outside the womb.”